Designing banner ads is more than just going into Microsoft paint and quickly whipping up something in 5 minutes. Many designers spend quite a lot of time thinking and planning what exactly to put on a banner ad. The reason they do this is to maximize the potential success of the banner. The more attention a banner ad can get, the more people will click through to see what all the fuss is about. Here at beautifulbannerads.com we believe in beautiful design to ensure our banners get the high clicks that they deserve. This potentially for you, means that our banner ads will give you greater web traffic meaning a better conversion of sales.

So what are the 5 incredible secrets then?

1. Call-To-Action

One of the most simplest things you can do when designing a custom banner ad is putting a call to action on it. This call to action will ask the user to ‘interact’ with the banner ad. This could be a simple as adding a “Click Here” or “Read More” button; this encourages the reader to click on your banner ad to find out more information. Call to action buttons are only 100% successful if you link it up with point 4 and point 5 of this blog post

1. KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid)

One major mistake many new designers and inexperienced designers make is trying to over complicate everything and make It some kind of amazing Photoshop masterpiece. They have this idea in their head that simply, a bit of text an image and a call to action is “crap” because it’s too simple? But the reality is you don’t have to make it complicated for yourself so cut down on all the excessive textures and fancy brushes – it won’t help you

1. Eye-Friendly

Try and look for some good colour pallets when creating banner ads. There are many great sites out there such as http://www.colourlovers.com which can really help you out. The worst thing you could do is create a banner ad which is bright red and then have something even worse like bright blue writing. Not only is this very difficult to read, all the reader can see is a big blotch of colour, it doesn’t portray any information because the reader probably won’t even realise the blue writing is actually text! Make sure the colours complement each other, however, don’t go too subtle or washed out – the ad may be a little too faded – It’s all about getting the right balance

1. Attention Grabbing

If you are advertising on a major website and your banner ad is amongst 7 other banners, as much as you are getting the ad impressions. What guarantee do you have that people will click YOUR banner rather than somebody else’s? Make sure that your banner stands out, have something unique or special in it that makes the reader have that second glance. If you catch the readers eye from the start then the rest will follow. Something attention grabbing could be animation (Not over the top though, this can ruin banner ads) or an interesting icon / picture that you need to look twice at to work out what it is.

1. Delivery of the Important Unique Selling Point (USP)

Don’t fill your banner ad full of text, the idea of a banner ad is like a road sign, you need to convey as much information as possible in the simplest and easiest form. The best thing to do is of a maximum have about 10 words on your banner ad. Usually we would aim for about 6 words that really sell off what you are trying to advertise. Along with all the other points above, if you manage to get the reader’s attention, they will read what your banner ad says, become interested in that and then click your call to action button.

As you can see, these points all closely link in with each other, they all help each other out and they all work together. These 5 simple steps are like a team and when you put them together – you get results. However the question is – where can you find a place to design custom banner ads that follow all these rules and ensure successful results? Well you’re in luck! Here at beautiful banner ads we design custom banner ads that are professionally designed at an affordable price. We make sure your banner ad deserves the most clicks possible!

Banner Advertisements are a massive part of the online web advertisement industry. If designed right, a banner ad can get a very good Click through rate (CTR) which means, if you buy advertising and the monthly impressions are 1 million visitors. And you have a click through rate of 20%. You have just send 200,000 people to your site or wherever your banner ad is directing to. How amazing is that!? There are websites such as www.beautifulbannerads.com that design professional, affordable and effective banner ads for you for amazing prices to help you promote whatever you want!

Why are Banner Ads so Special?

The internet has a massive market online that are ready to buy your products. The internet is a sitting gold mine and everybody can have their own share of it. The internet trade online is worth $251,000,000,000 thats 251 billion dollars! Many people are looking for ways to make money online and the best way to do this is by creating your own website shop or business that sells a service. You can also promote yourself through various other ways such as affiliate marketing and blogging.

The question is, how are you going to promote your products or your site? You can only make money if people are coming to your website

The answer! Custom Banner Advertisements

Banner Advertisements are visual graphics that are placed on websites that have high traffic. Impressions can vary greatly from the 1000′s all the way to the millions! The more impressions (views) a banner ad is expected to get, the higher the advertising cost of the space. So the question is, when so many people are advertising, how do you stand out from the crowd and get people to click on your advertisement. Simple! Check out great websites and companies such as www.beautifulbannerads.com they specialize in creating beautiful custom banner ads that are professional, affordable and effective. These banner ads are specifically designed using clever ‘science’ to get people to click onto your advertisement.

Improving Banner Ad Performance

Another thing that makes a difference on the banner ad performance, is where the banner ad is placed! Here is a great diagram
Kindly supplied by http://www.squidoo.com/heat-map

This shows how the placement of a banner advertisement makes a difference in the response. As you can see the best areas to display advertisements are in the primary content area smack bang in the middle. This diagram can also be used if you are an advertiser and you want to make the most money possible by increasing the clicks from your visitors on a website. This shows where you should be placing your adverts

Simple Steps to Success

A few simple methods of making banner ads successful and effective is following these simple rules

1. Use a call to action!
Make sure you have some form of button that entices people to click, make sure the text is asking the reader to do something like “click here” or “find out more” this will make more people click your banner ad

2. KISS!
This is a simple abbreviation used in design. Keep it Simple, Stupid! Don’t overcomplicated your advertisement and squeeze too much information on the banner. All you need is something catchy to get the readers eye on your banner and the rest will follow!

3. Human Computer Interface (HCI)
This is a biological abbreviation. The Human Computer Interface is all about making buttons the right size and text the right size. If you have a button that is very very small, people will find it difficult to click on it. The same goes for text, don’t make it too small or else people will not be able to read anything on your advertisement. The best thing to do is find the right balance between keeping it simple on the advertisement while portraying the most / best information possible.

Beautiful Banner Ads really can boost your sales and make your traffic rocket sky high! Its all about getting noticed! A successful banner will always have a high click through rate (CTR) measured in percentage. If your banner ad has a click through rate of 20% which doesn’t sound a lot, and you advertise on a website which has 1,000,000 monthly page visitors. That means that 200,000 people will click on your ad, that is a massive amount of traffic! The art of banner ads and special creative services such as www.beautifulbannerads.com is to try and raise the click through rate as high as possible to ensure you are getting the maximum amount of visitors to your website through advertising as possible!

http://www.squidoo.com/beautiful-custom-banner-ads-to-rocket-sales-boost-traffic

“The Key To Freelance Freedom”

Lets look at the most obvious method / path web designers take when they land themselves a project or have a website and make a sale for a website. I assume that you will naturally charge £X amount of money possibly with the opportunity to up-sell things like “Standard / Premium / Deluxe” services which differ in price depending on how much time / quality is put into building the website, but have you ever considered almost a ‘Subscription’ method?

What this means is that you could actually undercut all your competition without having to sacrifice money yourself. The way this works is by charging a smaller £X amount of money for the initial building and designing of the website to deliver to the client, but then adding on a charge per month service. If somebody wants a website building by you then theres some factors you need to consider that you might be able to get an extra slice of money from.

• Do they need hosting?
• Do they need whois security?
• Do they need website backups?
• Do they need email accounts & spam filtering?
• Do they need extra training?
• Do they need software updates? (if wordpress for example)

Say you charge a small business £300 for a simple website, all your competitors are around the same price as well. But you could actually undercut your competition resulting in more sales by selling the website for say £189 base cost, then charging a monthly cost of £32 per month for the hosting (with security), email accounts and then added up-sells of who-is security – now this for example costs about £8 a year however, whats stopping you charging the client an extra £2 a month which means you make £16 profit per year per website. Now thats not much but thats only one small part. Add the base £32 a month for the hosting you charge the client and the email addresses’ that literally took 10 minutes to set up. You could be earning an extra passive £40 per month per website. Multiply that figure by say 20 websites, you are making passively with next to no effort

“a substantial £800 per month or £9600 per year”

Thats just under £10,000 a year you are adding onto your bank balance for doing next to no work!

“Why This Method is AMAZING!”

• Your client gets the extra services that they need
• Their site cost less money than the rest of the competition
• If the work load has dried up, then theres still a nice amount of money to see you through tough times
• You can team up with the hosting companies for a little extra money so they can provide a support feature for clients, meaning clients don’t drive you wild by asking how to set up this or that when really you have next to no idea

If your asking yourself, “clients might clock onto the idea that they have to spend more money with my website package”

Well yes, they do, however its like buying an expensive car, you have two options, you either pay for the car in full at say £30,000, but who has £30,000 stashed away just to spend? Instead most people would go for a finance option which means you pay monthly in smaller payments which are a lot more realistic and are only a scratch out of your monthly earnings, but of course, that way you end up paying about £35,000 for the car over the course of the finance plan, but you still pay it for the convenience of having to pay lower prices. And thats exactly how it works with this method, some clients will understand that they have to pay more, but when you spread out the costs clients can afford to pay that extra bit of money for a convenience.

Covering Your Back

Just make sure that the client understand that they must host with you to be able to take advantage of this offer, of course you would be loosing yourself a lot of money if you was to sell a website at £189 with the understanding the client would host with you, but what if they pay the price, get the website then run? Make sure they sign a contract to say that they will host with you. If not – charge them full price!

Risks with New Businesses

Well remember this can always be risky, I myself specalise in gaphic design solutions for small businesses, so personally i do not use this method, because the risk with this method for a new business is a lot greater. The rate of failure of a new businesses is quite high and if you give them a cheap website then a recurring plan, if they fall on the ground, you have sold a cheap website, but a lot of time and effort into it and not gained enough back from the monthly subscriptions, so… Really i know that i would only use this with established businesses than i can assure myself and they can assure me that they will be around for a long time – enough for myself or you to make a decent amount of money back plus profit.

Value for Money = £££

Give the client even more value, say you have sold and  built them the website, you then have set up a recurring fee every month, but they also want something extra. What is the point in having a website that doesn’t generate any sales because of poor SEO, thats right Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization for the American English). If you create a website for a local builder in your area, now getting ranked #1 for the keyword “Builder” is going to be extremely difficult, but think about it – how easy is it to rank #1 for “Builder in Sheffield” because you have just majorly decreased the competition from the whole world, just to one city, and SEO can actually be sold for quite a lot of money. So whats stopping you from chargining an extra £200 there for simple SEO, i bet your thinking that all of this sounds like your ripping off the client, yes? – NO!

The client is happy, they are getting what they want and you are getting a fair amount of money that benefits you. This method can be used in many different ways, it doesn’t just have to be websites. You could design banner ads and then offer a small hosting fee to the client to see if they want it hosted on your server.

CONCLUSION

Technically all of this is a passive income but obviously a little bit of maintenance is required, i’m sure that you will always have clients with questions, thats why you lead them to the professionals (your hosting company) who are able to work with your client and help them through the hosting part of their website.

This brings me onto my next blog post to come soon – Outsourcing, you could literally make quite a lot of money from graphic design by not doing any design work yourself, technically you could be classed as a business entrepreneur, taking orders, giving it to a graphic designer a lower cost, getting it back and selling it to your client for a higher price to gain profit.  More to come on this soon!

All types of people from affiliate marketers to full companies always struggling in the beginning, let’s be honest – Who doesn’t? Unless you have a lot of luck on your side, a lot of hard work is needed to succeed. An expensive solution to getting your site, product or service noticed is a marketing campaign, but marketing campaigns come in all shapes and sizes, some are straight to the point, other campaigns are quite unique in the sense that it gets people thinking. A good example of this is the recent Cadbury advertising campaign and one of their adverts was a gorilla playing the drums. The question companies and people have to ask themselves when considering a marketing campaign is “Who am I reaching out to?” and “What point do I want to put across”. You have to put yourself in a customer’s shoe and ask yourself questions about what you understood, what you know, what you don’t know and what more you would like to find out.

Advertising Campaigns on the web are also another major success as far as the advertising industry goes; a lot of money is spent on online advertising each year and it’s not too expensive to come by if you know where to look properly.

Are Banner Ads ‘Worth It’ Financially?

You can use your banner ads in many ways, common methods include CPM where you pay per 1000 impressions, or there is CPC where you only pay when somebody clicks on your banner ad. But the first thing you need to consider before even buying advertising space is where or how will you get a custom banner ad for your business? Remember that you have to either do it yourself – which might mean you don’t have a successful result or you can pay that professional designer who knows exactly what is hot and what is not as far as banner ads go.

A great example is a live case study from Campaign Monitor; they documented on their blog a campaign for a web designer content management system. They tested out 3 banner ads and 3 landing pages, and tested which gave the best conversion rates from the advertising space. There are some ‘common’ ads out there which seem to always have high conversion rates. In this specific example they used a blueprint layout, a chalkboard and a post-it note. The blueprint custom banner ad was the most successful and had a 3.51% conversion rate compared to the second highest being the post it note at 2.36% and the chalkboard being bottom at 2.09%

Banner Ads Aren’t Everything for your Campaign

Just because somebody clicks your ad does not mean that click will turn into a successful sale. You also need to consider your website content, when the user clicks on the ad, where do they land next, this landing page needs to be a crucial sales page which really shows off your product. The aim is to deliver as much information in the most simplest form possible, this is quite like road signs – they portray a good amount of information just from a simple shape, outline or word. A good way to keep people interested is a call to action. Make the user interact with the banner ad by having a “Click here” button and then also have another call to action on your landing page. The best performing landing page from Campaign Monitor shows that when the user enters the page, they are greeted by a big landing image which asks them a question and is asking for their response. This keeps the user engaged and interested in the site and will keep your average time on the site quite high.

Planning out the Campaign

You need to consider quite a few things when researching and exploring the campaign. You need to ask yourself a few simple questions

• What message am I trying to give from this?
• How can I portray the most information in the simplest form possible?
• Can I be clever and have something that makes my banner ad unique?
• When my visitors click through on the ad, what greets them, is it a half built page or a fully working landing page?
• Can the customers make a relationship between themselves and your brand, company, site before purchasing anything?
• If the customer wants to find out more, can they easily contact me or can they easily see our community on facebook and twitter?

A banner ad marketing campaign isn’t just about sticking up some images which say BUY NOW. It requires technical planning and a lot of creativity. The best way to get a good idea is draw your ideas down on paper. This will help you see a visual representation of what you want to show through your banner ad. A designer is only as good as their brief.

Creativity at its Best

Banner ads again are not thrown together on Microsoft paint in 5 minutes; designers spend a lot of time thinking of clever ways to portray this information in the best way possible. Some people see this as a science as it requires brains and expert knowledge to get the best results possible. You need to consider a few things when designing a banner:

• Are the colours eyes friendly? Can somebody look at them comfortably but do the colours still stand out?
• Does the banner ad match the house style of my website? Do they match up?
• Is the message easily understood on the banner?
• Would you personally want to click the banner ad if it was amongst a lot of other banner ads?
• Is there a call to action? – making the customer engage with the ad

Part 2 coming soon!

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We are Beautiful Banner Ads and we specialize in creating professional and affordable banner ads and headers for websites and blogs. Advertising is a massive part of our society and the reason why It’s so big, is because it works! To get noticed out there you’re going to need more than your personal skills on Microsoft paint, that’s why we are here. To design banner ads for you suited to many of the major ad networks on the internet so you can get more clicks and greater traffic through to your site. Our designers have years of experience and know every technical detail to make sure your banner ad is a successful banner ad.

Over the coming weeks and months I hope to be able to introduce lots of amazing great discounts and offers on our beautifully designed order form and website.

What is Banner Design?

Banner design can come in many shapes and forms. These are advertisements on the internet that websites and companies use to promote their own website or product, these internet banners can be found usually on the sides of websites or blogs, usually the human eye will ignore these advertisements, so this is our job to make sure that we defeat this and get your banner ad marketing campaign rolling by ensuring that your ad is noticed amongst all the rest on the internet which ensures that your custom banners are a success for your website. In the blog we will be going through and showing you how the placement of these banner ads effect how well they perform and also what key features need to be included in custom banner design. Yes! That’s right; I will be revealing the major secret to the success of our banners. How would it be a success if we don’t share the knowledge?

Banner Ads

Our banner ads start from just $25 and you can mix and match these banners to suit what your needs. The site is part of our portfolio as the site was fully designed by us and we love it! Make sure you check out our banner ad video here on the homepage of the website, kindly hosted by youtube. Each and every banner we make is guaranteed quality assurance meaning that it is delivered to the best quality and the best standard because that’s how we deliver here at beautiful banner ads! If something isn’t right or you’re not happy, give us a shout and we will happily work with you to revise the banner or even give you a full refund!

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