Banner advertisements are an amazing way to generate and captivate mass targeted traffic to your website to generate leads and sales. There are well known ways to generate and send traffic to your website. Many methods include organic methods such as search engine rankings and google search traffic or paid methods including paid traffic networks where you can buy so many visitors to your website. The problem is, especially with paid traffic networks your traffic will NOT be targeted, meaning the traffic is pretty useless because the chances are you will not make any conversions at all into sales.

Banner advertisements are a fast and easy way to generate great high quality targeted traffic. You can pick up great deals on www.buysellads.com or alternatively you can go with google and use their adwords network to advertise on websites specific to your niche. I prefer getting banner ads from buysellads because you can pay for a fixed 30 day rate. This means that you only pay a certain amount. For example if you pay $150 for 30 days, no matter how many impressions you get, the price will remain the same. Alternatively you could use a PPC method which you pay per click and you set the bid limit for the ad. The higher you bid, the more competitive keywords your ad will rank for and the higher they will rank.

There are a few blog posts on here that go through about how to increase your click through rate and get the most possible viewers through to your website. But the idea of this blog post is pureyl to promote the idea of banner advertisements in general compared to other methods of traffic generation. Banner advertisements can actually be quite a good investment! If you spend $150 for 1 months advertising and you generate more than that in sales, you have broke even and also made yourself a healthy profit!

Next time you are looking at ways to drive traffic to your site, make sure you consider banner ads!

Internet Banners are all over the web and it is a well known fact that banner advertising online is the most commonly used form of advertising at this moment in time. Why? Because its effective! And another great thing is targeting the banner ads at your audience. If you put a buy a 30 second TV ad slot, your viewers might not necessarily be targeted for your product. The closest way you can get to this, is putting a gardening advert in the middle of a gardening show.

Internet Banners have an advantage because you can specifically target your ads at certain countries and on certain keywords so you know your ads only show to people who are already actively searching on google for that specific term. There are loads of great ad networks out there. My favourite are www.buysellads.com and Google Adwords. If you have the budget available you can drive so much traffic onto your site its unreal! We’re talking 1000’s a day. Depending on how well your banner ad is performing and its click through rate will obviously change things, the higher the percentage, the more people will be coming through to your site.

There are a few secrets that can really help your internet banners perform on these ad networks

1. Call to Action
Add a call to action such as CLICK HERE or READ MORE to get people engaged

2. Rhetorical Question
Add a question on the banner ad to get people engaged

3. Snappy Tagling
Make people interested from the word GO by having a really catchy snappy tagling, usually is a question that is thought engaging

4. Branding
Keep the branding the same from your banner ad through to your landing page and the rest will follow

5. Good Quality Images
Head over to www.istockphoto.com or www.shutterstock.com where you can buy professional quality images for a really cheap affordable price. These will add more value to your banner ads

All these secrets together can really help our your banner ad and make it perform better to get more people onto your site. So try it out for yourself and see how it goes!

If you are looking to increase views on your website, you can promote it various ways to gain traffic. This can be through social bookmarking or social marketing. All the way through to article marketing, back linking and SEO ranking. However if you have a budget available at disposal for your website, you can always fork out a bit of money and buy paid advertising. This could be a PPC campaign or a fixed 30 day contract with a website. A great place to buy affordable banner advertising space is over at www.buysellads.com they provide great opportunities with major established authority websites that have a lot of domination on google, a lot of traffic and a lot of power to drive that traffic to your site.

Another interesting way to look at this is click through rates vs impressions. If you are advertising on a website that has 1,000,000 impressions (that’s one million!) and you have a tiny click through rate of just 1% you are still getting 10,000 visitors through to your website. You can check out other blog posts on this site about increasing your CTR because just by raising your click through rate by another small percent, the visitors to your website can double from 10,000 to 20,000 per month! That’s incredible stuff… All by 1%

This is the reason banner ads have a superb advantage over other methods because those methods either take A) A long time B) a lot of money C) Low quality unimportant traffic. Of course, you can buy traffic to your website, but seriously – don’t do it! That traffic is so low quality its unreal and you won’t get any conversions whatsoever. Where as if your advertising on a specific website, you’ll have real people that are TARGETED for that niche. Another word of advice also is don’t use traffic exchanges, again, the quality of traffic there is extremely low and the majority of people on traffic exchanges are after traffic themselves, so the only reason they look at your website for 20 seconds is to get credit for their own account to get more views on their own site. Now what use is a 20 second visit to your site where the person viewing probably has another tab open on facebook and is looking at that instead?

Banner ads are definitely the way forward and you should definitely invest in them. A $100 campaign could drive you about 4x revenue leaving $300 profit for you to spend on yourself or re-invest!

When you are advertising in the right niche, there are a few ways to increase clicks on your ads by changing the banner design and including clever ideas. I’ve already talked about CTR and call to action however this post is all about the actual banner design and what designers can do to tweak it a little to increase clicks by making it look more professional and upmarket.

So, what can you do?

1. Texture
Instead of having plain colour or graidents on your banner ads why don’t you overlay a texture to that colour, this adds depth and interest and certain for me catches my eye more than what a plain ad would just because its not what you would commonly see and as some people are blind to ads, meaning their brains just don’t acknowledge them because they are so used to the web – its worth trying out new techniques to get their attention back again

2. Colour Scheme
There are some great sites out on the net like colourlovers.com that have great pallets of colours to choose from that can really compliment your banner ad. Its a bit like picking out paint and looking at all the strips of colours to try and mix and match, this already does it for you and they have some great variations you should check out

3. High Quality Image
Stop stealing images from google that are copyrighted and go over to sites like iStockPhoto or shutterstock where you can get high quality images for a really low price. These images can do wonders to your ad and really give it that professional look that you should be going for which can encourage people to click on your ad because they feel that its a more established brand

Its really that simple, the more established you make your banner ad and branding look, the more a viewer is encouraged to click on your ad because they feel they are entering a reputable area of the net which they can trust to provide a quality beneficial product for them.

One of the best ways to quickly and efficiently increase your promotion and sales is buying some advertising space for 30 days and creating banner ads to drive visitors from another website onto yours. The question is how do you drive people from other sites onto yours? The best way is by using clever tactics to get people to click on your ads, this blog here covers everything from CTR through to Call to action and I’ll briefly go over them in this post for you as well today.

If you want to accelerate your promotion by using banner ads. The first main thing to think about is make sure your banner ad matches the branding of your site or product! I can not stress this enough. If your ad gives a good view of what the product or brand is then the people clicking on it are more targeted than people who are clicking on it just because it has “pretty bright colours” or fancy “animation” which has no relation to your product or site whatsoever. If you keep it fluent throughout from the beginning step of the click to the sale then the customer will have more trust and recognition for the site and therefore may return in future or recommend your product or site to someone else thus generating another lead and potentially another sale.

The second thing to think about is using a call to action. Now this can be as simple as adding a big button that says “click here” or “find out more” this is asking the reader to engage with your ad, and when you have that initial engagement you have a very high chance of that person clicking on your ad. Alternatively you could use an arrow on your banner ad, usually the best combo is to use your arrow pointing from your tagling to your button saying click here. The last option is to use a rhetorical question, this is a type of question that gets the reader engaged but isn’t properly asking for an answer, its just getting the reader thinking and possibly answering the question in their head.

Thirdly, what you need on your banner ad is a fancy tag or snapline that will get the readers interested from the first word, if you have something that is very interesting the reader will more than likely want to find out more about what your banner ad is about, go through to your site, learn a lot more through your landing sales page and then eventually go onto buying your product. Make sure you don’t type too much on your banner ad else people won’t read it because it just looks too spammy.

Lastly, try and include colours and styles on your banner ad that compliment the eye, not attack it. If you have bright blue and red on a plain white background with a boring font, you might not attract the right attention, supposedly these ads do reasonably well, to people who dont matter. Again you can target a website and technically say all of those visitors are “targeted” however if your product or site is authority or up market, a budget looking banner can give the wrong impression and suggest that you are low priced and cheap and giving a good deal, so the people that just clicked through your banner ad are no longer interested because It wasn’t what they were expecting.

Remember thing next time you create custmom banner ads to accelerate your sales promotion

So why the tips? Well, there are so many banner ads online that are so badly designed. Why do people think that creating a plain white ad with bright blue and red text is doing any good, yes you may gain clicks, people may be interested at how badly designed the site on the other side is, seriously… you do not want clicks from people who just want to mock your website. You want serious customers and serious targeted traffic. I have included three really helpful tips in the blog post today to help your banner design achieve amazing results:

1. Call to Action
Make sure that you have some kind of call to action on your banner design. The most popular form of call to action is a button that says “Click Here” this is encouraging the viewer to click on your ad. Alternatively you could ask a rhetorical question – this is a question that gets the reader or viewer engaged but its a question that they HAVE to answer, it just gets them thinking about it.

2. Snappy Tagline
Don’t give a wall of text on your small 125×125 ad because people are not going to read it! The best thing to is have one short snappy tag line which only has 4 or maybe 5 words maximum at a stretch that really grabs the readers attention, this could be a rhetorical question to help get the reader engaged

3. Branding
Make sure your banner ad follows the branding of your company or website. There is no point following a blue colour scheme on your ad if your site follows a green colour scheme. If you mix and match, people may be less likely to buy, if they love your ad click through and then find out the site is very different they may loose interest straight away, so be careful!

So next time your on photoshop making a custom banner design. Make sure you remember these three very important points!

So, the next step to creating the perfect banner ad marketing campaign is making sure once the viewer has stepped through your ad onto your website, you keep them on your website and engaged this. You can keep them on your website by creating an optimized landing site. This is basically a sales page which really shows all the stars and diamonds of your product. If you can convince that potential customer that your product is really worth it, then chances are you will be successful and you will convert that “viewer” into a paying customers. Make sure you don’t just create a landing page and then expect it to work. Play about with it a bit, changing sizes of certain elements and playing about with the layout, the simplest of things can really increase the conversion rate of your site, some social triggers are common sense, others are something so simple that you wouldn’t even think about, this includes arrow, bold text and a clean liquid flow.

When you have optimized your banner ad and landing page. The next thing is to go into the big wide world and find some advertising space online. You could try out buysellads.com they have some great deals on advertising space. When choosing advertising space you need to be careful and consider 2 things, the first is choosing the right niche to advertise in, if you are advertising a design service like banner ads, its probably best NOT to advertise on a site where lots of other designers hang out. Try and target marketers and business websites where the website traffic there are people who need banner ads but cannot necessarily create the banner ads themselves. The second point to consider is when you have found a good site to advertise on and you are happy with the monthly impressions / CPM then make sure you buy an AD in a suitable location. Please take a look at the heat map to see where is best to advertise on a site. Even though a certain advertising space looks cheap for the amount of impressions, if your ad is placed on the footer of a site, you will get no where near as many follow throughs as you would if your ad was at the top of the page under the content title or something more visible. You can check out the heat map HERE http://www.squidoo.com/heat-map

Banner ads can pay themselves off – advertising will be expensive for some and affordable for others, don’t see it as a debit to your account, see it as an investment that you aim to make back. If you spend $100 on 30 days advertising and you make $500 in sales, from that initial investment you have made your money back plus $400 profit!

Stay tuned for How To: Create the Perfect Banner Ad Marketing Campaign – Part 3

7 Tips to Increase Clicks on Your Internet Banners

that gives you a few tips on how to create banner ads that convert impressions onto clicks. So, you have got the funding and bought up some advertising space for a month, you have your banner ad created and you are starting to get people through to your site, however your site still isn’t converting the clicks into sales. Why, you ask? Maybe there is something wrong with the product your selling or the niche your in, but that’s not what we’re focusing on. If you market a product well, you can sell anything! The problem is probably your landing page, remember that the viewer has got the initial impression from your banner ad, and if they get onto your website and see that the page is quite unprofessional and unfinished, you aren’t going to gain the trust of the visitors who are clicking on your ads. Your landing and marketing page is the most important thing on par with the banner ad its self.

These two work really well together, without a landing page, a banner ad will massively struggle to convert clicks into sales, however a landing page without a good banner ad won’t even get noticed because nobody will be clicking on the ad to begin with so you are definitely in a struggle if one of these is lacking behind the other. So make sure both landing pages and banner ads are always at top notch by making sure they follow things like branding between site, product and banner ad as well as using the techniques listed in my other blog posts and you will ensure you gain clicks and then convert those clicks to sales.

So if your struggling to make any sales, go onto your main landing page and ask yourself, does this give me enough but not too much information to make me want to buy this product. Don’t be bias towards yourself, be honest because your own constructive criticism will improve your site. Or even better get a friend or a professional to help you out and you will eventually convert those clicks into sales!

Sometimes the niche is just too competitive however there are little changes you can make to your banner ad to make it convert. To get more clicks there are a few different methods you can use to increase clicks. If you have 2000 impressions with a click through rate of 1% you are only getting 20 people look at your site through your ad. So, if you want to get more people through your site, you could double the amount of impressions. So 4000 impressions at a click through rate of 1% means you would have 40 people go through to your site, however doubling your website traffic isn’t easy…

So, lets try and raise the click through rate, if you have 2000 monthly impressions with a click through rate of 2% (That’s only a 1% rise!) you have doubled your monthly clicks from 20 to 40 from 2000 impressions. If you double your click through rate again to 4% you are getting 80 people through to your site from only 2000 people! After you optimize your click through rate, then you can look at increasing your monthly impressions. If you have 4000 impressions a month at a rate of 4% you now have 160 people looking at your site.

I know what your thinking! “How can I increase my click through rate?”
Well, here is 7 simple tips to increase clicks on your Internet banners to make them convert better

1. Add a call-to-action button
Call to action buttons draw attention to peoples eyes and makes them interact with your ad, and when you have interaction you have a click!

2. Use arrows
Arrows draw peoples attention and points their eyes to a specific point, so if you have an arrow pointing to a call to action button! You cannot lose!

3. Catchy Snap Line
A snap line is the 1 liner that grabs the readers attention straight away, once you have their attention you use the other features of the banner ad to get them to click

4. Don’t use bright fluorescent colors
The worst thing you can do is make your brand and your Internet banner look cheap. You can so easily make it look cheap and worthless if you include bright colours like bright yellow, blue or pink, some people think this attracts attention; DONT! It attracts the wrong attention

5. Match your brand to the branding of the Ad
What is worse than seeing a greatly designed Internet banner and then going onto a website which is rubbish! Make sure the brand of your banner ad matches the brand of your site, this will gain the initial trust of the viewer

6. Use a good high quality complimentary image
Check out some stock photo sites and get your hands on a high quality stock image that portrays a certain message. If you can get a photo to backup what your snap line is saying then your banner design is a winner!

7. Be Honest!
Don’t include crazy facts (This is aimed at you affiliate marketers!) don’t claim how to make £10,000,000 overnight when you actually cant. Include real statistics and figures If you use them, however I don’t personally recommend using it. I would prefer to use a question like “Want to find out how to make money?” this rhetorical question makes the user want to interact with your ad

Advertising is everywhere in our day to day lives, especially on the Internet! There are a tonne of websites and a lot of them make money through advertising. Its how facebook generate all their revenue, and the same goes for google as well, they make a lot of their money through advertising. Banner ads are an art form and require a lot of skill. I’ve rounded up a few popular and well known websites here to show you how they showcase their ads and what those ads look like for inspiration!

Web Design Ledger
Web Design Ledger show their ads along the top of their side as long banners and then also more square banner ads down the right hand side

Abduzeedo
Abduzeedo places ads around various locations including the banner ad at the top and the high converting right hand side ads

VectorTuts+
VectorTuts+ provide tutorials for vector images using Adobe Illustrator

Smashing Apps
Opensource, Free and Useful Online Resources for Designers and Developers

Six Revisions
Six Revisions publishes web design articles, news and tutorials

PSDTuts+
Adobe photoshop tutorials from beginner to advance

Nalds Graphics
Naldz Graphics is a Design Blog dedicated to help the Design Community.

LogoPond
Identity Inspiration for designers

Design M.AG
DesignM.ag is a blog and community resource for web designers. Follow industry news and browse through our design gallery as well

Bittbox
Design freebies including tutorials, vectors, high resolution Photoshop brushes and textures