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Banner Advertising Isn't
Dead.. So Use It!
by Dan Grossman
Banner
advertising surely isn't dead, if you know how to
take
advantage of it. While an effective campaign for
driving traffic
to your site through banner advertising can cost far
too much for
any small business owner's budget, banner
advertising can still
be used effectively. It is much more useful as a
tool for
branding your site or product or attracting leads.
If you're thinking of letting the world know about
your site or
product through banner advertising, consider these
important
steps before you start:
1. PLAN YOUR CAMPAIGN
Thoughtful planning is the most important step in
successful
advertising in any media. There are several things
you must
consider before even creating your banners or
choosing where
to advertise:
o Is your goal to build brand awareness?
o Is your goal to generate leads or clickthroughs?
o Who will be most interested in your site or
product?
o How will you track the effectiveness of your ads?
Once you've answered those questions, you can start
planning the
banners you're going to create and exactly what
you're going to
do with them.
No matter what your specific goals are, targeting
will be a very
important part of any campaign. With the high cost
of advertising
with banners, getting them in front of the people
you want to see
them becomes incredibly important. This involves
identifying the
groups interested in your site or product and
getting your ads
on websites that cater to that market. For example,
a car
dealership would probably be interested in
advertising on the
website of an auto magazine.
Before you spend any money, spend the time to choose
the right
places to advertise. It may seem like the perfect
idea to buy
targeted advertising at the first search engine you
run into, but
researching into specific sites in your industry can
lead to a
buy with results 20 times better. Check out the
media kits or
advertising sections of some sites related to your
site or
product for information about demographics, previous
customers,
and any information they might make public about the
effectiveness of previous campaigns.
2. DESIGN YOUR BANNERS
To maximize your campaign's effectiveness, you
should rotate
between several different banners, possibly as many
as 10 or
more. This way, you can appeal to different types of
people
within your target group. It also allows you to
compensate for
banners which don't perform as well as others, and
to decide
which designs or ideas work best for you.
The banner creation process starts in a standard
graphics program
such as Adobe PhotoShop or JASC's Paint Shop Pro,
which comes
with Animation Shop 3 which will help you later on
in the design
process (http://www.jasc.com/product.asp?pf%5Fid=001).
Assuming you're creating your own banners and not
outsourcing to
a separate company or using a ready-made banner site
(such as
http://www.readybanners.com/),
you'll start by creating several
468x60 images in your favorite graphics program to
use as the
frames in your final animated banner, or just one
image if you
choose not to animate. Animated banners, even with a
simple,
single element of animation tend to draw more clicks
than static
ones. Then, use a GIF animation program to create
your banners
from the static images. Some include Animation Shop
3 which comes free with Paint Shop Pro, GIF Movie
Gear (http://www.gamani.com/) or
ULead's GIF Animator (http://www.ulead.com/ga/trial.htm).
Here are a few tips to keep in mind for creating
effective
banner advertisements:
- Color Scheme: Choose only a few colors, maybe
3, to use in
a single banner. Keeping it simple works best,
and reduces
image size.
- Don't loop your banner animation more than a
few times.
- Use your best copy when writing the text for
your banners.
Choose important features and include words like
"free" and
"click here."
- Use a simple, readable font.
- Look at the banners that catch your attention
on the web;
see why you stop and look at theirs.
- Optimize your banners' file sizes so they
download quickly.
Many graphics programs have functions to do this
built in.
3. LAUNCH YOUR CAMPAIGN AND TEST IT
Now that you have several banners created and you've
planned
where you're going to advertise and what your goals
are, it's
time to launch the campaign; get those banners on
the sites! You
should be tracking response with your web logs or
other statistics
so that you know when you are receiving traffic from
the sites
you advertised on. To make this easier, you may want
to have your
banners point to a special page you've made on your
site just for
those who click on them so that you can easily
identify traffic
from your banners by how many times the page is
seen.
You should also track which banner is referring
which traffic,
either by the referring URLs in your web logs or by
setting up
different pages for each banner to point to. This
way, if certain
banners are working better for you than others, you
know to
either increase their exposure in the current
campaign or use them
again in the future.
Hopefully your banners are now increasing your brand
name
recognition to your audience on carefully selected
sites, or they
are bringing you new traffic and leads you didn't
have before!
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Dan Grossman runs http://www.websitegoodies.com
where you can
find over 250 hand-picked resources, articles, and
tools! Dan
also publishes the free weekly "WebDevPortal"
newsletter for
website owners! Subscribe today and get articles
like this every
week:
mailto:subs
cribe@webdevportal.com?subject=article-subscribe
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