Proven Laws of Banner Advertising

1ST OF ALL - WE USE BANNERS TO LEVERAGE OUR WEBSITE FOR EXPOSURE
Get on the internet and Join two, three, or four quality link-exchange organizations, and place your banner. A typical exchange organization will offer you one-half to .7 or .8 credits, each time you host, or put up another member's banner on your own website, and paying a full credit will earn you the right to display your banner on another exchange members site.

Some exchanges offer multiple page coding so you may host members banners on numerous pages throughout your site. Thus membership in multiple exchange organizations allows you to leverage visitors not only as a result of each unique visitor producing multiple credits for you, but also as a result of visitors who go beyond your home page, explore your web site, and earn you additional exchange credits through the impressions they are exposed to on any or all of the pages you host banners on.

So, not only are you getting credits, but you're gaining in exposure, advertising and getting your branding and promoting your brand out there in the world.

It's highly possible to earn, with a ten page web site, and a visitor who sees all ten pages, ten or more credits, meaning impressions due you just for belonging to two exchanges. Now that's leverage. The co-op offers a full one to one exchange plus a unique program paying cash for click throughs. And you can exclude specific catagories of competitors banners appearing on your pages.

WHAT DOES A GREAT BANNER ABSOLUTELY NEED?

BRAND YOUR BANNER CAMPAIGN!
I can't stress this enough. There is no reason not to brand every banner you ever create. Branding your banner can be accomplished by doing nothing more that placing your product or company logo on one of the screens in the animation process, or simply giving the name of your company, or domain name, or a picture of your product. With average click through responses in the 1-2% range, why waste 98% of the impressions by not telling the viewer who you are or what your product is? Off line advertisers have known for decades the power of branding, and with properly designed banners you can accomplish both direct response advertising and branding simultaneously. With branding you can get your name, your product name, continually in front of your prospects, even if they don't "click" on.

DON'T BE AFRAID OF HOSTING BANNERS OR LOSING YOUR VISITORS
Don't get hung up on hosting banners on your site for fear that you'll lose a visitor. Listen, they're going to leave anyways. If they're interested in your site they'll stick with it until their interest is totally satisfied. If not, you're going to lose them in any event, so you may as well get some mileage out of those visits.

DON'T QUALIFY YOUR VISITOR
Do not try to qualify your visitor. In other words, let the site do the qualifying and selling job for you. After all the name of the game is to get each and every unique new visitor to your site as possible, thus leveraging credits due you should you belong to a banner exchange.

USE THEMES
When building your five to ten word static banner, or five to seven words first screen animated banner copy, rely on these themes. Fear, curiosity, humor, the big promise. Example, Warning, you must see this before you purchase xxx; never worry about losing xxx again, learn the secrets of cashing in on xxx, do you know how to xxx? As an aside, a warning banner is an enormously powerful approach. Many off line yellow pages publishers will not even allow them because the other advertisers complain about the unfair advantage such an ad delivers. Try one.

CLICK-THROUGHS NOT IMPRESSIONS!
When appropriate to your marketing campaign, buy click- throughs and not impressions. With click through purchases you can lock in on the cost of each unique new visitor. Purchasing click- throughs helps to eliminate concern over rigorous and ongoing testing and new banner design and creation concerns, as well as the arduous task of ongoing meaning daily, monitoring of each of your banner's effectiveness. When purchasing click- throughs and paying only for those new visitors, all of those issues become someone else's problem. The co-op offers an excellent click through ad program.

TARGET YOUR MARKET!.
 If you are a niche market advertiser, or a local or regional advertiser, targeting is vital to the success of your banner campaign. You'll want to very carefully select sites or work with an ad agency that offers the opportunity to reach those prospects who are the most likely to be interested in your product or service. On the surface, purchasing targeted impressions is more costly, however, it represents the best way to reach your audience. If you're selling automobiles in southeast Texas, it makes no sense to place your banner into a national network where only a fraction of the audience would have any interest. Instead you'll want to target web sites serving the community you service, including the Chamber of Commerce, newspapers, radio stations, television stations, and other local and regional businesses serving the same geography.

WHAT DOES A GREAT BANNER ABSOLUTELY NEED?