The 14 Proven Laws Of Banner Advertising
by Michael T. Glaspie
Banner advertising unquestionably has become the industry's most reliable, predictable, and measurable method for attracting new visitors. With 60-70% online ad expenditures being allocated to banner advertisements, there is little room for question as to the effectiveness of a well managed banner ad campaign. I have therefore assembled for your review the 14 principles of successful banner advertising.
You are encouraged to incorporate these concepts into your online marketing strategies, to not only boost traffic to your site, but to leverage it as well.
1. Join two, three, or four quality exchange organizations. A typical exchange organization will offer you usually one-half to .7 or .8 credits, each time you host another member's banner at your site, and a full credit will earn you the displaying of 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. 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. My personal favorites are www.linkexchange.com, www.free-banners.com, and my number one favorite www.bannerco-op.com. 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.
2. When dealing with seconds, and sometimes fractions of a second, to grab the attention of the viewer, it's vital that your ad screams LOOK AT ME NOW. You accomplish this goal primarily through and in this order, your copy, color, graphics. Therefore spend as much time on the five to ten words that little box has space enough for as you did practicing to ask for that first date.
3. Bright colors almost always out perform the reds and the blacks which are less effective. Use yellow, orange, blue and green.
4. Animated banners have multiple advantages over static or single screen banners. Use them to layer in additional copy. A three screen animated banner easily provides enough room for five to seven words per screen. Just make certain the copy that you choose for the first screen is compelling and attention getting. Focus on your web site's premium benefit. Why do people visit your site? What's in it for them? Build your headline, ie: the first screen, or your static banner, based upon your single most prominent, compelling benefit.
5. Banner size, should be maintained at 3-5K which is ideal if you can accomplish your copy and creative objectives. If not, up to 7 is OK. Never more than 10 as it takes much longer to load and you run the risk of the visitor not seeing your banner at all.
6. 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.
7. 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
Michael T. Glaspie, a renowned direct marketer, whose experiences have been both pace setting and often legendary, now shares his insights through "How To Sell Anything To Anyone Anytime" a twice monthly newsletter, free via e-mail available at http://mysiteinc.com/mglaspie
