click here, or, click here now, or show a drop down box with a click arrow prominently displayed.
12. 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. Web Promote offers an excellent click through program as does the bannerco-op
13. Targeting. 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 Florida, 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 Chamber of Commerces, newspapers, radio stations, television stations, and other local and regional businesses serving the same geography.
14. Test, test, and test some more. Once you've got the perfect banner working, design another one because sooner or later even the best banner runs out of steam. It's generally accepted that after a prospect sees a banner for the third or fourth time, the likelihood of a click through plummets. When testing, always test the next new design on the same site or on the same network, so you are indeed comparing apples to apples. Testing is a continual ongoing, dynamic process. Review your stat pages on a daily basis and be prepared to act quickly when results begin to lag. Remember the three most critical elements of your banner. First the copy, next the color, and next the graphics. Once a successful banner has been created, tweaking and modifying these elements can keep it alive and producing strong click-throughs for many months.
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
