1. Negotiate with e-zine publishers to get free or
discounted ads by letting them join your affiliate
program and earn commissions on the ad you run.
2. Build up the number of people that join your free
affiliate program quickly by temporally offering your
product for free to the people that sign up.
3. Allow people to download software or e-books
from your web site at no cost. Just ask your visitors
in return if they'll refer their friends to your web site.
4. Offer daily or weekly visitor bonuses. This will
increase your repeat traffic and sales because your
visitors will visit regularly to get the visitor bonuses.
5. Sell advertising space in your product package.
You could sell inserts, flyers, brochures, booklets,
and digital ads for electronic products.
6. Publish your e-zine only on your web site. Have
people subscribe to a "new issue" e-mail reminder.
This could really increase your traffic and sales.
7. Create two versions of your e-zine so people
can choose if they want ads included with it or not.
This'll attract the people who hate ads to subscribe.
8. Add a free classified ad section to your web site.
You could then trade banner ads with other web
sites that have free classified ad sections.
9. Turn part of your web site into a members only
web site. Instead of charging for access, use it as
a free bonus for one of your products.
10. Create a free ebook directory on a specific topic
at your web site. People will visit your web site to
read the free ebooks and may see your product ad.
by Henry J.
Fasthoff, IV
Banner advertising is an effective way of getting your advertising message
seen on the Internet. Banner ads should not be your only online form of
advertising, but they are an essential part of your online advertising mix.
This article assumes that the reader knows what a banner ad looks like, but do
you know how they work, and how you can derive benefit from them? Let’s
define a few terms before answering these questions.
1. “Page views” or “page impressions.” These terms are interchangeable
and they refer to the number of times that a page within a website has been
displayed on a website.
2. “Banner view.” Like a page view, a banner view is the number of times
that a banner has been displayed on website.
3. “Click through.” A click through is the number of times a website
visitor has “clicked” on a particular banner ad and was transferred to the
website of the banner advertiser.
4. “CTR.” CTR is the acronym for “click through rate,” which is the
ratio of the number of banner view versus the number of times visitors have
“clicked through” to your website. CTR is expressed as a percentage, so a
click through rate of 1% means that for every 1,000 banner views, 10 visitors
have clicked through to your site.
5. “CPM.” CPM is an acronym for “cost per M,” where “M” is the
ancient Roman numeral for 1,000. Translation: CPM is the price your business
will pay to have its banner advertisement displayed 1,000 times on a website,
e.g, the cost of 1,000 banner views. So, for example, if the CPM to advertise
on a site is $80.00 your business will pay $80.00 for every 1,000 banner
views.
6. “ROS.” ROS is the acronym for “run of site,” which simply means
that a banner ad is displayed on every page in a website, as opposed to being
displayed only in a particular category of a website or only when a particular
keyword is entered into a search engine.
Everyone who is in charge of a advertising or marketing department (that’s
you if you’re the sole shareholder of the company) knows that advertising
is, in large part, a numbers game. The more frequently your message is seen or
heard, the more likely the consumer is to purchase your service or product.
Take Mattress Mac with Gallery Furniture , for example. If you live in the
Houston area, or if your radio can pick up the signal of almost any Houston
area radio station, you cannot go a single day without hearing or seeing an
advertisement for Gallery Furniture. Peppering your senses with constant
reminders that “Gallery Furniture Saves You Money!” has enabled Mr.
McIngvale to build his single location furniture store into an empire. (Of
course, advertising alone won’t do it; you still must have a quality product
or service). I have no scientific data to support this assertion, but I’ll
make it anyway: I’m willing to bet that Gallery Furniture is known to more
people in the greater Houston area than any other single business. How did
that come to be? Mattress Mac understands the advertising numbers game and
plays it better than anybody else.
Banner ads are a numbers game. The industry standard click through rate for
online advertising in general is around .5%. Not 5%, but .5%. Doesn’t sound
very encouraging for your banner ad campaign, eh? Well, there are ways to
significantly increase the CTR of any given banner. The best way is by
targeting a particular banner ad to a narrow audience, an audience that is
looking specific for a product or service just like yours. Highly-targeted can
boost your CTR to as much as 2%-3% or higher and significantly increase the
traffic to your website.
Another valuable purpose of the banner ad is branding. Intertwined with the
messages Gallery Furniture delivers about particular sales events or types of
furniture is the company’s consistent and recognizable logo, color scheme,
and tag lines. Your banner advertisements can, and should, perform the same
function; they should be designed using your company’s logo and colors, at a
minimum. Sometimes incorporating the tag line is the way to go, but other
times you may want to advertise a particular special offer, product, etc. The
important thing is that you take advantage of the numbers game by continually
displaying your name, logo, and colors. The more visitors that see you, the
more they will come to associate your name with your type of product or
service, and the more likely they will be in the future to buy from you.
About the Author
Mr. Fasthoff is a commercial litigation attorney by day, and an
entreprenuer in the marketing field by night. He represents corporate clients
and individuals in the fields of commercial litigation; entertainment
litigation; intellectual property litigation; arts law; technology law; and a
wide variety of other business litigation matters.
