Banner ads continue to be internet’s most widely used form of advertising and use of ‘rich media’ in banners has improved impact and given a fillip to usage of banners. For those who use traditional media forms like TV, Radio or Print ads, use of Internet banners increases brand visibility and provides response capabilities through click-throughs. To quote from a Forrester Research report “Online advertising can boost brand impact at 60% less cost than piling on more offline ads -- under right conditions. Marketers should use new technologies to plan an online/offline mix to increase brand impact”.

For those who cannot afford mass media or consider their products too niche for traditional media, Internet banners can help establish brand name recognition. For such advertisers who depend mainly on Internet to create brand awareness, key lies in placing their banners within website environments with focused and relevant content.

When customers view a company’s banner ads, whether they click through or not, it adds to overall brand building activity and brand recall at a low cost. There is a tendency to run banner ads as short-term campaigns of 4-8 weeks but it takes longer for a banner campaign to establish a brand. Brand building on Internet has to be a sustained effort just like in case of traditional media but you could adopt a strategy of regularly refreshing and changing your banner ad content. This will ensure that you keep brand top-of-mind as well as renew interest with fresh copy/visuals.

The banner space is evolving in terms of sizes, location on page, interactive capabilities and audio-visual delivery. If you capitalize on these developments early in game before all Internet marketers wake up to it, forerunner advantage and element of surprise will be yours and you can establish your brands quickly and effectively.

You can also pay to get your site listed on search engines.

Ask Jeeves, Looksmart, Inktomi (and more) all accept payment for including a particular website page in its database. Take a look at http://www.positiontech.com (Inktomi) for more details.

And if you want to pay per click, then can I politely suggest you read my 'Pay Per Click To Guarantee Targeted Traffic!' article - http://howipromotemywebsite.com/pay-per-click

=> BE LAZY, AND USE THIS AUTO-SUBMIT TOOL

AddMe.com is a great free website promotion resource.

And it includes a useful auto-submission tool. The free tool - first auto-submit tool I ever used!! - submits your site to 13 major search engines. Whilst paid-for professional tool submits your site each month to 2000 search engines and classifieds - http://www.addme.com/submission.htm

I recommend hand-submission, but it's your choice!

=> THEN MONITOR RESULTS!

After a month or so, check to see if your site exists on particular search engine database.

And only resubmit your site if you can't find it listed.

(Do a search for your website URL; e.g. do a search for www.yourwebsitename.com .)

Or you could use following position checking tools, and see how your site ranks for keyword of 'www.yourwebsitename.com'

- http://www.marketleap.com/verify/default.htm - http://www.free-webmaster-tools.com/PositionAnalyzer.htm

Note: there are much more sophisticated ways of checking to see if you need to re-submit your site, but they are out of scope of this article!

=> EVEN DO IT YOURSELF!

For programmers out there, you might like to create/ modify your own site submission and position checking tools. CGI Resources is best place to find such resources - http://www.cgi-resources.com

And some site building tools come with automatic site- submission and position-checking tools built in; e.g. Site Build It!

=> READ MORE...

You can find out a great deal more about search engine submission from following excellent resources. Just do a search for "search engine submission" and off you go! (You can also find out more about paid search engine submissions here too.)

http://www.sitepoint.com http://www.google.com

--

Search engines and directories can still be a great way of getting free traffic to your website. But you only need bother with a few search engines these days (particularly Google). So add your site to major search engines /directories and monitor results. And only re-submit if your site does not get listed.

Happy submitting!

PS There is much more to website promotion than just submitting your site to search engines. But then you knew that, anyway, didn't you? ;-)

© Copyright 2002-2004 Steve Nash. All Rights Reserved.

STEVE NASH is the owner of free website promotion guide http://HowIPromoteMyWebsite.com. His popular site covers all the basic aspects of web site promotion. Visit now!