You do require a certain amount of initial outlay to kick-start an affiliate program because of support tools and software necessary to run an affiliate network. There are companies that offer customized affiliate program solutions as well as companies that offer specialized banner creation services. You can achieve additional sales when you run an affiliate program as well as widen presence of your brands through banner displays at a large number of affiliates.

Banner Exchange schemes

Banner exchange schemes especially benefit small and medium businesses. This is a barter-like opportunity to create brand awareness without spending money. In a banner exchange network, members display each other’s banner ads at their web sites in a particular ratio. In a 2:1 scheme, for example- for every two banners displayed on your site your banner is displayed once on banner network.

The scheme is mutually beneficial for participating websites. On many banner exchange networks you can choose categories of web sites. This provides targeted displays and ensures audiences with similar interests for your banners, thereby increasing likelihood of click-throughs. Check out www.linkbuddies.com

Create a banner and choose a suitable scheme If you are battling with how to create awareness for your website within limited resources, you should explore innumerable banner exchange schemes available. You can create banners for free through online free banner design websites that offer all kinds of tools from color, animations, 3D effects and so on, and thereafter sign-up for one of these schemes. If you have been in business for a while and can afford to invest a little bit in name of long-term brand building, then go ahead and launch an affiliate network for your brand/brands.

If you want your banner to have a presence on high profile high traffic sites, you can buy space on sites of your choice. You can also adopt new design techniques in ‘rich media’ to improve impact and effectiveness of your banners.

The internet is a great place to achieve focus in audiences reached and finding these opportunities is key to running a successful banner campaign.

What if you’re not satisfied with product? How do you return it without difficulties? Make sure you have a refund/return policy and that you want your visitors to return products easily. Don’t make it complicated or restrictive for your visitors since they won’t return to buy anything else from you in future.

Where did I make mistake? It keeps telling me that I omitted important information and won’t let me proceed to next frame in ordering process. Been there once too many times and guess what I did? I gave up ordering. When visitors fill out forms or are required to input information, sometimes it gets overlooked or omitted by mistake. You should try to anticipate as many of these simple mistakes as possible and design your site to minimize occurrence. In all honesty, visitors will make mistakes even if site is designed specifically to meet needs of visitors, so do best you can to keep those mistakes at a minimum. You can have a feature where it tells visitor exactly where information is lacking so they don’t have to go through entire form to look for what they forgot to type in.

Keep it short and quick. I’m finding that many website owners are now offering two types of check out options. One is regular check out and other is a ‘Speedy Checkout’. This is a nice feature to have if you’re just either a one time customer buying on a whim, or even repeat customer where your information is stored within their database making it easy and quick for you to place orders within that website at any given time. A good rule of thumb—make buying process only a two-frame process if possible and third would be final page with payment method and a receipt of order. If you make your visitors fill out 5 pages before they order something, they’re going to be annoyed rather quickly and give up.

Payment method options should be attractive and allow visitors choice in how they want to pay. Provide as many credit card options as well as use of a debit card; also to pay by check where funds are electronically withdrawn from that visitor’s checking account. If you only let credit card holders opportunity to buy from your site, you’re truly missing out on another group of consumers that rather pay through methods where they actually have funds. Why deny non credit card holders privilege of buying from you? If you do, they will seek out your competitors that offer that feature for them.