"Wake Up Surfers" (and lo and behold, I did wake up!), "Attention Hi*t Exchange Surfers!" and "Are You Still Having Fun Clicking?"

2) Be original

It seems that every other page being promoted in hit exchanges is an affiliate site. Unless its for a relatively new program or program has a variety of sites you can choose to promote, people are going to get weary of seeing same pages over and over and over again.

Whilst repetition is important so that people become aware of a product or service, over saturation can sound death knell for your promotion activities.

If you're an affiliate, you need to create your own page, with your own take on benefits of program, product or service you're promoting. Write your own recommendation and if possible, add on a freebie as an incentive for people to join through YOUR link.

Or offer a free gift in exchange for people's email addresses and then follow up with your product/program recommendations.

3) Be short & sweet

Shout out largest benefit of what you're promoting as soon as possible because unless your copy is particularly engrossing, most surfers won't hang around long enough to read it all.

Remember, you've only got 30 seconds max for your site to be viewed and WIIFM is very much in full swing! The next page and guarantee of another visitor back to a surfer's site all beckon.

But if you absolutely can not do with out long web copy, then you need to give them a reason to remember your site, to bookmark it and to come back later.

This may sound a bit "new agey", but here's a final tip. The obvious reason why people use traffic exchanges is to get visitors to see their sites, but this stems from a deeper motivation.

Everyone who promotes their pages in business related categories of hit exchanges is most likely doing so because they want to earn a living online and fulfil a dream of working for themselves.

When you think about it in this way, you can't help but feel a kind of kinship or bond with owners of sites that you see as you surf. So wish them well as you look at their sites and visualise people looking at your pages with interest. By doing this you'll be increasing success of your campaigns and on a more practical note, don't forget to give yourself regular breaks!

CREATIVITY The real nice thing about banner ads that there isn’t too much creativity involved since you’re working with an area that is relatively small to begin with. Making sure that you select an appropriate color is big factor in banner ads. The second factor is that creativity comes in form of designing. For example, a creative strategy is to design a trick banner ad, in which graphics look like links or buttons. As long as banner ads take viewers to kind of site they’re expecting when they click on it, clever "trick" banner ads are acceptable enticements to get people to click. There are other creative solutions that you can use, but key thing here is when you design banner ad, make sure you test it considerably to see what kind of click through ratios you are receiving. If you find that it isn’t working, then you need to change design or approach you’re using. A good place to get started is to find banner ads that appeal to you and see how they work.

With these short and simple tips at your disposal, you should be able to come up with some real effective banner ads by following Four C’s to boost your banner ad click through ratios. The most effective banner advertising campaigns are a combination of branding and click through strategies. Both types feature a call to action and offer a clear benefit to end users. Any web site that has a clear benefit and actually delivers on that benefit will get positive branding and results with potential customers.

Joelene Orlando is a Web enthusiast and a staff writer/consultant for eMarketing Answers with a broad knowledge of topics covering Internet marketing and communication strategies for both consumer and small business owners. http://www.emarketinganswers.com is dedicated to providing free, comprehensive emarketing resources and online promotion tools.