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.

The first two lines in our RSS feed example define this as an RSS feed. The tag comes next and contains required information about this news channel (as listed above). Optional information follows these items and includes language, copyright info, contact email addresses, and an image (logo) that can be displayed with channel's headlines. The above example contains all these options, but you can leave these out of your own feed if you prefer.

In addition to required information, channel must contain at least one news item.

News items consist of following:

- Title: this is headline that will be displayed for news item

- Link: URL where full news item can be found (for best results, each item should be on its own unique web page)

- Description: a description of news item - sometimes referred to as a "teaser."

The first two elements are minimum expected by nearly all sites that carry headlines. The description field is optional, as some syndicators will ignore this field altogether, posting only item headline. Because of this, Kalena's RSS file does not include item descriptions.

Below that, you'll see two news items listed, "Google Defines Ethical SEO" and "Yahoo Offends Gay Community in UK". Additional news items would follow same format and be listed directly below within tags. Finally, last two lines of feed are closing tags - XML, like HTML, requires opening and closing tags.

To preview what Kalena's RSS feed looks like when syndicated, visit here:

http://www.wc.cc.va.us/services/news/preview.asp? c=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.high-search-engine-ranking.com%2Fsenb.rss

You can create your own simple RSS file with just about any text editor - I set up sample above with Notepad. Once you've created text file, do following:

1. Save file with .rss as extension (example: mynews.rss) and upload it to main folder of your website.

2. Validate your RSS feed by running it through RSS Validator (http://feeds.archive.org/validator/) to make sure it's set up correctly.

3. Display "valid RSS" logo on your site (available from link above) and provide a visible link to your feed (link: http://www.mydomain.com/mynews.rss) from your site page/s. You could say something like Kalena uses on her site: "Webmasters! Click below to feature our Search Engine News Blog headlines on your site. RSS Feed For This Page." (http://www.high-search-engine-ranking.com/senb.rss)

4. (optional) Create a javascript version of RSS feed to enable other webmasters to syndicate your content on their sites (the Wytheville Community College News Center (http://www.wc.cc.va.us/services/news/default.asp) provides this service for free).

5. Submit your feed to content aggregators. Some sources are provided below.

6. Update your feed regularly by adding new items to .rss file and ensuring each item has it's own link on your web site.

7. To keep your feed fresh, try to keep your channel items to a maximum of five, deleting older items from your feed as you update it. The dates next to your news items will adjust depending on when content aggregators pick them up. So, that's basics of RSS! We have only been able to scratch surface in this short lesson, but it's enough to get you started. A complete description of RSS 0.91 format can be found at http://backend.userland.com/rss, and more resources on creating your own newsfeed can be found here:

Set Up Your Own Newsfeed http://www.internet-tips.net/Homepages/newsfeeds.htm RSS: Lo-Fi Content Syndication http://www.econtentmag.com/r4/2002/bannan1_02.html Blogify Your Page http://logicerror.com/blogifyYourPage Content Syndication With RSS (Blog about RSS) http://rss.benhammersley.com/

[Kalena] Thanks Dan. Ok, so your feed is created, you've verified it works and you've set up code and Javascript on your site so that webmasters and content syndicators can grab it easily. But you're not finished yet! Now you need to spread word about your feed. Here are a few content aggregators where you can register your newsfeed:

Syndic8 http://www.syndic8.com/ Moreover http://www.moreover.com/ Aggregator Userland http://aggregator.userland.com/ News is Free http://www.newsisfree.com/ News Knowledge http://www.newsknowledge.com/

You only need to do this once and then syndicators tracking your feed automatically pick up your new feed items as you update them. You can also download one of these RSS readers to examine your own newsfeed:

http://www.feedreader.com/ http://www.headlineviewer.com/

So there you go. Not as difficult as you thought huh? With a little effort, your site can be rubbing shoulders with big players on major news portals. Enjoy traffic!

- By Kalena Jordan (kalena@high-search-engine-ranking.com) and Dan Thies (dan@cannedhelp.com)

Kalena was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australasia and is well known and respected in her field. For more of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing, please visit www.high-search-engine-ranking.com