I keep a constant watch on Ebay for banner impressions. Watch a few auctions and get a feel for what kind of prices they are going for. Then start watching for some good deals.

There are a lot of places that will put your banner on their site with unlimited impressions for a month, two months or even more.

There have been a few companies lately offering unlimited banners for life of their site. Banners may not be road to getting rich if you are trying to sell them but they sure can be a nice way to get a little name recognition for advertiser.

A little word of caution here. Check out person who is auctioning off product. Ebay allows feedback on every transaction and you can get a pretty good picture of what kind of person you are dealing with. Make sure you check before bidding.

Here is a link to section that has banner auctions.

http://listings.ebay.com/aw/plistings/list/category11763/index.html

So many people think they have to get a return on their advertising investment today. You will find those who are very successful are always looking towards tomorrow.

Start thinking about long term when spending money on advertising. A little money on branding yourself each month will go a long ways towards assuring your business success in future. Think beyond today and start branding your future.

* Ecommerce Guide

This site at http://ecommerce.internet.com/ is a great general online resource. The articles provide insight into what is happening with ecommerce right now. Recent articles as of this writing are: “Dot-Com Sales Lower This Year”, “Amazon Sales Jump 21%”, and “Payment Made Easy (online merchant accounts)”.

* Big Picture Cyberatlas Statistics Toolbox

This site (http://cyberatlas.internet.com/big_picture/stats_toolbox/article) has recent stats on Internet usage, ecommerce, demographics, advertising, and more. This is a real treasure trove of valuable data. Here are some of reports you can find here: “Top US ISPs by Subscriber”; “Online Populations”; “Hispanic Ownership of Selected Home Media Technologies”; “Lycos Top 50 sites for week ending June 29, 2002”; “Surfer Traffic, May 2001 to May 2002”; “Newspaper Site Traffic”; “2001 Worldwide PDA Shipments”. As you can see, there is tons of information here that can help you plan a marketing campaign, or roll out a new product or service.

* eMarketer.com

This site provides excellent reports, but alas they are not free. However, for a reasonable price you can get highly focused and detailed reports for any segment and topic you are interested in…check it out.

This is just a quick list to get you started. You can always do a Google search on ‘market research’ or ‘statistics ’. By way, many of links mentioned in this article can be found on our Resources page at http://www.profitmonkey.com/resources.html

Michael Martone is the webmaster at ProfitMonkey.com and is also the editor of the free newsletter Ebiz Edge. Additional articles on eBusiness and a Free welcome basket are available at http://www.profitmonkey.com/newsletter.html