Banner Ads Don't Work, But Non-Banners Do!

Written by Ernie West


Make your banner look like text on a page. This is what I call a "non-banner" (close to "no-brainer"). If your banner looks like a banner, it gets ignored. Conventional banner ads only pull less than three percent on average. Why is that? It's because we have learned to ignore advertising. Every day we are bombarded with sales pitches in newspapers, on repparttar radio, on television, on highway billboards, and so on. It becomes background noise that we learn to tune out. Something that doesn't appear to be a sales pitch will receive more attention. Intelligent surfers are looking for information. They want to find out about something and be told how their problem can be solved. Do that properly and you will get their click. If you try to entertain them, impress them with graphics or bore them with your company's features, you won't get noticed. Your banner is pretty much a classified ad. And classified ads work whenrepparttar 101192 rules of marketing are followed. Make your banner an attractive text ad and it will pull like crazy. Make it look like any other flashy, hyped up banner and it just becomes more ofrepparttar 101193 clutter on a site. If your banner will be staying at a permanent home, design it so it looks like it is part ofrepparttar 101194 site. Matchrepparttar 101195 background color, fonts and layout as much as you can. If your banner is going through a banner exchange, use white as a default color. Atrepparttar 101196 very least your text will be highlighted if it lands on

The Secret Methods of Tracking Your Advertising

Written by Marc Goldman


When you are placing ads in ezines or posting to newsgroups or leaving your sig file anywhere, you should be trackingrepparttar effectiveness of your efforts. People have been tracking their advertising efforts sincerepparttar 101191 beginning of direct marketing. If you are a fan ofrepparttar 101192 tv infomercials, you would have noticed that whenrepparttar 101193 payment information is displayed, it always includes a particular Department number or instructs you to call a particular extension number. This tellsrepparttar 101194 advertiser where their customers and prospects are coming from. You can easily implement these tricks yourself so that you can determine whatrepparttar 101195 most cost effective methods of advertising are for you.

Here is a simple and free way to track your ads. Lets say you are running 3 ads forrepparttar 101196 same product and placing those ads in 3 different ezines. The product is sold from one page on your website called: http://www.yourdomain.com/sales.html

If you had every ad point to that URL, you would never know which ad worked or which ezine brought inrepparttar 101197 sales. Therefore, you could track your ads by doing this:

Place a question mark and some code atrepparttar 101198 end of each URL. For example:

sales?ezine1 sales?ezine2 sales?ezine3

You can makerepparttar 101199 code whatever you want as long as you remember which code you chose forrepparttar 101200 particular ad. Just remember this does not only apply to ezine advertising, you could use this in your discussion forum posts or in your sig file or anywhere else that you choose to promote your site, both online and offline. I suggest keeping a record of which code matches which ad as it can be quite confusing keeping track of all your ads. For example, I use Microsoft Excel to keep a spreadsheet record of all of my advertising efforts.

Your webserver will not recognizerepparttar 101201 question mark (?) code but your server logs will. This isrepparttar 101202 key. People will all end up onrepparttar 101203 same page (sales.html) but your logs will indicaterepparttar 101204 sales that came from each unique ad. This will allow you to make an informed decision about which ezines to continue to place ads in and those that aren't worth your investment of time and money.

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