Every pitch in baseball is a battle. Every contest between a pitcher and a batter is a skirmish that bears on who will win game. Although baseball is a team sport, each individual must fulfill their role for team to win. If a batter gets lazy, he may miss pitch that he could launch for a game-winning home run. If an infielder makes a throwing error, he may be throwing away game.

The closest parallel to business is battle between pitcher and batter. The pitcher must fight for every pitch, and batter must contend with every pitch. If either let up for just one pitch, end result of game could be in jeopardy.

The pitcher must know batter well enough to decide which pitch to throw. Every pitch is crucial. If pitcher throws too many balls and falls behind in count, it becomes a hitter’s count. If pitcher challenges batter with strikes and moves ahead in count, it becomes a pitcher’s count and pitcher has more flexibility in how he can pitch to batter.

The batter must know pitcher well enough to guess at pitches he will be thrown. He must protect plate. He must know his own best hitting zones, and foul off pitches that might be strikes so he is not called out on strikes.

As range of goods and online services offered via Internet has grown at an incredible rate over last few years, therefore so has competition. Web site visitors need to have a very good reason for clicking on a link or banner.

how to choose right banners for affiliate marketing tools

In most affiliate programs, you are offered a wide variety of banners to place on your site but very few of them will be effective. If you can attain a clickthrough rate of 2%, then you are doing very well. It has been our experience, and this is generally speaking, that graphically rich banners do not perform as successfully as their simpler counterparts. The main reason for this is download time. If a banner is last thing to load on your page and banner ad is excessively byte "heavy", by time it has loaded your visitor may already have scrolled down page - missing it entirely. Heavy banner ads can also slow down loading of your pages, or critical elements of your page and you can lose your visitors altogether! A graphically rich banner can also confuse actual message - artwork and marketing blurb can be imbalanced. For these reasons, we suggest that banners you implement be no more that 15kb wherever possible.

Banners that have "extreme" animation, such as rapid flashing, are also something to consider very carefully. While these do achieve high clickthrough rates, they are also highly annoying. If you do decide to implement this form of banner advertising, use it very sparingly.

When selecting any form of graphical advertising, try and keep theme of your site in mind - while graphical ads are meant to stand out and catch a visitors eye, it shouldn't be to point that everything else on page is totally ignored. Wherever possible, ensure that all banner ads uses a link that opens in a new window. That way, if a visitor does choose to visit one of your advertisers it is easy for them to return to your page and review what they actually came to your site for!

Pop ups and pop unders Many companies, but mostly agencies representing a number of advertisers, now give their affiliates options of using pop up and pop under ads. Our opinion - pop ups are evil. They annoy visitors and are usually closed before they even have a chance to load. Go for pop-unders and preferably those that only display once per visit.