— It is ad message of company/website,

— Allows visual display of company name, logo and product

— It is click-through device

— it is a concise sales pitch that can trigger customer click-through

— It is key for affiliate tracking mechanism (if you run an affiliate program)

What’s point of banners if clicks are declining?

At turn of century it seemed like it was all over for banners when research showed that click-through rates had dropped to 0.5% or less from a level of 2-3% in 1990’s. Fortunately there was also research that showed that banners play a big role in improving brand awareness on net. In fact, despite finding that click-throughs are falling one yardstick that gives us some insight that banners are still effective - is affiliate program concept. It is well known that affiliates make a significant contribution to Internet economy and as we all know, affiliate programs use banners as main advertising format. This implies that banners continue to work even at reduced click-through rates and have probably stabilized at this level after heightened interest in initial years of net.

If we draw parallels with paper mailer based direct marketing industry, lessons learnt in direct response marketing show that expectations in terms of response rates should be realistic and as a percentage of total mailers sent out, response is actually as low as 0.5%. It is therefore not surprising that click-throughs on banners which is online equivalent of an initial response to ad are also at similar levels.

The point to be borne in mind is that banners still make business sense especially due to their ability to create brand awareness and maintain brand visibility.

NO, don't bother! It's a waste of time, and you'll probably just receive lots of unwanted e-mail.

Instead, submit your site to major search engines and directories (i.e. Google, and a few others). Monitor your results, and resubmit only if your site isn't listed yet.

Repeat this process for any new content you create.

== Aside == Your site does contain good page content, decent page title and useful keyword and description meta tags, doesn't it? Read my 'Use Keywords And Meta Tags To Get The Click!' article if not! - http://www.howipromotemywebsite.com/keywords == Aside ==

You *can* use an auto-submission tool, or you can hand- submit to each site. The latter approach takes more time, but at least you know that your site *has* been submitted!

Either way, site-submission process doesn't take long, but it may well take a few months before your efforts are rewarded by search engine traffic.

=> SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE

Nowadays, your site must be listed on Google.

Google is now *the* dominant search engine on web. Not only do most people use it for search, but it also provides results for AOL and other major sites.

Submission to Google is easy - you need only submit your home page. Other pages, linked to from home page, will then get added to Google's database over time.

In fact, you don't actually have to submit your site to Google (Google prefers that you don't). It may well find your site anyway, especially if another site (already on Google) has links to your site.

== Aside == Want to know how to go about swapping links with other sites. Read my 'Reciprocal Link To Boost Your Website Traffic!' article if not! - http://www.howipromotemywebsite.com/link-swaps == Aside ==

It's worth reading what Google says about getting your site listed. (The 'add your site' links follow.)

Google Information for Webmasters - http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Add your site to Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Add your site to Google UK - http://www.google.co.uk/addurl.html

=> ADD YOUR SITE HERE, TOO...

After submitting your site to Google, you should hand-submit your site to these other major search engines and directories, also (listed in alphabetical order):

AltaVista - (Search results are provided by Yahoo!)

AllTheWeb.com (Fast Search) - (Search results provided by Yahoo!)

AOL Search - (Search results provided by Google and DMOZ)

MSN (Inktomi Search Index that powers MSN search) - http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Open Directory Project (DMOZ) - http://dmoz.org/add.html

Scrub The Web - http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Yahoo! directory - http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

Yahoo! search (new) - Yahoo! registration required. - http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

Note: regional (and maybe more appropriate) versions of above search engines exist too.