Banner advertising methods

Buy ad space on suitable websites

Run an Affiliate program

Participate in a Banner Exchange scheme

Buy ad space

This is conventional approach to banner advertising and you have to decide on type of websites that suit your product in terms of content. When content is relevant, audience visiting that site is likely to be a focused audience for your products/services. Given fragmented audiences on Internet, each website in a particular specialized area attracts a small audience. Unless you have a major player like Amazon.com in a category like books, you usually have to use a combination of sites to reach a significant portion of your intended target. You can choose large portals where there is a lot happening - News, business sections, sports, email facility, search engine facility, games, music etc - for instance, a portal like MSN or a newspaper website. Portals attract a larger number of visitors who usually visit to check their email or catch latest headline news. The visitors to such portals usually cut across demographic barriers and represent all age groups and occupation types. But even on such a portal you can choose sections that you consider relevant for your brand. This brings focus and given high popularity of portal you benefit from larger audience base within your target group. Research shows that travel-related advertisers prefer broad reach sites like portals and search engines, while consumer goods companies follow targeted ad approach, preferring to spend a major portion of their ad dollars on focused content sites and channeling a smaller proportion of their ad budget to broad reach sites.

Affiliate programs

To create an optimum site that revolves around ‘buying process’, take heed of these series of questions and concerns to make sure that you’ve covered all bases possible to have a top notch ‘check out’ feature on your website.

How long will it take to ship your products or a service to be implemented? Do you offer a rush delivery?

What are your shipping or service fees as well as tax or surcharge costs? All sites should always have these numbers listed since no one likes to be surprised with additional fees or costs. Make these numbers available immediately and don’t give this information at very end of check out process since they may get discouraged and cancel out order.

Detailed description of product or service in question should be provided. Let your visitors know what is entailed and what it includes. Make it very clear on exactly what your visitors will be receiving from you.

Do you offer dimensions or sizes to describe products? Many people are easily fooled by pictures they see on web and since you can’t physically see or touch what you’re about to buy, it helps when you give an accurate dimensions of what product is.

Many websites have jumped on bandwagon of giving their visitors option of clicking on a button to see a larger description of a picture. An example of this would be “Click to Enlarge Picture”. This feature is greatly used and appreciated by visitors since it assures them that product in question will be worth purchase. This is a huge factor for visitors in their buying process.

The more features you have on your ‘check out’ process; always provide simple details in how to move forward in buying process. Don’t assume visitors will know or figure it out. They don’t want to figure it out and work hard to buy something. Just provide simple, accessible instructions for anything even remotely challenging.