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General advertising and promotion - Multiple streams of Traffic: PART II
There are a variety of ways that you can advertise and promote your site or products. In this, Part II of 'mini-series' on Multiple streams of traffic, I'd like to take a look at a couple of more commonly known methods of online promotion. Some are much better than others, and some are more suitable than others. Our goal then is to look a little more closely at them to determine if they are suitable for your needs. Read on for more...
Banner ads
Using banner advertising and displaying banner ads on your site has changed a lot in last 2 years. The cost and value (benefit) of banner advertising has dropped significantly. I won't talk about them too much other than to say that their main use is now principally as 'branding' tools. A way to get your name/product/site in front of people's faces quickly. For average person, it is nearly impossible to get kind of reach required to really get much benefit from banners. That being said, if you can get good exposure in a niche that fits your market, go for it, it won't hurt.
On other side of things, displaying banners on your site as a source of revenue is only worthwhile if you are getting thousands upon thousands of hits/month. The average CPM is now only about $2.00 (that means you earn $2.00 for every 1000 banners displayed!). Considering that when you display a banner on your site you are promoting a product or site that is not your own, you are giving visitors an exit that does not generate income for you. It isn't any wonder that top online marketers (Cory Rudl, Jimmy D. Brown, Ken Evoy etc.) don't display ANY ads (banners or anything) from any other site.
I am not knocking banners here. They serve a purpose. You just need to be sure that they suit your purposes. I have found that FastClick Ad Network provides very good service for all your banner advertising needs.
FFA's and traffic swaps
Let me be very blunt about FFA's. They are a waste of time for anyone except person who owns it. No matter what claims may be, they will not produce traffic. Traffic swaps and exit exchanges have to potential to produce reasonably large amounts of traffic, however problem is that for most part it is untargeted. Most traffic swaps are based on a system of credits, where your site gets a visitor in exchange for displaying traffic swap link on your site, or visiting a member site yourself. The real problem is that much of traffic is simply other webmasters trying to boost their own credits. They are not interested in visiting your site except to get credit. I'm sure you can see problems with that. In a way, you can think of traffic swaps as an online equivalent of a highway detour. Lots of traffic gets re-directed your way, but it doesn't really want to be there. If you are interested in learning more about traffic swaps, you can go here to take a look at a popular one.
