Advertising Online

The success of your Affiliate Marketing Program is based on the success of your ability to drive traffic to your sites.

Advertising Online is all part of developing a vertically integrated marketing plan that is designed to get people to your site. As with traditional Advertising for any business, Advertising for your Online Business can be used to have a consumer take a direct action, or just to “get you known” and build a Brand Image.

While they have had their share of controversies, still one of the most popular methods of advertising on the Web is to use Banner Ads.

While the value of Banner Ads as Direct Marketing tools are questionable, they certainly are good at building awareness, or branding. Banner advertising is not cheap. Cost of Banner ads are based on a CPM, Cost per thousand impressions, the more impressions the higher the cost.

Costs vary based on the site you advertise on, the more popular the site, the more regular traffic it receives, of course the more it will cost to place a banner ad on it. If you are not in a position to afford to place ads on the most popular and therefore highest priced sites, then it is best to select sites for your banner ads that are of content most related to your own site.

In any case your ad should be simple, eye catching, and have a direct call to action, like “click here to save big money”.

Like with advertising for any business, you can go it alone, when it comes to placing or designing a banner ad, but if your have the budget for it, there are design and placement pros who can help you maximize your banner ad dollars.

The success of a banner ad is based on Click Through Ratios (CTR). This is the ratio of people who have seen the ad to those that actually click on it. Believe it or not 1% is considered a good CTR!

There are programs that offer Free Banner Exchanges, where you display other peoples banner ads on your site, in exchange for you displaying yours on theirs. There are different sizes of banner ads available, and of course size does matter when it comes to cost.

E-zines are another great avenue to advertise on the web. An E-zine is the internets equivalent of a magazine, and just like ads are prevalent in a magazine surrounding the articles of relevant content, so to can you place ads to drive traffic to your site among the related text in a e-zine.

Also much as we talked about in a our discussion “Submitting Articles” you can actually write articles, press releases or other newsletter type items for an e-zine that can bring people to your site.

And finally a great way to advertise to build both Brand Awareness and to get people to your site is by using sponsored PPC ad links on the major search engines like Google.