6 Top Banner Basic Guidelines!

By Following these six basic guidelines, you can dramatically increase your banner ads' effectiveness (and the rate at which they are clicked):

1. Be professional: People are going to get their first impressions of your website based on your banner ad, so you need to be certain that it presents you in the best possible manner. This means you should be extra careful that all your spelling and grammar are correct. Also, select font sizes, styles and colors that maximize your ad's readability. If your banner ad is of poor quality, people will assume your website is too.

2. Ask for an action: What do you want people who see your banner ad to do? Most likely, first and foremost, you want them to simply click on it, so be sure your ad says so. Because this is so important, most of the banner ad designs already have a "call to action" (such as "Click Now") built in.

3. Keep it simple: Your banner ad may only have a few seconds to make its impact on the viewer. As a result, it must be able to convey your message in a small amount of time. By keeping your ad's concept and wording clear and concise, you increase the likelihood that the viewer will actually get your message. Remember, if the viewer can't easily and quickly understand what your banner ad is saying, it is unlikely he/she will click on it. Use the fewest (and most simple) words you can. Just because you can fit more words in your ad doesn't mean you should. Once someone clicks to your website, you'll have ample opportunity to provide more details.

4. Use words that raise attention or emotion: Words like "free", "special offer", "secrets", etc. help grab the viewer's attention and increase his/her curiosity in your offer. Try this technique: pretend you are reading your banner ad's text for the first time: would YOU be interested in or excited about what it offers? If not, then most people probably wouldn't be either.

5. Emphasize benefits, not features: What is the difference between a "benefit" and a "feature"? In simple terms, a "feature" is a service or an aspect of a service that you offer. A "benefit" is the actual impact it has on your customer. Let's say your site offers income tax services. Which of these is more enticing: "We speciallize in finding deductions" (a feature) or "Pay less tax" (the benefit)? Advertisers realized long ago that more than anything else people want to know how your product/service can improve their lives.

6. Test your banners: Because we've made designing banner ads so quick and easy, we suggest you design several, using different styles and messages. Run each one for a week or two and collect any data you can (such as click through rates). Analyze your data to determine what the more successful ads have in common and then refine your ads and test them again.






      


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Top 10 Banner design Tips!

Just using or having the right banner software doesn't usually mean that you will create a good banner though. To give you some ideas on your banner design, try putting these 10 banner design techniques to the test.

1. Use the words "Click Here" or "Enter" every time you design a banner.
   You may think that these two words are overused online, but tests have proven that these words are able to increase the effectiveness of a banner ad by 20-30% without changing anything else in the banner. They inspire the reader to click on the ad if the headline of the banner interests them.
   
   
2. Animate Your Banners.
   An animated banner will increase your banner ads effectiveness by 30-40%. The key in using animation in your banner is keeping it small. The reason that you don’t want big pictures or images that look like live video in your banners is the fact that the banner will load too slowly on people’s pages. The visitors just won't see it.
   
   
3. Create quick loading banners.
   Keep most banners under 10-12 KB. This will be very difficult to accomplish when you are using animation in your ads, but it needs to be done. Most animated banners are 15-20 KB, but that is way too large to load quickly. Keep them small. As a matter of fact, try to keep your banner under 10 KB to have good results from a banner exchange.
   
   The way to do this when using animation it to keep it simple, maybe only one or two movements. Then, use Paint Shop Pro to decrease the number of colors. A banner that may have been 15 KB can often be decreased down to 3 or 4 KB when you decrease the colors to 16 or 216. You need a nicely designed banner that is high quality but loads quickly.
   
   
4. Use an awesome headline in your banner.
   Don’t think that just having a good looking banner will make people click through. The key to effective banner advertising is having a good headline. A good technique to use is to keep the same headline on your banner ad that you have on your entry page. Then when they click through the banner, they will come to see the same headline that sparked an interest in them in the first place.
   
   
5. The best word to use in your banner headline is "FREE."
   This doesn’t mean that you just need to put the word "FREE" on your banner without any other text. Tell them exactly what they will be getting for FREE. Using the word "FREE" in virtually any headline will make your response rate increase dramatically.
   
   
6. Blue underlined text will often increase your response rate.
   When Internet users see blue underlined text, they know they are links. By placing your headline in this type of format more people will realize that it is a link to another site. It will achieve a higher click through ratio.
   
   
7. A blue border will give you a better response rate then any other color border for your banner.
   Use blue as the border color for your banner and it will influence more people to click onto the entire banner. These little things may not seem like much, but they can increase your response rates.
   
   
8. It is often a good idea to use your web site address or some type of company logo in the banner.
   Don't focus your banner on your logo or web site address, but do include it in many cases. Your main benefit headline should be the focus of your banner. Your use of a web address or company logo in a small section of the banner just helps to produce a branding effect on people’s minds giving you a few extra hits.
   
   
9. Use trick banners.
   Make your banner look like something in windows that people can click on. For example, a lot of effective banners I’ve seen use what looks like a windows slider. People create trick banners that look like sliders, buttons, checkboxes, and drop-down menus. These types of tricks will bring out the curiosity in people. They want to see more of the text and will click on the banner.
   
   
10. Change your banner ads frequently.
    Studies have proven that most banner ads start losing effectiveness after the third time a person has seen it. If they haven’t clicked on it by then, they probably never will. If you are spending a lot of money on advertising and purchasing hundreds of thousands of banner impressions, you will need to come up with a lot of different banners.

Feel free to leave a comment or any tips that you have to share! Please no spam!





      


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Free Banner Site-Great For Promoters

Here are some free online banner generators (makers) that I use

1. BannerSketch
   
2. BannerBreak
   
3. BannerFans
   
4. Animation Online

Experiment a little till you find a banner that you like! Remember that these banners that your make, might be seen by thousands of different people!



      

Using Banner Properly For Promoting!

Banner Placement and Coding Tips!

An effective banner can make the difference between an unsuccessful and successful promotional campaign. I have found that the following banner design tips can increase CTRs (Click Through Ratios) and referral sign ups. I hope these tips help you increase your referral downline.

(1) Banner placement! Whenever I want to increase my down line (referrals) in any program that I am promoting especially during a “referral contest”!
I always place that banner in the top spot on my sites/blogs that I have more than one affiliate banner on. Seems that the highest banner get the most sign ups!

(2) Since search engines can not "read" images. I make sure that I use the "Alt" tag/attribute in all of my banners! Another important feature of the "alt tag" is that it a great place to put your keywords in!

An example of using the “alt tag”

<*a href=“http://realstat.info”><*img src="http://banner.gif" alt=“Banner Tips, realstat.info”>MySite <*/a>

(To make the code work remove the *)

Notice that I have used a keyword and my site name in the “alt” tag. I prefer to have the keyword first and the site last! Of course, you can just use a keyword(s) or just your site’s URL.

(3) Another important code that I always add to my banner coding is the “target” coding.

An example <*a href=“http://realstat.info” target=“_blank“><*img src=“http://banner.gif “ alt=“Banner Tips, realstat.info”><*/a>

(Again to make the code work remove the *)

When my sites visitor clicks on my banner, they are taken to the site in a new window. So when they close that window, they are back on my site. This is a great code when you are promoting more than one affiliate site and you hope that they will sign up for more of the sites that your are promoting.