When you consider the different ways that you can market your business online the options sometimes seem endless, but there are a few tried and true strategies that never go out of style. Banner advertising is one them. No matter what, you are always going to find commercial websites and blogs full of banner ads. As an online entrepreneur you should have some graphics banners to promote on your own websites as well as on sites that cater to your target audience.
Here are some quick banner marketing tips that I have for you:
(1) The key to effective banner advertising is to start with eye catching photos and short phrases with clear meanings.
(2) If your true goal is promote a certain product, event, service, etc. in most cases you want to avoid that gutt telling you to link your banner to your main page. Take your viewers to a specific product, service, video, post, or landing pages that best reflect the information in your banner. I can tell you more about this, but your gonna have to schedule a marketing consultation call if you want me to give you all my marketing gems (BIG SMILE). And of course I do have my Starter Kit with ALL the ebooks I've written about low cost marketing strategies online.
(3) Ok. Shameless plug over, back to the tips. The first place I like to post my banners is my own websites, because its free advertising. If you have multiple spaces, always cross promote your stuff. And its just plain smart to put your banners on your website so you can grab people's attention and send them to specific pages on your space. Sometimes you have to help customers find their way, don't be a lazy entrepreneur. Let me give you one quick example: ever seen those banners people have that say 'Grab my free report' and then it takes you to a page to join something, so you can get something. A BIG part of driving more traffic to your space is getting people's attention.
(3) Many websites owners (especially bloggers) like to create 'link to us' pages OR graphic 'badges' that people who love their stuff can grab and post on their own websites. It's like word of mouth marketing, but digital style. Again, this option is also free. As a matter of fact I created some banners for black business women online and quite a few of our members have added those banner to their sites. That means that your fans can actually help you market your site if you give them the chance, ie the banners. I love link love, don't you?
(4) Then at some point when you want more eyes on your site, you are going to have to pay for advertising. You can go to a website like Google Adwords to get your banners published on multiple websites relevant to your target market and today with SO much social media buzz you can even buy advertising on sites like Facebook! If you've been reading about this stuff, you would have heard that some folks are saying its cheaper and even more effective to market on Facebook, but I can't comment as I haven't done it that much to say it works better one way or the other.
(5) You can invest in working with individual website owners, especially bloggers who cover your niche market, they are often times cheaper than bigger ad companies.
(*) BONUS: You can start your own affiliate program, or join websites like clickbank, glam media, or commission junction so you can pay people to promote your website for you using your banners in combination with unique affiliate links.
I design graphic banners, as I'm sure you know, and I make it soooooo easy to buy a banner from me. You can purchase my banner design packages anytime online via my ejunkie store or contact me if you want a design package not listed on that website.
Last thing: I always like to support my clients and fellow entrepreneurs as well as give you a taste of what I do SO I am going to end this post with examples of the last few banners I have done.
One more thing. How could I forget this one? I get this question all the time, "Love you LaShanda, but how do I create a banner by myself?" If you want to DIY... create do it yourself banners, you can do that too! I do it all the time (BIG SMILE). How do you do it? Well you need a good photo/graphics editor, I use Adobe Photoshop and Image Ready... find one that works for you and is in your price range. And I get all my amazing royalty free, low cost, high quality photos from istockphoto.com . They generally cost between $1 and $5 a pic.
Last, last thing, I also did a post on eBook Covers, for those of you who want more info on that.
Replies
I'd like to comment on your point about not linking our banners to our home pages, but using landing pages instead.
1. Some of our home pages are very busy. Not only can this divert our visitors' attention away from the action we want them to take, we can also lose potential clients if they can't easily find what they are looking for. This is especially true if we sell various products and services. For example, I sell software/web development services, landing pages, web analytics and crm (customer relationship management) training and consulting services. If I create an email marketing campaign advertising my crm services, yet when my visitor clicks the link to go to my home page, the first thing they see is my banner about landing pages and they can't find the information about crm, I've lost them. Landing pages provide the specific information your visitors are looking for and focuses them on taking the intended action.
2. Landing pages are critical for tracking purposes. I use different landing pages, with different urls, for different campaigns, so that I can easily see which landing pages are more effective in converting traffic. In my Google Analytics view, I can see conversion rates for each landing page and immediately know which campaign (PPC, email marketing, BBWO, etc.) is successfully driving traffic to my website. If everyone is going to your home page, it's more difficult to know which campaigns are working and which are not. You also want to exclude certain landing pages from being crawled and indexed by "bots" so as not to contaminate your conversion data.
Once again, I appreciate your support and I encourage everyone to use banners and landing pages if you want to drive traffic to your website and successfully convert that traffic.
If you don't understand analytics or would like to learn more about using it to strategically guide your business decisions, I am developing a series of webinars on the topic. For more information, go to FREE webinar on Google Analytics.
Thanks!
www.gems-shine.com
www.mysuccessdependsonIT.com
Cross promotion, another tip! -lh