Using Text With Banners For Profit

For many this is all remedial, but I see banners everywhere without accompanying text around them and I thought I would offer some tips for using text with banners to increase our revenues... It's been well proven that a good text link will outpull any graphic form of advertising by surprising margins. Banners have been dubbed a dying breed... Or are they? We all use banners to entice our surfers with eye candy, get them horny and get them interested in our sponsor. There are places to use banners the right way for fun and profit.

First off I pose the question of even using a graphic ad or banner at all. Save the bandwidth and spoil the webmaster perhaps. If you are trying to build sites without the use of banners on every page, then more power to you. Because the rules say 3 banners per gallery or page certainly doesn't mean you have to put three, 468x60 pixel graphics up... Whatever the case we can all agree somewhat that the banner ad can be used to generate sales, so it is a tool for your arsenal.

We want signups. They make us money. You have looked around for a sponsor you would like to have send you checks every month. After signing up and receiving your link codes you perhaps went to get some banners from the sponsor's website. You spent the time to create a freesite/avs/etc. and you are flying banners, feeding traffic to your new site and eagerly checking your stats to see how many people are buying what you have to sell.

When first starting out, the new adult webmaster will notice that getting a surfer to even go to your sponsor is not as easy as you might have thought. Getting them to buy is even harder. You will need lots of traffic to your site to get both clicks and ultimately, the sales. The more clicks to the sponsor, the better chances you have of getting sales. Not everyone will click. Not every one that clicks will buy.

This week we'll look at some ways to increase our ctr or clickthru rate, the number of times a click is measured to your sponsor stats as a fraction of the number of times the surfer is impressed with your site's banner ads (not impressed like he thinks, "wow that's cool," but an impression as simply one set of eyes seeing your advertising).

Now, let's see if we can look at the difference in a few examples and illustrate that there are some guidelines for using banners successfully.

In the above example, the ad on the left is going to suck more wind than the one on the right. Firstly, it doesn't use alt tags to our advantage. Carefully played out text in there can get you clicks before your graphic even loads. Also, the text below lacks a specific call to action that interactive advertising needs for it to work. Yes, I am ready for the nasty action... What now? Never leave your surfer stranded like that. The ad unit on the right is perhaps not going to go down in the annals, but it has some components that would help get the clicks. It attempts to challenge. It tries to entice. It creates an illusion and tries also to draw the surfer in. It also tries using color and bold tags to highlight key phrases. Finally and most importantly it tells the surfer to click.

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