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Online business Toolkit

Harness other Web sites' popularity

Staff Builder.com

Published: 20 Jan 2004 14:45 GMT

Trade ad banners on your own
Brokering your own exchange deals is a great way to save money and reach a specific audience with your ad banners. Reciprocal ad exchanges with complementary sites can be fruitful for both parties. For instance, a home improvement site and a real estate site could bring each other lots of interested visitors.

Your list of bookmarks probably includes sites similar to yours that might be interested in swapping banners. Get in touch with the people behind the site, and see what you can work out.

Boost your banners' click-through rate
Server log files tell advertisers how many times a page with their ad banner was served on a site (impressions), as well as how many times the banner elicited a click from readers (click-throughs). The ratio of impressions to click-throughs gives you the click-through rate, which is the common measure of an ad banner's success.

Several strategies can increase your banners' click-through rate:

Keep your message short.

Use attention-getting words like "free."

Tell users what you want them to do: put "click here" on the banner.

Keep banners fresh. Change them periodically, or create more than one version and rotate them. (This is especially important if you advertise on a popular site with a lot of repeat visitors.)

Movement draws the eye. Jazz up the banner with a GIF animation, but try to keep the animation simple and the file size less than 15K.

You can learn a lot from looking at other ad banners. Microscope magazine features weekly reviews of the most interesting ad banners designed by the big names in online advertising. The Four Corners page offers click-through comparisons and tips for creating successful banners.

Be new
Highlighting just-hatched Web pages is the job of "What's New" sites. Some sites, such as Netscape's What's New, have real people scanning hundreds of new sites and writing reviews of the most promising. The Scout Report operates on the same model and includes a form that lets you submit sites for consideration. Similar sites, such as What's New Too, have listing engines that accept submissions -- their only criterion for adding a site is that it has a URL they haven't seen before. Perhaps most importantly, some e-zine Web reviewers use What's New pages to scan for sites that are worth writing about.