| | About The Author
Scott Covert's new book "The Banner Advertising Traffic Machine" is available at http://www.banneradmagic.com -- it teaches you how to create an entire Internet business model around banner advertising. Scott is also available for private one-on-one banner advertising consultation and complete design services. Phone 1-705-749-2225 or email scott@banneradmagic.com
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4 Things You Probably Didn't Know About Banner Advertising...
(C) 2000 Scott Alan Covert, Covert Consulting Inc.
POINT 1: Banner Advertising Works
Most ultra-small web business owners (3 employees or less) believe that banner advertising is too expensive to use as a traffic generator, and is primarily purchased by large corporations that are into "branding" and have more money than common sense.
But there is a very small group of people who run ultra-small businesses that know the secrets of making banner advertising profitable.
One of my business partners pays over $40,000 per year to buy banner advertising, which has led to over $1.2 million in sales over the last two and a half years. We do it because it works for us. And our first test runs cost just $50 and $300.
As an example, $60,000 spent on banner advertising to promote our sites would represent about 6,000,000 times our banners show up on highly targetted websites (we pay about one penny for each "banner impression"). If our banners average a 1% CTR (Click Through Rate), that means 60,000 highly qualified and motivated visitors to our web site. That's $1 per visitor. A 3% CTR would bring us 180,000 visitors (which would be 33 cents per qualified visitor), and so on.
The reason banner ads don't work for most small businesses that are focussed on making immediate sales, is because their click rates are far below 1% - 3%, so their cost per visitor is way too high ($5, $20, even $50+ !).
What's My Secret?
I make banners that don't look like ads. They disappear into the sites they're on and when people click on them, they sometimes don't even realize they're clicking on an ad. After all, most web surfers ignore obvious ads on websites.
I also design my banner ads to make a promise, and deliver on that promise, so that when people click on them and end up at my website, they are not upset!
The way I conceive and create banners (in 3 minutes apiece!) is fully described in my book at http://www.banneradmagic.com
A lot of people design banners "sort of" like I do, but they ruin it by throwing in an orange background, a border, some animation, or a photo, and boom - now the people visiting the website automatically look away because it's obviously AN AD!
POINT 2: Banners are great for niche targetting
As each year goes by, more and more niche markets can be reached on the Internet. More traffic is available, and you can target your banners at specific markets, countries, states, demographics, and in some cases you can even target specific pages within specific websites.
I look for $10 CPM deals ($10 cost per 1000 "impressions" of my ads.) Advertising on networks which promised to deliver me targetted traffic used to be profitable for me. It no longer is. So I deal personally with individual websites.
I don't pay the ridiculous $50 to $70 CPM ad rates that some websites, especially search engines, are asking.
POINT 3: Banner Advertising Is Highly Scalable
With banner ads, once you have a favorable cost-per-visitor number (which is determined by what you pay for the advertising and how good your click rate is), you can simply buy as much traffic as you want to.
POINT 4: Banner Ads Are For "The Little Guy" Too
Banner advertising isn't just for big business. Sure, it's not free - you'll need $500 to $1000 minimum to get started - but even a very small business can use banner advertising. Our initial test in early 1998 was for $50 on LinkExchange.
Start off testing at least 5 or 10 banners against each other. This way you find out what your market responds to.
Remember my own experience - under $160,000 spent on banner advertising, resulting in over $1 million in sales - starting with a little $50 test back in early 1998. So don't let anybody tell you "banner advertising doesn't work"!
Related Links - Banner Advertising Traffic Magic
How to make banner ads, how to design them for a high click-through rate ("CTR"), what to make them link to (hint: NOT your home page!), and where to buy your advertising. |
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