2nd Reliable Way To Build Online Traffic ( Banner Advertising)

Read the first part here. 

Time and Money Wasters

The following traffic-building techniques can be summarized in two words... don’t bother. They will waste your valuable time and money, and more importantly, they won’t generate any worthwhile income. Skip the drum roll. Here are the least efficient ways to build traffic... Banner Ads

Banner “click-through” rates have plunged, from 5-10% when they first emerged, to a dismal 0.3%. On a run of a thousand banners, this translates into a miserly 3 visitors to your site. Terrible.

And the cost per visitor? On a general site, advertising costs range between $15 to
$25, per thousand impressions. In other words, Yahoo! will charge you $15 to $25
to show your banner 1,000 times -- this cost is called the CPM (cost per
thousand -- thousand is “mille” in French). OK. Let’s assume you pay a $20 CPM. That means, if you get...


• 3 visitors from those 1,000 impressions, it costs you $6.67 per visitor.
• 5 visitors, it costs you $4 per visitor.
• 10 visitors, it costs you $2 per visitor.
How about advertising on a specialized site? Good question! Advertising costs are
much higher, generally around $50 CPM. Okay, back to our little experiment again.

If you get...

• 3 visitors from those 1,000 impressions, it costs you $16.66 per visitor.
• 5 visitors, it costs you $10 per visitor.
• 10 visitors, it costs you $5 per visitor.
That’s not great. Really not great. In fact, it’s simply too, too expensive.

Banner advertising makes no sense at all, unless you have a fantastic Conversion Rate (CR) as well as a HUGE profit on each sale. Even then, there are a million better and (more importantly) cheaper ways to drive traffic to your site.

So what’s the problem? Why is the banner ad “dead?”

Three BIG reasons...

1) People have become so desensitized to flashing ads, they don’t even look at them any more. Some even go so far as to download shareware programs that actually prevent banners from being displayed. And of course, they all have something in common --they feel “pitched.”

2) Pay-Per-Click-Search-Engines and other “pay-per-performance” models have made the banner ad an impractical traffic-generating strategy. Why fork out big bucks for visitors who might come to your Web site, when you can get guaranteed results, even with a tight budget?

3) The dot-com shakedown means there’s less disposable income to access. Marketers must choose the “biggest bank for the buck” means of advertising.

So what’s the bottom line on banners? Simple. There are better and more effective ways to spend your advertising
dollars online.

However, we can’t just ignore banners all together...

You’ll often hear Internet gurus discuss the role of the banner ad in “branding,” a powerful advertising process.

And in fact, recent research by AdRelevance indicates that a large majority of online advertising is not geared towards getting a visitor’s click-through. It’s about “building the brand”...

So what does branding involve? We’ll use an example to demonstrate...

If I see your ad often enough as I surf my way around the Net, eventually your company name or product will percolate down into my subconscious. Next time I need what you’re selling -- ZING! Your company’s name will be the first one to
POP into my mind.

But there is a speed bump on this route. The exact number of times a person has to see your ad before it makes a lasting impression is something the marketing experts are heatedly debating. Some say 7. Others say 10. Still others say 13.

And that’s with all things being equal. You still need to factor in the effectiveness of
the banner, the sales message, yada, yada, yada.

Yes, banners are a great branding tool. Wonderful, in fact. But they are completely
useless to the little gal (or guy). Why?

Imagine the size and expense of an advertising campaign that will get your ad in front of people’s eyeballs 7 or more times --across the breadth of the
entire Internet.

Phew! Exactly. Small companies simply cannot afford this sort of financial commitment. You need
millions of dollars. And very few of us have that kind of spare change in our
pockets.


Not so coincidentally, whenever you read that banners are really great for branding, it’s written by someone with a vested interest in selling banner advertising!

This situation reminds me of a famous old offline business saying...

“I know that I’m wasting half of my advertising dollars...
... I just don’t know which half!”

But the Net has changed all that. Advertising is now trackable -- stats do tell you what works and what doesn’t. You can be the judge!

Luckily, there is a way banners can be used to help brand your product across the entire Net --and only for the cost it takes to create them.

How?

By implementing an affiliate program, and allowing partners to use banners as part of their own advertising strategy. Sure, the best affiliates will recognize the importance of text links and personal recommendations, but for many affiliates, participation in your program will consist of nothing more than posting your banner on their site.

Effective? Nope. But it IS better than nothing. And the more people come across your brand (even in banner format)...

The better it is for you!