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Date: OCT 2000 AffiliateMoneyMakers.com "Helping You Make Money On The Internet!" webmaster@AffiliateMoneyMakers.com Can you remember the last banner ad you saw or what about the last tv commercial? If you can't then I'm not surprised. BUT, what are the most common links that affiliate programs encourage you to put on your site? Surprisingly, the answer is banner ads! Standard banner ads work well for companies by promoting brand names, but are not very effective for affiliates. The average standard banner ad click-through rate is less than 0.5%. This means a 1000 visitors to your web site would result in an average of 5 people clicking on it. How many of those 5 people will actually take the action required for you to get paid by the affiliate program? IF YOU ARE LUCKY, BETWEEN 1% AND 2%. This is not going to make you very much money unless your web site gets tons of traffic (such as yahoo.com). Of course, there are a few ways to improve your banner ad click-through rate. The most important thing is to promote banner ads from affiliate programs that fit with your web site's theme. For example, if you have a web site about hockey then banner ads promoting romance novels would not do well, but ads promoting hockey products would. However, the banner ad doesn't need to be about the same thing as your web site. It just has to work with your site's visitors. For example, if you create a site about internet marketing then Nothing But 'Net ads may do very well on your site. Even if you target banner ads to your site's theme, click-through rates will probably still be low. There are a few reasons for this:
First, there are non-standard sized banner ads (buttons, squares, tall rectangles). Currently, people do not ignore these unusual images as often as standard sized banner ads. However, as these become more popular people will probably begin ignoring them as well. Second, there are interactive banner ads. Some Commission Junction programs offer interactive banner ads. Look at the ad below for an example of an interactive banner ad: Notice why this would be more effective than a standard banner ad. For this ad, you get paid $1 for every unique user that signs up for their newsletter (UPDATE: This affiliate program no longer exists). This ad makes it extremely easy for site visitors to choose the celebrity they want a newsletter about and then type in their email address. Third, there are email ads. These typically have high click-through rates. However, in order for email ads to work, you need to write a content packed newsletter or advertise your email ad in someone else's content packed newsletter. By the way, I am talking about opt-in newsletter emails, NOT SPAM! Don't forget that you still need to target your ad. You don't want to put an ad for vitamins in a celebrity newsletter. Email ads can be extremely effective because of the following:
Fifth, there are text link ads, which may be the most effective type of web site ad. Let's look at the benefits of using text link ads:
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