Paid link advertising is is the same really as putting up a billboard advertising your site/business on some else's property and paying them for the use of the space your billboard takes up. In the case of the internet, you pay the owner(s) of a site a certain amount per month, week, day or year to put your banner or link somewhere on their site. Naturally, as a prospective advertiser, you want to pick a site related to the content of your site or the part of your site you are advertising. So if you want to advertise your ski shop, you are going to look for high quality ski sites on which to place your link.
*Please note that you don't have to have an online business or other enterprise in order to advertise online. You can advertise the family corner store online if you want.*
Your next consideration is finding a high quality site on which to place your banner(s) and/or link(s). You want a site that is easy to navigate, aesthetically pleasing, well written, full of fresh content, has lots of good tips and info and is updated at least two or three times a month.
You want the site to be well established on the internet. It should be well known, get lots of traffic and have lots of sites linking to it. Use a site like Who Links to Me or search for the site with Google and see how many pages and results Google returns for the site. You should also check the Google Page Rank (GPR) of the site. GPR is a somewhat nebulous thing but it basically tells you how important or popular a given site is, at least according to Google. Webmasters drive themselves nuts trying to get a higher GPR. You can read more about GPR at the Google page explaining it or Phil Craven's much lengthier article on it. For our purposes, you want to advertise on a site, depending on your budget, with a GPR of no less than four.
Relating directly to GPR is the requirement that the site gets lots of traffic. You don't want a site that gets only a handful of visitors each day. Again, depending on your budget, you are looking for a site with a traffic count in the thousands every day.
How much you are going to pay for placing your link/banner on the site depends on all the above criteria. For a well established high traffic site you can expect to pay upwards of 800-1000$ dollars a month for a premium placement on the site.
You don't have to settle for placing your banner on websites alone. There are many email and online newsletters on which to advertise your site. The first one that comes to mind is the excellent and popular Langa List which is an internet computer tech centered newsletter. I said earlier that you should pick a site (or newsletter) related to the content of the site or page to which you want to drive the most traffic and that's largely true. But it's quite possible to get a lot of traffic by placing your ad just about anywhere. As long as the product or service you offer is appealing and the site/newsletter is popular you stand a good chance of profiting greatly from buying advertising space on websites and newsletters. Make sure of course that your banner is well designed and your text link is well written. You want to catch people's eye and pique their interest. High performance banners almost always share the following :
- "call to action" phrases and words like "click here" or "Enter"
- are animated changing at a slow to moderate pace
- load quickly
- emphasize the benefits, not the features, of the product or service
- Employ "power words". You know the kind I mean, "Unbelievable", "Guaranteed", "Awesome", "Free", "Breakthrough", "Wealth", "Save", "Love", "Discover" etc. Think your power words carefully through. Don't use them dishonestly. They should relate directly to your product or service. Use them to generate interest in your offer and make sure your offer matches the power words. You don't want to turn your visitors off with hype that doesn't match the goods. If what you offer matches your power words, you will build that all-important customer quality - trust.
- Use large size fonts
I suggest cruising the major portals to look for examples of effective banner ads. The banners on those sites are high priced, well researched and proven effective. By major portals I mean sites like:
For more on banner design check out: Interestingly though, banner ads are not the most effective kind of ads you can employ. Text links are. Effective text links are much the same as well done banner ads. They impart a sense of urgency, use power words, highlight the benefits of the product or service to the reader. Good text links also stand out from the rest of the text on the page they are placed. They are either a different color, size, font, or combination of the three , than the rest of the text on the page. Text links should be no longer than four or five words.
You can read more about writing good text links. Check out
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