Banner advertising fell into disfavor in the past few years due to overuse and poor performance. Text links replaced them as the preferred ad-linking method in most cases, and this still holds true today. However, banners aren’t totally dead. In fact, they’re alive and well on quite a few high-traffic niche sites, sometimes at bargain basement prices.

Sites to target for banner advertising:

• Online editions of local newspapers or your local news station’s website.
• Websites of talk radio or other niche related radio programs.
• Niche blogs or targeted, independent news sites
• Any targeted website that makes use of banners while strictly limiting the amount of banners in place

Are Banners Advertising Making A Comeback?

In a sense: Yes, banners are making a comeback, but in a much more targeted fashion.

What killed the effectiveness of banners in the past:

1. Overuse:  Webmasters went “banner crazy” during the early days of Internet advertising. Visitors began ignoring banners due to overexposure and poor targeting on the part of advertisers.

2. Over-Reliance: Over-reliance on banners as the primary source of monetization for content-driven sites. The dot-com graveyard is littered with sites that attempted to drive revenue solely through banner advertising. The idea of free content was a noble one, but it didn’t hold up economically.

Today, the most effective banner advertising takes a cue from Google Adwords. In other words, it’s all about contextual advertising.

Banners targeted to the content and to the audience of a given website perform, from an ROI standpoint, on par with text-link advertising. But, again, you’ve got to target the placement.

Proven Performers:

Banner advertising works best when you follow the rules of niche marketing.

Niche products ->Niche Advertising ->Niche Web Sites.

Here’s a hot tip: some of the best sites for banner placement are radio program websites. In particular, the official websites for talk radio programs, especially on the AM frequencies.

Why?

Well, if you’ll tune in to a program on any given day, you’ll hear the reason. There are literally dozens of small businesses advertising on these programs. You’ll notice, too, that the nature of the products they advertise are the kind you’d expect to find in mail-order catalogs or other direct-marketing mediums:

• Nutritional supplements
• Investment courses
• Specialty products

You’ll find the same types of products advertised on the program’s website as you do on-air. But that’s not the best part. The best part is that talk radio programs cull a select, pre-targeted audience. Let’s say you have an e-book related to automotive repair.  Where should you advertise?

Well, Car Talk (http://www.cartalk.com) would be a great place to start. This show has been on the air for years, and boasts a loyal audience - not in the thousands - but in the millions.

News Portals:

News portals and sites focused on alternative media are proving to be great investments for both banner and text-link advertising. Though these sites aren’t always laser-targeted from a content standpoint, the demographics of their readership makes them very attractive. Let’s look at what News Max (http://www.newsmax.com) has to say about their demographics:

• Highly Educated: 63% have a college degree
• Highly Affluent: 70% have a household income over $50,000
• Loyal Readers: 81% visit the site daily
• Online Spenders: 70% have purchased something online in the last year.

Sounds like any marketer’s dream come true, right?  But what makes this type of audience so responsive? Think about the visitor’s frame of mind for a moment. They’re open, curious and in “information gathering” mode. The news content itself may have them actively thinking about their own problems - and wondering where they might find a solution. Oh, and notice, too, that they’re already ‘awash’ in attention-grabbing headlines?

Use Your Own:

Right now there are thousands of sites which rely on auto-generated content (and auto generated advertising). Some of these sites are ‘blogs’ - featuring a mix of both auto-generated content and manually entered content. But there are also  sites created with ‘page generator’ programs, and these rely on content syndication to pull in fresh articles and fresh advertising. If you aren’t familiar with page generator software, here one example products to check out: http://www.trafficequalizer.com

Sites built with these types of programs tend to get search engines traffic if done right.

Most marketers build them for the sole purpose of monetizing the traffic that comes in. The primary method of earning revenue on these sites is Google Adsense. Adsense advertisements are sprinkled across every single page of targeted content.  If you own one of these types of sites, here’s an idea:

Why not place banner advertisements on select pages?  Take advantage of the opportunity to direct those visitors to one of your affiliate programs, where the payout is likely equal to or greater than the amount you earn per click with Adsense.

Now you might be thinking: why would I want to do this? I’m guaranteed to earn something when a visitor clicks away from my site on an Adsense link, but I’m not guaranteed anything if they click on an affiliate banner! This is true, but it also is going to depend on the niche you are targeting and what types of affiliate programs you’re involved in.

Let’s say you have a highly trafficked page that is performing well for you in terms of generating Adsense revenue. This is a sign that the mix of content and advertising is very highly targeted -  in other words, it’s optimized contextual advertising.

If you have a related affiliate program that meets these criteria:

• High pay-out
• Commission earned as ‘pay per lead’ (e.g. Visitor fills out a form or takes some other simple action)

Then I’d say it’s worth the risk of adding that banner to the page to see what type of response you get. You’ve got a much greater chance of nailing that commission since the visitor isn’t having to decide whether to buy anything.

As for programs that do require a purchase for you to earn a commission, I’d recommend placing banners for those products on your under-performing pages. In other words, check your stats and find out which pages get fair traffic but only so-so conversion on Adsense clicks. Slap your banners there and see what you get. You won’t be risking as much revenue this way, and you also up your chances of squeezing more revenue out of that page.

Technorati Tags: Banner Advertising, Website Traffic Tactics

After all the hard work that you manage to get a certain traffic to your website, the next thing you got to do is get them to come to your website for more. Here are some tips to get repeat Web Traffic to your Site.

10 Tips To get Repeated Web Traffic

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

9. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

10. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

Follow these tips and Your Business Website will almost certainly see an increase in web traffic which ultimately means higher profits for You.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Optimization

Many studies have proven that radio is a good medium for product advertisements. People listen to the radio for entertainment, usually to listen to the latest music or to their favorite radio program. In between the program, advertisements on products and services are being played.

For many years, this has been the trend in advertising. But now that the radio medium is almost behind the audio-visual medium, the TV, and the Internet, other marketing strategies have to be employed to continue the benefits of advertising through audio.

It is then that the benefits of using music on websites were discovered. Before, music on the Internet was just available in downloadable forms as mp3. Even through hosting downloadable music on their servers, companies were able to get much traffic on their sites. And everyone engaged in Internet marketing knows that website traffic plays a big role in boosting product and service sales.

However, there had been a problem with illegal music download in which artists, musicians and record companies have lost millions of revenues.

Then, came the popularity of Internet music streaming. Unlike the former, radio streaming does not allow download of the music files. Thus, the copyrights of the artists and record label owners are protected.

So, how can this be done? There are several ways to stream audio from your site. First, is to stream a radio program from your site or blog. You can find free affiliate programs that allow you to stream their radio content from your site.

What will this mean to you? This means that your site will have new audio content every time it is visited. What’s even great is that the content is being updated even without much effort from you.

In this case, what you needed to do is to signup with an Internet radio station and have the link embedded on your blog or website.

Another way is to stream mp3s. To do this, you just need to upload your mp3files on a server and add the files’ links to the page. When the link is clicked, the browser opens a media player window and plays a file. However, since the file is in mp3 format, it may also be downloaded. Downloading music files without the authorization of the copyright owner is illegal. Therefore, if you will be using this type of streaming, make sure that you have the appropriate permit to do so.

A third way to add audio to you blog or website is to stream music through organizing playlists. Playlists are m3u files, which if downloaded, will not play music if offline. Using this process, however, can be complex. Here is a short instruction on how to do it.

1. Save your mp3 or wma file on the server. You may skip this step if you know that the file exists on another server and know the link to that file. Make sure that the link has a .mp3 or .wma extension.

2. Open your text editor and type the path to the file. Include the http:// and the file extension. Repeat this step until you have included all the links to the files that you would like to be included in the playlist.

3. Save the playlist with a .m3u extension.

4. Upload the m3u file on the directory where the music files are hosted or to your server.

5. Open your html editor and embed the link to the m3u file. Through this, you can also set if you want to have the playlist to autoplay if someone visits your site of if you want your visitor to control playing the music. You can also set the volume level.

After the code is embedded on the html file, and whenever your site is visited, the songs in the playlist will be buffered, streamed and played one after another. If your playlist has several songs, the user can skip forward or go back a song in the playlist using the media player controls.

Doing this setup works for many website owners. Through this you can customize the type of music being played on your site. You can even play recordings related to your product to boost product awareness.

It requires knowledge of html to be done. But if it will be the best way to increase traffic to your site why not request assistance from programmers. After all, having audio on a website is a proven way to increase sales.

Technorati Tags: Blogging Strategies, marketing strategies

There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites for they really don’t know how to monetize their websites with Adsense. But then of course there some so called “geniuses” amount them that are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.

I have some useful tips that can help you boosted your earnings with Adsense.

5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings

• Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad.

The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.

• Create a custom palette for your ads.

Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

• Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top.

Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.

• Maintain links to relevant websites.

If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

• Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included).

Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.

This website has beeing using these principles to great effect or some time Ebooks In Abundance. Start using these principles today to ensure that YOUR Adsense earnings will perform at their very best. 

Technorati Tags: adsense ad, adsense code, Google Adsense

There is no question about it that choosing an appropriate domain name as well as getting the domain name to the right web hosting is very important key in search engine optimization. First let talk little bit more about the why it is important to have good domain names.

First and foremost, when it comes to domain names, try to stay away from the silly, stupid, ridiculous or clever. Keep your domain name simple and make it something your customers can remember if they lose the link to your business website.

Take note that, while your domain name on Geocities or AOL may seem like the least expensive way to go, it may also get you dropped from certain search engines. Some search engines ignore domain addresses that reside on these ‘free servers’ or on the ‘cheap’ servers.

Even if your site is recognized and considered by search engines, a professional domain name that uses your primary company name or associated words is likely to get more attention and be considered as a stable business by your prospective customers.

Purchasing a domain name is not that expensive and there are many companies that can register the name for you, provided it is available and has not already been used by another company.

Using one of your keywords in your domain name can increase your score on some search engines. For example, solderingiron.com could be more effective as Electric-solder-irons.com, if that domain name was available.

You might also choose to establish more than one domain name using keywords and then link your ‘doorway’ domain sites to your primary site. But you will have to pay for each of the domain name and also the monthly hosting fees. It all depends on the type and size of your business and your competition.

Keep in mind that some search engines disregard ‘doorway’ sites. So put at least a page of content on the doorway site with some useful information and then link it to your primary site. But don’t design it as an empty page. The other reason being, you can have one, three, five, or even more email addresses that all contain your business name, and give your business a professional feel. When customers get an email, for example. from dominstone@solderingiron.com they feel as if they are dealing with a stable, professional business operation.

One last thing – There is no need for customers to understand how you manage all your email boxes on your domain. They just need to feel your business is dependable and reputable.

Technorati Tags: Search Engine Optimization

Adsense is a must have for your contents sites. Inorder for you to understand let learn how it works first. The concept is really simple. The webmaster publisher inserts a java script into a certain website. Each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program. The ads that are targeted should therefore be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the click.

The search engine is the one handling all the tracking and payments, providing an easy way for webmasters to display content-sensitive and targeted ads without having the hassle to solicit advertisers, collect funds, monitor the clicks and statistics which could be a time-consuming task in itself. It seems that there is never a shortage of advertisers in the program from which the search engine pulls the Adsense ads. Also webmasters are less concerned by the lack of information search engines are providing and are more focused in making cash from these search engines.

The Reason Why Adsense Is Essential For Content Sites

The first reason

Adsense is essential for content sites is because it already has come a long way in understanding the needs of publishers and webmasters. Together with its continuous progression is the appearance of more advanced system that allows full ad customization. Webmasters are given the chance to choose from many different types of text ad formats to better complement their website and fit their webpage layout.

The different formatting enables the site owners the possibility of more click through from visitors who may or may not be aware of what they are clicking on. It can also appeal to the people visiting thus make them take that next step of looking up what it is all about. This way the people behind the Adsense will get their content read and making profit in the process.

The second reason

The ability of the Adsense publishers to track not only how their sites are progressing but also the earnings based on the webmaster-defined channels. The recent improvements in the search engines gives webmasters the capability to monitor how their ads are performing using customizable reports that has the capacity to detail page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. Webmasters and publishers can now track specific ad formats, colors and pages within a website. Trends are also easily spotted.

With the real-time reporting at hand, the effectiveness of the changes made will be assessed quickly. There would be time to sort out the contents that people are making the most clicks on. The ever-changing demands would be met while generating cash for the webmasters and publishers. The more flexible tools are also allowing webmasters to group web pages by URL, domain, ad type or category, which will provide them some accurate insight on which pages, ads and domains are performing best.

The Third Reason

The last and final reason is that the advertisers have realized the benefits associated having their ads served on targeted websites. Thus increasing the possibility that a prospective web surfer will have an interest in their product and services. All because of the content and its constant maintenance. As opposed to those who are no using Adsense in their sites, they are given the option of having other people do their content for them, giving them the benefit of having successful and money-generating web sites.

Adsense is all about targeted content, the more targeted your content is, the more target the search engines’ ads will be. There are some web masters and publishers who are focused more on their site contents and how best to maintain them rather than the cash that the ads will generate for them. This is the part where the effectiveness is working its best.

There was a time when people were not yet aware of the money to be achieved from advertisements. The cash generated only came into existence when the webmasters and publishers realized how they can make Adsense be that generator. In those days, the content were the most important factors that is taken quite seriously. It still is. With the allure of money, of course.

This site has been using Google Adsense for some time with great success ebook website. Don’t get left behind start using Google Adsense today and take YOUR share of the profits of one of the foremost money making tactics online today.

Technorati Tags: Google Adsense, search engine