Banner advertising is an effective way of getting your advertising message seen on the Internet. Banner ads should not be your only online form of advertising, but they are an essential part of your online advertising mix.

This article assumes that the reader knows what a banner ad looks like, but do you know how they work, and how you can derive benefit from them? Let’s define a few terms before answering these questions.

1. “Page views” or “page impressions.” These terms are interchangeable and they refer to the number of times that a page within a website has been displayed on a website.

2. “Banner view.” Like a page view, a banner view is the number of times that a banner has been displayed on website.

3. “Click through.” A click through is the number of times a website visitor has “clicked” on a particular banner ad and was transferred to the website of the banner advertiser.

4. “CTR.” CTR is the acronym for “click through rate,” which is the ratio of the number of banner view versus the number of times visitors have “clicked through” to your website. CTR is expressed as a percentage, so a click through rate of 1% means that for every 1,000 banner views, 10 visitors have clicked through to your site.

5. “CPM.” CPM is an acronym for “cost per M,” where “M” is the ancient Roman numeral for 1,000. Translation: CPM is the price your business will pay to have its banner advertisement displayed 1,000 times on a website, e.g, the cost of 1,000 banner views. So, for example, if the CPM to advertise on a site is $80.00 your business will pay $80.00 for every 1,000 banner views.

6. “ROS.” ROS is the acronym for “run of site,” which simply means that a banner ad is displayed on every page in a website, as opposed to being displayed only in a particular category of a website or only when a particular keyword is entered into a search engine.

Everyone who is in charge of a advertising or marketing department (that’s you if you’re the sole shareholder of the company) knows that advertising is, in large part, a numbers game. The more frequently your message is seen or heard, the more likely the consumer is to purchase your service or product. Take Mattress Mac with Gallery Furniture , for example. If you live in the Houston area, or if your radio can pick up the signal of almost any Houston area radio station, you cannot go a single day without hearing or seeing an advertisement for Gallery Furniture. Peppering your senses with constant reminders that “Gallery Furniture Saves You Money!” has enabled Mr. McIngvale to build his single location furniture store into an empire. (Of course, advertising alone won’t do it; you still must have a quality product or service). I have no scientific data to support this assertion, but I’ll make it anyway: I’m willing to bet that Gallery Furniture is known to more people in the greater Houston area than any other single business. How did that come to be? Mattress Mac understands the advertising numbers game and plays it better than anybody else.

Banner ads are a numbers game. The industry standard click through rate for online advertising in general is around .5%. Not 5%, but .5%. Doesn’t sound very encouraging for your banner ad campaign, eh? Well, there are ways to significantly increase the CTR of any given banner. The best way is by targeting a particular banner ad to a narrow audience, an audience that is looking specific for a product or service just like yours. Highly-targeted can boost your CTR to as much as 2%-3% or higher and significantly increase the traffic to your website.

Another valuable purpose of the banner ad is branding. Intertwined with the messages Gallery Furniture delivers about particular sales events or types of furniture is the company’s consistent and recognizable logo, color scheme, and tag lines. Your banner advertisements can, and should, perform the same function; they should be designed using your company’s logo and colors, at a minimum. Sometimes incorporating the tag line is the way to go, but other times you may want to advertise a particular special offer, product, etc. The important thing is that you take advantage of the numbers game by continually displaying your name, logo, and colors. The more visitors that see you, the more they will come to associate your name with your type of product or service, and the more likely they will be in the future to buy from you.

Henry J. Fasthoff, IV
Principal & General Counsel
HoustonBusiness.com

Ask anybody who has been in business for a long enough and they will tell you how newspaper advertisements have for decades helped to build countless small businesses.

The advantages of a newspaper advertisement are many, but what has attracted small business entrepreneurs for decades is the speed at which a struggling entrepreneur (short of funds as many starting small businesses always are, and looking for customers fast) is able to get a very quick response.

Many extremely successful businesses today started off booking tiny classified newspaper advertisements, grew into larger display advertisements (that were still very tiny) and today are multi million dollar enterprises commanding lots of respect. If folks were laughing then because of the tiny advertisements, you can be sure that they are no longer laughing today.

Many of those who know all this stuff are not aware of an amazing new development. That there is an equivalent of the highly effective newspaper advertising online. And what’s more it is FREE.

Most people know that free articles posted at relevant web sites with a good detailed resource box leading back to your web site or free course or whatever works for you, is the most effective way of advertising online. However there has always been one very important missing link. And that is high readership.

Newspapers tend to have very high circulations and that’s how small businesses would manage to get such a good response from those tiny advertisements placed. The problem with online articles is that in order to have a high enough readership, you will need to post an article at numerous different sites and you may require quite a number of articles to get the good response you seek. It usually takes a while for the articles posted and the viral effect (that good articles enjoy of being reposted over and over again) to take effect and give you a good regular response similar to good offline newspaper advertisements.

Not any more. Smart entrepreneurs are now combining their free articles with the amazing Ebay site to reproduce an effect that is even better than the newspaper in the old says. Better because it is mostly free and yet has the potential of pulling in the sort of targeted traffic that no daily newspaper on earth can even dream of. The key words here are "targeted traffic."

All you need to do is register with Ebay. And you don’t even need to sell anything. You just have to use your Ebay about-me -page.

Ebay has well over 1.5 billion page views per month. There are well over 40,000 people who sign up for Ebay every day - Sunday included.

Of course there’s serious money to be made from the auctions or by selling something with a fixed price. But you can profit on Ebay even if you are not selling anything. You can use the About me page to put in all sorts of information including a link to your article or web site. Just by learning how to do this, you can dramatically increase traffic to your posted articles or even to your web site. This highly targeted traffic is bound to yield sales for you, whatever it is you are selling. The traffic is targeted because you select your section in Ebay carefully.

I found Brian McGregor’s ebook, "The Ebay Formula," extremely useful in helping me understand how to use Ebay to drive my traffic and profits. You can get the ebook now by emailimg me personally at ckyalo@yahoo.com

Despite all the hype on the net these days, there are a few really amazing things that you can do with the internet, this has to be at the top of the list because it gives one the potential to earn some of the incomes the hype guys are throwing around. Those are the figures I’m going for myself and I dare admit that I’m getting there quite fast.

When you do get those high numbers please remember that you First heard of this amazing secret from me.

Christopher Kyalo has over 20 years experience in marketing and creative writing. Order his FREE COURSE:HOW TO ADVERTISE FREE ONLINE by sending a blank email to bizboom@freeautobot.com. He can be reached at strongwallafrica at yahoo.com

When you start out a home based business it’s a common mistake to start off advertising your website. If you have a website with lots of things for sale on it you’ll probably just end up confusing your potential customer. They may or may not be able to determine what it is that’s for sale. Here are a few reasons why it’s better to advertise a Splash Page/Squeeze Page vs. a Website.

1. If you’re using Google Adwords to drive people to your site then you’ll want to get sales for your advertising dollar. If you’re paying for people to come to your website and they are confused about what it is that’s for sale, chances are that they will click on through. If a splash/squeeze page is used then you can capture names, email addresses and a whole lot more useful information. By using the splash page/squeeze page you will at least get some information in which you can use for a sale down the road. Having a newsletter sign up on the splash page/squeeze Page will accomplish this.

2. If your using Traffic Exchanges for your advertising then you’ll want to make sure that your surfing is all for not. Using a Splash/Squeeze Page to capture leads for your business is what people are doing more and more now. The splash/squeeze Page forces the surfer to put in info by using a method like: "If you join now I’ll give you this free…..", or "Join up now before it’s too late". By using this method the seller accomplishes two things; they obtain info on the potential customer and give away probably some sort of viral e-book/software etc… This method of advertising is becoming more and more popular. Why? Because it produces results.

3. Joining Ad forums/groups is another yet not as effective way to advertise yet the same thing applies here as well. By using a well thought out ad and using a splash page/squeeze page to obtain information you will accomplish some results. If you just advertise your website, again people will tend not to take your offer up because they get confused about what’s for sale.

By using a splash/squeeze page you will obtain very important information on your potential customer which will give you an opportunity to repeatedly give you chances to sell what ever it is you’re selling. The whole idea of Internet Marketing is to have buyers for your products and to be able to have repeat customers is what the splash page/squeeze page is all about. If you just advertise your website then you risk the customer clicking through and not ever seeing them again.

About the Author:

To find the Best Home Based Business Ideas and Opportunities Visit: http://www.siriusfreehomebiz.com/blog

When you first start out in a business, some people might tell you that you should start advertising in a local daily or a national newspaper. The advertisement need not be a full-page advertisement. The point is to advertise…to get the word out – be it small or big. When I first started out in my business, I advertised small too and it didn’t cost me an arm and a leg. Thinking back, it didn’t even qualify as an advertising campaign because throughout the nine months that I advertised in a national daily, not a single response from the advertisements was seen! Yes, none…as in nil…yes.

Sad but true. You see, the whole thing about ‘just advertise irregardless of whether the advertisement is going to be big or small’ is a whole bunch of hogwash probably spun by the media to encourage people to advertise in their papers or magazines.

Don’t get me wrong…I am not saying that everyone have to advertise a full-page advertisement in order to effectively get the word out – this is not true either. The truth is that one must never waste financial resources to ‘just advertise’. Small advertisements rarely work because the location is ill-fitted, the size of the advertisement is too small to be read and there’s not enough information in the advertisements to encourage others to ‘act.

The whole point of advertising is to get people to respond. You want ‘WOW’, you want ‘YES’. You don’t want ‘Mmmmmm….”. Many of the important factors of successful marketing and advertising tactics are lost when the advertisement is insignificant.

THE SHOCK, SURPRISE FACTOR
Successful advertisements are usually those that either make you laugh, cry, sad, shocked or surprised. There must be an emotion attached to the advertisement. Don’t be surprised but even small advertisements with enough emotion attached to it can elicit a reaction. I repeat, it doesn’t have to be a full-page color ad. Just something big enough or strategically placed is good enough.

THE INFORMATION FACTOR
Imagine you’re looking at an advertisement of your competitor. It’s a small advertisement beside the ‘classifieds’ section with small print, black and white and literally devoid of information except for a telephone number and website. Would you be curious enough to call the number or log into the website? Would you even remember the phone number or website address from the advertisement? Probably not. You need to arouse curiosity in your target audience and this need is very evident in an advertisement. There are hundreds of advertisements in a newspaper or magazine and you’re all competing for the same attention. To elicit response or reaction, you need to give them just enough information to make them curious and not enough for them to dismiss you. That’s one of the biggest advertising secrets the world over – and this formula works for every industry.

If your advertisement is too small or too plain, it’s not going to be enough to entice your audience.

THE ‘ACT NOW’ FACTOR
You don’t have enough space to even write your web address, explain your business and also print your telephone number in the advertisement space, what more expertly written copy to encourage your audience to ACT NOW! Another industry secret if you want to call it that. an advertisement is successful when it is able to get someone to WANT to act NOW – not later, not tomorrow and definitely not next week. You want to make the target audience act as soon as they get the chance to.

Admittedly, this is one of the hardest things to do because consumers are not stupid – in fact, they are getting smarter and smarter by the day. And that is why we, business owners, have to be just as smart, if not smarter. Find a way to get to their heart and get them to acknowledge that they WANT (note: NOT NEED) to find out more about your products or services.

CONCLUSION
The above is enough to convince you that placing small insignificant advertisements every day in a local daily is not going to be good enough. In fact, most advertising and marketing experts concede that it’s a total waste of time and money. However, here’s the loophole, small advertisements work for some industries like real estate, classifieds, credit facilities and other industries that has been using this method for some time. For us, small business owners, who are new to the market and plan to penetrate it, we’ll be better off promoting ourselves elsewhere.

Marsha Maung is a freelance work at home graphic designer and copy writer. She focused on below-the-line advertising and marketing. More information can be found at http://www.marshamaung.com and http://www.creativejooz.com

According to the National Association of Realtors, almost 75 percent of the people use the Internet to find their new home. Modern communication technologies offer an optimal way to advertise real estate. But there are slightly more traditional methods that are considered to work well, too. For example, you can do real estate advertising on a local newspaper or on the TV. Your local real estate magazines are another opportunity for attaining workable real estate advertising. If you are a home seller, you need to know all the different types of real estate advertising and use them in a profitable configuration that would attract buyers.

The most common one is online real estate advertising. Billions of dollars for online real estate advertising will continue to shift in the next three years. Fidelity Assets’ Web traffic service promotes the service of campaign management tools, which can branch off traffic from AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo! on behalf of their clients, so that home sellers can advertise their websites or listings. Thus potential home buyers or sellers can be targeted if they search in their local geographical areas. Another opportunity is to use the Company’s Web Lead Service, which attracts buyers and sellers as they are doing their search in a real estate agent’s area. Traffic is redirected to a special “landing page” which belongs to a particular agent. People can find more information about the real estate they are interested in. Another point is that there is no overlap between the real estate offered by one agent and another. They are different so that people can find the most suitable one.

Another way of real estate advertising is by classified ads in local newspapers. They cost little, and, most of all, they work. Put an ad for 3 or 4 days and you may be astonished at the results. Buyers are looking at those ads. You can advertise there your company and your brand name. But there is a specific order which you should obey when advertising: advertise property first, agent second and company in the third place. If people are recognizing your name, it may go well with everything you sell or offer: prospective clients will stop at a building or a sign that carries your name.

The last thing you should comply with is not to share too much information in your ad, otherwise clients won’t call. Make people curious about the property you are selling. And take note of the right terminology: don’t call a hut a house, and know exactly what style of property you are offering. Otherwise, you risk losing trust with the clients.

Article by Robbie Darmona - an article writer who writes on a wide variety of subjects.

For more information click =>Real Estate Advertising

Here is a question my clients pose regularly:

I’ve been in business for several months and things are moving in the right direction; however, I want more business. I’ve thought about advertising but it seems so expensive. Do you have any advice on where to advertise and how much to spend?

Many design professionals equate advertising with marketing. This is not, in fact, the case. While advertising may be a component of an effective marketing strategy, the terms “advertising” and “marketing” are NOT synonymous.

Advertising is, in most cases, expensive and – without repeated ad appearances – fails to provide the new business you hoped for. As a result, I highly recommend focusing your efforts on other marketing strategies that are more effective, such as speaking and writing.

But, to the extent your budget is large enough to support an advertising campaign (as opposed to haphazard occasional placement of “an ad here and another ad there” – otherwise known as “shotgun advertising” which is NOT at all effective), I have a few things you should keep in mind:

• Advertising budget. The Small Business Administration suggests that 5% of your gross sales should be budgeted for advertising. As an example, if you project $50,000 in gross revenues, the SBA recommends that your annual advertising budget be $2,500 (or just over $200/month). While you can use this as a “rule of thumb,” don’t fret if your available funds do not support this kind of expenditure. Instead of investing hundreds of DOLLARS per month in traditional advertising, spend your TIME & EFFORTS seeking to “get in front of” your target market as much as possible (by, for example, speaking, writing or networking).

• Before placing an ad, do your homework. Contact the publication to ascertain demographics related to their subscribers and readers. Indeed, you need to confirm that your target market reads the publication you seek to advertise in.

• There is no correlation between the amount of money spent and the resulting new business. This conclusion was reached in a recent study at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. So if the money spent does not necessarily indicate the success of an ad, what does?

• The message is the most important aspect of an ad. Often, the message is in the headline, which is the first – and, often, the only – part of the ad readers will see. The headline needs to be simple, compelling and, ideally, appeal to the reader’s emotions. If the headline delivers in this way, the reader will likely be drawn in to read the rest of the ad.

• Think “out of the box” when creating your ad. If you want your ad to be read, you should strive to make it unique – ensure that it “stands out” from the rest. Let’s take your local Yellow Pages as an example. If you would peruse your Yellow Pages, I’m confident you would see that most are of the same format – what is called an “institutional” ad. That is where the logo and/or company name are “front and center”, along with their contact information. Rather than “leaping off the page with an attention-grabbing headline, many ads “look like all the rest”, which often results in a less-than-expected return on investment. So, instead of creating a “cookie cutter” ad, take the time to focus on your target market – choosing a problem they struggle with (e.g., putting a space together to look cohesive and attractive) – and try to come up with a headline that promises a solution to that problem.

Here’s an example: Instead of saying: “Specializing in One Day Room Makeovers”, try this: “Come home to a beautiful like-new space . . . completed in just one day”. Do you now see the difference?

• Repetition is key. As mentioned earlier, you cannot expect to get results from one ad placed one time in on publication. Likewise, placing an ad in one publication one month, then placing that same ad in another publication the following month, etc. will not get you the response you seek. To the contrary, the key to success in advertising is multiple appearances in the same publication so that readers begin to recognize you, get to know you, trust you, etc. The average reader will NOT contact you after seeing your ad once. In fact, most people will contact a business only after seeing the ad 8 or more times. As a result, before investing in advertising, realize that your investment will pay for itself only if you engage in a true advertising “campaign”.

Judy May is the President of Show House Marketing, a business development and marketing firm catering exclusively to design industry professionals. She can be reached at 610.324.5240 or judy@ShowHouseMarketing.com. For FREE Resources, including the Weekly $uccess Secrets Newsletter and the New! 14-day Jump Start your Design Business E-Course, visit them online at: http://www.ShowHouseMarketing.com.

So far, you may have bought website traffic, paid for clicks in PPCs, been in traffic exchanges. But what do you notice? Its that everytime you tend to slack off the traffic quickly disappears. So how do those other people get long term traffic, or "sticky" traffic? Well the asnwer isn’t a big "Secret" or some other crap like that. Its simply your content.

Subject does NOT matter

It doesn’t matter if your site is a personal site, a business site, a art and crafts site. You need to have good quality content. The big mistake that most businesses make is that they just put their product up for "order" and not much else.

Say for example you baby cribs, dont just put up a few pictures of baby cribs, a logo and just a order button. Write a few articles on lets say techniques to quieting a baby or good ways to put the baby to sleep (you can also hire people to write articles, just make sure that they dont use duplicate content or copied content). So the basic idea is that no matter what the subject of your site is, you should always have articles or other content related to that subject for your potential and existing customers to explore freely. This is almost always the biggest "sticky" factor.

Submit your Content

Although having good quality relevant content is important to have on your site, it is even more important to make sure that your content is doing what it can to its full potential. You can unleash this potential by exposing your content to more people. How?

Article submission.

Article submission sites will gladly accept your material if you’ve truly put effort into writing it. Once accepted, many more people will be able to access your content and many times when people read content that they think is useful or good they visit the authors site to see more of it (include your URL in your articles or in the bio after the article). So whats the moral? Make sure that your content gets exposed to other people instead of just your current visitors, this will really thicken the stream of quality traffic to your site.

Do not "Set and Forget"

The content I said that you should write can’t be a one time thing. Old content is just as bad as duplicate content. This section isn’t going to be a long lecture because its simple, keep updating your content to give your visitors something to come back to.

Other cool ways to get some good traffic

Content, however important it may be, is just one dimension of creating a steady quality traffic flow to your site. There are other techniques such as contests and awards. Let me explain a bit more.

Contests:

Viral marketing. Ever heard of it? (You should otherwise you’ve been living under a rock). Well incase you haven’t, its marketing that spreads by itself with people telling other people about you (and not just yourself bragging about your site). Contests, like weekly drawings etc. can be really effective. Lets say your website sells LCD screens. Have a contest about lets say a month long where people enter to win a 17" LCD monitor (Yes I know this item is kind of expensive, but who said marketing was free?). If you post this on forums (maybe gaming forums, tech forums or computer forums) you’ll be sure to get a lot of participants (which can be converted into sales). Experiment with contests, think of creative prizes, its a great way to strengthen the flow of traffic to your site.

Web Awards

Website design awards from your site is more a SEO technique than anything else, but the fact is that it still works. How does it work? Simple. You give out "awards" to "lucky" webmasters that you say have nicely desinged webpages. Then you give them code to put into their site to "display" their award, this is where you sneak in a anchor to your site. What this does is, one, give you a portion of the "winners" traffic, and two, it increases your link popularity and therefor search engine ranking.

Also when giving out your awards, you should select sites that are mostly relevant to the subject of your site so that the links that they might eventually have to your site are of high quality. I know this sounds sneaky and evil, but what works works.

Thats basically it, follow those guidelines to have a kickass flood of visitors to your site.

Pradip Patil is just a guy with no life and advice to give. Yep. Pretty much the best bio youve seen eh? Well I do have a site, its called http://www.freeforyou.mobstop.com/ Make my hit counter spin.

If you’ve never issued a free press release about your business, then you must issue the first of many tonight before retiring to bed.

Q When does one issue a press release?

A As often as possible. If you launch a business, issue one. If you launch a new website, issue one. If you make a donation to charity, issue one. If you redesign your website, issue one…the list is endless. If you promote an employee, add a new product line, etc, etc

Q Is it possible to create ‘Press Release Spam’?

A Yes. Make sure that what you have to say is news-worthy. (See above). It’s possible to issue them too often. People will get tired of you and they’ll stop picking up and distributing/publishing/reading your releases.

Q How do you create press releases.

A Write them yourself (There is a recommended format). You can pay to have it done (Will cost hundreds) but do you want to pay for this every few weeks/months? Perhaps not. It’s worth learning how to write them anyway so that you can tell when it has been poorly written for you. (Especially if you’ve paid for it). Go to a free press release site (there are many) write your release about your business and click submit.

Q Why bother with press releases anyway?

A Journalists/Reporters are always searching for newsworthy stories. When I submit a press release to a press release distributor online, the release (200 to 300 words) gets sent out to in-boxes of many journalists. Depending on the quality of the release, they will publish your story.

The whole press release composing/writing/submitting/distributing can be completely free or fully paid for. I’ve used both.

The secret is to have a newsworthy story or event about your business - you may need to be creative and you must write it in the recommended style.

Ugo Okonkwo http://www.mostexpensiveinternetad.com

Ugo Okonkwo http://www.mostexpensiveinternetad.com/

Ugo trained and works as an Orthopaedic Surgeon. His interests also include entrepreneurship and he has set up many successful business websites including Real Estate Entrepreneur http://www.mostexpensiveinternetad.com/

Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Home Page was unique for probably a completely different reason than just making the million dollars. It has spawned an immense number of competitors and there are probably many more on the way. Googling presently returns 1.5 million search results for “pixel ads”.

The problem is many of them are just clones-with nothing to distinguish them from the growing pack other than perhaps limited specialisation- e.g. pixel ads for Christians, countries, towns. Its made kind of easier as you can even download free scripts to do this- for example from http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/722486

So a couple of questions have to be asked.
· Is this viable long term? Has the novelty worn off and will anyone really be interested in looking at pixel adverts
· Are there any innovations that can make pixel ad sites stand out- ie rejuvenate the genre?

My answer is yes it can be a viable business for a few well run sites but then as I’ve just developed a site, I’m probably a bit biased. Alex Tew had ‘First Mover’ advantage, made his money and ran. However there are something like 30 million websites in existence, and I’d guess a large number of those, perhaps 2- 5 million are commercial and badly need web traffic. Word Tracker reveals 359 searches for “pixel ads” and nearly 200 for “Million Dollar Home Page” over the last 90 days so there is still some interest.

Lets examine the present crop and see in what way can they be improved upon. Note these are my own opinions and I could be (probably am) very wrong!

The premise on which a pixel ad website is offered is that it brings traffic to your site if you advertise there. To do that of course it must have a lot of traffic itself. It’s a chicken and egg situation. There are scores of sparsely populated websites that will never go anywhere and will eventually quietly die. Their owners have spent a bit of money preparing the site but thats where it ends.

Creating a website is easy but getting eyeballs there is not. Here are some principles that I believe provide one way forward.

1. Why stick with a monolithic block divided into 10 x 10 pixel blocks? Quite frankly it is both confusing and ugly. I think a future innovation may lie with smaller blocks, less intrusive in web page, just as google ads don’t take over a web page but enhance it by offering context sensitive adverts.

2. Why stick with just one page? My own site http://logoadz.com has a home page and anyone paying for an advert there can choose any six ‘tags’, each of which has a page of its own.

3. Why pay by the pixel? Be flexible on pricing. Why not pay by the block- conceptually they are the same price but the look of the site can be enhanced by offering pages of bigger adverts all the same size. Ten 100 x100 pixel ads looks much more attractive than the hotch potch you get normally.

4. Advertising has to be far more flexible than buying a space for 5 years etc. Why not offer advertising by the week, the month or any number of days? Advertisers can then test the site and see if they are getting the traffic they expect without a big financial commitment.

This needs the website to be fully automated so that advertisers upload their graphics and their advert is live within an hour if the images can be rebuilt that often. There are sites with individual graphics but the html overhead bulks the page size up inordinately. If the adverts are changed on a day to day basis then its more interesting for both human and search engine visitors to your website.

5. Provide click statistics so advertisers can feel they’re getting value for money. Tracking clicks isn’t rocket science. Nor is sending out a weekly email. Customer service is very important. It helps to keep them coming back.

6. Try and make your site look different to the Million Dollar Home Page; experiment with layouts. I find it depressing that a number of websites have cloned the layout, fonts and colours. There’s enormous scope to be innovative here and some sites have done this.

Have I succeeded with my own site? Well I have applied nearly all of these principles but as the site has not gone live yet it is too soon to tell. Its the first part of a package I’m producing for advertisers. Watch this space!

Recently there was an article in USAToday by Edward C. Baig that cast doubt on the value of spending large amounts of money on pricey banner ads.

According to Baig, the Nielsen Norman Group, based in Fremont California, recently released a study where the Nielson firm asked more then 230 participants to research specific topics online. The participants were hooked up to sophisticated eye-tracking equipment that allowed the authors of the study to track what people were looking at on their computer screens.

Baig writes, “the study findings show companies still have much to learn about how best to present an online image.” The findings of the study suggest people see very little on most web pages – including the pricy banner ads at the top of most web pages.

This would explain why most banner ad click through rates are horrendously low. If most companies get a click through rate of 5% they are incredibly happy with the results of the ad campaign.

There are literally thousands of pay per click advertisers on the net who will gladly take your money with no promise of any return or guarantee of success.

For some small start up companies or people interested in starting a home based online business, you may want to consider where you spend your hard earned advertising dollars.

There seems to be a growing opinion out there that a credible press release may in fact be the way to go when trying to get your companies name in front of the masses. Many reputable companies can often do a press release for under two hundred dollars. If you consider that some of these companies that submit press releases have instant credibility with news sites like Yahoo! and Google, then you can easily see how your press release can easily get picked up and posted on the web.

The other thing you should consider if you are considering submitting a press release is old adage that “content is king” on the internet. There are many websites out there that are starving for online content. They would love nothing better then to post your press release online just to have content for their readers.

Gary Kelly is co-creator of the online dating website for golfers, http://www.DateAGolfer.com and http://www.PuttingForPar.com, a golf website specializing in personalized ball markers