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Follow These 5 Simple Steps to Drive a Flood of Traffic to Your Affiliate Marketing Site

Guest post by: Michael Farrell

Article Overview: Many large and mid-sized corporations have redirected more than $15B of their advertising budgets from traditional promotional activities to Internet Marketing including Affiliate Marketing, suggests Mike Farrell with aspenIbiz. Read this short post as it provides 5 critical steps and 7 tips to follow to get your share of the future of the world’s digital economy.

Follow These 5 Simple Steps to Drive a Flood of Traffic to Your Affiliate Marketing Site

Affiliate Marketing is all about traffic. Not just any traffic but the quality of the traffic and the chance that the traffic will convert from a browser at your website to a buyer. A banner advertising campaign is a key strategy to drive a flood of traffic to your affiliate marketing website.

Key parts of the banner advertising campaign include the creative part of the ad and finding the most effective website where you can place your banner ad.

This article will provide 5 core steps to creating a winning banner advertising campaign and 7 tips to generate over-the-top results.

Step 1. Prepare Yourself for Banner Advertising. Make sure your sales funnel is operational. The most effective way to monetize traffic is with a capture page that gets your prospect's contact information. This turns your prospects into a lead so that you are able to market to them over and over again, for free, and get that sale.

Get into your ideal customer's shoes. Know everything about them so they will want what you are promoting like there is no tomorrow.

Know the motivational factor that will spur your leads to take Action. Convey this motivational factor in your banner ad, perhaps it is a FREE Report, an ebook, or a link to an inspirational video. The final item of step 1 is to test all three items to ensure that they work well together.

Now it is time to find a suitable place to host your banner ad.

Step 2. Find the Perfect Website Where You Can Show Off Your Banner Ad. Here are five main areas that you must consider when searching for a suitable website.

Quantity of traffic - contact the site webmaster to get the stats about the number of visitors and pageviews that the website (where you will place your ad) gets a day.

Quality of traffic - look at the website from your customer's perspective to ensure that the audience for the website does indeed comprise your target market. Look at the content being posted on the website; is it something you and your target market would enjoy? If it is, then it is highly probable that the website will be attracting the right crowd that comprises your target market.

Your competition - take a look at the website and look for your competition. Are there a billion ads on every single page of the website or will yours stand alone? If the website is saturated with banner ads from all sorts of different competitors, avoid using the website because you want as little distraction as possible. Every ad that shows up at the same time, and place, as yours will steal some of your ad's effectiveness and your leads.

Your ad position - another item to check is where the website will place your ad. Be sure your ad will be served up to be above-the-fold and is relevant to the content on the webpage. Some website owners will suggest your ad be served up to the top left of your page (because most of us read from left to right starting at the top of a page.

However, here is something to take into account ... most people do not linger where they start. They frequently are eager to move on and check out what the rest of the page looks like. Based on this action, you may want to consider having your ad served up to the place on the page where the eyes naturally stop and REST before they either click on your ad or move on to another section of the page or a new page altogether..

Your ad size - the most common banner ad sizes, in pixels are 336x280, 300x250, 125x125, 240x400, and 250x250. These sizes are proven to get more traffic than other sizes.

Some popular content sites frequently visited by many include CNN, Weather (The Weather Channel), ESPN, USAToday, WSJ (The Wall Street Journal) and TVGuide. These are good sites for the general marketplace. A more targeted market can be found by visiting sites like forums, blogs, and social networks (such as Facebook and Youtube). As you get more targeted with your candidate marketplace, you need to use more niche specific websites that allow online advertising. You can find these websites by using Tribalfusion, Leadtail, and PayPerClickSearchEngines as these sites assist you in the search for, comparison of, and the purchase of online advertising. The niche sites they provide are where you can place your banner ads.

Step 3. Now it is Time to Purchase Your Ad and Get a Deal. Many of the websites where you will want to place your ad will post their rates on their website. These rates will most likely be in the form of CPM (which stands for Cost Per Thousand, not Millions). This means they will charge you on a per impression basis which is how many times your ad shows up on their website. Another cost item to obtain and understand is if the site has a minimum budget they want you to spend. Also, determine if there are various ad positions you can occupy, such as a banner at the top or on the right hand side. Also determine if you have the option to specify which specific page or group of pages where your ad will be served up or will it be a "run of the site" which means your ad will appear on every single page of the website. Finally, ask the website owner or account representative if there is a back-office like location where you can obtain detailed information on the visitors to the website, their demographics, number of visitors a day, and pageviews.

Step 4. Create a Banner Ad That Actually Works. A web banner or banner ad is a very popular form of web advertising that embeds an ad into web pages with the objective of attracting traffic by linking the ad to the sponsor's site.

The advertisement is built from an image and usually saved as a gif, jpg or png type of file. The creative part of the advertisement is the message contained in the text, graphics, colors, and buttons on the image. The creative part of the advertisement has a huge impact on the CTR (Click Through Rate). Banner ads vary according to size, aspect ratio, and positioning on the web page. The most common banner ads are those that are a horizontal rectangle spanning the top of a web page (referred to as the banner), a vertical rectangle on the right hand side of a page (referred to as the skyscraper), and a small to mid-sized rectangle that may appear in different places on the web page above the fold. Here are some sites to visit and engage people prepare your banner ads. These include 20dollarbanners, 99designs, heybannerbanner, fiverr, and logomaker.

Step 5. This step contains the 7 tips to generate over the top results.

Tip 1 - Be Congruent ... once a visitor clicks on your ad, they expect to see on the pages of your website what was conveyed in the ad so ensure the message in the ad matches the content on the pages of your destination website.

Tip 2 - Avoid the Falsely Coveted Top Banner Ad Slot ... it does not matter why but most people tend to ignore the top spot, while it is indeed the place where people start reading, it is not where they stop.

Tip 3 - Animation Catches the Eye ... when human eyes detect objects, they see movements first. So use this to your advantage. Add some animation to your banner ad to get more attention and it might be as simple as animating the static ad you have right now.

Tip 4 - Switch Up Your Creative for that Breath of Freshness ... the website where you place your ad will most likely be visited by the same users day in and day out. In order to keep up your banner ad's effectiveness, occasionally give your ad a facelift.

Tip 5 - the Bottom Line of Your Ad ... be MORE interesting than whatever your prospect is reading on the same page your ad is showing. Remember that the visitor to your website is perusing through content that is competing for the attention of your visitor so do the best you can to make your ad irresistible and more interesting than everything else that is on that page.

Tip 6 - Fly Under the Radar ... some websites display warnings to their visitors that advertising is contained on this page and this causes some people to SKIP checking out the ad altogether. Do your best to make sure the warning is not before your ad; often times this is negotiable so talk to the webhost and determine if they are able to hide the "warning" labels for your ad.

Tip 7 - Track Your Success ... be sure and ask the webhost to track your results and provide you "progress reports." You want to keep a constant eye on how your ad is performing and this is determined by measuring the CTR (Click-Through-Rate). Also note that a typical banner ad campaign get a 1 - 2% CTR however using the tactics provided in this post, you should expect to double or even triple those averages.

Also, install the FREE Google Analytics tool on your website and observe the increased number of visitors to your website. This will be a result of people responding to your ad by clicking on the banner and transitioning to your website.

Many large and mid-sized corporations have redirected more than $15 Billion of their advertising budgets from traditional promotional activities to Internet Marketing initiatives like Affiliate Marketing. In this past year, online buyers spent more than $112 Billion.

Online promotions, and advertising, combined with Internet Marketing and Selling campaigns are redefining the future of the world's digital economy.

If you can find a huge group of people, with the same interests gathered at one central location, then the people in this group become your target market. You then have the perfect channel for your Affiliate Marketing campaigns and target customers for your affiliate offerings.

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Article Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Banner Advertising, Income at Home, Make Money Online, Mike Farrell aspenIbiz, Work From Home



Related Forum Posts
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - Carol, Mary and David - thanks for your great input and insight on Affiliate Marketing! This is the kind of discussion I was hoping for in this thread. There are pros and cons to Affiliate Marketing, just as there are to any business. As has been suggested, he best policy is to proceed with caution and do some research before jumping in. As Carol has recommended, this topic thread in the EvanCarmichael.com forum is the ideal place to ask questions and seek further input on available Affiliate Marketing programs. If a person is serious about building an online business and is interested in Affiliate Marketing plans, they should approach the process as they would any other form of business. Research, ask questions, compare opportunities, participate in forums on online business and Affiliate Marketing. GT :-]
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - Hi GT Affiliate Marketing is one of the easier ways to get started making money online, but it does take quite a bit of work before you see any great results as you have to keep promoting constantly. It does teach you one hell of a lot about all aspects of Internet Marketing though as you will need to learn how to write and submit articles, create and maintain a blog, social networking is a great help to affiliates too..the list goes on and on. In fact from what you learn from Affiliate Marketing you can apply to any niche and be sure to succeed, take care, Carol
Re: Affiliate Marketing - Open for Discussion - You made some very good points here Jeff and I agree with you, Affiliate Marketing should not be something that you concentrate all your efforts into. As i said earlier I have learned a lot with Affiliate Marketing and continue to do so, and it has helped me tremendously to understand what I am going to have to do in my chosen niche(s). I am also being coached by the same group of mentors as GT and we are all moving forward daily to achieve our ultimate goals. Take care, Carol
Re: Should Evan add a "Social Media Marketing" category to the f - Hi, Online Marketing would be a great title, and having sub categories would make it even better, there would plenty of categories to choose from, Social Media, SEO, Article Marketing and yes even Affiliate Marketing to name just a few, great looking site btw Jeff, take care, Carol
Re: What are your May Goals? - Thanks Evan! I just changed one of my business goals from setting up a video site on Traffic-Geyser to: "Set up a newsletter email series (let's say 10 messages) on Get Response..." I reviewed Traffic Geyser in the latest episode of "David's Den" on my blog (see sig file), included an excellent video review of Traffic Geyser by John Detlif and decided against taking that particular project any further. Still lots to get done!


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