Economical Use of Banner Ads On Your Web Site!

Ever go to a site and there were a dozen or so banners and it took forever for the page to load? If you are selling your own product or service or selling for affiliate programs that you belong to, you probably have banner ads available.

Most affiliate programs will have a good selection of promotional tools for you to use when you sign up. Banners are usually one of the tools that you are given. If you are trying to develop multiple income streams you probably are associated with a number of affiliate programs like we are. Some can be for products, some for services and some may be network marketing type programs. Plus as I mentioned earlier, you may also have your own products/services too.

No matter what the type of program or product you are offering, the one thing that you want to do is get exposure for them so you get sales or member sign ups. For purposes of this discussion let's say you are associated with eight such programs or products.

So here you have eight different banners you want to get prospects to click on to increase your income stream. What do you do? Do you place eight different banners on your web page? I wouldn't! First it doesn't look very professional to have a page cluttered up with eight to ten different banners. Secondly, it will probably make your page load very slowly and you will then create what I call "click aways", when someone is waiting for your page to load and it takes so long that they just click another link to another site.

What's the solution? Get yourself a rotating banner script. You can get it free and it really isn't that hard to set up. What is a rotating banner script? The one we use is a cgi based script which allows you to load as many banners into it as you want to rotate and place a short one line of html code on your page. Each time a new visitor goes to your page a new banner comes up automatically. If you want to see one in action, go to one of our pages at: http://www.homebizlink.com/newslt.htm The banner on the top of the page is on a rotating script. Let the banner load and then hit your browser "refresh" button and you will see another banner come up in its place. Repeat it as many times as you want, and it will randomly select a new banner from the twelve or so we have loaded into the script.

One other neat thing about this is that you can have the banners rotate on as many pages as you want and you only need to set the script up once on your site. We have it on about 20 pages of our site. All it takes is to put that one short line of code on the html page you want the banners to appear on. The more pages you have it on, the more exposure you get. If someone surfs six pages of your site and your happen to have the banner script on those pages, there is a good chance they will see six different banners.

So where do you get it? While there are a number of the scripts available both for free and for a fee, we got ours for free from Cliff's Perl Scripts site. Just go to his site at: http://www.shavenferret.com/scripts and look for "Cliff's Banner Rotator Version 2.51". There was a link to it right on the first page the last time we were there. Then just download the files (there's only 3 small ones), follow the easy directions and upload it to your site.

It is a great way to get exposure for the multiple activities that you might be involved in. You can put 2, 5, 8 or 12 like we have. You could even put different banners from the same program (we have two from the same program in the rotation). Be creative! You could even sell space on a rotating script! Take a look at it and see if you might be able to use it to your advantage and create a more economical use of your web real estate.

About the author: Joe Reinbold, owner of The Entrepreneur's Home Business Link, resources for the home based business at http://www.homebizlink.com and publisher of a free weekly marketing tips newsletter. Subscribe at his website or by email at: mailto:subscribe@homebizlink.com