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    Banner Advertising
Everyone knows what a banner advert is, right? Just checking. Banner advertising is less intrustive than pop-up / pop-unders or domain redirects. This can either be a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, people who do click the banners are probably going to be receptive to seeing your site, on the other hand, you're paying per thousand impressions (when a banner is shown) rather than per visitor, so results will vary.

With banner advertising, you have two choices to make. The first is whether you do it yourself or get someone else to do it. The second is whether you pay for it with banner space on your website or with cold hard cash. So really, there's four ways to do banner advertising – DIY swap, DIY paid, third party swap, third party paid. Each of these has their advantages and disadvantages.

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Link Building Direct provides linking services. They will help you with creating backlinks and do link exchanging for your website.
The most basic form of banner advertising is a straight swap – I'll put your banner on my website if you put mine on yours. Ironically, this is also the most difficult to arrange, since you have to find an appropriate website, contact them, negotiate the details (since one of you is likely to have more traffic than the other, or pre-existing deals, or something), and then keep everything up to date. It also requires a lot more trust and commitment than the other options.

The other form of Doing It Yourself banner advertising is buying direct from the source. Find a webmaster who is looking to sell banner ad space or contact one who isn't and make an offer. When you come to a deal (these are usually $X per month, although some larger sites have banner serving software that counts impressions so you will be buying X thousand impressions. These deals can be very good value, or very bad value, depending on which webmaster is more desperate to do the deal and more accurately estimates the value of the banner advert. If you are going to go the DIY route, then spend some time looking for good sites and getting a feel for prices (look at commercial banner placement company websites and inquire about rates at sites you are interested in).

Google is by far the worlds biggest search engine and they also have the largest PPC network. They can offer you endless hits, but the price isn't always cheap.
Commercial banner placement companies are a third party you can pay to buy banner placements for you. There are a couple significant advantages to going this route. The first is that they have already made arrangements with a much larger number of webmasters than you could reach. The second is that your banners will also be part of a rotation. Studies have shown that rotating banners typically have a 20-30% higher Click Through Rate than static banners. Unless the webmasters you contact personally are running banner-serving software, this is a feature you probably won't have access to by doing it yourself. We are still trialling banner advert companies at this point and hope to have a recommendation soon.

The final option for banner advertising is an organised exhange network. Basically, you sign up with a banner exchange, install the HTML code (where you want the banner to appear) The problem with these is that you are giving up more impressions than you are getting most networks run at 2:1 (you get your banner displayed once for every two times someone else's is displayed on your site) although there are some at 6:5 and other ratios in between. While you aren't actually paying anything for your impressions, you might be losing some clickthroughs to sponsor sites, and that is potentially a disaster.

I hope this article has given you a brief introduction to banner advertising as a potential source of traffic. Other sources of bulk traffic are popunder advertising and domian redirects or you could move to a Pay per click model rather than pay per impression.