Banner Advertising on Affiliate Landing Pages

Everyone knows what a banner advert is, right? Just checking. Banner advertising is less intrusive 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.

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 affiliate web site, 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).