What are banners and how are they used?

I would like to explore banners and their use via the web. Banners are simply graphic ads that are placed on web pages to promote a product or business. When a prospective customer clicks on the banner ad he or she is directed to the site that is coded in the html web page they have visited. A very simple and effective way to advertise your product or service.

So how does one use this advertising method? Probably the easiest way is to join a banner exchange. there are hundreds of these exchanges spread through out the Internet. When you join an exchange, your banner is placed in the exchanges network and theirs is placed on your web page. Usually their service requires a certain number of clicks of their banner for one show of yours on their web pages. This number rate varies for each exchange site but is normally two or three to one. Also you can purchase banner displays for different thousand amount packages which are usually competitively priced.

In order to be able to take advantage of this type of advertising, an entrepreneur would need to understand html code at least understand the basic applications to be able to ad the exchange code to their web pages. A good html editor or web page builder software with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) capability is a great tool to enable a newbie to accomplish this task with a minimum of effort. We have featured a great one to use that is free easy to use and you can even use to make money yourself. (I will explain affiliate advertising shortly in another post)

Now we need software to create our graphic ads with. There are a vast array of software available to accomplish this task. It just depends on your budget and features needed. the programs available vary from simple text banners to animated and flash type presentation.
There are also free online banner creators available to you but you will be using templates that
are very common so you would be limited in this area if you wanted to stand out by having your own unique banner. The free ones are still a good option however. At this site you can choose from several animated styles, but you might have to wait on their page to load, as their server is usually barraged with seekers using their free service.


OK, so now you know enough to get started with your banner advertising campaign, well almost. The next step of course would be to do a Google search for banner exchanges to join.
I will list a few well known and trusted ones here for your convenience. (to be continued on page2)