Online Manual - Web Advertising / Billboard Ads
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Web Advertising / Billboard Ads

A very popular but expensive method of promoting your site is through billboard ads. These are the little rectangular graphics that you see near the top or bottom of some popular page beckoning you to click on them in order to transport you to their site. You mostly see larger companies doing this type of advertising, but if you have the money, they can pay for themselves several times over. The price of a billboard ad generally will depend upon the size you want and which site is offering the ad. Some sites, such as CNN get very high volumes of traffic and a billboard ad will be costly for the average business person.

There are two types of billboard ads that will also effect the price. One type is the type that you are probably thinking of where billboard ad stays in the same spot. Then there are those that rotate or change, each time a person has logged in or after a set time frame. That means your ad may only appear to a percentage of the audience that the site generates, rather than everyone. This type of ad is not as bad as it seems, because even though say only every fourth person to log on will see your ad, many of those users are repeat visitors to the site and will eventually see it. However, it is always better to have your ad seen by all people, all of the time.

Even though billboard ads are expensive, they are worth the money. It is the most graphical way to promote your site. It will be seen by thousands of people, depending upon which site you have it on. With billboard ads, you are going to attract many people that are interested in your site, but probably never thought to search for it via keyword searches. You are actually going to try and shape the will of people. To tease them into visiting your site.

Billboard ads are generally small, so you have only a limited space in which to convince a reader to visit your site. Your ad needs to be highly visible and to the point. A great way to do this now is to use an animated billboard ad. In this technique, you create many different GIF images, each one a different frame in the animation. Then, using special shareware programs, you can combine all of these GIF images into a single GIF file. The resulting GIF file is then accessed as usual in a web document. This technique makes your billboard ad stand out, and is highly recommended. If you can make an animated billboard ad, then do so. This is also a good way to get more text in the small ad space.

Just as you would not put an ad for tropical fish in a computer magazine, you need to determine which site you are actually going to purchase billboard ad space from. There are a few choices to be made even before this.

First, you must decide how much money you are willing to spend on billboard advertising. Up until now, everything you've done to promote your site has only cost you time, not actual money. Once you've decided how much you can afford to spend on advertising, you need to decide how long you want your ads to run. A billboard ad is like any other ad that may appear in printed media. You cannot put it in for one month and then remove it.


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