Banner Affiliates are Lame
Ok, so not every Affiliate who relies on banners to make sales is lame, but the practice in general is lame. Banners are annoying, uninformative, and generally unsuccessful. Banners are the Billboards of the Internet. People look, then walk/drive right past.
Instead, try text links, video or something creative and personalized. Think about yourself as a web surfer and a potential buyer. Would you click on something flashing bright red saying “Click here or we will Kill you”. I doubt it, so don’t expect visitors to your site to click either.
The most successful affiliates use video or text links with a solid pre-sell to prepare their web patrons to move onto the merchant’s site and complete the purchase. Your job as an Affiliate Marketer is not to make the sale. It is to prepare the customer with knowledge of the product/service/company so when they arrive on the merchant’s site they are in a buying state of mind. Just please stop flashing banners everywhere, they are mostly useless and rather annoying. Â Testimonials, expert analysis, product/service/company reviews are all effective ways of marketing for your merchants.
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I’m confused, if they are lame, why is there a bigass banner on your page?
Because I was sick of seeing Google ads for the time being and I wanted to promote Affiliate Classroom. Not necessarily to sell their services, but more of just getting their name out because I like the company and I enjoy supporting them
I also just posted on this the other day… banners are crap compared to text. And when you get really creative… TEXT OWNS!
[...] Instead, try text links, video or something creative and personalized. Think about yourself as a web surfer and a potential buyer. Would you click on something flashing bright red saying “Click here or we will Kill you”. I doubt it, so don’t expect visitors to your site to click either. (more…) [...]
I recently wrote an article that noted this point (which is a good one). People are used to advertisements that are images. They look right past em’, its built in to our brains now that those image ads are just ads.
The most clicks are links, especially if you make the link ads look like your regular ol’ website links. Way more CTR.
Best of luck. Let me know if you would be up to exchange links someday. Great site.
Leon
Banners are sooo 1998.