I wanted to quickly up together a quick blog post to let out one of my biggest traffic and lead generation secrets. Well its not really a secret but let me tell you this. Most people are NOT doing this which makes it all the more profitable. What is this advertising method?

Banner Advertising

Yep your probably thinking well thats nothing new. And your right its not but its a wide open for advertisers because believe it or not only a very small number of internet marketers take advantage of this. I’m not sure why because its one of the best ways to get targeted traffic without having to worry about braking rules and getting Google slapped or getting your website slapped with the panda or penguin update when doing SEO.

All you need to do is get a good graphics designer to put together some banners. I would get all the sizes done that you can possible think of. That way your not going back asking your graphics designer to do more sizes. Also ask for the banners to be congruent to the website. Your Banner needs to look like your website because its important that when the visitor clicks the add that they feel they ended up on the right website. If your banner looks nothing like your site you will not do very well.

Also get your designer to create you a normal banner and a animated flashing banner for each size. The reason for this is because some websites allow flashing animated banners and some do not. So how do you find websites to place your banners on and how do you track everything to see whats working? Good questions and I will tell you exactly what I’m doing. I first want to tell you about tracking. What I first do when I find a website I want to place a banner on is I make a new page on my site for that website and that website only.

So I would simply get my index.html page and open it in my HTML editor and call that page site1.html or something I could recognise for that site. So when I upload that file to my website it would be www.mysite.com/site1.html

I would then use this URL to attach to that banner on that site. So I could even call it thesitename.html and not site1.html this way I will personally know that URL is for that site I found to place my banner on. Why do I do this? Well its important I build a new page just for this banner ad because Aweber that I use to list build notify me which URL my leads are coming from. SO on my page I will be collecting Opt Ins and when Aweber tell me that a lead has come from www.mysite.com/site1.html I will know that the opt in come from that banner ad and its working.

So this is what I do. I open up a excel file and I have a few columns. The first will have the website I’m placing a banner on. The next will have the price its costing me each month. The next will have the URL I have set up for this banner and the next will have the date the banner ad went live. The next will have a section where I can go in and input how many opt ins I’ve had for that month from that banner. So as the opt ins are coming in each day I manually open up the excel sheet and update the number for the amount of opt ins.

This way at the end of the month I can see that if I’ve spend say $400 and I’ve had say 89 opt ins all I do is take $400 and divide that by 89 which would then tell me I’m paying around $4.49 per lead. That by the way is very good and this is the kind of results I’m seeing. Its just a case of finding the websites which have good traffic and are relevant to your niche market. How do I do this? Well you can do a few things. The first way is obvious. You can simply go to Google and type in your main keywords and look at the top ranking sites. Them are the ideal sites you want to be placing your banners on because they get a lot of traffic.

But just because a site is not at the top of Google for your main keywords does not mean it does not get a lot of traffic. But how do you find them? Well you could type in to Google Top Blogs + Your Niche and see what pops up. Normally someone will have written a blog post sharing this information with people so take advantage of it. Another thing you could do is post a job on elance.com and ask someone to do this research for you. Just let them know that you want a list of the top 50 high traffic blogs that accept advertising in your niche.

You can also find some websites that put advertisers and website owners together. On them sites you can just search for blogs and websites that already want to sell advertising space. You can see how much traffic the site gets, the niche market its in and you can purchase banner ads all in one convenient place. A good one to take a look at is Buy Sell Ads.

I hope you got some good advice

Take it easy

Lee