1) Use as FEW links as possible on your web site. The more ways you give surfers to get out of your page/site the less likely they are to click on your advertisements.
2) Use banners in unique positions. Don't restrict yourself to a consistent layout. Often surfers will tune out all but your content if you have a special layout and thus fewer clicks. Use additional advertisements in the bodies of articles, etc.
3) This is one some people don't like but it works very well. Place banner coding on the top of the page with no image size coding, then place a one pixel by one pixel image that would appear directly underneath it. This will slow down the loading time of the rest of the page a bit and thus expose the surfer strictly to the advertisement for a longer time. I have also seen this done using cgi, where there is a deliberate five-second delay from the advertisement loading on top to the display of the rest of the content on the page. The longer the delay the higher the chance of a click. Of course, this increases the risk that a surfer will not be very happy with your site . . .
4) Put your highest paying banners on top. Time and time again I've seen people use LinkExchange or affiliate program banners superceding per click banners. With rare exception have I ever seen anyone earn a higher CPM from affiliate programs than from CPC programs.
5) Use good Alt Text links... remember a significant number of people surf with no images turned on, so in that case an exposure is just a waste but the alt text will at least help define more as to what the image was supposed to be.
Don't necessarily say, "Please Click here to visit our sponsor, or Sponsor Ad", etc. Be creative, be personal, be original.
6) Get traffic - don't lose yourself in site design and content development. Once you have at least a decent shell of a site up, the key is then in promotion. Banner exchanges are a good way to get some reach, so are webrings, search engines and the like. Of course these are all not new concepts but the real trick is in mastering them all. Some of our most successful webmasters are those who have simply gotten great domain names and gotten them registered in the search engines.
For instance one of our clients owns a great number of something-chatrooms.com names. Each of the pages is nothing more than a free zoom chat page with our banners on top and bottom. He gets about 3+ million hits a month.
7) Networking - Just like in the real world it's crucial on the Internet for long-term survival. Go to all the search engines and find sites that are similar to yours and email them with your URL and a page on your site where they can find their URL already listed. Make sure you already have their site listed, because it will greatly increase your chance of having them list you. If they don't reciprocate then take theirs down after a week or so.
It's long, tedious work but it's the most rewarding by far. Some of our sites have links on other sites established years ago and still receive thousands of hits weekly from them. There are some programs/sites, like Free-for-Alls, etc. but it's just like search engine spam software, basically just a piece of junk. The only way to do it is to manually and humanly make these contacts.
8) The right place at the right time, stay on top of things, monitor your stats, experiment, etc. It's not just my responsibility to ensure you get the highest click-through rate possible, as a website owner you must experiment with all of the various companies and means of using advertising on your site to create revenues. Be methodical and ORGANIZED in your approach, set up some spreadsheets and record your daily/weekly ad reports/revenues. Sooner than you think you will have a great amount of information from which to refine your attempts and generate more revenues per visitor than previously.
9) Make every attempt to ensure that the web surfer will come back to your site: the use of "site update reminder" services, mailing lists, questionnaires, bookmarking, using time/date sensitive content, announcing upcoming events, changes, etc.
10) Collect as MUCH data as you can, because information is king and a one-eyed man in the land of the blind is king. Those who will do best will be those who can learn the most from the data they collect and react to it in the best possible manner. Use web site statistic programs, chart trends. I've gotten hundreds of e-mails from webmasters who report dramatic increases in earnings after they noticed that a banner performs better in spot A rather than spot B, etc, etc. Optimization is KEY!
No comments:
Post a Comment