Banner Advertising

Banner Advertising

If you’ve been online for any length of time yourself, you’ve more than likely seen banner advertising in action. These are the graphic ads that you see on many sites. There are a number of ways to buy this advertising space. You can work with an ad network that handles the placement of your ads for you – choosing relevant websites, controlling what cities they get displayed in, etc. – or you can work directly with other websites to buy ad space on their pages.

You can even team up with other businesses in your local market to “trade” ad space on each other’s websites. There are lots of ways to work with people who don’t compete with you directly but would still be getting visitors who would be interested in what you have to offer.

For example, let’s say you own a plumbing business. You could partner up with local electricians, realtors, contractors and various other businesses to share ad space on each other’s website. Someone who is looking for an electrician will quite likely need a plumber at some point, and vice versa. Someone looking for a realtor may be looking for a whole bunch of other businesses because they’re moving to the area and aren’t familiar with it yet.

This can even be taken a step further by offering “finders fees” for any referrals that you get as a result of another local business. You can set up a system that will track any new customers who click through from an ad on one of your partner businesses’ website and wind up contacting you. You can then pay the person who referred them a finders fee. If you set up these types of partnerships with several other complementary businesses, it can work out well for everyone involved without taking anything away from their own bottom line.

Banner advertising can be very effective, but for local business purposes you need to be sure that you are able to control where your ads get displayed. If you’re an electrician in Portland, Oregon there’s really no point is having your ad shown to someone who is surfing the web in Sarasota, Florida.