My Money Making Journey

A great way to add more visibility to your site and increase its link appeal, is to create nice banner creatives for your site. We as internet users are very visually engaged. Between reading small text and processing all of the different colored links, we are constantly using our eyes to scan web pages fast and furiously. Creating a banner that has a fun animation, or even a simple and elegant banner, makes a low stress zone for the eye on a page and will help bring free traffic to your page. They are better than text link ads because they give readers a visual image to hold on to.

Now come to actually sitting down any making a banner. Think about a design that will grab attention and consider what you want the banner to say. How much information will give the viewer. The sign of a good banner is one that drives free targeted traffic to your site. For the beginners out there, don't freak, I promise you that it is the easiest thing ever. The things that you will need:

1. .jpeg or .gif that you would like to use for your banner. Now there are standards for the banners that you see around the web. The most common banner out there is the 468 x 60 banner. I am sure that most of you are familiar with the others including 125 x125 ( the size of the banners to the right)

2. Online photo storage account. If you do have an account where you can upload your photos and videos to the web then go out and get one. They are all over, some include: Flickr, Webshots, KodakGallery, etc. I personally use both Flickr and Webshots. Flickr is great because it allows me to also upload .gifs.

3. Lastly you will need this little piece of code:


You can just copy it exactly as it is, making sure to replace the highlighted links with links of your own. The first should be replaced with the URL (including http://) that you would like your banner to link to. Where the second link is, enter the URL of the image or gif that you uploaded to your photo account.

When you have all these three pieces complete, just copy and paste the HTML code for your banner into your site, profile, etc.

Another great way to utilize your banners is to advertise on other sites around the web. There are many sites out there that offer advertising on a blog, forum, or website. And this kind of advertising is nice because it will not necessarily break the bank.

Another one of my banners that I made for Qyao is featured in the MY Sponsors area.
I used GIMP image program to make the simple .gifs.

So go out and make your own website banners. If you are not into creating your own banners from scratch, you can also search the web as there are sites that allow you to create your own banners right on their site, with nice graphics and effects.