Facilities - What You Need For Your Home Based Business

You would have to be blind not to have seen several hundred 'banners' on the Internet every hour you've spent 'surfing'. Regardless of the type of website you visit, there's a very good chance there will be banners. They are the 'Advertising Billboards' of the Internet. Instead of roadside signs, billboards, buses, railway stations, airports and shop fronts, you have websites and all their pages. Your Home Based Business or Affiliate efforts would at least a little less effective, not to mention interesting, without them.

Some of the banners are placed there by 'paying advertisers' in much the same way as add signs are in the real world. Your website is the 'billboard' of the Internet, but of course, if your website is in a little back-street that no-one ever enters, it's not worth anything to the advertiser. Exactly the same as a website with little or no traffic. But do not fear, there is the Banner Exchange.

Banner exchanges are responsible for the fact that banners are so plentiful. How they work is simple. They work on a reciprocal arrangement whereby you add a script to your website, which displays a rotation of all the member banners as your page is visited. Each time you show a banner on your site you receive 'credit'. Your banner is included in the rotation for all the other member sites and shown according to the amount of credits you earn (or in some cases can buy). Generally you need a website to join such an exchange, obviously, but there are some that will accept membership from people who have no website (and no means to display reciprocal banners), but they have to buy all their credits as they can't earn any.

Your join and supply your website address (URL) and  upload your banner (or supply the URL of your banner on your own server if you need or want to host it yourself). They supply a script to add to your web page (either html or java) where you want the 'reciprocal' banner to appear and that's it. 

The very best you will do in terms of the 'credit' exchange rate is 1 : 1 (although the average is closer to 2 or 3 : 1), that is, you get one 'exposure' of your banner on another website for every time you expose one on yours (each visitor to the page which contains the banner). Most exchanges allow you to choose the topic of the websites your banner is shown on (you don't want your feminist banner on a chauvinistic website, do you? :-) or maybe you do?. You can also usually choose what type of banner is displayed on your website, for the same reason, but I've found they are usually pretty broad categories, so there sometimes can be conflicting subject matter. This is the price we pay for a largely free facility.

You can have your banner made professionally and it costs you to do so. However, there are a number of websites which have a facility which allows even untalented people to make a banner out of a 'blank' which is relatively attractive and professional looking. You just have to accept that they will 'brand' the banner with their trade name or website address. They can be found by searching Google or any other search engine for keyword such as 'banner maker' or 'free banner creator'

Banner exchanges can be found in the same way, using search terms like 'banner exchange' etc or from the Google Ads below.

You can't expect a very good 'click rate' from banners. Recent surveys, and by all accounts, text ads tend to attract more clicks. It's been quoted that banners can only be expected to attract something in the order of 1 click in 100 exposures. Not a great rate, but given that these exposures are either free, by way of reciprocal exposures earned through your website, or very cheap (you can usually get 1,000 to 5,000 banner exposures for a dollar or two) it's not so bad. However, again, these exposures generally return a very small amount of clicks.