When you are taking a stab at promoting your own services or products, you will find that there are a number of different options available to you. One type of advertising that will leap out at you fairly quickly are banner exchanges. In banner exchanges, you will find that an ad for your site is posted on someone else's site, while you post their ads. The ad, when clicked, leads back to your site. There are definitely advantages to this kind of advertising as long as you keep a few things in mind.
In the first place, you need to think about what kind of advertising network you get involved in. Take some time and check out the networks that are offering you a membership. What sort of sites do they represent and do you think that the people that they are targeting would be interested in your goods or services? For instance, if you are someone who is looking to sell t-shirts, it wouldn't do you very much good to get into an exchange that was largely targeted towards people looking for pet food!
Another thing that you will want to look into when you are thinking about doing a banner exchange is that you should think about what kind of exchange rate you are looking for. For instance, in many of the networks, you will get your ads on a one for one basis, where for every ad you put up from the network, your ad will appear on a network site. Other networks have a two for one ratio, where you have to put up two ads before your own ad appears. Think about how you want to set up your site and what ads you'd be happy to host. Remember that you should think about how you want your own site to look and what you can do to ensure that you are getting the attention that you need.
Banner exchanges can be instrumental towards getting traffic to your site. If the network is well targeted, you will get people coming to your site from the other sites, and they will be interested in what you have to say. You will also find that this will let you work on your link building. Because you aren't going to be trading links, you will find that this will be quite valuable; Google tends to dismiss links that simply reciprocate one another.
When you are looking into banner exchanges, you will find that they can be quite valuable to your site, but only if you go into it with open eyes. Make sure that you get a network that represents your best interests and that will put your ads in a place where they will be seen by people with relevant interests. Take some time and do your homework. Some networks will definitely suit you better than others, and often, you are the only one who can make a good call on which one will be best for you.
Andrew Green is part of the team behind A-Z Proxies, an attempt to list from A to Z every active web
proxy. Andy has been actively working in the web proxy field since 2005 and has built up a wealth of knowledge on the subject.
