Mix It Up and the Power of Text

There is a tendency for new web site owners, desperately trying to make money from their web site, to use the flashiest, most attention grabbing adverts they can. This creates a barrage of visual noise that will drive your visitors away. Contrast is the key. One animated advert stands out if its is surrounded by static images. One picture stands out if it is surrounded by text.

Having a variety of advert types, sizes and shapes helps prevent the visitor developing banner blindness. During the Dotcom boom of the late 1990s, banner adverts ( 468 x 60 ) where almost the only form of advert and appeared at the top of most web pages. As a result, users learnt to ignore anything of that size in that position. To combat this, advertisers produced a greater variety of advert shapes and sizes but advert blindness is still a risk. Especially if all your pages carry exactly the same adverts in the same place. A bit of imagination in your site's layout, some Javascript to randomly select adverts to display or using one of the free ad-servers such as Adbutler can prevent banner blindness occurring.

When picking your advertizing program's range of adverts, do not ignore how effective text is in advertising. We are bombarded by advertising images because a picture is worth a thousand words but the right words can trump any image. The right words can jump straight out of the page and get the viewers attention in a way a graphic cannot. Pixel for pixel, the phrase “Want free money?” will grab more attention than any image. Its not just simple phrases. Long pieces of text, known as copy, are highly effective at drawing people in and converting their interest into money.

The art of creating this text is known as copy-writing and is an art form all to itself. However, one trick I have found very useful is to take parts of customer reviews from Amazon instead of the Amazon's own adverts.   A standard Amazon advert has a picture of the product, three or four words from the product's name, a price and Amazon's logo. Instead of this I find a good customer review and pick a tasty section from it. I apply a bit formatting, may be add a border around it and add a link saying “Find Out More” and this becomes my advert. These adverts add variety to my web pages and not just visually because the writing style in the customer's review will be different from my own.

By mixing up your graphics and text, by having different formats of adverts and finding other people's writing to use as advert you can create variety on your site. This increases the chance of something catching a reader's eye and the more this happens, the more you earn.