Banner Ads Don't Work, But Non-Banners Do!
Make your banner look like text on a page. This is what I call a "non-banner" (close to "no-brainer"). If your banner looks like a banner, it gets ignored. Conventional banner ads only pull less than three percent on average. Why is that? It's because we have learned to ignore advertising.
Every day we are bombarded with sales pitches in newspapers, on the radio, on television, on highway billboards, and so on. It becomes background noise that we learn to tune out. Something that doesn't appear to be a sales pitch will receivemore attention. Intelligent surfers are looking for information. They want to find out about something and be told how their problem can be solved.
Do that properly and you will get their click. If you try to entertain them, impress them with graphics or bore them with your company's features, you won't get noticed. Your banner is pretty much a classified ad. And classified ads work when the rules of marketing are followed. Make your banner an attractive text ad and it will pull like crazy.
Make it look like any other flashy, hyped up banner and it just becomes more of the clutter on a site. If your banner will be staying at a permanent home, design it so it looks like it is part of the site. Match the background color, fonts and layout as much as you can. If your banner is going through a banner exchange, use white as a default color. At the very least your text will be highlighted if it lands on a dark background.
Put useful information on your banner. Highlight key words and phrases. Use a power headline consisting of your best benefit right up front. Appeal to their "click impulse". Make them an offer they can't refuse.
Create a sense of urgency. Put the words "Click Here" at the end of the text message, underlined and in standard blue. This visual is the most underused and yet the most effective way of getting a surfer to click. Who cares about having fancy buttons, use what works! Don't use animated banners. Animated banners do pull betterthan static banners but they still look like banners.
Mostpeople smile and say "That's cute!" before clicking awaysomewhere else. Normal text doesn't flash or move, so neither should your non-banner. By following these and other simple rules for banner design you could very well, through testing, end up with a non-banner that generates a much higher click-thru rate than a conventional banner.
Currently many website owners are only too happy to host your banner and collect your money for doing so since the banner is only pulling a little of his traffic and is harmless to him. However, he might become concerned after your new non-banner starts to pull a bigger chunk of his traffic away from his site! Of course, you won't care because you'll be on your way to the bank....
Pan Theater Announces Play Festival Anything Can Happen in Ten Minutes Performance Dates for 2006
Oakland, California (ContentDesk) July 14, 2006 -- Pan Theater, producer of the popular improvisational theater show, "Imagination Unleashed," will present its second annual Ten Minute Play Festival- "Anything Can Happen in Ten Minutes 2006."
The Ten Minute Play Festival has become an annual production due to the outstanding success of the 2005 Ten Minute Play Festival "Anything Can Happen in Ten Minutes."
The Ten Minute Play Festival showcases new scripts from all over the United States, portraying a range of topics, genres, and dramatic styles.
The festival will be held at the Blue Bear Theater, Building D, and 2nd floor at Fort Mason. Performance dates are scheduled. The performance is scheduled to run: September 16, 23 and 30, 2006. All shows start at 8pm.
Seating is limited. Tickets should be purchased in advance. Tickets at the door are 16 and advance tickets are 15. Students and TBA members are 12 with ID. Last years show was a sellout for...
Pan Theater Announces Play Festival Anything Can Happen in Ten Minutes Performance Dates for 2006
Color printers > Pan Theater Announces Play Festival Anything Can Happen in Ten Minutes Performance Dates for 2006
Does your Company have Documentum?
Are you lost in the mess of documents that get passed around your company, never knowing what the latest version is and which one you should work on without worrying if someone else has already made the same editions that you are making? Perhaps you have heard of collaboration software solutions such as Documentum to help your company manage its documents that are passed around. Documentum is a very good solution to this problem but is it the only one? In this article you will be presented with some basic information about the differences in collaboration software from Documentum and NextPage. What is collaboration software?
Collaboration software allows business professionals to work directly with other business professionals by allowing them to work together to create business documents, presentations, and budgets. Most collaboration software is centralized. This allows business professionals to work on the same documents at the same time from different...
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Tips for Buying a PC
Buying Your PCBuying a PC that's right for you and your family is not all that simple task. More so if you're going to buy an unbranded or an assembled one. But branded or not, you have to get you facts right before you shell out your money. First, why do you want to buy a PC? Is it because almost every one has one these days, or that you have the money to spare. If these are the reasons are that you want to end up spending a lot of money on something you're unlikely to use.
But if your reasons are that you want it for home based business, or for your kids for their education, or to work at home, or
that you want to surf the net, you are on the right track. Now let's get down to specifics.What do you need it for?Take a piece of paper and write down what all you need to do with the pc.Spreadsheets, Word processing, Surfing the Web, sending e-mail, playing games. Running multimedia, Watching movies, playing music ,CAD drawings, graphics designing, Web designing....
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Increase Sales with Easy-To-Read Web Pages
Article Title: Increase Sales with Easy-To-Read Web PagesAuthor Name: Copyright: ? 2003Email: webmaster@profitablewebstrategies.comURL: http://www.profitablewebstrategies.com/easytoread.htm Word Count: 636 wordsCategory: Web Design, Internet Marketing, Online Marketing, Internet, Business, Marketing, fonts for the web, typographyReprint Instructions: This article may be reprinted freely with bylines and URL.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Increase Sales with Easy-To-Read Web PagesMake sure you've made it easy for visitors to read your web pages. Web pages with readable text will generate more sales than fancy pages that are hard to read. Follow these design tips. Not only will your web pages be easier to read, but you'll keep potential buyers at your site and position yourself to increase sales.Keep Pages Short -- Especially Your Home Page- Put important content at the top of your pages so it's visible on the screen. Users may not scroll through lengthy pages.
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Increase Sales with Easy-To-Read Web Pages
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Cambrian House Inc. Sends Lunch to Google
Calgary, Canada (ContentDesk) June 28, 2006 -- Cambrian House Inc., a Calgary based software company spent Monday afternoon delivering lunch (over 1000 pizzas) to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California as they inducted the famed internet search company into their NVA hall of fame. The National Viking Association (NVA) is a hall of fame for those companies and individuals that make a dent in the online universe.