After spending hours of cleaning up the Square Banners, I thought this would make a great blog post Square Banners 101. In this post I’m going to show you how many people waste impressions and in some sites waste, piles of money as you have to buy the square banner impressions.
If you are not sure what a square banner is, it is just that… square.. and it measures 125X125 pixels. Most sites will have these for you to use in the Affiliate Toolbox. If the site does not offer this, contact the site owner and tell them what you need or just make your own.
Now many of you are trying to put a 468×60 in where the 125×125 square banner goes. When you do this, people can’t read your banner… thus wasting impressions and money – here are some examples
Also Photobucket has changed its terms… people who were using Photobucket to store their images… can no longer use Photobucket for free 3rd party hosting. Photobucket defines 3rd party hosting as the action of embedding an image or photo onto another website. So basically what they want you to do is pay a monthly fee now to host your images and anyone that has not paid you will see an image like this
Now if are experiencing this – there are a few things you can do and that is sign up to the monthly upgrade at Photobucket. The other thing is that you can go to your Photobucket account and save the images to your computer and then upload them to your own domain’s site. A third option is to get a cheap domain and get a $2 yearly hosting package from some hosting (Maderite does this) and store all the photos there and use your own link for these banners… I suggest that people buy their name domain… twofold purpose and hang the jpgs and gifs and pngs there and if you upload the graphics to the root of the domain… it is simple…. domain.com/graphicname.jpg
One more thing that you should pay watch when designing your own banners are the colors – a dark text on dark background is very hard to read… also just using different colors won’t work for people who might be color-blind… saturation is also important…
AND I remember when I first started I thought that the flashing was eye catching until I got a ticket from a member letting me know that every time she saw my ad – it gave her a migraine. (also can trigger epileptic seizures)
So keep in mind when you are designing… just because you CAN get fancy… most of the time you will find the K.I.S.S rule applies.
That’s a really good point. Banners can be great real estate for your brand and logos, but if it’s squeezed and pulled, it’s just a waste of potential. Great reminder Nancy, thanks!
Thanks Jon and sometimes I think people are just not paying attention when they add their ads
Great post Nancy,
Also, for anyone who can’t afford hosting and registering a domain: there are some sites out there that have some free memberships where you can store some (not a whole lot — but some) banners. (And even create the banners there!)
That might tide some people over ’til they can afford to spend more.
Thanks Brian and that is an another option
Outstanding post Nancy.
These are things that some take as common knowledge but we need to remember that there are new people coming into the industry all the time.
That was also a very interesting point you made about flashing ads.
Thanks John – well I know when I first started designing that is something I learned the hard way and just trying to share. I thought the flashing banner would grab attention and it might have but then I had a couple members email me and tell me that every time they saw the ad they got a headache – I felt so bad but sometimes that is how people learn here online and just trying to save others from going thru this
As usually, Nancy gives us very good tips to help us in our online marketing strategies! Square banners are very important, in my opinion, more than 468 banners. So, thank you, Nancy!
Thanks Manuela and I do try to help others to not make the mistakes that I have – glad that it helps