square banners | Zaney News & Blog

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.

How many times have you heard that before as I know I hear it all the time. In preparation for the upcoming event of Zaney Clicks celebrating their 5000 member celebration – I was in cleaning up the banners that were not showing and thought I would write this post.

Banners do not work if you don’t have banner impressions assigned to the banner and it was amazing how many I seen with 0 in the impressions assigned column as I was cleaning up the ones that were not showing. This is one of the easiest and overlooked things that a member can do as you really get more bang for your credit here.

See for that ONE credit you are using to get your site seen – that ONE credit (depending on the site) can either give your banner show anywhere from 10, 20, 20 and I have even seen 45 on some sites.

So here is my zaney thinking – your banner gets view say 20 times – name in their face and then your site comes up – and they just might be more apt to click on your site – why? well because you kept it in their mind, it’s something they have seen before and that might just be the time that they say – well I need to check this out now.

Banners do not work because another thing that I noticed when checking these banners is that your image is not showing and yet you have impressions assigned to them. There could be a number of reason but I will keep it to just a few so I don’t write a book here.

The first is that you added the urls wrong and believe it or not I have done this – am in a hurry and reverse the urls and put the image where the target one should go and then it don’t show.

Image URL: http://zaneyclicks.com/images/banner1.jpg
Target URL: http://zaneyclicks.com/?rid=57987

OK you know you put it in right and all of a sudden it’s not showing – well there are a couple of things that could have happen – one that site is down as they are having server problems at the time. Heaven forbid but the site could have just vanished and is no longer around and that does happen – so periodically check your banners to see if they are showing right.

Banners Do Not Work and here is another one that I learned the hard way and it was nothing that I did wrong but the site owner made new banners and instead of reusing the banner name it was given – deleted it and add it as a new one – so even tho you did nothing wrong in putting it in – the site owner might have made some changes and I see this alot with sites that like to do seasonal banners.

Standard Banner 468×60

The one last thing that I will mention – there is a right size and a wrong size when inserting your image urls. So many times I see people trying to put a 468×60 image in a 125×125 area and all that happens there is that your image is so crunched up that it’s not readable. I know there are many names that some of the banners are call but the standard banners are most 468×60 and then there are the square banners, button banners well those are the 125×125.

Square Banner or Button Banner

http://zaneyclicks.com/images/banner1.jpg as you will see from this URL the .jpg or some will have .gif or .png – this is what you want as your image url. On the LFMTE scripts now you will also see http://zaneyclicks.com/getimg.php?id=2 and that is telling the site to go get the #2 image at Zaney Clicks

So hope this has cleared up some of the questions or problems that you have run across and when you hear one of your referrals say Banners Do Not Work – now you know what to tell them as to some of the reasons why.