Banner Advertising Money Down The Toilet

Have I caught your attention yet?

Thinking of purchasing a banner ad in hopes of having your door busted down with all the new traffic coming to your website and/or blog? Well, from my experience with banner advertising I can tell you that it likely is not going to happen. Like the picture, your hard earned cash spent this way is money down the toilet.

Sometime towards the end of September/2006, I had the bright idea to purchase a banner advertisement for one month on the front page of a podcast site totally unrelated to my niche. At the time, I had a 30+ page Internet Security and Privacy website and blog published on the vast electronic frontier called the World Wide Web.

As the site claimed to get 10,000 unique hits a day, I thought it was a great idea. I was certain that I would get a ton of traffic for my small investment of $26.00.How much traffic did I get you ask? 300 hits, maybe a thousand? Nope, nowhere close. According to my web stats I got a grand total of 35 hits, and at least one of those hits was from me making sure that the link was working properly.

I should have listened to Shoemoney, who says that banner advertising brings in really crappy traffic. From my limited experience from banner advertising I certainly agree with him.

I have also read in numerous marketing blogs, sites, and forums to only have links placed on sites relative to your site.

Of course, I knowing more than every other web marketer and SEO expert worth their weight in gold, ignored them and wasted 26 hard earned bucks to get 35 some odd shitty hits. That works out to 75 cents a click folks, for traffic that resulted in little or no monetization!

What have I learned from this experience?

First, to only pay for advertisements in sites that have the same niche as my website and/or blog.

Second, from my personal knowledge and what I have heard from other Internet entrepreneurs banner advertising is dead. Not only that but it also brings in real shitty traffic, that usually doesn't convert to sales.

Third, to obtain those valuable back links that are so crucial to obtaining a good search ranking and Google PageRank, you need text hyperlinks. Theses links need to be in reputable sites related to your website's theme, preferably with a good PageRank. The ever important search engines don't index banner ads, thus they don't even count as back links anyways.

I guess $26 is a small price to pay to learn a lesson in how not to spend my limited advertising budget.