Cheap banners, like many things on the internet, aren’t always what they seem to be. Some banner ads work much better than others do. Banners that you’ve paid $100.00 dollars for can be cheaper than banners you get for free. Obviously $100.00 is way more expensive than 0 dollars but when banners and ads are concerned it makes for some surprising results.
The point I’m trying to make is that if you make 3 banners yourself, they are free except for your time. Now you know as well as I do that even if you were making a banner ad your time has some value. Even if you value your time making ads at $10.00, which is cheap, and it takes you 3 hours that’s a cost of 30 bucks.
Now say you buy 3 banners for $100.00. Actually you can get them made much cheaper but this is an example. Say you get 100,000 visitors to your site and they see your own banner ads. You get a 1% ctr for your own banners and out of that you make 50 sales.
Now take a look at what professionally designed banners could do. Same 100,000 visitors but now you’re getting a ctr of 4.5%, which isn’t unheard of with good banners, and out of those 4500 people you make 500 sales. Yes, better banners can raise your conversion rate.
You may have paid 100 bucks for the banner ads but they outperformed your self made banners by 10 to 1. In the end, which banner was actually the cheaper one? Comparing banner costs to the money each banner made and the high priced banners were actually the cheap banners.
I frequently make make my own banners and some of them work really well and others don’t. This is why I test all my ads and banners and get rid of the ads that don’t perform the way I expected them to. I’ve been in this business for 15 years now so I’ve learned a little in that time. That makes it easier for me as I know what works for my sites and what doesn’t.
Yes, free is cheap but if your ads and banners don’t perform they were a waste of your time and in the end cost you money that you could have made if you’d have paid for the banner ads.
If you have about 8 hours to spend time on learning some banner making skills you can make your own cheap and effective banners. What you want to learn about is colors, fonts and what makes people click.
If your banner ad is solving a problem, relieving any kind of pain or is something people want to know about they will click on your banner. That takes some research in your niche. While doing that research pay attention to the ads being used on those sites. If you check 10 sites and 7 of them are using the same colors those are probably the colors you want for that niche.
Check the wordings and the fonts too. After you have enough information on the color, words and fonts go make a few of your own banners and put them on your site to test them. Make sure each banner gets at least 1000 page views as the more page views the more accurately you can judge the banners performance.
Designing banner ads is more science than art so it’s not to tough to learn. Now go make a few of your own cheap banners.