Website Sponsorship Ideas
When creating an advertising mix for your website, consider your potential advertisers and your audience. Too many ads can turn off your audience and your advertisers. (After all, who wants to pay $X/month to compete with fifty other button ads?) There are many types of direct advertising that you can offer, and it often takes some trial and error to find the right mix of advertising.
Below are the most common website sponsorship methods:
Banner/Button Positions: What’s old is new again. They offer color and sometimes animation. For best results, choose standard ad sizes.
Text Links: These can be static links. Sometimes they may have a sentence or two about the advertiser under them. Paid text links have come under scrutiny lately, but they still remain popular, and SEOs are still buying them. They key is to be smart with them. Contextual linking falls under this category.
Pop-ups/Pop-Unders: Intrusive and annoying, but they do tend to have a higher click-through rate than banners. (Or is that just people accidentally clicking on the ad when they are actually trying to close them.) Many users have blockers that keep standard popups from appearing.
Content Sponsorship: Advertisers have limited control and submit their own content to the publisher, as well as having their ad on the page. These sponsorships tend to be for fixed periods, and the content should be targeted to the publisher’s audience.
Interstitials: Sometimes referred to as Bridge Ads, interstitials appear as you move between pages on a site. Click-throughs are generally greater than from banner adverts or traditional pop-up ads.
Email Newsletters: An advertiser is prominently displayed at the header and/or footer of a regular email newsletter. The ad can be text-based or graphical in nature.
Text Content Links: A keyword phrase embedded within the content of a web page is linked to the advertiser’s web site. Bloggers are sometimes paid to specifically link content. Like text links, this type of advertising has also come under scrutiny.
Are we missing any direct ad types here?
