Once you’ve decided on affiliate marketing as your home based business model and you’re in the process of creating your website you will need to add killer content to attract the major search engines to your home page in order to get ranked and to make sales. A major component of this content will have to be advertisements for your affiliate products.
There are two types of ads you will be highlighting on your home business website: text promotions and image advertisements. Your natural inclination may be to think that image ads outperform their text counterparts by a wide margin but this isn’t the case.
From past experience text ads outperform images in all stages of the sales process but depending on the situation this may change. As with any type of advertising it’s best to experiment with each type before making a decision as to which one to use.
Of course the main objective of image ads is to attract the visitor’s attention and have them click on your embedded link. These images can take several forms including the very popular banner ads. You can usually find these rectangular promotions at the top or bottom of a website and one of the advantages is you can size them to fit the content of your web page.
The once accepted advertising technique has come under fire in recent years as not being an effective method for attracting visitors to your home page. However banner ads are still widely used and when strategically placed in relation to your website content can still be an effective Internet marketing tactic for driving traffic.
Another type of image advertisement is the rich media ad. The main characteristic of these ads is their appeal because of their enhanced graphics. The term rich media refers to these ads ability to flash text and move graphics and they have been proven to be much more effective than regular image advertisements.
Text ads have always fared well when competing with their flashier counterparts and the main thing to remember when using text advertisements is to make sure they match or are relevant to your home business website’s content in order to attract the major search engine’s attention.
The final type of affiliate ad available is the combination text and image advertisement. As the name suggests this is a combination of the other two methods and offers the advantages of each. The graphic attracts the reader to the text and the text draws your visitor into the message and outlines the benefits of your product.
When searching for these advertising materials online your most likely source will be the affiliate programs you’re promoting because they usually supply the promotional materials needed to sell their products. Your affiliate program makes the HTML code available to you and all you need to do is copy and paste it to your website to display the message.
You can also find advertisements through websites such as Google where you can obtain what are referred to as contextual ads, as long as you own your own website. These advertisements are matched to the content of your home business page and they are dynamic in nature and change on a regular basis, so a promotion you noticed yesterday on your site may not be there today.
Google is certainly the most reputable provider of contextual ads and they supply them through a program known as Adsense. You need to sign up for this program and when you’re accepted Google will supply withy the code necessary to place on your website.
These are the types of advertisements you can employ to make money through your affiliate programs for your home based business and where you can find them.