Employ Action Words such as "FREE" and "Click Here" in your banners, both of which attract the reader to click on your banner.

Use Short and Punchy Headlines to deliver your message. Always load your headline with benefit statements - offer solutions to the challenges that your customers face. If you sell diet products, try "Lose 10 pounds in four weeks!". Work on a winning combination of text and graphics in your banner ad. Tell your viewers what's in it for them. If you show or imply a really great benefit that they will gain from your site, they are more likely to click to see more.

Animated banners usually outperform their static counterparts by more than 100%. Surfers are more likely to notice banners that are animated. For example if the words "Click Here" are flashing in your banner, it will perform better than a static version.

Adopt better designs by engaging a professional banner ad designer to create your banners. We can create banners for you from £30. Please email us for more details. The standard sizes for banner ads are 400x40 pixels or 468x60 pixels. We recommend that you design a 468x60 banner. With the clutter of graphics on most web pages, a larger banner has a higher chance of getting noticed.

Try trick banners that resemble Windows dialog boxes, scroll bars, submit buttons or blue-colored underlined hyperlinks,- which your viewers are already accustomed to using with the Windows operating system. Consider disguising your banner to make it look like part of the site, more people may have the confidence to click it. If you use trick banners with short and punchy headlines, you can get click-throughs above 10.0%!

Rotate your banners regularly, always have 2 or more banners to promote each product. A banner usually burns out after a surfer has seen it 3 times. They will ignore (if not hate) banners which they see repeatedly. If your click-through is steadily declining, then it is time to rotate your banners.

Target your banners by placing them on website's visited by your potential customers. If you promote gourmet coffees, place your banners on sites targeted at gourmet coffee drinkers. The quality of leads generated are higher, and more likely to result in sales. You are reaching people who are most interested in what you have to offer. Ensuring that the audience of the site you advertise on is as closely matched as possible to your own not just in terms of age and socio-demographics, but also in attitude, reduces expensive wastage. Of course, you can try website's with general audience if they generate substantial return on investment.

Advertise on popular sites that people are likely to have bookmarked. One of the reasons many people resist clicking on banners is because they know they will be taken away from the site they are viewing to someplace they may not want to be. Highly bookmarked sites are easy to find again.

Monitor your banners' performance every few days by monitor the click-through rate to tell you how well your banner is performing. Most banners fetch a click-through of between 0.8% to 2.0%. If your banner gets more than 2.0%, it is doing a pretty good job. By monitoring your banners' performance, you can kill under- performing banners before they waste away your advertising revenue.

Do your mathematics for each banner advertising campaign. Calculate the cost-per-visitor, cost-per-sale and return-on- investment ratios. For example: If a website charges you £20 per thousand impressions (£20/CPM), and you get a 2.0% click-through (20 visitors), your cost-per-visitor is £1.00 (£20 / 20 visitors). If 1 in every 10 visitors buys your product, your cost-per- sale is £10.00 (£20 / 2 sales). So if each sale of your product produces a gross profit of £15, then your net profit per-sale will be £5.00 (£15 gross profit - £10 cost-per-sale).

Your return-on-investment (ROI), before non-marketing expenses, is 50.0% (£10.00 total net profits / £20 investment). This campaign is profitable!

Try advertising on different sites or using different banners. Find the winning combination(s) that can yield the highest ROI. Comparing Deal A which yields an ROI of 20% to Deal B that yields 60%, your advertising revenue works three times harder (and profitable) with Deal B!

Until recently, most sites selling banners insisted on a cost-per-thousand impressions policy. The advertiser pays every time a viewer has an opportunity to click the banner whether or not that opportunity is taken. This is becoming outdated, thankfully, as a more appropriate payment-by-results model is growing in popularity.

Before you spend any money on a site, talk to other advertisers. If they say that their response stunk, (and their ad seems reasonably okay), bear this in mind when you negotiate price. Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate. Never take the first price offered. Always ask for (and expect) a discount on the price, or a bonus on top of what you are buying.

Achieving valuable CTR's can be done, but not by blindly following the sheep. Successful advertisers do things a little differently.