Picture you own a restaurant and you need to sell a certain percentage of the special of the day. How are you going to accomplish that?

The waiter may tell you what the special of the day is or it would be visibly posted when you entered the restaurant. Your attention will be drawn to it. The principle is true with banners as one of your primary forms of advertisement.

Banners are used to get peoples attention and direct them to the "special". On a website, we don't have a special, so to speak, or even a menu, but we do have banner advertisements. Prominently displayed, usually on the top of a webpage, banner advertisements are the first thing people see when they load your page or at least they should be.

The goal of a banner ad is to give just enough information that the person seeing it wants more information. They do this by clicking the banner ad. Your affiliate information is contained within the banner ad so when a person clicks on it from your page they are directed towards additional marketing materials designed to result in a sale - a sale which you get credit for.

There are about eight different banner sizes and they can range from a simple text and picture to animated and interactive with sounds. Some websites will put a limit as to what you can have, as the size and complexity of the banner affects the time it takes to load the webpage. If a webpage takes too long to load, people will look elsewhere.

Putting your banner on a website with relevant information is going to be a big help, because you are getting people who are interested in your type of information seeing your banner.

Banners can vary immensely in how they look and there is a science behind everything from the font selected, right on down to the color scheme. The banners can vary as greatly as the products they advertise and contain just as many combinations of colors, images, and text.

You won't need to worry about the nuts and bolts of banner ads, however. Go look at some of your favorite websites and you'll notice that they most likely contain banner ads. Click on one or two of them and see what happens.

This is the same thing your banner ad will do, with one major difference - your banner ad will be earning you money. Because the internet never closes, it's like having your own employee at a carnival, yelling "step right up" to each person that passes by.

What you need to understand is that banner ads aren't new, they are proven and most importantly - they can make you additional money.

Placing a banner ad into your site isn't difficult and you don't even need to understand html code to put them to work for you! Using the information we provide, your affiliate link is already embedded for you, ready to earn you money.

If you have a friend who has a website, you can pay them to place your banner on their site as well! You can often use the banner ad code in emails that you send out to people as well.

Banner ads are most successful when they are relevant to the webpage being viewed. This makes sense, because if someone already has a defined level of interest in a subject, reason would follow that they would be open to buying a product related to their interest.

You don't need to worry about tracking your statistics either. Using tracking software, when someone clicks your affiliate banner ad, you automatically get paid for the purchases that you referred. No guesswork, no records to worry about.

We hope that you understand at least a little bit better how banner ads can increase your profit as an affiliate. Even if you don't completely understand, that's ok. One of the beautiful things about banner ads is how easy they are to use.

Just like you don't need to understand electricity to know how to work a light switch - we don't make you pass a test showing you understand how banner ads work in order to get paid for using them!

So if you haven't done so yet, make sure that you get your banner ads ready. They aren't going to make you money unless you use them!

E. Alan Cowgill