Internet Home Business-Using Banners To Promote Your Business

Banners were a great marketing tool when they began. As of now banners are not considered to be  that effective. But banners are still part of your arsenal in your home business. They are very effective to brand your business. Plus they are very valuable tools in building affiliate program.So, marketers still make a use of them.Banners are great branding tool like billboards on highways promoting the companies.You cannot ignore banners at all. You should get few for your site too. As usual there are two choices    * Do it yourself    * Get them madeTo do it yourself,you need to have a graphics editor. You would need to build image from the scratch. There are different standard sizes of the banners which have evolved with time. They are also given different names according to their sizes.Banner size is measured as width X height in pixels. Here is the list of standard banner sizes    * 728×90 - Leaderboard    * 468×60 - Full Banner    * 234×60 - Half Banner    * 180×150-Rectangle    * 336×280- Large Rectangle    * 125×125 - Square Button    * 120×600 - Skyscraper    * 160×600- Wide Skyscraper    * 88×31 - MicrobarNo body stops you from building your own size. But it is better to be aware of the trendsFollowing points are important to remember when you think of using banners* Make it very simple! Flashy and fancy banners repel visitors* Make it readable without needing to strain.* Adding an action call like buy now greatly increases the chances of click through.*It should not be ugly and it should not be so heavy that it takes ages to load.There are some online sites which would offer you banner templates or let you build a banner online using their services* Creative Connectivity - crecon.com allows you to download banner templates which you can customize using your graphic editors* Quick Banner - auickbanner.com provides dozens of free templates and online customization.* Coder.com offers a free banner generator online service.There are many more. Just conduct a search.Other option is getting them made. If you are not a professional graphic designer from the start, you will need a learning period before you can become good at it.Here are few good resources to outsource your banner work    * Bannerworkz-bannerworkz.com/    * Lounge Lizard-loungelizard.com/    * Animation.com-animation.comYou can use animated banners too. Animated banners are a couple of gif images strung together by an animator program. First you need to use a graphics editor to build a series of gif images. Then you need to use an animation program to string them together. This will program the banner to display each image after an allotted period of time and the banner appears to be animated.Do not use too many images to make a animated banner. This would make your file extremely heavy.You can try Ulead’s Gif Animator(ulead.com/ga/runme.htm). A trial version is available and actual version comes at quite affordable cost.There are services that will let you build free animated banners online. Here are two services I could find quickly*banner.com/*creatingonline.com.