It used to take days or weeks to create a banner ad, post it online, and get results. But your small business or website doesn’t have time to wait while your competitors steal the visitors and sales that could have been yours.
In this article, you’ll learn the quick and easy way to create and run your banner ads today so you can start seeing results right away. It’s especially useful if you’re just getting started with banner advertising, but it’s useful if you frequently purchase banner ads.
Step 1. Create a banner ad
Old Way: Find and Hire an Online Ad Designer
New way: online tools make it easy to do it yourself
The internet has made it easy to book your own plane tickets without a travel agent, and now it’s just as easy to create your own banner ad without a designer. A new generation of online tools has emerged that allow your small business to create a banner ad using a pre-designed template. Just personalize it with your message and add your logo. The advantage of web-based tools is that you can download your display ad instantly.
In addition to standalone banner ad design websites, some ad networks offer tools that let you quickly create an ad, though you may need to use it to advertise on your collection of websites.
Step 2. Buy ad space online
The old-fashioned way: Hire an ad agency or spend hours researching
New way: buy online or through ad networks
Finding where your customers are online used to be difficult and time consuming, so you needed an advertising agency or a lot of time doing research. When you found the specific websites you’d like to display ads on, you had to call or email the sales representative to negotiate the price and complete the insertion orders.
While there’s still a time and place for that with larger online marketing campaigns, you want your web ad to go live today. If you’re looking for where to use your ads, our advice is to start with a website or ad network that allows you to quickly and easily buy ads from a variety of websites online.
Prices are shown to you in advance or you can set a budget that must not be exceeded. By following their step-by-step instructions, you only provide them with the banner ad you created in Step 1 and let the ad network do the hard work behind the scenes. While it may take some time to set up your account or get your banner ad approved, it could be live today.
With this simple two-step approach, you can save your small business hundreds of dollars and countless wasted time. Start driving more people to your website today using banner ads.