A Partial Cure for Banner Blindness?
Posted On: 2007-11-15
The problem of banner blindness is one that has been affecting this industry for years and it's now a growing problem over in mainstream as well. The simple fact is that surfers just aren't 'seeing' the banners that are used for advertising on our web pages.
Of course they really do see the banners we're using but they just aren't registering as something that is worth looking at and that is a very real problem when we want to attract the attention of the people who are hitting our websites.
Lots of people still use banners both here and in mainstream simply because they either have no marketing skills or they think that there really is no alternative. And sometimes the advertisers won't allow their affiliates to use anything other than banners to advertise their services.
While that sounds absolutely crazy and you have to wonder if those advertisers really do want to make sales those are the rules and you have to abide by them. But fortunately, here in adult, the rules are a lot less stringent and that allows us to perhaps find a partial cure for banner blindness.
I'm sure that there are several different ways to overcome the problem of banner blindness but one that we found ... that works for us ... is to make our own banners. That's right, we open up Photoshop and produce our own banners for various sponsors.
If the sponsor allows it we use some of their free content for and combine it with our own text. We certainly don't waste time building the usual 460x60 or 460x80 banners but concentrate on unusual sizes and these days that's something you need to focus on.
When people hit your web pages they do see the banners that you're using but they instantly recognize the usual crop of banners that sponsors provide simply by their size and shape. When they see those easily recognizable banners they automatically ignore them because they know that it's not something that they really want to look at.
So the trick is to build your banners in odd sizes ... sizes that don't instantly trigger banner blindness in your surfers. If you combine the free content and your own text in ways that most banner designers don't use then you have an even greater chance of 'fooling' the surfers.
Spend some time looking at various banner designs and then see what you can do with just a single image and some text. Perhaps use some unusual fonts and colors too. One of our banners uses a font that looks as though each letter is slowly melting and dripping down the page. Steve colored the text a light cream color and embossed it and it looked like cum splashed on the image of the girl.
It wasn't the usual size or shape most sponsors and affiliates use for banners and we didn't use it in any of the places that you normally see banners on a web page. We didn't even place it near the 'Enter' button on a free site but it got a lot of clicks when the site went live and it still gets clicks today because it's different and it's something that attracts the surfers instead of triggering banner blindness.
So if you want to build sites and incorporate banners why don't you spend some time producing your own? Yes, I know that it takes a bit of time and it's much easier just to grab some banners from your sponsor, throw them up on your sites and hope for the best but if you want to make money in this industry then sometimes you do have to work hard.
Sometimes you do have to produce your own advertising material because you really do need to make your free sites and galleries look a little different to all the other sites and galleries that are out there. When you take the time to make your sites look that little bit different you will have a much better chance of getting surfers to see your banners and see your advertising. And when they do that you're going to have a much better chance of making some real money.
Before I go I'd like to take a moment to point you back to something that I talked about yesterday. I suggested then that if you're interested in learning more about search engine optimization you should be looking at the search engine results pages for terms that are important for you because they will have a lot to teach you.
I noticed today that someone else had discovered the same thing we had when we did a little research into a keyword phrase that was important to us. I also noticed that a lot of people rubbished him because they didn't quite grasp what he was talking about.
I'm sure that doesn't bother him in the slightest because, the more people who can't see the wood for the trees, the more money there is to be made by people like him ... and me. So let me suggest that you go back to yesterday's article and review what I wrote about ... there's some great search engine placements waiting for you if only you care to take the time to make it work for you.