Since the birth and popularity increase of the Internet, advertising has become a booming industry. Throughout the past few years, more and more types of advertisements have begun in an attempt to make online advertising more effective: cost effective for advertisers and sufficient revenue sources for publishers. Banner ads, newsletter ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, and many other forms of advertising have been tried. Making Flash banners hasn’t improved the click through percentages either. What is going to be more effective? Featured Links are going to become the new frontrunner in the online advertising industry.
Generally speaking, it seems people put more stock in what people say in text than pictures that they see online. When a user looks at a website in their browser, their eyes first go to the text. Of course it would, as that is why people use the internet, to read text to gain some knowledge that they didn’t have before. By establishing a featured link section on your website, or advertising on someone else’s featured link section, it will be like giving a personal referral from one website to another. The most effective advertisement is the one where the visitors don’t even know it’s an ad. Featured Links can be easily integrated into a website so that it appears to be a general recommended link and not an advertisement.
A recent announcement to make the standard sized banner advertisements bigger, including an increase from the old 468×60 pixel banner to 728×90 (a considerable increase), aims to increase the effectiveness of the advertisements. Although this may make things a little bit more effective, it’s going to be a painful change for many websites as their smaller banner sizes are already well-integrated. However, featured links can be added anywhere, in many different forms. Versatility is key when advertising online, and providing a wide array of different variations make these link results impressive.
Not only do featured links send visitors between sites when a user clicks on the link, but it also has more advantages. A fringe benefit of running text links is that search engines see the link, and cast a vote,’ like in the Google search spider, raising the advertisers link popularity. Link popularity is becoming a popular method of ranking websites, and featured links will increase the popularity of the advertiser. With several featured links on well trafficked websites an increase in your search engine ranking will likely result, and ultimately the number of visitors will also increase. This form of advertising only begins with the actual link, perhaps going much further than one may think.
One way to implement the idea of featured links is by creating an actual featured link section on your page, and offer links in that section. Prices can be in either the traditional CPM (cost per thousand) or a monthly cost. These links can be static on one page, all of the pages throughout your site, or be a rotation much like banners. CPM advertising is generally the way to go unless you’re looking for a more predictable income statement by establishing long-term advertisers in the featured link section. It is suggested that you cap the number of links you show at the same to keep the position selective. Don’t let your featured link section turn into an over-priced link farm of websites. Go for a few good advertisers paying a higher amount rather than a high quantity of advertisers in this section with a low price. Keep the featured links a special place to be, not crowded, as those advertisers should appear to be “featured.”
Another way to apply these featured links is with announcements on the main page, or featured articles, if you will. For a short period of time, add a short article about a company on the main page. Be sure to mention their product/service line, company information, and provide links to each of these. After their couple days on your main page, archive the article so that search engine spiders can still find the page. This featured link/article method can work very well as advertisers get a huge amount of featured impressions with a great location for a short period of time. These can bring in much more revenue and can collaborate with the standard featured links to provide a great amount of income. Be sure to leave this on your server, or the link will not be found by a Google bot.
Finally, featured links can come in the form of text links on content pages of your website. For instance, if you’re discussing online stock trading on one of your pages, in the midst of discussion, throw in a recommendation for a brokerage firm. Visitors think you are just giving them a link out of the kindness of your heart, while in reality there is either a set fee attached to that ad, or you get paid-per-performance. Putting small links like this in a couple places on your site doesn’t clutter things up, keeps it simple, and increases your bottom line.
This innovative way to both increase profits for your website and provide affective advertising for your clients will help your effort to raise online profits. The success in text links is shown in the new Google Adwords where the text links are rotated throughout thousands of sites including the Google search engine. In some industries owners will pay over a dollar for every click-through coming to their site. The market for targeted unique customers is a very strong one.
Setting featured links aside from the rest of the advertising industry, you get a two-for-one deal when using them. Not only do you get more bang for your buck, but you also get the search engine rank improvement. However, don’t think you’ll all of a sudden be ranked first in your target keyword on every major search engine for setting up a featured link. Building a large collaborative of high ranking link partners is also vital in establishing yourself on a search engine. This form of advertising gives you a step in the right direction.
In the coming month and next year, look for featured links to become abundant all over the web. Small text links in the navigation menus, articles on main pages, short stories, even advertisements in the middle of content pages. The possibilities for usage are endless, and these links will be skillfully integrated into millions of websites before you know it.
Owner and developer of several websites including Londes.com, JimSalmon.com, TAPHI.com, and WhamRealEstate.com. Over five years in the online business field.
