LinkBuddies Banner Ads - Not Dead Yet!

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Above you can see a typical banner ad. There's a good chance it's about Tupperware, since eBoz -- the parent company of LinkBuddies -- is a big Tupperware distributor.

Will you click on it? Probably not. (Unless you were looking up "website promotion and marketing" when you really meant to look up "food storage")

Is it annoying? Sure, when it's at the top of the page, but how annoying is this one?

CPM is "Cost Per Thousand" (Mille is Latin for "thousand"), or "Cost Per iMpression" -- take your pick. The mere existence of the term highlights an important principle: Banner ad alone won't get you far. You're going to have to show A LOT of ads -- and, in the case of link-exchanges publish double that -- for banners to have any effect at all.

If your ad gets two or three clicks for each 1000 times its shown that's pretty good. Obviously need a lot of traffic from other sources before your banners have any impact.

Still, J. Paul Getty said, "I'd rather have 1% of something than 100% of nothing." And that's why banner ads still work, when they're priced right. and the right price is Free. ( Not really free, you have to show other people's ads, but that is a cost most sites can bear.)

One thing I like about LinkBuddies, is that they don't seem to be paranoid about viewing your own ads. I'm sure that if I built a 'bot that reloaded an ad per second 24/7 they'd be upset.

Normal editing and verifying of pages is no problem, though. I often view hundreds of my own ads per day, and that seems to be fine with LinkBuddies.

I should mention that I only trade impressions for impressions. If I switch to cash compensation, naturally I will be careful about any "spam" surfing that might be construed as fraud.

Just as standard procedure, I usually put an ad on a page before anything else, then as I add to, edit, and revise it, I rack up impressions every time I refresh the page.

Tracking is important to any website as a source of information about the effectiveness of the changes you make. If you're writing pages for Squidoo, you already have some pretty good page tracking in place, but LinkBuddies' is better.

There are a lot companies that provide "free" tracking services in exchange for a small link on your pages, but the LinkBuddies tracking is more than adequate for most people, and comes with the more valuable link exchange.

When you first sign up with LinkBuddies, you will get the "premium" tracking service for a trial period. I think it's a couple of months. The extra stats are nice, but I decided to stay with the "free" version when the trial elapsed. Your mileage may vary.

LinkBuddies rewards you for helping to spread the word. I hesitate to call Buddy Credits "Multi-level Marketing" since the term conjures up images of fraudulent "Ponzi" scams, but you can recieve residuals (as impression credits) when people enroll in LinkBuddies using your referrer code.

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