When you are trying to make money from your website, it is important to effectively promote your site, so that you will attract customers and they can see just what a good, quality site you have. There are several ways to market and promote your website, one of them is AdSense and another is through banner advertisements. What Banner Ads Can Do For You Banner ads can help bring visitors from others sites, to your own. Although monthly fees can be expensive to advertise on high traffic sites, in the end it may be cheaper and/or a faster way to start seeing significant revenue from your website efforts, rather than waiting for SEO techniques to bring your own site to the top of search engine results. Besides paying to advertise on someone else’s site, there are also free banner exchanges to choose from. We will look at the pros and cons of each banner advertising method below. Free Banner Exchanges Free banner exchanges are when you and other sites exchange each others banners. Their banner will go on your site and your banner will go on their site. It is the same principle as exchanging links. Although this option is free, there are two main problems with it. First, if you want your banner on a significant number of sites, it will mean cluttering your own site up with their banners. This could even shoot you in the foot, if you run an affiliate website, because, instead of clicking on your affiliate links, your visitors may be clicking on your banner exchange links and leaving your website. Secondly, you have to be really careful about the types of sites that you exchange banners with. Some sites like to gather a lot of banners, so that they can be a directory or portal site and not have to have any real content. These “banner farms” or “link farms” will do nothing positive for your site and in the meantime, you will be bringing them potential traffic. Paid Banner Ads As stated above, paid banner ads cost money, but they will eventually pay off, if you choose the right ones. You need to ensure that the site actually produces the amount of traffic that they say it does and that they have your ad placed in a way that invites visitors to click, without being too pushy. You also want to choose a site that does not house too many other banners, on the same page as yours, or that there are no competitor links on the same page. All in all, banner ads can end up being profitable for your site, if you go about it the right way. If you do decide to check out banner advertisement as a marketing avenue, be sure to keep the above tips in mind. The first Banner Exchange that really pays is : http://skadoogle.com/sp!3982/snvek Derek Robson has been a successful Internet marketer since 2003. He has a vision of empowering all fellow South Africans and other non U.S folk, to have equal opportunity and success on the internet, by finding solutions to the many obstacles facing them. He is a syndicated article writer. He and his wife Sally, have started a string of sites, resources, courses and articles, as part of Dersalsites. For informative articles on Internet marketing, South African online business, list building, affiliate marketing, article marketing, blogging, seo, the law of attraction, rugby and other general topics, such as gardening and fitness, visit Derek and Sally at their blog, part of http://dersalsites.com/