How to Make a Website Banner Ad

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Creativity is important if you want to lean affiliate marketing. Knowing how to make a website banner ad is a valuable skill but not all of us have had a good education in graphics design or have the tools available. The good news is it can be a very simple process. A few minutes work with some free tools can produce very effective banner ads.

Required Tools

When learning how to make a banner ad you will want to get Paint.Net. Photoshop is an amazing tool but is much too expensive for the small tasks we are going to do here. Unless you plan on doing a lot of website and graphics design you’ll find Paint.Net to be just as good.

Point your browser to www.getpaint.net and download the free graphics editor Pain.Net. This software has been around a while and is very stable, it provides almost every tool you might need when creating a banner ad and it’s 100% free!

Making a Banner Ad

First we need to set the size of our image. Typically website banner ads are 468×60, this is a horizontal banner. You can get many IAB standard ads that can include 250×250, 125×125 or perhaps 60×960. A more advanced trick you may want to use is to set your canvas to double or triple the size, this allows high quality images to be used in your banner ad then resized down once complete.

Now we have a canvas we need to create a background for out banner. It can be a solid color or any sort of graphics or texture you prefer. Make sure you pick a high quality image if you are planning to use it for a background.

Many website banner ads have a large amount of text. This can be good for giving visitors the required information before clicking onto your website. While large brands or a viral marketing campaign can use plain images it does not work so well for affiliates.

There are two main ways to color your advert. The first is “complementary” where you try to make your banner advert look much like the website you are advertising on. This can add a a lot of trust to your advert and help get many clicks. The other method is “clashing” and your aim is to make it stand out as much as possible. Both methods work well and ideally you should test to see what works for your campaign.

Red and Yellow are powerful colors that can really stand out but be careful not to overuse them as they can be hard to read. Blue and Orange go very well together as well as Yellow and Purple. Avoid hard to read combinations.

It is always best to have multiple banners ready to test, you may find some websites or audiences respond differently to different banners.

Easy Banner Design

If you still don’t enjoy making website banners then there are other methods. Programs like XHeader or Flash Banner Pro can be used to speed up the process. Choose from pre-built backgrounds, images and text to customise it quickly. Outsourcing via Elance or somewhere like 20DollarBanners.com does cost but can give you very attractive website banners for a small cost.

It doesn’t have to be a challenge to learn how to make website banner ads. A great tip is that many experiments have found that amateur looking banners actually perform better than very professional ones! So just get stuck in…

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