More Than Just a Banner Ad

Congratulations, you have identified a niche and created a forum. Enticed enough people to create a community and have sold a few banner ads. Now what? How do you keep these advertisers as a part of the community? We all know that banner advertising has become part of the white noise that constitutes a web page these days. In fact, most people now tune out banners or even worse for the advertiser, use ad-blocking software. As the forum owner, you want to keep these advertisers for the long term and grow the advertising base by introducing new players to your site.

In order to keep the advertiser over the long haul there needs to be some value to their participation. Banner blindness is pervasive, users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad. According to Eyeblaster, a New York-based online ad serving and monitoring firm, the average click rate on standard banner ads across the whole Web is 0.2%. To put that in perspective, only 2 people out of 1000 that view a banner actually click on that banner. The rate drops when the same banners are presented over and over on your site.

How can the advertiser reach your sites members?

In simple terms …by being engaged on the site and with site members.

There is much more to it than that. This works both ways. As vendors of advertising, we have to educate our customers, the site advertiser, that in effect, they are purchasing access to the sites members. The advertiser is more than just a profit center to us. They need to see their message is getting across to the site members and they measure this by the Dollars, Euros, Dinars, Rupees etc that can be directly attributable to purchases generated from the site.

How do you keep the vendors engaged both with site and the sites members?

Communication is key and a multipronged approach in an attempt to reach all of your vendors is important. Some ideas include:

• Creating a Vendors only forum where vendors can exchange ideas.
• Admin staff or vendor liaison posting in the above forum reminding vendors from time to time that communicating with the members will help drive sales.
• Email newsletters to the vendors. Keep them up to date on site happenings and always add a message that encourages activity.
• Add features that filter your site to deliver information to the vendors about subjects that concern them.

Balance is important as well. If it appears to the site membership that you take the side of the vendors, they let you know in no uncertain terms. On our sites we try to maintain this balance by adding features where both vendors and members participate. Not only does this help build rapport between the vendors and members but it creates that all to important content while encouraging activity.

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Great write-up; thanks for sharing.