Schewanick Computer Services

Ever go to a site and there were a dozen or so banners and it
took forever for the page to load? If you are selling your own
product or service or selling for affiliate programs that you
belong to, you probably have banner ads available.

Most affiliate programs will have a good selection of promotional
tools for you to use when you sign up. Banners are usually one of
the tools that you are given. If you are trying to develop
multiple income streams you probably are associated with a number
of affiliate programs like we are. Some can be for products, some
for services and some may be network marketing type programs.
Plus as I mentioned earlier, you may also have your own
products/services too.

No matter what the type of program or product you are offering,
the one thing that you want to do is get exposure for them so you
get sales or member sign ups. For purposes of this discussion
let's say you are associated with eight such programs or products.

So here you have eight different banners you want to get prospects
to click on to increase your income stream. What do you do? Do
you place eight different banners on your web page? I wouldn't!
First it doesn't look very professional to have a page cluttered
up with eight to ten different banners. Secondly, it will probably
make your page load very slowly and you will then create what I
call "click aways", when someone is waiting for your page to load
and it takes so long that they just click another link to another
site.

What's the solution? Get yourself a rotating banner script. You can
get it free and it really isn't that hard to set up. What is a
rotating banner script? The one we use is a cgi based script which
allows you to load as many banners into it as you want to rotate
and place a short one line of html code on your page. Each time a
new visitor goes to your page a new banner comes up automatically.
If you want to see one in action, go to one of our pages at:
http://www.homebizlink.com/newslt.htm The banner on the top of
the page is on a rotating script. Let the banner load and then
hit your browser "refresh" button and you will see another banner
come up in its place. Repeat it as many times as you want, and it
will randomly select a new banner from the twelve or so we have
loaded into the script.

One other neat thing about this is that you can have the banners
rotate on as many pages as you want and you only need to set the
script up once on your site. We have it on about 20 pages of our
site. All it takes is to put that one short line of code on the
html page you want the banners to appear on. The more pages you
have it on, the more exposure you get. If someone surfs six pages
of your site and your happen to have the banner script on those
pages, there is a good chance they will see six different banners.

So where do you get it? While there are a number of the scripts
available both for free and for a fee, we got ours for free from
Cliff's Perl Scripts site. Just go to his site at:
http://www.shavenferret.com/scripts and look for "Cliff's Banner
Rotator Version 2.51". There was a link to it right on the first
page the last time we were there. Then just download the files
(there's only 3 small ones), follow the easy directions and upload
it to your site.

It is a great way to get exposure for the multiple activities
that you might be involved in. You can put 2, 5, 8 or 12 like we
have. You could even put different banners from the same program
(we have two from the same program in the rotation). Be creative!
You could even sell space on a rotating script! Take a look at it
and see if you might be able to use it to your advantage and
create a more economical use of your web real estate.

About the Author
Joe Reinbold, owner of The Entrepreneur's Home
Business Link, resources for the home based business at
http://www.homebizlink.com and publisher of a free weekly
marketing tips newsletter. Subscribe at his website or by email at:
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