Do concepts like banner, animated gif, loop, e-zine, java, opt in email, reciprocating link, affinity program, affiliate program, click through, rich text, page views and the like leave your head spinning?

Welcome to the world of Internet advertising the most exciting and sophisticated, yet potentially treacherous advertising medium to come along since someone hung a sign on the back of his camel announcing a sale on rugs. Advertising on the Web is simple. All I need to do is put up a couple of ad banners and the customers will flock to my site making me rich while I sleep, right? Not quite! A marketing honcho at a major clothing company recently commented that he was spending $150 to get a customer to their web site. That's hard to swallow when you're selling $30 jeans! Does that mean banner ads are not worth using? Of course not, it means that using banner ads successfully requires more thought and planning than randomly placing messages in cyberspace.

Advertising your site Even though you registered with the major search engines and include your web address in all your marketing and advertising materials, you'll want to use traditional ad media to promote your web business even if your business exists only on the Internet. Last quarter, the top web sites spent several million dollars each on radio ads to promote their web businesses. Priceline.com is spending over twenty million dollars a quarter on advertising and eBay budgeted more then four million per quarter for radio advertising alone.

Online ads A successful online advertising program follows pretty much the same principles as any other ad campaign. There are web sites for every conceivable business, interest or hobby. Once you've identified your target market and visited some of the sites that might appeal to their interests, you can begin outlining your strategy.

Opportunities abound but watch the traps

This is where it can get tricky. Opportunities for advertising on the web are more plentiful and more varied than anywhere else. Not only are there a multitude of options in addition to banner ads opt in e-mail, e-zines, affinity programs, pay per click and more there are numerous options within the banner category itself.

One of the pluses of banners is that you usually pay by the number of impressions, as a cost per thousand (CPM). Many sites will let you rotate two or three different ad banners, enabling you to test different messages and designs, at no additional cost. In many cases, they'll offer you real time reporting which lets you know immediately the effectiveness of each banner. Comparative testing, that can take weeks or even months to measure using traditional ad media like direct mail, can now be accomplished in a matter of hours or days on the web.

For example, if you need to reach a very narrow niche audience, rather than buy the main page, you could buy the banner deep within the site. While this is produces less impressions, the people seeing the banner are the right people and are more likely to be interested in the offer. As in any advertising media, test your ideas before pouring a lot of money into an ad program. And keep promoting your web site every way you can think of. Remember, repetition is the key to success in all advertising.