Free Banner Advertising

Free banner advertising is a good way to get your brand or product name out there to many more prospective customers without spending money you don't have. Or if you are a professional and your product is a service, it will bring more inquiries. Free banner advertising also requires a lot of monitoring to keep track of stats, so be sure to factor that into your schedule.

Free banner advertising has its pros and cons, like many other business options. You may find your banner isn't being displayed nearly as often as you like on other sites, or that the banners suddenly rotating through the home and main pages of your own site are for online casinos, psychics, annoying polls or other sites that you instinctively know will irritate the kind of visitors you'd rather have.

Some companies are savvy enough to display free ads in web toolbars where you can control the timing of the display, at least on your own site. Look into them, but be wary of any company that writes in broken English (or whatever language you need for display). They may be using common machine translation software, which can give warped results.

Your Contract with Your Web Host

Your contract with your web host, whether annual or month-by-month, gives you a certain number of e-mail accounts and storage space on the host's shared servers. If you sign up for free banner advertising, your website may well see a big uptick in visitors. But then, if the increased traffic exceeds your allowed bandwidth, the overage charges can be steep.

Check carefully to see how much your traffic is increasing. Find out how much going over your allowance would set you back at your present level, and what signing up for the next level of hosting would cost. If you have a good hosting service, it will be far cheaper to sign up for the higher bandwidth.