– by Trevor James

In another business we have experimented with running display adverts through google, but you don’t have to use their display advert builder … mainly because it’s so easy to create a display advert on your own, and this allows  easier construction and the ability to use your own graphics.

When you use a text ad (in the context network), you get stuck into a box with others. Well, the amount of screen real estate you occupy has a direct correlation with how many eyeballs you can attract.

FIRST, YOU GOTTA GET THEIR EYES

No matter what follows, your success has to *begin* with getting the eyeballs.

When you use selected website placement, your own advert will often appear

larger, and this is an improvement, because the size of text and screen real estate are helpful factors.

However, if this is the case, why not use a display ad, and then you can exercise some actual control over the elements, and then you can select some elements that will attract the eyes?

And then you begin to consider their easy display-ads-for-dummies approach, and you might want to consider … why use a dumbed down version of graphics construction?

A STORY ABOUT YELLOW PAGES

For many years I ran an answering service, and later a voicemail service, in San Francisco. Yellow Pages advertising was as essential to our business as it is for plumbers and outcall-massage parlors.

And I learned early on that the nice folks at the Yellow Pages would actually design your display ad … for FREE?

What do you think of that? Is that a good deal?

IT’S A LOUSY DEAL

No. It is NOT a good deal. Is can be suicide.

For I also discovered that, for reasons of economy and compactness, the paper used in Yellow Page books is necessarily thin. Ink can show through from the other side.

So it turns out that one of the primary goal of the yellow-pages-employed graphics folks is to quickly design an ad where the black ink won’t show through to the others side of the page.

However, I also knew — from previous experience running a poster-distributing service — that the posters on the wall which grabbed your eyes often had a lot of black ink.

So by shunning the free ads that serve *them*, you have the freedom to design an ad that serves *you*.

And since grabbing eyeballs has to come before anything else, before a headline even, this is your number one priority.

Our first advertisement in the Yellow Pages used 85% of the space to grab their eyes, and the other 15% to tell our benefit and tell how to contact us. It worked gang-busters.

WIZARD-BASED GRAPHICS?

So, sure, if you really want graphics from a wizard, experiment with their wizard. But ask yourself if it’s the hardest-working advert for your money.

I use fireworks, but photoshop would work fine, and there’s a free program called paint.NET which would be easily powerful enough to use.

SAMPLE HOME-MADE GRAPHICS

Here are five adverts that I made, and they were quick to make –

• For a Dating book:

• For a buy/sell board for specialty tapping guitars:

• For a site listing seminars about two-handed tapping:

• For our free newsletter for guitarists:

• For a recent promotion about a new guitar model:

However, bear in mind that google also accepts in a number of cases, larger advertisements than these 768×60 banner ad sizes.

THREE SIMPLE RULES-O-THUMB

Display ads can grab eyeballs better than text.

You gotta get the eyeballs before anything else can help you.

It’s easy to create display ads.

– Trevor James, for Simply-Free-Article-Spinner.com