Affiliate programs usually offer banners for you to use to promote their program. Many times the banners are lame and optimized to perform well on the most generic of sites but not your site. Sometimes you can increase the clicks on your banners by creating your own for your own situation.

Out Of Necessity

When I recently wanted to promote Widgetbucks with a 468×60 banner I quickly realized they didn’t offer that size. Out of necessity I created my own:

Match The Color Of Your Site

Many affiliate banners come with a generic white background and if the section of your site doesn’t have a white background the affiliate banner really looks ugly and stands out saying “I’m an ad”. With a little modification with your favorite graphics program you can make your affiliate banners blend right in, like we made the background of this godaddy ad the same as our blue background on a site.

Personalize Ads For Your Regular Visitors

Add your own text to stock banners or banners you’ve created yourself to personalize the ads and speak to your readers. You can go simple or get creative. Here is a simple version of modifying a banner to personalize it for your readers:

Personalize Ads For Your referral Visitors

You can show different ad creations based on where your visitors come from or are referred from. For instance we can show a customized ad to google visitors (this script can easily be modified to show a different ad based on the referring site):

Click Here

No example needed here. Put a “click here” or other simple direction for a call to action from the visitor. Most tests I’ve seen show that adding “click here” to banners increase the ctr yet most affiliate banners don’t have the text.

How To Create Your Own

There are many other reasons to want to create your own affiliate banners. To do so you need a graphics editing program. The graphics program I use is Adobe Fireworks, however many are free like Gimp and Paint.net. The next step is to figure out how to use the graphics editing software and a related tutorial site or forum is where to ask questions.

Disclaimer

Ask your affiliate manager if you can modify your affiliate banners before doing so. I don’t ask unless I make drastic changes, but Better safe than sorry.

Think Outside The Stock Banners

Have fun playing with your new found freedom to modify banners. Recently I’ve been experimenting with different customized banners and finding I can increase the number of clicks on them by not using the stock banners provided by the affiliate company. Hopefully you can too. Good luck ;-)