GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Adult Webmstering 101: Making Your Own Custom Full Page Ads

As always, the tips in this on going series are aimed at new webmasters (but hopefully sometimes help other folks too). So, if you find them a bit too basic I am sorry but I know from dealing with new webmasters everyday that there is still a need for the basics to be explained :)

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I have noticed that a lot of newer affiliates think that they are limited to only using the promotional materials that are already provided for them by the sponsor. Those readily made banners and other promotional materials are all very useful but by their very nature of having to appeal to many different affiliates they may not always be specific to your needs.

So, sometimes the way to go is to think a bit out of the box and use the materials your sponsor gives you to make you own unique promo tools.

One thing that I have found useful is to use these materials to make my own free page ads. I like the free page ads that Max Cash and other sponsors offer but I find that sometimes they are a bit too graphics based and don?t use enough text for my liking. So, by making my own free page ads I can make sure they better suit my needs.

Making your own full page ads using the tools already available to you really is rather easy.

When deciding to put together my own full page ads I go through the following steps:

First of all, as with always, I need to pick the site that I am going to build the FPA for and this time I have decided that I am going to build a full page ad for House Of Teens.

Then once I have decided on the site I need to make a mental list (or even physical list - I am always writing out my plans) of what materials I am going to need in order to build my own FPA.

In this case, I have looked through what is available for me to use from Max Cash and decided that I want to gather a banner and some hosted thumbnails.

Now that I know what I need I log into the affiliate area and head on over to the hosted gallery section and go into the area that is specific to House Of Teens.

Then, when I am on the hosted gallery page I am looking to use the 88×88 sized thumbs.

http://sjayne.com/fpa/picking_hosted_galleries.jpg

For my FPA I plan to use four of the 88×88 hosted thumbs. So, I look at a number of them in my browser and decide on the four I like the most and then keep them up in the tabs of my browser while I go and collect my other materials.

http://sjayne.com/fpa/picking_thumbs.jpg

The next item I need is a banner. So, I simply go the banner section of the affiliate area and grab a banner I think looks good. I don?t really have any rules about which banners are best but I tend to like fairly simple ones that still grab the eye.

http://sjayne.com/fpa/saving_banner.jpg

Then the final thing I need before I start to build my custom FPA is the linking codes.

One thing that I tend to do with my custom FPAs ,that new webmasters may not know they can do, is use a link code the sends the surfer directly to the join page of a site. I do this because I will often be using these FPAs in situations where I am sending traffic that is already hyped about the site to them. So, once they see the FPA I want to get them to that join page.

Not all sponsors offer join links but many do. With Max Cash, if you are going to use the join link codes rather than the normal linking codes you simply need to go to the linking codes area and instead of picking ?regular link codes? you pick ?direct to join page link codes?.

http://sjayne.com/fpa/join_link_codes.jpg

Once you are there you simply need to copy and paste your link code as usual.

http://sjayne.com/fpa/house_of_teen_linkcode.jpg

Now that I have collected all the necessary components for my FPA I fire up my copy of Dreamweaver. Though, you can obviously use whatever program you use to do your site building.

Once I am there I make a really simple table which provides space for the banner on top, a block of text, then four slots for my hosted thumbs and then a text link.

Now, this really is just an example. As I have said many times before, I am SO not a designer and my designs are all really basic like this (but perhaps with background color changes and that sort of thing). They still work for me when they are basic but I know that many people can make it look so much better.

Once I put everything in place using Dreamweaver it looks something like this:

http://sjayne.com/fpa/dreamweaver_view.jpg

Then as a final step, I link the banner, the thumbs and my text link up with my join page link code and then check it out in a browser where it looks something like:

http://sjayne.com/fpa/browser_view.jpg

The text portion I want to use much the same way that I do when I do my ?one page wonder? pages for the search engines. I want to make it keyword rich (but not spammy) and persuading.

Once I have these custom FPAs how do I use them? There are many ways that they can be used.

As of late, I have been using them often in connection with my blogs. If I use a picture in my blog, instead of linking either to a gallery or directly to the sponsor I link to a custom FPA that I have made.

For some reason this has proved to make really good conversions for me. Plus, as a bonus, these FPA pages are getting picked up by the search engines and getting their own traffic - and sales.

As a whole, they can be used whenever you need something that is more tailored to your own needs for particular project. For example, last week I talked about promoting the micro-niche elements of a sponsor?s site. That is another case where I would think about making my own FPA so that it better reflected that micro niche (particularly in the text).

So, there you go - just a simple tutorial on how to do a simple thing that could be useful in your projects.

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As always, keep in mind that you can find all of my Adult Webmaster 101 tutorials and more tips in my blog which can be found in the Max Cash affiliate area.