For the purpose of attracting traffic to a new site that is still doing the Google fight up the search engines, do people find that participating in some sort of Banner Exchange program is worth it? Has anyone participated in any of these before and do they actually tend to attract "real, relevant" traffic? I mean I know every little bit of advertising helps, especially for brand new websites, but I'm interested to hear any success stories related to having your banner listed on someone else's site. Thanks!
I remember joining these years ago. My advice - FORGET IT - You MIGHT get a little trickle of traffic - and I stress MIGHT. Not worth giving up that ad space
Banner exchanges are OK. They are free, and can increase your traffic if used properly. However, banner ads aren't clicked on as much as text links. If you can find a program that is text-based you will probably have better results.
I would focus more on seo and ppc and blogging. Banners are good if you want to promote a brand for example if you started a new company that sells themes you may want to do a banner campaign for a few months to get your name out their to the web design and blogging community.
Click-thru rates on banner exchanges are horrible. However, for branding if you create a banner with your actual website name and logo it may be worth the time.
I think banner excange is worth it because you can save your money and at the same time promote your website on plenty of other sites. i don't see any disadvantages in such approach.
Banners are useless nowadays, net-people brains get used to skip banners from their attention by default. So, you will get very low CTR by any, even advanced, banner.
Banner exchange networks differ from simple link swaps in terms of potential visitors reached. Members of large banner exchanges have the potential for their ads to be shown on thousands of other sites. Also, unlike simple link swaps, which are often hard-coded directly to a page, banner exchange networks allow rotation of ads among many different sites, sometimes with the benefit of sophisticated targeting.