Banners or text links?

[MrYum]

A question for the prolific free site builders among us...

I'm working on some sites for a sponsor I haven't used before. Am finding that their banner pool is pretty limited...

So, what are your thoughts on using more text links...and very few...if any...banners?

Would think a side benefit of this is the spiders should like it better too :)

[Useless]

I've been promoting a handful of really small sponsors lately and they have fuck-all for banners. So what I do is try to use one banner per gallery page and use pure text for the two remaining sponsor links. Text is better for SEs and it's also better for making your sales pitch. But I almost think you need the occasional banner to add some level of legitimacy to the site being marketed.

I may not be a good example to follow though. I only make one sale every three years or so.

[stuveltje]

i have free sites without banners and with banners , all i can say because realy i dont see a difference, if you use baners use tesxt links with them because they load faster

[Halfdeck]

If a paysite has lame banners, I usually pick one that hurts my eyes the least, use that once or twice, then use text for the rest of the site.

The problem with these sites is that their paysite tours sometimes look as bad as their banners, if not worse. But as they say, looks aren't everything...

[MrYum]

Excellent...thanks for the feedback folks :)

Yea, the few banners they have are ok...just not many of em. And I tend to build a lot of sites...those few banners will get stale pretty quick.

Looks like a good excuse to shake up the ol build style a bit...always a good thing!

Thanks much for the input :)

[Mishi]

I've built a handful of sites using very few banners. One of those sent more clicks than any site I've ever built...and resulted in no sales. (I was so pissed.)

Overall, I don't see a huge difference between sites with banners vs. sites with no banners, but from what I can tell, it's text links that make the sales. (No surprise there.)

My gut tells me that having appropriate banners helps get the paysite brand in the customer's mind - potentially making him more open to buy - but I haven't really tested this. One of these days a bunch of us need to hook up and run an experiment or two.

[Greenguy]

You can get very creative with tables & colors & text when banners are not available :)

[gilbert]

After all, you can make your own banners, if you really need it. :)