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Members of VaBeach.com are eligible to participate in our banner advertising program which is divided into pools. These banner ads must be 500 pixels wide by 70 pixels high and they may be static GIF or JPG images, animated GIF images or Flash animations. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, that's ok. We can build the banners for you, or you can have a third party design them for you. Here's the company that designed the new VaBeach.com logo: http://www.logodesigncreation.com/other_pricing.html - scroll to the bottom of the list for the banner design package.
The banner slot that appears on the home page of VaBeach.com (www.vabeach.com/index.php) is currently spoken for and unavailable. There is a waiting list in the event the banners ever become available. Please let us know if you wish to be added to this list.
Site-Wide Pool - This banner pool covers inclusion on the following areas of the site. Lodging Guide Pool, Dining Guide Pool, Shopping Guide Pool, Attractions Guide Pool. Search Engine Results Pool.
Category Pools - Your banner ad(s) will only appear in the individual category pool(s) of your choice. Lodging Guide Pool, Dining Guide Pool, Shopping Guide Pool, Attractions Guide Pool, Search Engine Results Pool.
- Lodging Guide Pool - The banners for the main lodging guide page, the beach home rental page and the condominium rental pages are completely sold out. The Lodging Guide Pool banners will appear on Hotel & Motel Listings, Campground Listings, Vacation Ownership Listings, Apartment - Bed & Breakfast - Condo Units Listings.
- Dining Guide Pool - This pool will appear on all of the pages in the Dining Guide. These include: Main Dining Guide Page (directly linked to home page - very valuable), American, Bar-B-Que, Catering, Chinese-Japanese-Asian, Fast Food and Delivery, Ice Cream-Desserts, International and Other, Italian and Pizza, Mexican and Southwest, Steak and Seafood.
- Shopping Guide Pool - This pool will appear on all of the pages in the Shopping Guide. These include Main Shopping Guide Page (directly linked to home page - very valuable), Clothing and Swimwear, Gifts, Malls, Misc., Repair, Surf Shops.
- Attractions Guide Pool - This pool will appear on all of the pages in the Attractions Guide. These include Main Attractions Guide Page (directly linked to home page - very valuable), Amusement Parks, Bicycle, Churches, Eco-tourism, Fishing, Golf, History, Museums, Para-sailing, Surfing, Tours, Venues, Wave-runner and Boat Rentals.
- Locals Only Pool - This pool will appear on all of the pages in the Locals Only Pool. This part of the site is currently under development and for now, unavailable. Please let us know if you are interested in advertising in this area. Those who express interet first will be the first contacted when these banners become available. In the past VaBeach.com has been primarily a tourism website with very little information for locals. We've added a "Locals Only" button to the top navigation bar on every page of VaBeach.com. This means we are making a major commitment to local content. We will be adding features and services that will not only draw locals to the site, but they will visit every day, sometimes several times per day. The Locals Only Banner Pool will grow in value and may become the most visited part of VaBeach.com.
Search Results Pool - This pool is likely to be one of the most viewed. Whenever someone does any type of search, the results pages will feature banners from this pool. Our results page only displays 10 business listings at a time, which means more page views and more banner views.
Our banner advertising program is quite unique because our banners rotate in slideshow fashion. Most websites add a banner to each page and that banner stays the same until you navigate away from that page. Our banner program displays a banner for 20 seconds and then automatically crossfades to a new banner. This gives your banner a better chance of being seen multiple times by any given site visitor.
Conventional wisdom says that banner advertising is about getting people to click. The truth, of course, is that people tend not to click on banners. I know that's not the best sales pitch, but it's the truth. People on Madison Avenue who are a lot smarter than I am have figured out that the real value of banner advertising is building brand and logo recognition. Our clickthrough rate is much higher than the industry standard, but even if it wasn't you still benefit from just having people see your banner on VaBeach.com.
There's a problem with the way most websites "serve" or display their banner ads. Most of the banner ads you see across the Internet are "served" by Google, Yahoo, AdWords, or any of dozens of other banner advertising clearing houses. These ads are supposed to be relevant to the content of the page where they are served, but a lot of times it ends up being a competitor's ad that appears. That means that if I used one of those banner ad serving companies, my site could end up having banner ads for Myrtle Beach or Ocean City all over it. My decision to not use 3rd party-served banner ads costs me thousands of dollars per year, but I will not allow a Myrtle Beach or Ocean City ad to appear on my website. The big advantage to you is that the banners that appear on my site are all relevant to Virginia Beach. Viewers are quick to figure this out and the result is that my clickthrough rates are many times higher than the national average.
Most banner ad programs are run on a pay per click, or pay per "impression" basis. Naturally, we do things differently at VaBeach.com. Our prices are annual fees and include unlimited clicks and impressions. I could make a lot more money by charging per click or impression, but if I was in your position I'd prefer to pay annually. That's why I set it up this way. Pay per view or click means you really don't know how much you will be paying for your advertising. With VaBeach.com you'll know exactly how much your banner ads will cost for the whole year.
Each page will have no more than 20 banners in rotation - 10 Site-Wide Banners and 10 Category Banners. The design of VaBeach.com is such that the viewer will likely look at far more than 20 pages in one visit. One internet statistic that few people talk about is the amount of time people spend looking at a website. VaBeach.com's site visitors tend to stay more than ten times longer than the average site visitor.
Here's another way of examining the value of our banner advertising. One ad in the Sunday edition of The Virginian Pilot will be seen by their subscription base of 473,832 readers. One ad in one day's paper will cost $3,870.00. That's a lot more than what a Category Pool Banner Ad costs on VaBeach.com.
The banners on just one page of my site are currently viewed by more than 1,000,000 people per month, or more than 12,000,000 people per year.
The cost to reach 1000 viewers with the Virginian Pilot - $6.17
The cost to reach 1000 viewers with VaBeach.com - $0.004 (and that is an extremely conservative estimate)
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