Letting People Link to Your Banner

R&D - More Links to you if you allow them to just copy/paste

[EliteWeb]

Hello WebmasterWorld!
Everyone gets so defensive when people link to their graphics on their website. Day in day out I see sites that offer the link code and tell the webmasters to download the graphics and put them on their own servers. the link code says <a href="http://www.widgets.com/"><img src="image.gif"></a> if the webmaster were to copy that without uploading the image the link would be broken.

I love links, so I did some Research in comparisions on how people will link to sites and which one got more links the one where i let them link directly to my image <img src="http://www.widgets.com/widget.gif"> and guess which one people put on their site most? 75% more people put the link where they pulled the image off my server compared to having to upload a image to their server.

I say pay the few bucks of bandwidth and let people link directly to the image on your server. If theyre going to give you the link why not pay the cost for bandwidth and make it easier for them to link. The more advanced webmasters will think, oh thats nice they allow me to link to their image, but what if theyre offline.. i dont want it to show a broken link so they upload it to their own server anyways.

Make the link as easy to impliment as possible, make HTML code as easy as copy and paste and you will obtain more links and make your banners differnt sizes for differnt people. My thoughts.

[buckworks]

Something worth thinking about here is making sure that your banner(s) is/are optimized to conserve bandwidth. Smaller graphic files would also load faster for whoever is linking to them.

Be sure you also supply code snippets for some well-worded text links. You could even encourage linkers to use a text link by mentioning that some sites prefer them because they load faster.

I like the GIFbot at NetMechanic for optimizing graphics; others may be able to suggest similar tools.

[Jenstar]

There are many people that can't do anything beyond pasting a completely coded html snippet into their webpages. This is the exact reason why I allow remote hosting of images on one of my sites, so that people can put a promotional banner pointing to my site. And I got tired of the "how do i put your banner on my site" questions, even though I had very concise step by step instructions right there ;)

[EliteWeb]

Yes, make sure your images are well optimized like your sites are :D And if you dont have a page with link code setup its time to start one just so they will know how easy it is to copy and paste :D

[toolkit]

I agree EliteWeb

It should be as easy as possible for people to link to your site.

[lorax]

I've been toying with the idea used by CJ and the other affiliate marketers - provide a selection of images and the code for them to cut and paste. Let them choose.

[EliteWeb]

With the linking images you figure each one should be optimized to allow for quicker display on the end-websites side and less bandwidth for your side so that was a good tip. I dont think ive optimized my graphics in about a year. Could explain why Im doing so much bandwidth ;D