When it comes to Internet marketing, banner ads or Web banners are among the most visible promotional vehicles around.

You've surely seen them, even if you didn't know what they were. Banner ads are those flashing, rectangular boxes that are usually positioned at the uppermost portion of popular Web pages. Every time a Web user clicks on these banner ads, the user is brought to the Web site of the advertiser.

If you want to increase traffic to your Web site, investing in a banner ad on a leading Web site is an Internet marketing tool worth pursuing. But first, you have to make sure that you place your banner ad on a site that has the same target audience as your site. Other considerations are the cost of the banner ad placement and the available physical area where your ad will be placed.

On the other hand, if you want to earn from banner ads, you must first make your Web site popular enough to entice advertisers to place their banner ads.

It's easy for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of your site as an Internet marketing medium. Each time a visitor clicks your banner ad and goes to the advertiser's Web site, his visit is recorded on the advertiser's logs and this serves as his basis for paying you. Typically, an advertiser pays about five to ten US cents to the Web site owner each time a visitor clicks the banner ad. That's not a lot, but if your Web site is so popular that it attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, your potential earnings from banner ads can become substantial. Ideally, your income should not only cover your site maintenance and development costs and your Internet access fees, but also give you a tidy profit as well.

As an Internet marketing money earner, banner ads may also be computed based on CPM or Cost Per Thousand. For instance, a banner ad which costs $15 each time the banner is displayed a thousand times. That's how much the leading Web sites earn from Internet marketing. Meanwhile, a regular Web site with average and above average traffic will earn about $10 to $12 CPM from Internet marketing.

Here are some tips on how to use banner ads as a viable Internet marketing tool:

1. Take steps to generate significant online traffic to your site by making your content attractive and valuable
2. Invest in placing banner ads in popular Web sites that are related to your own site to get more visitors
3. Blend the banner ads on your site with your content so that visitors will naturally click on these ads.

The last one has some limitations as far as Google is concerned. Google does not allow the use of phrases like 'Click on my Google ads' as an Internet marketing initiative. However, they do allow words like 'advertisement' and 'sponsored links' to be placed near banner ads for Internet marketing purposes.

In recent years, banner ads have lost some of their glitter as an Internet marketing tool because the sheer clutter of having so many such ads online is believed to have affected their effectiveness. However, banner ads are still a viable Internet marketing vehicle, especially if they are rendered uniquely and creatively.