Designing Your Own 125x125 Blog Ad

You need to cre­ate a small 125 x 125 pix­els square ad for your blog if you want to use ad net­works and link exchanges like CMF Ads, Adg­i­tize, Project Won­der­ful, Tech­no­rati Engage, Yahoo Pub­lisher Net­work (US only), Google Adsense, Blog Ads, Spottt and 125 Exchange. (Pub­lisher Spot will give you reviews of ad net­works if you are inter­ested in find­ing more).

So, how do you design an ad that says what you need to say, fits into the small space while still being read­able and attracts peo­ple to your blog?

First, you can make your own ad. It isn’t really hard if you just get some free­ware and work on it a bit. Or you can get some­one to make an ad for you. Free 125 Cards will let you cre­ate one on the web too.

Sec­ond, know what you really want to say. What is the most impor­tant thing you want to say for your site? Don’t put too much into it, don’t make a com­pli­cated mes­sage. Con­sider that you have about 1 sec­ond to catch their eye and tell them why they should click your ad. Not much time is it? But, don’t get scared off. You don’t need to get every­one and any­one to click on your ad, just the peo­ple who will actu­ally be inter­ested in what your site is about.

Once you have got­ten this far it’s time to con­sider the design itself. Keep it sim­ple and clear. You can go with dra­matic colours but chances are your ad will appear with other ads (all using dra­matic colours).You might look around at other ads on other blogs and see what colours catch your eye. Maybe its not about dra­matic colour but the graphic they use or the words? Make notes about what ads you look at.

Every ad is that same square shape so how about using a white back­ground and have a cir­cle or tri­an­gle inside it, some­thing to make your ad appear to be dif­fer­ent from the stan­dard square. Or, how about fram­ing your ad in a dif­fer­ent colour? Sharpen focus onto your ad by giv­ing it a framed bor­der you can even have cor­ners that nar­row in like a real frame on a paint­ing. Read more about using colour on: Color Me Click­able.

1. The blended technique

This tech­nique sets the ad unit’s back­ground and bor­der color to the same color as the page back­ground color. The title is then in either tra­di­tional hyper­link blue or in another color used for page links.

2. The match­ing technique

If your logo is green, you might try match­ing both the bor­der and back­ground of the ad unit to the same green, then use the page back­ground color as the ad unit’s text color. You aren’t intro­duc­ing new col­ors, but match­ing the on-page col­ors, and this makes the ad unit more notice­able than the blended technique.

3. The com­pli­men­tary technique

This would use new col­ors not cur­rently on the page, but col­ors cho­sen to com­ple­ment the col­ors that are. There are many tools avail­able online to help you fig­ure out what col­ors com­ple­ment the major color ele­ments on your page. You can leave the bor­der hid­den and use the com­ple­men­tary col­ors for all the text, or use those com­ple­men­tary col­ors in the ad unit’s bor­der and back­ground, as well.

4. The con­trast­ing technique

This isn’t used as often, but there are pub­lish­ers who find con­trast­ing ad units per­form the best. For con­trast­ing col­ors, think bold, bright and, most impor­tantly, obnoxious.

Some peo­ple sug­gest you use the word ‘free’ in your ad. I don’t. I tried it and found no dif­fer­ence. In fact, I have had far more inter­est from my cur­rent ad than the one which pro­claimed “Free Writ­ing Exer­cises”. Also, it made me feel cheap and I didn’t like that feel­ing. I put time into my site, it’s not an ad farm and the con­tent is all done by myself, orig­i­nally me. Yet, that “free” ad made me feel I was pro­mot­ing a splog (spam blog).

Don’t use too many words and make sure they are easy to read. Don’t have them too small or to blurry from try­ing to fit them in. Come up with some­thing very short and yet descrip­tive of your blog. If you really want a chal­lenge see if you can be witty too.

Use a graphic and words together, but make sense. If your graphic has noth­ing to do with your site it makes a con­fus­ing kind of ad. One thing I have noticed are that hav­ing eyes in your ad will attract reader eyes too. Think of a way your ad can inter­act with other ads which may be beside it, on top of it or under it in a blog side­bar. I’ve seen one which has a bug with it’s legs up in the air, as if push­ing the other ad off. It caught my eye. What else have you noticed in your own wan­der­ings around the web?

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Tagged as: copywriting, marketing, promoting, web publishing