If you wish to have people link to your website, the best way would be to have them put a graphic link on their website. To get other websites to display your banner or graphic ad on their website, you need to make it easy to get you added. The GCS "Link to Us" module does that for you. The GCS "Link to Us" module consists of four or more pages (all for $400). They consist of an intro page, a Terms page, and a contact form that they fill out so that you can contact them if necessary, and an individual page for each sized graphic you have made. Our own site works as a demo.
Each individual graphic page shows just how simple it is to link to your website. It even has helpful text to explain how to add your one-line of code to their website.
How it works.
If you provide the graphic to other websites, then they can use it to make the graphic link. Of course, it would be a graphic of your logo, using the "official" colors no less. But what happens down the road when you decide to change the design of your logo? Now, countless other websites have links to your website, except they are using an old version of the logo graphic. How do you get them all to update their website? After all, it was hard enough convincing them to add the graphic in the first place, and now you have to bug them to do more work so that it looks like the new logo that you just paid a fortune to have a graphic artist design. There is a solution obviously, otherwise, why this long spill, right? The solution is to implement a plan at the onset of the website that will take care of the future. Part of the secret is to never give your graphic out. If you don't, how do they display anything at all for your website? You supply a short one line snippet of code that they paste into their website code, and it gets the latest graphic from your website. That way, you have control over it, and when you change it, all of the websites that are displaying your graphic link will automatically be updated. This means you can change the graphic at any time to show news, sale specials, or whatever on other people's websites and the changes are instant!
The "Link to us" module consists of an index page that shows the banner or other graphic sizes you offer. For each type or size of graphic, there is a demo page to show what the graphic will look like, plus it displays the code that can be copied and pasted into their website code. It even has all the instructions spelled out so that anyone could do it. The package also consists of a license agreement to use the link, and a sign-up form so that should you ever need to get in touch with the people that display your graphic, you will have the important contact information.
One of the nice things about the package is that you can have different images display at different times. Say for example, you want to display a different graphic around Christmas time, or any holiday, or for any other special event that you wish to be unique. One way would be to change the default graphic of course, but what I am referring to is to have it switch automatically based on the date and time. The changes occur for all years into the future automatically. I have made these work so that all major holidays have their own banner that is displayed, or for example during Christmas, a "random" Christmas banner is displayed. I even made a set for one company that gave a birthday greeting on each employee's birthday. One of the birthdays occurred in the middle of a special holiday period but for that one day, the banner was for the employee.
One of the complications I have not implemented into the code is to calculate when certain holidays occur (Easter and Thanksgiving) so you have to specify when to start showing banners during these periods and stick with them for future years. That can be especially tricky for Easter since it has such a wide range. I have the algorithms for determining these special holidays but have never bothered complicating the process to add this in. So far, it has not been a problem with past implementations. Usually, you start advertising way before a holiday and sometimes carry it past the holiday too.
