Many merchants on ArtFire, Etsy and other online marketplaces use the popular 125 x 125 pixel advertising square, sometimes called a button or banner, to advertise their businesses. Most of these small, square ads are lumped together along the side columns of blogs and marketplaces. If you scroll down the pages of handmade/craft related sites such as VoteHandmade.com and HandmadeNews.com, you will see good examples of these column ads and you will soon notice that it will be very difficult for your ad to stand out from the other ads lumped together in that small column.

One answer to this problem is to add animation to your ad. Because you only have a small 125 x 125 pixel area to work in, this animation shouldn't be too complex. Your goal is not to WOW the potential customer with a fancy animation but to grab their attention and to make a simple statement about what they will find when they click on the link to your store. You could hire a graphic artist to design and build your animated ad for you or you can make it yourself.

A good animation for this type of ad would be a background image with animated text on top. Your first step is to choose the background photo for the ad. Try to choose one that will work well when reduced to the small 125 x 125 size. Don't worry about the actual size of the photo. We will reduce the size down to the 125 pixel square later. For now, decide how you will crop the photo into a square and keep the product, or the most important part of the product, still visible. You will also need to decide what text you will use in the animation. You will, of course, use your business name. If you already have a tagline, you can use this also. If you don't have a tagline, try to create one or just pick a few words that will tell your audience what you are selling.

There are many brands of software that you can use to create an animated ad. Most of the popular graphic software such as Adobe^R Photoshop^R Elements, Photoshop^R and Corel^R Animation Shop^TM have an animation feature. Adobe Photoshop Elements is within the price range of most small businesses and creating this type of animated ad with PE is quite simple.

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