One thing that many people do not create for their sites (especially at the beginning) are banners and images that can be used to promote the site. While this may be OK for awhile, because you want to have some content on the site before you start promoting it, eventually they are must have items.

It would be my suggestion that anyone who has a site that is to the point where they are directing a significant portion of their time to promoting the site and getting new visitors to have some basic promotional items. Having these items will make it much easier to take advantage of opportunities that may come your way.

The main recommendation is to have at least one banner type image of each of the common sizes available. For this first of each, keep it something fairly timeless and generic that you can have around and available incase a situation were to arise where you would have a need for it. The sizes I am referring to are 125×125, 180×70, 300×250, and 468×60. These are the sizes that the majority of ad spaces fall in to and will give you a fairly well-rounded arsenal.

For some people, creating these banners and images comes easy and takes only a few minutes. To those of you in that category, I would still suggest having generic images like this around. While there is benefit in having new images all the time that keep things fresh and using these banners to promote your latest promotion, there is also a “branding” benefit to using the same image on several sites to where people will instantly recognize it.

If you don’t have images of these sizes yet, I would strongly suggest that you have some ready. I fell into a situation a short while ago where I suddenly had some free ad space to fill and no images to send in to use. This caused a small amount of panic followed by some frantic image creation and fine-tuning of the GIMP skills. Also, not having these images cost me a few days of advertising.