Many people are confused by the different types of advertising techniques online. In today’s blog post, my aim is to classify all the techniques into 5 main types. I will also discuss the key to success in each of them.

Ready? Here we go……

1) Content Advertising

The first type of advertising technique is content advertising. It basically uses content to draw visitors’ attention. It is the main type of advertising technique because the entire internet is made up of content (or information).

The following traffic strategies all fall under content advertising technique:

- Submitting articles to article directories
- Posting articles to Squidoo, Hubpages or Blogger
- Posting articles to your own blog or content website
- Press release
- Paid reviews at other people’s website
- Yahoo answers
- Social bookmarking at Digg, Propeller etc
- Post videos in video sites
- Posting comments in forums

In content advertising, you draw traffic from 2 sources. You either get the traffic from the website where the content is posted or from the search engine.

Existing traffic from the website is given. There is nothing much you need to do other than making sure that your content is good and your title is interesting.

The real challenge lies in getting traffic from the search engine. Your aim is to get high ranking in the search engine and direct the traffic from the search engine to your content and then to your website. This is done through careful keyword research and search engine optimization.

2) Link Advertising

This type of advertising technique typically uses a short link with some description to attract the visitors directly to your website.

The following traffic strategies all fall under link advertising technique:

- PPC advertising
- LeadsLeap advertising
- Classified advertising
- Submission to directories
- Link exchange partnership
- Banner advertising (image version of link advertising)
- Craigslist advertising
- Email signature

In link advertising, you draw traffic from just 1 source, that is the existing traffic from the website where your link is posted.

The key in link advertising is your OFFER.

Many advertisers expect people to click on whatever link they post. When no one clicks, they wonder why people are not responding.

Remember, people are NOT AT ALL interested in your ad. They are only interested in how they can benefit. If your ad fails to convey the idea that you have something good for them, they simply won’t click!

3) Viral advertising

This kind of advertising technique is similar to word of mouth advertising in the offline world. The idea is to encourage your existing traffic to bring more traffic to your website.

The following traffic strategies all fall under viral advertising technique:

- Offer your products’ affiliate program, including finding joint venture partners
- Place a “Tell-a-friend” script on your website
- Distribute viral screensaver, software or ebooks

Success in viral advertising depends a lot on your ability to create a buzz in your community. You need to package your product into something that is unique and interesting so that people are interested in spreading the words for you. Viral advertising can hardly work for a “me-too” product.

4) Incentivized advertising

The forth type of advertising technique is incentivized advertising where the traffic is rewarded to visit your website.

The following traffic strategies all fall under incentivized advertising technique:

- Traffic exchange programs
- Auto-surf advertising
- Paid to read advertising
- Safelist advertising

Success in this type of advertising depends mainly on your offer and the way you present it. Most advertisers who fail either do not have a good offer or they fail to deliver the benefit of their offer across to the target audience.

5) Obtrusive advertising

The last type of advertising technique is obtrusive advertising where the traffic is forced to view your ad. The most typical examples are popup and popunder advertising.

The first rule in obtrusive advertising is to avoid untargeted traffic, which happens to be quite common in this kind of advertising. If your ad is shown to a pool of people who are not interested in your offer, you are simply barking up the wrong tree!

If the traffic is targeted, your success in obtrusive advertising depends mainly on your offer and the way you present it, similar to incentivized advertising.

Final note……

As you can see, online advertising is not as complicated as what it seems to be. I hope that by understanding the main types of advertising techniques, you can be better prepare your advertising campaign. All the best!

After reading my previous post on The Truth About Creating A Passive Income Online, someone asked me this question, “Can Blogging Create Passive Income?”

To answer this question, first of all, we must understand what is blogging.

To me, blogging is just another traffic strategy, something like article marketing.

Assuming you have not done anything to your blog, no link, no promotion, no JV, a blog post is just another piece of content lying somewhere on the net. If you’re lucky, someone may find the post through the search engine and read it. If not, it will just be another digital dust.

When the gurus tell you that you can make money from blogging, what he is really saying is you can make money by leaving tons of ‘content footprint’ on the net. The more ‘content footprint’ you have on the net, the more traffic you are likely to attract.

(Sidenote: That’s the reason why I started LeadsLeap Blog - to create a large content footprint so as to attract more traffic and benefit our members who show their ads in this blog.)

As I’ve said, blogging is just another traffic strategy. It’s what you do with the traffic that determines whether you can create a passive income from it.

So can blogging create passive income? My ‘immediate’ answer is - it depends on what you do with the traffic to your blog.

Blogging Myth 101

Many years back, when the idea of internet marketing first started, there was a myth that says “Built it and traffic will come”. ‘it’ refers to a website.

People started building different kinds of websites, only to realize that their websites are only visited by ghosts.

Years later, history repeats.

The concept of blogging was introduced and everyone starts to blog. The myth now becomes “Blog and traffic will come”.

People started to blog about different things under the sun, only to realize that they are just talking to themselves.

So can blogging create passive income? My ‘better’ answer is - it depends on whether you can generate ‘passive traffic’ to your blog and what you do with the ‘passive traffic’.

What Should You Do With The Traffic So As To Create Passive Income?

Assuming you know how to generate passive traffic to your blog, the next challenge is how to monetize the traffic so that you can earn passive income.

Here is what you can do:

1) Sell advertising space

Unless you have a very popular blog, chances are no one will advertise directly with you. The easiest way to start selling your advertising space is by putting Google Ads on your blog.

As your blog becomes more popular, you can find your own advertisers and earn more.

2) Sell affiliate products

I’m not talking about selling ebooks. If you want to build a passive income, you should promote products or services that can earn you recurring commissions.

Some examples are web hosting services, autoresponder services, network marketing products and membership programs.

For non-internet marketing niche, try to promote membership programs that can generate recurring commissions for you every month.

3) Sell your own products

Eventually, you want to sell your own products through your blog, preferably a membership program so that you can build another recurring income.

Selling your own product has another advantage because you can recruit affiliates and generate more traffic to your blog.

4) Position your blog as a brand

This is the ultimate thing you should do with your blog to create long term passive income.

Do you know why companies spend so much money on branding? Because people prefer to buy from brands that they are familiar with.

Once your blog becomes a brand by itself, every other things will fall into places. Your traffic will increase beyond your wildest dream. Advertisers will be queuing to pay you. Your sales will soar. And more importantly, you can employ people to produce the content.

This is when your blog truly becomes a passive income source for you.

In this blog post, I’m going to share my answer to the following question:

“If you were to start from scratch with NO list, NO JV partners in your niche, and all you have is $100 capital, what would you do to start making sales for your niche membership site within just 15 days?”

Before I answer this question, let me state my assumption.

I’m assuming that you already have a niche membership site and you can make some modifications to your website to accommodate the marketing plan that I’m going to tell you.

Ready? Here we go……

If I have a niche membership site, with no list, no JV partner and only a hundred bucks……

1) I’ll go to Clickbank and see what kind of ebooks people are buying in my niche.

2) I’ll think of a topic that complements (not competes with) the popular niche ebooks sold in Clickbank.

What I’m going to do is to turn that topic into a special report that people are willing to buy.

It is important that you don’t write something that compete with the popular ebooks sold in Clickbank. You will see why later.

3) Since I only have $100, I’ll have no enough budget to outsource but to write the report myself. So I’ll spend 2 solid days to write a report on the topic that I’ve researched.

I am planning to sell the report for just $7.

4) On day 3, I’ll spend 1 day writing a powerful sales letter to sell my new report.

In the sales letter, I’ll include my niche membership site as a free bonus, i.e. those who purchase the report will get 1 month free membership to my niche site.

5) Day 4 is a technical day. I’ll have to spend the whole day to integrate the sale of the report and the one month membership trial together. (If you are not a technical person, you can outsource this job to a freelancer at GetAFreelancer.com for $60. This was what I used to pay before I figured out how to do it myself.)

6) Day 5 onwards is all about marketing.

First, I will go to Clickbank and find all the best selling authors in my niche. I will then contact them with my JV offer.

My JV offer is that I will give them 100% commission for the $7 report that they sell. I will also give them 50% commission on all the future sales generated from my membership site if their leads stay on my membership site after the one month trial.

Since my report actually complement the ebooks they are selling, there is a high chance that they will be interested to promote the report to their customers and lists.

Next, I’ll go to the top bloggers in my niche and contact them with the same JV offer.

With 100% upfront commission and 50% recurring commission in the future, I’m pretty sure that a handful of the bloggers in my niche will take up the offer.

7) Finally, my job is to overdeliver to my members so that they will stay on my membership site for as long as they can.

The entire plan actually costs me $0. But if you have $100, you can spend it on outsourcing certain tasks such as system integration.

When I quitted my job (with no backup income and only a strong desire to succeed), I told myself that I’m going to build a passive income system that will make money on autopilot. By then, I will travel around the world, and sit in my office and shake legs (meaning: doing nothing).

Is that your dream too?

Well, here’s what is happening……

Yes, I now travel to different countries anytime I like. But I have to carry my laptop wherever I go. When I book hotel, I have to make sure that it comes with high speed internet access.

And yes, I really sit in my office and shake leg (as a habit). But my hands are always on the keyboard and my eyes are glued to the computer screen.

So what happen to my dream?

What happen is I’ve fallen in love with my work. (My wife hates me saying this!)

Sometimes I ask myself, what would I do if I retire. Guess what my answer is? I will still be doing the same thing as what I’m doing now!!!

Will you say you are going to ‘retire’ from your hobby? You won’t, right?

You may be wondering what is it that I’m doing everyday that makes my work so interesting.

Let me tell you the truth……

I’m doing all the boring things that you probably have been dragging yourself to do; things like writing articles, posting ads, replying emails, creating websites and managing freelancers.

I bet this is not the first time you heard people saying that to succeed, you must love what you do. But I bet no one has told you my version:

“To succeed, you must love the boring things that you do.”

Most people can’t succeed online because they’ve been painted with the fantasy of easy money, but when they get down to the actual work, they find it boring and quit. Those who eventually make it are those who love doing the boring stuff.

Don’t ask me how I fell in love with the boring things. It’s like falling in love with your wife (or husband). There is no reason!

So, how do you fall in love with the boring things in internet marketing?

Like I said earlier, I don’t know how. To me, it’s like falling in love with your soul mate. Is it fated? I don’t know.

But what I can tell you is that when I first started, I was motivated by money.

As I went through the process, I slowly get used to it and now it has become part of my life.

Come to think about it, that’s how two person fell in love with each other, isn’t it? You may fall in love with someone for some initial reasons, but when you’re truly in love, what you really love is the feeling of being together.

So the moral behind this is, if you want to fall in love with the boring things that you do, keep working until you get used to it.

Creating a passive income online is something that you probably have heard of. Many business opportunities use the idea of “creating a passive income online” to sell you their systems. It works because I’m using this trick too. But does passive income really exists?

In this article, my goal is to share with you some essential truth about creating a passive income online. I know most of you are more keen to learn how to create a passive income online. I’ll talk about it in future. But before I do that, it is important for me to cover some grounds and get your mindset right.

Passive Income Doesn’t Exist!

First of all, I need to get this straight - passive income doesn’t exists, at least not according to what most newbies define as passive income.

Most people define passive income as “making money without having to do anything”. If you are one of them, you will be very disappointed when you realize that this is not true.

Do you realize that whenever you get into an opportunity that ‘claims’ to give you a passive income, you end up being overwhelmed with lots of sh*t and often have to work like a dog? That’s when most people give up.

Truth is, there is no such thing as making money without having to do anything. If such opportunity exists, it’s most likely a scam (unless you’re talking about putting your money in the fixed deposit).

So what is a passive income then?

Here is my definition of a passive income - “A passive income is an income system that does not trade time for money.”

If you go with my definition, you are less likely to be disappointed and more likely to succeed because you’re prepared to work hard to create such a system.

Once you get the definition right, all you have to do is spend most of your time creating different streams of passive income and spend less time making money.

“Huh, what are you talking about, Kenneth?”

If you understand what I am talking about, good for you. If you don’t, let me explain.

Most people spend time to make money. One obvious example is working for a monthly salary. Some other less obvious examples include the following activities:

- Staring at the computer screen to trade the stock market or forex.

- Selling products in Ebay (unless you have plans to turn it into a system).

- Posting ads to sell Clickbank products (unless you have plans to turn it into a system).

- Providing freelance services such as graphic design, article writing etc (I hope my freelancers are not reading this!)

If you are pressured for money, yes, go find a job and do some part-time freelance jobs. But if you want to be rich, spend most of your time creating different streams of passive income.

You need to understand that making money and creating a passive income are two different things.

Creating a passive income may not make you money, although the ultimate goal is to make lots of money passively. When creating a passive income, you are creating a system that does not trade time for money and in the process of creating this system, you may spend more than you earn.

Many people can’t get pass the idea of losing money before making money. That’s why most people fail to create their first passive income online. On the contrary, those who are ‘lucky’ enough to create their first stream of passive income online will continue to create the second stream and third stream because they’re used to the idea of losing some money before getting it all back, multiplied. Another reason is because with their first passive income established, their risk appetite is higher and they are more willing to lose. The last reason is because they are more experienced now.

If you’ve just started out, go find a job to make money. But don’t spent too much time on it. Take 3-5% of your monthly income and most of your spare time to create a passive income online. Online opportunities cost much lesser than offline opportunities and 3-5% should be enough for you to learn the ropes. How soon you’ll see your first passive income established depends on how fast you learn and how hard you work.

Get your definition of passive income right and spend most of your time creating a passive income online. Once you’ve created your first passive income, go on to create the second, the third and more streams of passive income. This is possible since you don’t trade time for money with these systems. This is the sure way to make a fortune rather than just making a living.