If you have been studying the subject of affiliate marketing leads generation, you will agree with me that there are really not many new sources in generating online leads.

You have heard of search engine traffic, web 2.0 traffic, article marketing, different forms of online advertising etc. You probably have tried one or more of these sources and failed.

What’s wrong?

In today’s discussion, we are going to discuss the myths relating affiliate marketing leads generation. In particular, we will discuss about search engine optimization and online advertising.

Myth #1 - You Can Generate Affiliate Marketing Leads Through Search Engine Optimization

The story is always the same - If your webpage can rank in the first page of the search engines, you can drive lots of marketing leads to your affiliated product and make money.

It’s not true!

Well, it’s true that you may be able to drive lots of traffic, but you may not generate any sale.

Memorize the paragraph below by heart!

The first secret in affiliate marketing leads generation through search engine optimization is to find targeted leads who are “planning” to buy. The second secret is to find targeted leads who are “about” to buy.

The two may sound similar but not quite so. Read again if you don’t get what I mean.

Before you even think about search engine optimization, you must first decide what kind of keywords your leads may use.

Let’s say you are selling an ebook called “Forex Made Easy” (I made up this title), you should ask yourself for those who may buy “Forex Made Easy”, what kind of keywords will they use?

For those who are “planning” to buy, they may search for “forex ebook review”, “forex trading guide” etc. You can do your research using various keyword tools, through forums or even spying Adwords competitors.

For those who are “about” to buy, it is relatively simple. They will typically search for “forex made easy review”, “forex made easy scam” or “forex made easy bonus”. These are leads who are about to buy and with a slight push and some incentive, they will buy from you.

Myth #2 - Just Post An Advertisement And You Will Make Money Instantly

Many newbies loss money in advertising because they don’t understand the advertising industry, or should I say they don’t understand the mindset of the leads viewing their ads.

Most forms of online advertising involve promoting to a group of leads with a common interest. This means instead of targeting leads who are ‘planning’ or ‘about’ to buy, you are now targeting leads who have a common interest and may not be thinking of buying anything yet.

You may be asking what is the difference?

The difference is HUGE!

It affects the way you craft your salesletter (or presell letter).

Let’s use the same example - to promote a forex ebook.

You can advertise to a group of leads who are interested in forex trading or you can advertise to leads interested in making money online. The approaches are different.

If you are advertising to leads interested in forex trading, you want to write a salesletter (or presell letter) to share with them how you lost money in forex trading following some gurus’ guides and then finally, you make it all back after using “Forex Made Easy”.

But if you are advertising to leads interested in making money online, you want to show them that you are an online newbie trying to make money online but failed. Then you stumbled upon this guide “Forex Made Easy” and you naively followed the guide. To your amazement, you made $1000 in your first month of trading forex.

See the difference?

In advertising, you have to understand your target audience, know what problem they are experiencing and customize your ’solution’ according, although the ultimate solution is the same.

As I said in the beginning, there isn’t many new sources in affiliate marketing leads generation. The sources may be the same, but the approaches are different. The winners are those who know how to use the right approach for the right source in the right situation

“I am an internet marketing newbie. All I am asking you to do for me is to introduce me to the internet marketing from scratch, that is leading me step by step to the internet marketing system. Presently, I have no website, no list and no business yet.” - Akinbiyi Yinka Akinrinola

Many internet marketing newbies have been asking me similar questions and I usually do not bother reply.

Why?

Because the question is too general. Also, I got a feeling that anyone asking such a question is usually not serious in internet marketing.

But today, for the first time (and also the last time), I’m going to answer this question and post it up on our blog, so that I can direct whoever asking such a question back to our blog.

For all the internet marketing newbies out there, there are only 4 steps to making money from internet marketing from scratch.

Step 1 - Make a decision

Step 1 is to make a firm decision that you are going to make it in internet marketing, no but, no however, no unless, no excuse!

If step 1 is not accomplished, there is no need to proceed to the other steps. Quit now and go back to your comfort zone. Internet marketing is not for you. Nothing is, until you make a decision.

Let me tell you something I’ve never told anyone.

I started to explore internet marketing back in 1999, made my first $100 some time in 2004, made my first $1000 in 2006 and made my first $10k in the same year.

What happened in 2006? Did I stumbled upon a secret formula? Not at all.

What happened was that my offline business failed in 2005. I was $50k in debt and I desperately NEED to find an alternative to make money, so as to pay back my loan and keep my company alive.

For the years before 2006, I had been exploring internet marketing, but I was doubtful whether internet marketing was for me. Moreover, I had many other opportunities available and frankly, internet marketing was just one of the many options.

By 2006, I’d tried 3 different offline business, failed at each one of them, and owed $50k to the bank. I ran out of all my offline options and I had little cash on hand.

I was in a situation where I either make it in internet marketing or quit my entrepreneur dream and look for a job.

Not to give up my last option, I turned to internet marketing, with no other backup plan!

Here’s a little secret about the universe:

“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Opportunities will be open to you. Ideas will come to you. Your saviour will appear.

So, before everything else, make your decision first.

Step 2 - Stop looking for shortcuts

Forget about shortcuts or quick cash. There is no shortcut. What does exist is leverage.

To make money fast, you need to leverage. You leverage on advertising to bring you more traffic in a shorter time. You leverage on freelancers to save your time and provide skills that will otherwise take you time to learn.

Other than leverage, there is no shortcut. You have to take the down-to-earth ‘boring’ steps of building websites, promoting them and doing all the maintenance work.

I’m not saying internet marketing is tough. It is tough initially because you’re still learning. Just like the first time you ride a bicycle. It was tough isn’t it? But once you get used to it, it’s as easy as ABC.

Step 3 - Decide on a business model

There are too many ways to make money online. You can make money from Adsense, PPC ads, Affiliate Marketing, Ebay, MLM etc.

So your 3rd crucial step is to decide on the business model that you want to adopt.

If you want to make money fast, one way is to become an instant guru!

I’ve seen many newbies who position themselves as a guru and start teaching people how to make money online. It works! Many of them who ‘dare’ to pretend to be a guru eventually becomes a real guru.

As a guru, you need to have your own website, your own product and your own affiliate program. That’s why I invested money to create the free M.Y.O.B List Builder Script for our members. Make this script work for you and you’ll become an instant guru overnight.

Read these two articles if you haven’t done so. They will shed some light for you.

What Are The Steps In Creating An Online Business

How To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Step 4 - Keep learning and keep working

Remember, there is no shortcut. You got to work hard and you got to learn fast while you work.

In offline businesses, you can hardly learn because very few people are willing to teach you.

The good thing about online business or internet marketing is that many people are willing to teach you, for free or for a very small fee. As long as you have your own business set up and are willing to learn the ropes, you will eventually grow and become another guru.

Lastly, after today, don’t ever call yourself an internet marketing newbie again. The faster you believe you are the guru, the faster you can succeed online.

Today we shall discuss how to drive traffic to your website.

Before that, you need to understand that different traffic strategies are suitable for different online business model.

In our discussion today, we are going to focus on how to drive traffic to your website created using our free and powerful M.Y.O.B List Building Script, since many of you are working on it now.

So, you’ve got your website set up, found an irresistible gift to giveaway and created a too-good-to-miss one time offer. All you have to do now is to drive traffic to your website and the system will take care of itself, helping you to make money, build affiliates and snowball the initial traffic into hundreds and thousands of future traffic automatically.

The key here, my friend, is that you need to put in the effort to drive the initial traffic. Without the initial traffic, nothing is going to happen.

Here’s how to drive the initial traffic to your website:

1) Go for the bulk traffic!

Search engine traffic, article marketing or video marketing …. are great ways to drive free traffic to your website, BUT NOT NOW!

Why? Because you want to see result FAST or you’ll quit! It’s not your fault. Most humans behave that way.

As a start, you want to focus on getting bulk traffic, i.e. a lot of traffic in a short time.

You want to quickly build a few hundred people to your list so that you will not feel like talking to thin air when writing your newsletter or blog.

The only form of free bulk traffic I can think of is Joint Venture. If you can JV with someone with a list, go ahead and do it. If not, move on to the next one……

The next available option is paid advertising. Below are some examples of paid advertising you can use:

1) Paid to read emails programs - These programs typically sell thousands of traffic at low prices. For example, my website EmailCashPro.com sells 1000 guaranteed traffic for $42. Start small and if your one-time-offer converts well, you can order a larger package. Google for “paid to read emails” and you should find a few websites providing such a service. (Note that most websites sell number of emails sent, not guaranteed traffic. So when comparing the prices, take note of the difference.)

2) List building programs - These programs typically let you build a list for free but they also offer premium advertising service where you can post email ads to their members at a fee. For example, with an upgraded account with viralurl.com, you can post 3000 emails to its members every 3 days.

3) Not to forget LeadsLeap! - As a PRO member, you will receive about 400 visitors every month. We post our PRO members ads throughout our online network to bring in quality traffic to them.

4) Participate in giveaway events - Such event is hard to come by but if you happen to see one, grab it. Remember to upgrade your account to get the maximum exposure.

That’s for the initial traffic.

Once you build about 500 people to your list, your next best move is to start ’swapping’ your list with other list builders. This is how to roll your list from 500 to 5000!

Go to internet marketing forums and post a cross promotion offer. Tell them that you have 500 people in your list and are willing to JV with marketers with similar list size.

This is the ideal method for you because your website is set up to give away freebies. It’s very easy for other marketers to promote freebies to their lists and make money at the same time.

In such a deal, since you are the person who initiate the deal, ALWAYS ask the other marketers to do the promotion first, i.e. send the offer to their lists first.

The reason is simple. You want to work with serious partners only. If you offer to do the sending, you may end up spending a lot of time ‘reminding’ them to send the offer to their lists.

If you can do that with a few marketers, you will easily increase your list from 500 to 1000. Next, you will continue to work with people with a list size of 1000 and increase your list to 2000, then to 4000, 8000 and so on. Get the picture?

That’s how you drive traffic to your website and expand your list from zero to thousands. Lastly, remember to take good care of your subscribers because they are also your affiliate and they can drive traffic to your website in the long run.

I’m quite sure that you have constantly been bombarded with offers from different internet marketing gurus asking you to buy their products or other guru’s products.

The problem is, every product looks good. Even if you have money to buy all of them, you wouldn’t have the time to study them!

The secret, my friend, is to be selective in which guru you listen to.

Let me share with you a little experience of mine:

Some time ago, someone called me on my mobile phone asking if I was interested in making an extra $50,000 in the next three months.

Well, I bothered to answer that call because she was calling from an internet marketing guru’s office. I know that guru and I’ve purchased some high ticket items from him. That’s probably the reason why they have my number in the first place.

So I told her, “Yes, I’m interested.”

She went on to sell me a coaching program from another guru, whom I have not heard before, in a tactful and professional way and frankly, I was impressed.

Before deciding on whether to buy the coaching program, the first thing I did was to Google for the name of this guru and find out how he makes money.

Based on my research, this guru is a national speaker in the self-help industry. He has written many books and been featured in the national TVs. (I don’t know him because I live in Singapore, not US.)

If you remove all the bells and whistles, this guru basically makes money conducting seminars and coaching programs teaching people how to be successful.

I have no intention to become a speaker, nor am I interested to start any coaching program. So whatever experience that this guru is irrelevant to me.

What I’m try to tell you is don’t blindly listen to a guru simply because he is famous. Look behind the scene and find out what he does for living.

If what the guru does is what you envision to do, by all means, listen to everything he says. Or else, that guru is NOT your guru.

Get what I mean?

Let me give you another example.

A few years ago, I got into a membership coaching program by another internet marketing guru, Mark Ling. I invested in his program because he makes millions from Adsense and Clickbank by building little content websites in all kinds of niches that he knows nothing about.

That was what I envisioned myself to be doing and therefore, I got into his program and learnt everything he taught.

Speaking of him, the same membership that I was subscribed to is now free. I highly recommend you to get into the membership because there are tons of videos and tutorials that I used to pay to view.

Click here to get instant access to the free videos and tutorials that I paid to view.

That’s all for today. Remember, the next time you see an offer from another internet marketing guru, ask yourself, is the way that guy makes money the way you want to make money? If the answer is ‘no’, don’t waste your time on that offer.

This is an article about “Add-on domain vs Subdomain vs Subdirectory”. It’s a reply to a member’s question.

Here’s her question:

“Hi Kenneth, just like to know exactly what is the difference between an add-on and a sub domain, and what do you use each one for? I know you can host several different websites, or pages but, which do you use for what?” - Glenda

Hi Glenda, an add-on domain is a new domain, such as domain123.com, domain456.com, domain567.com. You have to buy a new domain name whenever you want to add an add-on domain to your hosting account. A sub-domain is a domain derived from your existing domain. Let’s say your existing domain is domain123.com, you can have unlimited sub-domain such as abc.domain123.com, xyz.domain123.com and so on.

Whenever you want to start a new project, there are 3 types of website structure you can consider.

1) A brand new domain (i.e. an add-on domain)
2) A subdomain
3) A subdirectory (simply a sub-folder of your domain)

If you are starting a new project in a completely different niche, it’s obvious that you should buy a new domain and host it as an add-on domain. But if you are starting a new project in the same niche, you will have to think which of the 3 structures above you should adopt.
Let’s say you have a website called esuccessonline.com, and you are thinking of starting a blog related to online success, you have 3 options to structure your new blog.

1) A brand new domain - you can call it esuccessonlineblog.com
2) A subdomain - you can call it blog.esuccessonline.com
3) A subdirectory - you can call it esuccessonline.com/blog

Below are some issues you should consider when deciding which option to choose.

1) From SEO perspective

If your original website esuccessonline.com is already well established, with a decent PR, you may NOT want to start a brand new domain just for your blog. This means option 1 is out.

If you use option 2 or 3, you can pass the credibility of your original domain to your blog, which is in either a subdomain or subdirectory. This will help your new blog and subsequent blog posts to get ranked in the search engines faster and better. Also your new blog content will help boost your original website. So it’s a win-win situation.

2) From branding perspective

If you plan to brand your blog in the future, then you should start a new domain called esuccessonlineblog.com. In general, as long as you intend to brand your new project as a new entity, it’s always a good idea to register a new domain for it.

3) “Expandability” issues

If you envision that your blog is going to be very big and it may require a lot of server resources, then it may be a good idea to start your blog in a new domain or subdomain, not a subdirectory.

To understand why, let me explain the technical difference between a subdomain and subdirectory. A subdomain can be technically treated as a new domain, in the sense that it can be hosted separately from its root domain. This means you can have blog.esuccessonline.com and esuccessonline.com hosted on different servers. But this cannot be done for esuccessonline.com/blog.

As such, if you expect your blog (or whatever new project you have) to consume a lot of server resources, your current server may not be sufficient to satisfy your needs. In such case, if you start your new project in a new domain or subdomain, you can always host it on another server in the future.

One good example is Google.com. Google.com is a brand. Everything it does must enhance its brand “Google”. So when Google started Google Map, which obviously requires a lot of server resources, it only has 2 choices. Google can either call it GoogleMaps.com or maps.google.com.

And you should know their decision. It’s logical to make that decision too. They call it maps.google.com.

4) To boost your Alexa ranking

More and more people, especially in the internet marketing niche, look at the Alexa ranking of a website as a means to gauge the credibility of the website. So if you want to boost the Alexa ranking of your website, it may be a good idea to put all your projects under one domain. This means you can either use a subdomain or subdirectory.

Take Google and Yahoo as a case study. Google names its international websites in separate domains, such as google.com.sg, but Yahoo names its international websites as a subdomain, such as sg.yahoo.com. The result is yahoo.com is now ranked #1 in Alexa ranking. I believe if Google were to consolidate all its international websites under google.com., it should rank #1 in Alexa ranking.

The Conclusion?

There is no conclusion. It really depends on what you want to do now and in the future. New domain costs money but it looks professional. Subdomain is free and it’s technically as flexible as a new domain, but it’s not as professional. Yet, if you want to create a mega website like Google.com, subdomain can give you a lot of leverage. Subdirectory is the simplest option for website structuring. If branding and server requirement are non-issue, it’s always easier to just use a subdirectory.

This is an article to show you the fastest way to get top 10 in the search engines for your own website. This method always work, especially for keywords with low competition. But there are some factors you need to consider before using it.

Ok, here is the method in summary:

Simply use the keywords that you want to rank for as the domain name of your website.

For example, if you want to get top 10 rank for “migraine headache relief”, you can name your website as one of the followings:

migraineheadacherelief (.com, .net or .org)
migraine-headache-relief (.com, .net or .org)

If those domain names are not available, you can add a prefix or suffix such as my, site, guide etc. For example,

mymigraineheadacherelief.com
migraineheadachereliefsite.com
migraineheadachereliefguide.com

The idea is to include the keywords in your domain name.

Before using this strategy, there are some issues you should consider:

1) It’s not a loophole

This method works for competitive keywords. If you don’t believe, search for ‘acne’ and see which website ranks top.

But this method is NOT a loophole.

You still need to build links into your homepage.

The only difference is you need lesser links compared to websites without the keywords in the domain names.

This brings us to the next important point - keyword research.

2) Keyword research

The more competitive the keywords, the more links you need and the longer time it takes for you to get top rank for that keywords.

As a start, it would be a better idea to aim for less competitive keywords.

How do you know if a keyword phrase is competitive?

Simple. Below are my personal checklist:

i) Google search result for that keyword phrase should have less than 500,000 results.

ii) Some of the webpages in the top 10 results should have a PR less than 3.

iii) Some of the webpages in the top 10 results are internal pages of Squidoo.com, Hubpages.com, Blogger.com, Ezinearticles.com and/or Buzzle.com.

If I found a keyword phrase that satisfies all the 3 criteria, plus the keyword phrase has a good demand, I know that I’ve found another gold.

3) Branding

If you think domain name such as migraineheadacherelief.com looks ugly, you are absolutely right!

But if I am creating an affiliate site or Adsense site, I don’t really care whether my domain name looks professional.

If I’m creating a website that requires some form of branding, I may have to give this trick a pass. Alternatively, I will try to include as many keywords as possible while making sure that the domain name looks professional.