Today I’m going to share with you two simple online advertising strategies - one is pretty common and the other one is hardly known!

I call the first strategy “Review And Compare”, and the second strategy “Review And Complement”.

Online Advertising Strategy #1 - Review And Compare

This is the most common strategy used by many online advertisers.

The idea is to pick 2-3 similar products and compare their pros and cons.

You probably have seen such online advertisements before.

There are two approaches to deploy the Review And Compare strategy. One works better than the other.

1) “Independent Review” approach

In this approach, you simply provide an independent review of the 2-3 products that you’re comparing. Many online advertisers will give some star-ratings to the products and ‘purposely’ award more stars to the product that they support.

This advertising approach has been overly used and to be frank, it is not as effective as the second approach below.

2) “Personal Touch” approach

In this approach, instead of writing an independent review, you position yourself as the user of both products that you’re comparing.

The idea is to share your personal experience with the prospects and tell them which product works better for you.

For example, if you are promoting a make money online product, your story can be something like this:

“My name is blar blar blar. I’ve been struggling to make money online….(tell your sad story). Finally I decided to try out product XXX and product YYY….(describe the two products). With product XXX, I made $. But with product YYY, I made $$$. Since product YYY made me more money, if you want my recommendation, I will recommend product YYY. But to be honest, both products have their pros and cons. Here’s my full review of the two products…..”

In your online advertisement (a.k.a. your presell letter), you should include your photograph and email address so that people know that you are real.

The gist of this “personal touch” approach is to appear real and honest. You want to do everything you can to deliver the following messages:

- I’m a real person and I’m reachable.
- I experienced the problem that you’re experiencing now.
- I’ve tried and tested both products.
- Here’s the result I get after trying both products. If you follow what I do, you too should get the same result.

I hope you can see why this advertising approach is more powerful than the first one.

This approach is the basis of our second online advertising strategy…..

Online Advertising Strategy #2 - Review And Complement

In the Review And Compare strategy that we discuss above, your objective is to compare different products and help the prospects to decide which one is better. Using this strategy, the prospects will buy at most one product.

On the contrary, in the Review And Complement strategy, your objective is to recommend a line of products that complement each other.

If done correctly, instead of getting people to buy just ONE product out of the few you’re comparing, you may end up having people buying the whole line of products!

See how powerful this advertising strategy is?

To use this strategy effectively, we need to use the “personal touch” approach, i.e. tell your own story.

Your story can be something like this:

“My name is blar blar blar. I’ve been struggling to make money online….(tell your sad story). Finally I tried product AAA and I made $A. With some initial success, I decided to try product BBB. The beginning was tough. I was struggling to find traffic. Then I came across product CCC that taught me how to get traffic to my website. I followed the instructions and it worked! I also joined website DDD and EEE, which further boosted my web traffic. Eventually, I started to make money from product BBB. Then I tried product FFF, which is a very lazy way to make more money online and I love it. Now I’m making full time income online and I continue to test different products. If you want to keep yourself updated with all the different products I’ve tested, opt-in to my list here….”

Can you see how all the products are linked? You’ll be surprised that people will simply follow your recommendations and buy every product you recommend, including opting into your list!

It’s like killing all the birds with one stone!

To be honest, I didn’t invent this method. It was shared to me by one of my advertisers, who have been using this online advertising strategy with great success.

The reason I’m sharing these online advertising strategies with you is because I’m still seeing many members advertising the product sales letters directly. This is not the best way to sell affiliated products. If you want to be a successful online advertiser as well as a successful affiliate, you should use one of the two strategies above.

What is the best website structure that is ideal for search engine optimization?

To answer this question, let’s look at the 2 types of website structures.

1) Flat website structure

In a flat structure, all the files are in the root folder.

For example,

yourwebsite.com/article1.htm
yourwebsite.com/article2.htm
yourwebsite.com/article3.htm
yourwebsite.com/article4.htm
yourwebsite.com/article5.htm
yourwebsite.com/article6.htm

2) Directory website structure

In a directory structure, the files are categorized into different folders/directory.

For example,

yourwebsite.com/cause/article1.htm
yourwebsite.com/cause/article2.htm
yourwebsite.com/treatment/article3.htm
yourwebsite.com/treatment/article4.htm
yourwebsite.com/prevention/article5.htm
yourwebsite.com/prevention/article6.htm

where article 1 and 2 are related to the cause of the illness (say we’re building a website about headache), article 3 and 4 are related to the treatment methods and article 5 and 6 are related to the prevention measures.

The question is, which website structure is better? Is it the flat website structure? Or the directory website structure?

Some SEO gurus say that directory structure is better. But from experience, I don’t see much difference.

On the contrary, I realize that flat website structure seems to be indexed faster by the search engines.

Another Aspect Of Website Structure

There is another aspect of website structure that is worth discussing. It is the way you link your articles.

If you have 5 articles on headache treatment, you should link all the 5 articles together. This will increase the relevancy of the webpage and thus improve its search engine ranking.

But good internal linking can be practised regardless of which website structure you use.

My Preferred Website Structure

I’ve built content websites using both flat and directory site structure. Personally, I prefer to use a flat website structure.

Reason? There are less potential problems.

For example,

1) I don’t have to worry about whether to use /, ./ or ../ when doing internal linking.

2) When promoting the website, I don’t have to worry that I may make a mistake in the url, since in a flat structure, all the urls have the same format of website.com/articleXX.htm.

My Advice On Website Structure

In conclusion, my advice is to use a flat website structure and link related articles together. This combination should be enough for search engine optimization. After all, website structure is just a small part in the entire SEO puzzle. What’s more important is backlinks and keyword analysis.

This is an article to give you a simple guide on how to get affiliate traffic as an affiliate marketer. It’s also my answer to one of our members’ question below:

“I have been trying to do internet marketing for some client but I have not succeeded. This is by being sales representative of this company and I be paid for every customer who sign up and pay. My problem is that I don’t know how to go about it. Please help me and show me how to do it.” - Susan

Hi Susan, what you’re doing is just a form of affiliate marketing.

In your case, your probably have a personal arrangement with your client instead of through an affiliate network such as ClickBank. But the idea of getting affiliate traffic is essentially the same.

Successful affiliates either own the customers (usually because they already have a high traffic website) or they know where to find the customers (usually through search engines or online advertising).

Understanding this fact, your job of finding affiliate traffic is now simplified.

Either…

1) you build niche websites to attract targeted traffic for the product you’re promoting, or

2) you get traffic through search engine optimization and online advertisements such as Adwords.

Each of these is a huge topic by itself. My job is to point you to the right direction. You have to find out the details. (More details can be found in LeadsLeap blog.)

1) Build your niche websites

As an affiliate, your long term goal is to ‘own’ the traffic. You don’t want to keep advertising and sent traffic to your affiliated site.

When I say ‘own’ the traffic, what I mean is creating your own content website, service website or blog, and building your own list.

Yes, it’s much harder than simply posting an advertisement and making a commission straight away. But it’s a business that can potentially grow exponentially and provide you with a nice passive income in the long run.

Building your own niche empire requires long term commitment from you. It’s not a quick fix. But it’s important.

If you want a quick fix, read on……

2) Advertise

Let’s say you are helping your client to sell an apartment in Denver. You can do some keyword research and post some Adwords ads to get potential buyers.

For low competitive keywords, you can leverage on Web 2.0 sites to get top ranking in the natural search results. This will save you some money.

You may also want to advertise in various online and offline property directories.

For some products, you can also generate affiliate traffic through article marketing, a.k.a. bum marketing.

As I said in my previous blog post, the key is to find targeted affiliate traffic.

Final words….

Last but not least, I want to instill into you the idea of passive and fresh traffic. Passive traffic are regular traffic to your website. They can be people on your list or your blog patrons. Fresh traffic are new traffic from advertising, search engines or other means.

You must make it a goal to create a system that builds both passive and fresh traffic. This will give you long term success as an affiliate marketer. Once your system is up and running, you will not have to worry about affiliate traffic all the time.

So, what is the most effective online advertising? Is it banner advertising? Is it social networking? Or could it be LeadsLeap advertising?

My answer is - none of them!

The most effective online advertising is not about the advertising tool or media that you use, but how you use them.

For example, some people say that banner advertising is not effective because people are ‘banner blind’ nowadays. I disagree. To illustrate, some of you may know that I’m crazy about link building for SEO. So whenever I come across a banner ad about new ways to build backlinks, I’ll click on the banner to find out more.

From this illustration, you can see that the key here is not about the tool or media that you use to advertise. The key here is whether you are advertising to the right target audience.

That brings me to an important conclusion:

“The most effective online advertising is one that is the most targeted.”

Some Web 2.0 gurus nowadays keep touting about how they can get tons of traffic and make money through social networking. It may be true for them. But you must understand that many of them are selling products teaching people how to make money through social networking. So their products will appeal to many social networkers.

On the other hand, if you are selling a niche product, spending hours a day in Facebook or Myspace may be a waste of your time.

I’m not saying social networking is ineffective. But you need to find the correct social networks for your niche.

For example, if you are in the “Make Money Online” niche, you can participate in social networking sites for internet marketers like this one.

Some new members ask me what kind of ad they should put up in their LeadsLeap account. What is your answer?

LeadsLeap provides a free online advertising platform for internet marketers. We generate fresh traffic through our blog (the blog you’re reading now), and our blog discusses about internet marketing stuff. This means our traffic are people interested in internet marketing and online advertising. Knowing the profile of our traffic, what do you think would be the best ad to advertise? It’s definitely not some Jewellery Offers or Sports Shoe Sale!

In conclusion, the most effective online advertising can be achieved through highly targeted advertising solutions. The challenge is to identify the right places where you can find your potential customers. Once you identify these places, you can use all the advertising tools available to direct the traffic from those places to your website.

Let’s discuss about the different alternatives available for bulk email autoresponder. This topic was inspired by one of our members, Grow, who asked the following question:

“I have collected names, email addresses, some telephone numbers. How do I send info to them if I do not have any autoresponder? Thanks” - Glow

In general, there are 3 ways to send bulk emails. The 3 ways are:

1) Using a bulk email software - free or one time cost
2) Using a subscribed autoresponder service - monthly subscription
3) Installing your own autoresponder script - free or one time cost (but require premium hosting)

Today we’ll discuss how each of the bulk email autoresponder alternative works, and the pros and cons.

1) Using a bulk email software

A bulk email software is not really an autoresponder because you can’t schedule a series of automated email messages. However, it’s an easy way to send mass emails.

With a bulk email software such as WorldCast (free for non-commercial use), you can import a list of names and email addresses, and send personalized bulk emails to the recipients.

PROS: The software works from your computer. No server is required. It works like your email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, except that it allows you to send personalized emails. Each recipient will receive a personalized email with his name and other customized info.

CONS: Mailing is done via your local ISP (internet service provider), such as AOL. If you mass mail to a huge list, you may get a warning email from your ISP. In the worst case scenario, your account may be suspended. But when I say huge, I’m talking about more than 10,000 people. If you only send to a few hundred people, it’s usually okay.

Remark: This is probably a good solution for Glow, since he has already collected a list of names and email addresses and simply need a cheap and easy solution to contact the list.

2) Using a subscribed autoresponder service

Another alternative is to subscribe to an autoresponder service. I believe many of you are familiar with such services.

For a monthly fee, you are given a certain capacity (in terms of the list size). You can schedule autoresponder messages and broadcast emails to your contacts. You can also set up the system to capture email address. This is what we call “opt-in list”.

PROS: The service is hosted with the service provider. So there is no need to worry about server issues. Also, it’s the upmost responsibility of the provider to maintain a good relationship with the different spam filtering systems in the market in order to ensure high delivery rate. As such, you can focus on building your business instead of solving technical issues.

CONS: It’s a monthly subscription service and there is “almost” no return! I say so because due to increasing spam, many premium autoresponder services do not allow users to import email list. This means you can’t simply move your list from one service to another. You should be mentally prepared to pay monthly fee of about $20 in long term.

3) Installing your own autoresponder script

Technically speaking, if you don’t want to pay someone $20 a month for an autoresponder service, you can install an autoresponder script to your server and run your own autoresponder system with the same features.

PROS: There is no recurring fee. You can go to www.hotscripts.com and search for some free or low cost autoresponder script. Our free M.Y.O.B list builder script also come with a complete autoresponder system.

Another advantage is that you have full control over your database, i.e. you can import any database into the system.

CONS: You need to install the autoresponder script in a premium server. Cheap hosting usually limits your mailing rate to 500 emails per hour to conserve its server resources. When I first started, I wasn’t aware of such rule and I sent 5000 emails in an hour. Needless to say, I soon got my hosting account suspended.

Another disadvantage of running your own autoresponder script is that you have to monitor the delivery rate of your emails and maintain a good relationship with the various spam filtering systems to prevent your server from being blocked.

Final Remark……

Regardless of what bulk email autoresponder alternative you use, remember not to spam. There are people selling email list. DO NOT buy those list! Most of them are useless and mass mailing to them will risk your account being suspended.

New Info Update……

After reading this post, a member emailed me asking this question:

“What are the names of the spam filtering systems and how does someone maintain a good relationship with them?”

I don’t have a list of spam filtering system. The most basic thing you should do is to have 3 email accounts (hotmail, yahoo and gmail) and make sure that you can deliver emails to these accounts. If any one fails to receive your email, search for the relevant guideline and do the necessary changes to your server. When done, report to them what you’ve done.

For other filtering systems, I only react when someone complains. Say someone emails to support saying that he cannot receive the verification email. If this is a persistent problem, go to the website of the email provider for that email address,  look for the correct reporting channel and simply follow the instruction. If you can’t find any reporting channel, send an email to the support and ask them for help.

In the most extreme case, I once had about 10 email correspondences with a filtering company to prove to them that I’m running a legitimate business and they should get my server off their blocked list.

Today I’m going to illustrate to you how you can use LeadsLeap’s free affiliate link cloaker to do some amazing stunt! If you have not been using it, it’s time to start thinking about it.

1) Be a more professional Clickbank affiliate

A Clickbank affiliate link looks something like this:

http://yourid.productid.hop.clickbank.net

When people click on the link, they will go to the product website that looks like this:

http://ProductSite.com/?hop=yourid

The “hop=yourid” is an eyesore, isn’t it?

With our free affiliate link cloaker, you can send traffic to http://ProductSite.com and still get your commission.

Technically, here’s how to do it:

1) For “Original URL”, you insert http://yourid.productid.hop.clickbank.net.
2) For “Destination URL”, you insert http://ProductSite.com.
3) For “Show Destination URL In Browser”, you choose Yes.

What will happen is the link cloaking system will direct traffic to the Destination URL (http://ProductSite.com) directly while loading the Original URL (http://yourid.productid.hop.clickbank.net) in the background and get your affiliate ID cookied.

Your visitor will see http://ProductSite.com in their browser. But when they make a purchase, you’ll get the commission. How is that stunt?

2) Earn affiliate commission without people clicking your affiliate link!

You may have written a review about a product but when the reader is ready to purchase the product, he may Google for the product and go direct to the salespage without clicking on your link.

Using the same feature above, you can send traffic to your review page and earn commission even if the visitors don’t click on your affiliate link!

Here’s how to do it:

1) For “Original URL”, you insert http://yourid.productid.hop.clickbank.net.
2) For “Destination URL”, you insert http://YourReviewPage.com.
3) For “Show Destination URL In Browser”, you choose Yes.

Similar to the first case, the link cloaker will direct traffic to your review page while loading your affiliate link in the background and get your affiliate ID cookied.

So even if a visitor skip your affiliate link and go directly to the product page, you will still earn the commission!

3) Use other people’s website as your marketing tool

Often when you are blogging, social networking or posting in a forum, you may share a web resource with other people.

How about turning any web resource into your marketing tool?

For example, you may be replying to a forum thread about how to promote ebook and in your reply, you can write something like:

“I found a good blog on how to promote ebook. You can read it here.”

When people click on the link, they will come to a blog that talk about ebook promotion. You are providing a true value to the forum readers. At the same time, you have included an ad bar to the page and can direct the traffic to your product or affiliated product.

Click on the “read it here” link above to see what I mean.

In this example, I’ve used a post from LeadsLeap blog . But you can use any website as the ’seed’ and put your ad to the page. For example, you can share a Youtube video and then put an ad bar to the page.

This is done through the AdFrame Settings in our free link cloaker (see the screenshot below). There are a couple of options in the settings. You can explore and play with the parameters on your own.

I hope that these 3 illustrations can inspire you to think of other ways to use the free affiliate link cloaker. If you’ve other ways to use this tool, feel free to share with us using the comment form below.

To all LeadsLeap members, I wish you and your family a happy and prosperous new year!!

On behalf of LeadsLeap team, I sincerely thank you for supporting LeadsLeap.

LeadsLeap was started in January 2008 and it’s turning to one year old.

Here’s what we’ve achieved over the past one year:

1) We’ve grown from zero member to 27000 members and we are now growing at a rate of about 100 members a day.

2) We’ve delivered more than 2,500,000 leads to our members.

3) We launched LeadsLeap blog, a viral blog that our members can advertise in. This blog is now well established in the search engines, getting more than 1000 visitors everyday, sending traffic to our members websites.

4) We also launched 3 powerful tools that our members can use for free.

The first tool is our Advanced Link Cloaker.

It’s probably the most powerful link cloaker available in the market. Besides helping you to cloak and track links, you can also use it as an advertising tool to promote your businesses.

The second tool is our rebrandable viral software - Affiliate ID Manager

Besides having a useful software to manage all your IDs and passwords, you can rebrand the software with your ads, distribute it for free and promote up to 6 programs of your choice.

The third tool is of course our latest M.Y.O.B. List Builder Script

This PHP script is my answer to the most common newbies’ question - “How do I start making money online?” M.Y.O.B. stands for Mind Your Own Business. That’s the message I want to give to all our members. Start your own business, build your own list, run your own affiliate program and sell your own products. With your own business, you can promote any affiliate program you like.

What’s next in 2009?

We’ve a list of new developments laid out for 2009. We simply need time and effort to turn ideas into realities.

Our developments basically focus on two areas.

1) To attract more traffic so as to deliver more traffic to our members.

2) To provide more values to existing members by creating more useful tools.

3) To continue educating our members by sharing my marketing experience in our blog.

My vision is to turn LeadsLeap into a community where members can advertise and build leads, and have access to useful tools that can give them a competitive advantage in winning the internet marketing game.

So in 2009, look forward to more traffic, more free tools and of course, more practical tips from LeadsLeap.

Once again, Happy New Year!!