What are the most important things to consider before you venture into a new online business? Is it the technical know-how? Or perhaps it’s the traffic strategies?

In today’s blog, I’ll give you a checklist that you can refer to whenever you want to start a new online business.

1) Is the market easily targetable?

Before you do anything, you need to make sure that the market you are trying to get into is targetable. What I mean is your prospects should belong to a community that you can easily locate. This is important because when your business is launched, you need to know where to look for your customers.

This may seem common sense, but in reality, many netpreneurs believe that their product targets everybody. As a result, they advertise everywhere and have no idea why the traffic doesn’t convert.

2) Is there a problem in the market you’re targeting and does your product address to that problem?

In most cases, a business idea is generated when the founder faces a problem that he fails to find a good solution in the market. If this describes the cause of your business idea, then congratulations, as you’ve found THAT problem.

However, if you have no idea what problem your business is solving, you really have to think of one and sell that idea as a problem. Otherwise, you are going to have a hard time convincing people to buy your product.

3) Is your product unique in the market?

To me, this is the most important point before I take action on any business idea.

If you have studied marketing, you may recall the term USP, which stands for Unique Selling Proposition. A good USP is one that not only provides a solution to the problem in Point 2 but one that is unique.

You don’t have to be Einstein to create a unique product. A product can be unique by simply combining two or more ideas into one, or it can be an idea that exists in some part of the world but not found in your territory or country. Or it can even be a cheaper way of providing the same solution and the low price itself can be the uniqueness.

No one can tell you if one USP is more profitable than another. This is where your vision comes into play.

4) Is there a viral component to your business model?

If you think getting traffic is tough, that’s because there isn’t a viral component to your business model. If all the traffic has to be generated by you personally, it’s just a matter of time before you give up internet marketing.

To truly understand the meaning of viral, look at Facebook. While most people think Facebook is doing the world a favor, by providing a good platform for people to connect, in actual fact, the world is actually doing Facebook a favor, as every Facebook user is a free promoter of Facebook, helping Facebook to expand its user base.

Viral components can include many things, from having an affiliate program to providing viral tools. However, the best form of viral component is a system that can easily convert your users into your affiliates, without them having to intentionally promote your website. This means the more they use your product or service to benefit themselves, the more they promote you!

5) Do you have a traffic retention strategy?

Getting traffic is easy, keeping the traffic is harder, converting the traffic into sales is the hardest. A good traffic retention strategy will help you keep the traffic that comes to your website, so that you not only have more chance to convert the traffic into sales, but also have more people promoting your website, if you’ve done the right thing.

The most common form of traffic retention strategy is getting people to optin by giving away freebies. As I said, this is the most common form but with more and more marketers using such trick, you need to be more innovative than that in order to stand out from the rest.

6) Do you have an automatic sales conversion strategy?

People need to be reminded to buy from you. If you need to do this manually, both you and your prospects will get sick and tired of it. Instead, what you should do is to think of a subtle sales conversion strategy that is always reminding your prospects that there is something better waiting for them.

Imagine a person who needs to get from point A to B everyday. He can either get there on foot or take your taxi. It will be annoying if you were to approach this person everyday. Instead you just have to make sure that he sees you everyday and he knows about your offer. One day, when he sees the value of your service, he will buy.

7) Is the need for your product long-lived?

If you sell something that people will only need to use once, you will have to find a new prospect after every sale. That is tedious.

On the other hand, if your product can service a person for live, like an insurance policy, you are going to have recurring income from every sale you make.

Another way of looking at ‘long-lived’ is are you selling a fad? A fad is something that suddenly bursts into a full buying frenzy and then, just as quickly, fizzle out. If you are selling a fad, you may be making some quick money but such income is not lasting. Soon you will be back to square one and you have to start all over again.

Is the operation of your business self-running?

How much time will it take for you to keep that business running? If the running of your business requires a lot involvement from you, it means this business is going to keep you so busy that you may have no time to expand the business or explore other business and investment opportunities.

As a basic principle, you should spend most of your time growing your business or establishing other businesses, not running the business.

Of course, no business is 100% self-running. If most processes can be automated or can easily be outsourced, that business is worth exploring.

Let me give you an example of what I mean by running a business. Say if you run a membership site that provides new video tutorials every month, you will have to spend time preparing the videos. You can outsource, provided that the outsource personnel can do an equally good job, and the business is profitable enough for you to engage that person.

However, there is an interesting twist. If you are indeed in such a situation, you can turn the ‘maintenance work’ into a growth opportunity. For example, you can turn your videos into a MRR (Master Resale Right) product and allow your customers to sell or bundle it with other products. This way, the same videos suddenly become a viral tool that will bring you more traffic. You can also produce videos based on interviews with other marketing gurus. This way, you are growing your affiliate network while at the same time delivering good values to your customers.

9) Is your business building an asset?

Most people do business to make money. But that’s not enough. In addition to making money, you have to make sure that your business is building an asset other than money. An asset can be a collection of websites, which the guru call virtual property, or it can be a network, which can be in the form of a subscriber list or a network of affiliates, or you may be building an infrastructure that you can use for your future businesses.

Looking beyond money and focusing on building assets is the way to ensuring that your online venture is a lasting one. Whether your current business is going to survive tomorrow or not, you know that you are sure to win because the asset that has been built is going to benefit you no matter what.

Sometimes I ask myself, “What would I do if I were a newbie in internet marketing?”. Let’s answer this question today. I believe it will benefit some of our readers here.

1) Build Adsense Income

Yes, the first thing I will do is to build my Adsense income.

Until today, I am still grateful that I added Adsense in my overall game plan.

The thing is, in the processing of building Adsense income, I would have mastered a few important skills, which include website building, simple server management and most important of all, search engine optimization.

I don’t have to know how to sell or promote things. As long as I know how to bring in traffic, I am likely to make money!

It’s truly a “Learn As You Earn” scenario.

When it comes to making money from Adsense, I will not start a blog, which most people will do nowadays. This is because blogging takes time. I want to spend most of my time learning more skills and exploring other ways to make money. (Note: When I say “starting a blog”, I don’t mean starting a blog filled with prewritten articles. I am referring to a blog where I need to personally write articles and post frequently.)

2) Explore Affiliate Marketing

The next thing I’ll explore is affiliate marketing.

There are many different strategies to make money as an affiliate marketer. For example, you can create different niche sites to sell different Clickbank products. But I wouldn’t do that. Somehow I don’t feel that it’s going to bring me long-term passive income. (I may be wrong.)

Instead, I will become a ‘guru’ type of affiliate marketer, where I build an info-rich website (not blog) and a list. I’ll get traffic through search engine optimization, advertising and viral marketing.

Once my website is established, I can sell many different affiliate products and I don’t have to worry about whether a particular affiliate product will disappear tomorrow because I own the customers.

When choosing which niche to get into, I will look for a niche where there is a lot of potential to earn passive income. For example, I may get into the stock trading niche where I can promote brokering services that earn me recurring commissions.

Through this venture into affiliate marketing, I would have learnt the art of copywriting, advertising and viral marketing. These are essential skills that will make me a powerful online marketer in time to come.

Did you notice that I said I will start an info-rich website (not blog)? Basically I will not start a blog until I feel committed to the niche.

3) Mess Around, Explore and Dream Of Big Ideas

In the process of building my Adsense and affiliate income (while learning all the IM skills at the same time), I will spend some time exploring different online programs and tools. While some of them may help me in my existing websites, the main objective of doing so is to learn more business models and marketing strategies that other marketers are using.

From time to time, I’ll also day-dream about big ideas and when a good idea strikes me, I’ll ‘ignorantly’ jump into it and never say die until I turn that idea into reality. The irony is what comes after a good idea is always a pool of sh*t and you’ve got to swim through that pool before seeing fruition of your idea.

Finally, throughout the journey, my mindset will be, “Though there is no guarantee that every venture will turn out to be a success, all I need is one successful venture to make a killing online.” The good thing about internet marketing is the downside risk is always manageable, but the upside potential is unlimited.

Most of the “How to make money online for beginners” articles on the web are either trying to sell a turnkey money making system or attempt to provide a huge list of a-z ways to make money online. But none of them have the answer I have in mind.

That’s why I decided to write my own version of how to make money online for beginners.

I started reading about how people made money online since 1999. Like many beginners, I opted-in to many gurus’ lists, reading their newsletters, trying and failing different opportunities.

At that time, information was pretty fragmented. Different gurus seem to have different ways to make money online. I was learning, trying, failing and confused.

Later I learnt that there is a technical term for this stage. It’s called initial perturbation. It happens whenever we are exposed to something new. It’s the beginning of a new learning process.

So my first ‘how to make money online’ advice for beginners is - be ready to learn, try, fail and get confused. It’s a natural process anyone will have to go through. During this time, you’re subconsciously building your industry knowledge, marketing senses and business acumen.

In 2005, I had an opportunity to help my employer at that time to build a simple company website. No one in the company knew about website building, so I volunteered to build one.

Did I know anything about website building? Not at all. I picked up a book called Frontpage For Dummies, read it over a weekend and spent the next one week building the company’s website after the office hours. With the basic website building skill, I started building all kinds of websites. That’s when the real game started.

So my second ‘how to make money online’ advice for beginners is - learn the technical stuff. If you believe in those gurus who tell you that you don’t need to know anything technical, well, good luck to you. All I can say is, the more competent you are technically, the more tricks you can do and the higher your chance of success.

Like many of you who have your own website, the next problem I had was how to promote my websites and bring traffic. That was when I seriously learnt about SEO, copywriting, advertising etc.

So my third ‘how to make money online’ advice for beginners is - practice purposeful learning. Purposeful learning means you only learn things that you need to use now. For example, if you build a content website, you need to learn and practice everything about SEO. If you build a squeeze page, you need to learn and practice everything about copywriting and advertising. Purposeful learning will make the learning process fun and you are more likely to appreciate and internalize what you’ve learnt.

Finally, my last ‘how to make money online’ advice for beginners is - treat yourself like an employee. Apart from thinking of new money making ideas and strategies, all other things about making money online is boring and repetitive. For example, website building is boring and repetitive. Traffic generation is also boring and repetitive. If you treat yourself like an employee, set datelines for yourself and push yourself to meet the datelines, you are more likely to complete the boring and repetitive tasks and eventually get the rewards you deserve.

In summary, here’s my advice on how to make money for beginners:
- Get over the initial perturbation
- Learn the technical stuff
- Practice purposeful learning
- Treat yourself like an employee

If you can follow through these four advices, there’s no reason why you can’t succeed.

My objective of this article is to give you an overview of how to make money with affiliate marketing, so that you can make a better decision on how you want to kick start with affiliate marketing.

Generally, I can categorize the different ways of making money with affiliate marketing into 3 basic ways. Let’s discuss each of them……

1) First Way - Direct Promotion

The first way to make money with affiliate marketing is by promoting the affiliated product directly .

A popular idea that many beginners are taught is to find a good product from Clickbank, create an ad for it and advertise to get traffic and sales.

Or if it’s a business opportunity, one may simply advertise the affiliate link to get traffic and downlines.

This method of making money looks very attractive, especially among the newbies. Some marketers I’ve spoken to said that this is their preferred method because the money is fast and they don’t have to bother about customer service and site maintenance.

This may be the easiest way to start making money with affiliate marketing. But if you ask me for advice, I would suggest that you put in a bit more effort and move beyond this method.

Reason: If you’ve been reading my work, you’ll know that I don’t fancy quick money. My focus is always on ‘building’. For long term success, you need to spend your time building something, either build a list, a network, a website or a community. What I don’t like about this method is you’re sending your hard earned traffic away, without building anything for yourself.

2) Second Way - Build A List

A better alternative to the first approach is to build a list. Instead of sending the traffic directly to your affiliated site, you focus your marketing effort in building a list FIRST, promoting other affiliated products LATER.

There are many variations to this method.

The most common strategy is to create a squeeze page, give away some useful freebies, and entice people to opt-in.

Another smarter strategy is to create a product in your niche, design a big launch around it, get other marketers to promote it for you, and instantly build a huge list that you can use in the future.

It takes a lot more time to set up such a website as compared to the first approach. But you are building yourself a list and reputation in your industry. You can easily build upon any success you have established and earn more in the future.

But there is one important downside to this approach.

Other than your free gift or product, there is nothing much on your website. Once your visitors get what they want, they are not likely to go back to your website again. The only way you can build further relationship with them is probably through a newsletter.

3) Third Way - Build A Useful Website

The third way to make money with affiliate marketing is to build a useful website around your niche.

The easiest form would be a blog. You can build a list and then start a blog to update your list with useful tips, promoting other affiliated products at the same time.

Or you can create a service site that provides useful online tools that people in your niche can use. This will entice them to come back to your website again and again.

One of my personal preference is to create a content website that is full of useful articles in a particular niche. The articles will help me to attract free traffic from the search engines. The website will have several product recommendations from me and these are the products I am affiliated to.

The disadvantage of this approach is of course the time and effort required to create and (for some) to maintain the sites. But the benefit is obvious. Once the initial traffic is built, you are likely to see continuous traffic to your website and hence consistent affiliate commissions to your account.

Although this third way is my preferred way of making money with affiliate marketing, it may not be the best way for you. There are many success stories in each of these approaches. You need to try out the different methods and see which one you are most comfortable with. Hopefully my discussion above can help you kick start with your preferred method right away.

“Please advice me on how best to get internet network marketing leads. I just joined an MLM company whereby I need to introduce the business to prospect and they purchase a product before I will get my commission. How best or which way can I do this in order to be successful in the business?” Winnie from West Africa

Apparently there are many ways to get internet network marketing leads. Different network marketing gurus will claim to have their proprietary leads generation methods.

I don’t have any proprietary leads generation methods. But I do know some effective ways to get internet network marketing leads and I’m going to discuss some of them here.

1) Just Advertise

Almost all internet network marketing companies have their standard lead capture squeeze page. If your company doesn’t have one, run away from it.

The easiest way to get quick networking marketing leads is to advertise the lead capture page in ‘established’ lead generation websites.

I’ve seen many of my customers (my advertisers) getting good response using this simple method.

One warning is that if your network marketing company is a popular one, this method will not be effective. This is because the lead capture page has been overused. Fresh and interesting lead capture page usually can generate better response.

2) Create Your Own Lead Capture Page

As I said, fresh and interesting lead capture page usually can generate better response. So instead of relying on your company’s standard promotion tools, why not create your own lead capture page?

Of course, in order to create one, you need to learn copywriting, basic html etc.

3) Use Funded Proposal Concept

This is by far the BEST way to get internet network marketing leads.

The idea of funded proposal is to charge your prospect upfront before selling them the actual backend product.

If this is the first time you heard of this term, you may wonder why these prospects are so stupid. Who in the right mind will pay for something upfront knowing that they will be asked to buy other things later on?

If you have such a doubt, wait till you see the example below……

Example - A $10 Internet Marketing Course

Will you pay an ‘experience’ internet marketer $10 for a half-day course teaching you how to make money online?

Many people will.

During the course, the marketer will ‘really’ teach you some good internet marketing skills and at the same time show you a good business opportunity that he is making money with.

See the idea?

The $10 fee will help to offset for his advertising cost. These prospects are in a way paying him to sell them.

4) Give Away A Book, Audio CD or DVD

Giving away free ebook for leads generation is becoming old school. Advanced marketers are now giving away a real book, Audio CD or even DVD. The cost of production is negligible but the perceived value is much higher. The response is hence higher.

5) Brand Yourself As A Guru

You must have seen some internet network marketing gurus online. They sell products to teach you how to make lots of money from internet network marketing.

This is another typical example of funded proposal, where they sell you their products upfront and then their network marketing opportunity subsequently.

Anyone can be a guru. It all depends on how you position yourself.

This is another episode of Tuesday With Kenneth where I help our members with their challenges. Today we have Jane, who shared with us her interesting business idea.

We are living in an economy right now where we are all short of money. I started a site where you can get books for $1.00 and I will buy them back for $.25 and pay the media postage. The site is http://janes-dollar.com. Please let me know what you think? - Jane

Hi Jane,

It’s an interesting concept, though I’m not too sure how profitable it will be.

From the look of your website, it seems that you are not too competent in web programming. It’s okay, but you must keep in mind that if you want to grow, you must take one of the 2 paths:

- Master web programming yourself
- Outsource web programming and learn how to manage programmers

That is something you need to keep in mind and work on consistently. For now, you just need to promote your website and measure the response.

Promoting your website is pretty straight forward. You can go to various book forums to spread the words out. At this stage, you need to know what is the market response to your service.

Bear in mind that market response depends on 3 factors:

- The effectiveness of your sales letter (in this case, your homepage)
- The source of your traffic (whether it’s targeted)
- The business model

If you are not getting response from your promotion effort, it must be due to one of these 3.

About your sales letter / homepage

My assessment is that your homepage is weak and it needs some major improvement.

You need to ask yourself an important question, “What do you expect your visitor to do when they visit your website?”

If you want them “to buy a book from you for $1″, then you need to show them what book you’re selling.

If your objective is to get them to sign up your newsletter, you should include the signup form on the same page and give them a good reason why they should opt-in.

Remember, when people visit your website, it’s your job to arouse their interest and give them a clear instruction on what to do next. If not, they will just do one thing - leave!

About your business model

As I said in my earlier post on How To Start An Online Business, never reinvent the wheel.

Your business is actually buying and selling cheap books. A simple search for “buy cheap books” and “sell books” returns several established websites that are already doing that.

As an entrepreneur, your job is to think of how to make your service better and different from other competitors.

For now, it’s apparent that you can’t win them in terms of popularity. You also can’t beat them in terms of website features and design. But there is one thing you can be better now - you can have a better business model, since you have the advantage of evaluating and improving their business models.

Do not be intimidated by these established sites. Start with whatever resources you have now. As long as you keep upgrading your skills and keep moving towards the vision of a better business model, your business must grow and prosper.

Do you have a huge online business but have no idea how to make your BIG online business idea work? This is the problem that one of our members, Ken, is facing.

Here’s the gist of his long question to me:

“I always felt it was best to market a store-front (that has within it all the “items” I want to sell/offer/promote) versus trying to (futilely) promote a multitude of sites individually. That’s a noble idea, perhaps. How do I make it work?” Ken

I shook my head when I read Ken’s problem.

If you try to create a website that sells everything, as what Ken is doing, you are not likely to succeed. (Ken, I hope you’re reading this.)

No, it’s not another “niche marketing” theory, where you are told to create tons of sites for different niche. Niche marketing works and it’s what I’m doing. But our discussion today is how to make your BIG online business work.

The problem with BIG online business idea is that it’s too big for a new website that has no traffic and no content.

It’s like trying to build a mega shopping mall with only 2-3 tenants selling things.

The best way to show you how to make your big online business idea work is to share with you a couple of case studies.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Amazon.com. It sells many things from laptops to shoes. But when Amazon first started, it simply focused on selling one thing: Books!

There is nothing wrong with having a vision that one day your website will sell everything. But when you first started, you must focus on one niche and that niche is your knife!

Let me repeat. Your first niche to building a BIG website is your knife. It needs to be sharp enough for you to cut through a cake and get your first pie from the market.

I hope you get the analogy.

When your traffic grows, you can then diversity into other things.

Let’s look at another example, Ebay.com.

When Ebay first started, it focused a lot on auctioning collectibles. Why? Because at that time, people were not used to buying and selling anything online. But there was a growing trend that people were trading collectibles online.

Ebay was smart enough to capture this trend and grew its popularity and member base from there.

Focus and then diversify. That’s the simple strategy to make your big online business idea work.

Recently I’m getting more friends and relatives asking me how to start an online business. It’s not rocket science, but it’s not easy maths too.

Starting an online business is pretty much the same as starting a brick and mortar business, except that the cost is much lower and so is the risk.

When I say it’s pretty much the same as a brick and mortar business, I also mean that you need to be entrepreneurial, to be able to ’smell’ the needs in a market and to have a vision. Are entrepreneurs born or breed? I don’t know. What I believe is, if you think you are, you are.

So, if you are entrepreneurial and want to learn how to start an online business, read on……

Step 1: Never reinvent the wheel

Believe me. Almost all the smart and innovative ideas you can think of are already done by someone else online, in one way or another. If you think you’ve a unique online business idea, it just means that you’ve not done enough research.

So, if you have any online business idea, the first thing you need to do is head over to Google and type in some keywords related to your business idea. Thoroughly check out all the top websites that provide similar product or service. This means you may have to try out their products/services and find out their pros and cons.

Next, you have to evaluate those pros and cons and come out with a BETTER idea.

Remember, the job of an entrepreneur is not to invent things. His job is to seek proven business ideas, improve on those ideas and get a piece of the pie out of the market, preferably a bigger piece.

Step 2: Think of the marketing system

Most newbie entrepreneurs have one problem. They spend too much time trying to perfect their products.

Having a good product is important. But what’s more important is the marketing system.

Without a good marketing system, no matter how good your product is, it’s going to be hard for your online business to grow.

Regardless of what you sell, your marketing system should answer 3 important questions:

- How can the system attract and capture a list of potential users and/or customers?
- How can you make the system viral, such that users will refer more users?
- How to convert prospects into customers?

For example, recently I developed a great online tool (I think) that can help me to manage all my stocks (I’m talking about the stock market). I believe if I roll this service out to the market, someone will be willing to pay for it. But before I even think of developing the tool for the multiple users, I first have to think of the 3 questions above.

Here’s my thinking process:

I probably have to develop an online system where stock traders can subscribe for free and manage limited number of stocks. This will answer question #1. If they find the service useful and want to manage more stocks, they will upgrade their account for a monthly fee. That will answer question #3. The tough part is question #2 - how to make it viral. I’m thinking of developing a system where users can allow the public to view their portfolios or their watch list and sign up followers to their watch list. It’s something like the Twitter effect. This will make the website viral.

That’s how I apply my theory in practice.

Step 3: Work

Once the idea is formed and the marketing system is well thought out, the last step to start an online business is to work.

This is the overwhelming part because there are so many things to be done, yet you can only move one step at a time.

First you have to build the website. You can buy a ready script if it’s available, use the free MYOB script that I’ve developed for our members or get a freelancer to develop the website for you, either from scratch or by modifying existing scripts.

When the website is ready, you have to promote it and keep promoting it. And that’s only the beginning……

That’s how to start an online business. After it’s started, to maintain it is another challenge. But if you start off on the right foot, things will be a lot simpler in the future.

By the way, I recently came across a good article on getting clients for your business. It’s worth reading. You may get a few ideas for your business.

Today, we’re going to discuss about identifying scam programs and making money through Pay Per Click marketing. It’s in reply to a members question.

Here’s his question:

“There is a lot of money making program out there, how to know it is not scam? I am thinking of Pay per click, how to start with it?” - Alvin Leow

Hi Alvin,

Frankly, there aren’t that many scams out there on the internet. The only thing you should really avoid is Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is one that typically makes money from newcomers and use that money to pay the existing members.

There are quite a few Ponzi schemes out there, but it’s very easy to identify them.

When choosing money making programs, don’t look at the income potential. Instead, study the business model and ask yourself whether the model is sustainable. If it’s not sustainable, or you have doubt about the model, don’t join!

Alternatively, you can avoid all these get rich quick programs all together and simply focus on the mainstreams of internet marketing, which are things like affiliate marketing, Adsense marketing, Ebay marketing and providing online services.

You mentioned about Pay Per Click marketing. The idea of Pay Per Click marketing sounds like an easy way to make money online. But it isn’t.

Let me explain……

Many people associate Pay Per Click with affiliate marketing. The idea is this: “Pick a Clickbank product, post a PPC ad, get instant traffic and make sales”.

That sounds easy. But the truth is even the best Pay Per Click marketing expert needs to spend a couple of hundreds to test their ads before they can strike gold.

Pay Per Click marketing has evolved so much that it is getting harder for newbies to get involved.

Why?

Because there are many spying tools that can help Pay Per Click marketers to spy on other people’s ads and find out which keywords and ad phrases are profitable. As a newbie, without such tools, you are searching for gold in the dark and that can be quite costly.

I don’t mean to discourage you but it’s the fact.

The good thing about Pay Per Click marketing is that once you hit some ads that are profitable, they can be your cash cow for quite a while.

My advice is if you want to make money through Pay Per Click marketing, make sure that you follow the right guide and run different campaigns in at least 5 different niches. If you simply want to run an ad and test the water, you need to be superbly lucky to hit the jackpot.

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.