4 Common Mistakes In Online Advertising By Kenneth

Today we are going to discuss the common mistakes that marketers make when advertising online. By understanding these mistakes and avoiding them, I hope you can improve your success rate in any form of online advertising.

Without further ado, here is the first mistake:

1. Bark Up The Wrong Tree

I once heard a story that goes like this:

Someone once asked a notorious bank robber why he only robbed banks. The robber looked a little surprised and simply answered, ‘That’s where the money is.’

This story becomes popular in the teaching of success philosophy because that’s the essence of success in doing anything. The same principle applies to online advertising. Before you start to advertise, the first question you need to ask is, ‘which online sites does my prospects frequent?’. Whatever the answer is, your challenge is to find ways to reach out to those sites and channel the traffic to your own site.

One common thing I hear from advertisers is they think their product is for everybody. If you think that your product is for everybody and you simply advertise everywhere to get traffic, chances are most of your advertising effort may be wasted.

2. Not Having A Bait

Most advertisers simply use a hook to catch fish instead of using a bait. They have a salespage that tries to sell something and they expect people to buy. This will work if the traffic has been ‘presold’. But if the traffic arrive at the salespage without learning about your product from somewhere else, the chance of making a sale is slim. If you have a mechanism to convert them into your list, you may have a second chance. Else, you will miss them forever.

A bait system is different in the sense that the objective is not in the sales. The aim is to reach out to people who can be your potential buyer by giving them part of your product free (not just giving away a freebie to build list, but to give away part of your product to let them have an experience with what you are selling). Say if you are selling a software, you can give away a ‘lite’ version of the software.

The concept of a bait system is very simple. Basically there are only 2 groups of people, let’s call them group A and group B. Group A are those who are not interested in what you are offering. Group B are those who are interested. In Group B, there are 2 more sub-groups, Group B1 and B2. Group B1 are those who are ready to pay and Group B2 are those who are not ready to pay. Most advertisers only target Group B1. In a bait system, your target is Group B. Once you have people in Group B in your net, sales is almost guaranteed, provided you deliver true value.

3. Too technical

Everyone knows it is important to prepare a good ad, but most people are too obsessed with the technical details. One typical example is they focus too much on the ‘features’ rather than the ‘benefits’.

You may ask, what’s the difference?

Features are the language for techies whereas benefits are the language for layman. For example, if you are selling a download manager, one of the features of your product may be ‘to be able to split files into parts and download them at the same time’. If you just leave it as it is, it may not make much impact. But if you translate that feature into its benefit, that may mean that your software can ‘download files 4 times faster’. ‘Downloading files 4 times faster’ is a benefit that will appeal to normal users, as compared to telling them about the technical aspect of it.

Another example is if you are selling a course on how to create a WordPress blog, instead of advertising it as ‘how to create a WordPress blog in 1 week’, you should say ‘how to create a money-making blog in 1 week’, or if you have a testimonial to back you up, you can even say ‘how to create a blog that makes $1,337 in its first week, starting from scratch!’.

Just remember, it’s the benefits that will appeal to people, not the technical details or the process of how to do it.

4. Lack Of Following Up

Last but not least, many marketers focus on generating traffic but fail to follow up with the traffic generated. When I say ‘follow up’, I don’t just mean converting the traffic into sales. That part of following up is important, but it’s not the only follow up you need to do. Another follow up that is equally important is encouraging the traffic to promote you.

As I always said, advertising is like a fire starter. You need it to start a fire, but if you want the fire to sustain and grow big, you’ll need to tactfully position lots of charcoal around it. That ‘charcoal’ is your follow-up system that encourages your existing traffic to bring in referrals.BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

Blogger Mistakes You Can’t Afford To Commit By Kenneth

Who am I to teach you about blogger mistakes? I’m not a big-time blogger. Neither has my blog won any award.

But I do know one thing, that is, how to use my blog as a tool to achieve my goal.

I’m telling you this because this is exactly the TOP mistake that many new bloggers make.

Many new bloggers tend to treat their blog as some kind of online holy grail, thinking that as long as they have a blog, traffic will come and they will make money.

What they should do instead is to think of blog as just another a tool. It should be part of the business, not the business.

I know this is a bit theoretical and ‘dry’, but this is an important fundamental that you must understand, if you want to follow my advice.

As you know, I get most of my writing inspiration from our members’ questions. Today’s topic on blogger mistakes is no different.

Here’s the question I received from a member:

“I respect you as a master marketer with great knowledge and insight. Could you have a quick look at my blog, http://membership-millions.com/blog/, and suggest ways to get it really going… and also to start making REAL money??” – Izzy Joseph

I’m not sure how Izzy’s blog is performing now. But if I were to be critical, here are some advice I can think of:

1) Build A Business, Not A Blog

As I said, I don’t consider myself as a blogger. My approach to blogging is from the perspective of a marketer.

To me, blog is one of my marketing tools for my business. In other words, blogging is not my business, and it should not be your business too.

Frankly, I can’t see a business in your blog. What I can see instead is you are trying to write some articles and get people to buy the Clickbank product you’re affiliated to. That’s not a business.

Your domain name is membership-millions.com. If I were you, I will turn the blog into a resource centre that teaches people how to make money from membership. You may write articles that teach people how to start a membership site, how to promote membership sites, etc. You can engage a freelancer to create a membership script to give away.

If you choose to go the membership way, everything you do should be related to membership. Your opt-in freebie should be an ebook about membership. Your articles should be about membership.

If you are afraid that you may not have enough material to write about membership, your worry is unnecessary. Everything about internet marketing can be twisted to link to membership. For example, your little twitter ebook can be renamed to “how to promote your membership with twitter”.

2) Forget About Making Money

Beggars can’t be choosers. New bloggers can’t be choosers too. For a new blog, you must focus on providing useful content and forget about making money.

At the beginning stage, you MUST establish your blog as a useful resource that people can turn to. Promoting affiliate products should be a by-the-way thing.

For example, while teaching people how to promote their membership websites, there may be some traffic tools that you can recommend.

You are more likely to make sales if you focus on providing useful advice rather than focusing on promoting the product.

3) Be Extremely Proactive In List Building

If you have been reading my blog, you should know that I advocate ‘list’ before ‘blog’.

If you haven’t started building a list, you should do it asap.

When I say building a list, I’m not talking about the opt-in form that is currently in your blog. I’m talking about a separate squeeze page that you actively advertise and promote to get people to opt-in.

You need to build your list fast so that these subscribers can become your blog readers. Else you are forever talking to dust.

Check out our list builder script in your members’ area and see how it can help you in this.

4) Practice Search Engine Optimization

Your blog may be SEO ready, but your articles are not, or at least I can’t see how a new blog can get to the top search result for a highly competitive keyword of “How To Make Money Online Fast” with some 1,390,000,000 competitions.

If you don’t understand SEO, learn it. If you have learnt it, practise it.

Build links to your blog. Research your keywords before every post. This is the minimum you should do.

You won’t see immediate effects. But in 3 to 6 months, you will reap what you sow.

These are the immediate things you as a blogger.

Moving ahead, there are tons of things you can do to keep you very busy. For example, you can sell your own product, start your own affiliate program, create a brand for yourself in your niche and a lot more.

The key message I want to put across to you is a blog is just a tool to achieve your goal. Create a game plan and see how a blog can fit into the picture instead of the other way round.BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

8 Online Sales Tactics That Are Proven To Work By Kenneth

If you are selling something online, do you simply put a price tag to it and wait for someone to buy?

You may say no, but I’ve seen too many people doing that. Yet they are wondering why no one is buying their products/services.

In online selling, or any kind of selling for that matter, there are certain sales tactics you can use to boost sales. There is no need to reinvent the wheels. Today we will look at 8 of them.

1. Price Discount

Probably the most common strategy is price discount. I’m sure you are familiar with price discount. The only thing I want to highlight here is don’t just sell a product/service. Instead, you should try to sell a package, so that the overall value looks higher.

Say if you are selling an ebook for $10, don’t just sell that ebook. Bundle it with lots of other complementary products that you can find or create, so that the whole package has a perceived value of hundreds of dollars. You want to make your visitors feel stupid to reject the offer.

Price discount is often combined with other strategies described below.

2. Free Gifts

If you are tight on pricing, or you don’t want to create a price war, the next strategy you can use is to offer free gifts.

Such a strategy is often seen by affiliate marketers when promoting affiliated products. Since affiliate marketers can’t give a direct discount to the product they are promoting, what they do is they bundle the product with a bonus product. Whoever buying through their referral link will be able to receive the bonus product for free.

3. Time Sensitive Offer

In addition to having a price discount and/or free gift, you can further push sales by adding an expiry date to the offer. It is commonly known as a time-sensitive offer.

You can set an actual date when the offer will end, or you can just say, “It is a limited time offer. We may end the offer any time.”

4. Limited Offer

Besides limiting the time, you can also limit the product or freebie. For example, you can have an offer where the first 50 buyers will receive a special free gift.

You can also limit the product itself. This is often seen in membership sites, where the number of members are capped at certain number.

5. One Time Offer

One time offer is an offer that is presented to the prospects only once. If they miss it, they will miss it forever. Such offer is usually presented after an opt-in page or as an upsell after the first sale is completed.

6. Escalating Pricing

In this sales tactic, the price will increase after certain number of products are sold. The marketer will usually have a table showing the price distribution.

7. Purchase With Purchase

In this technique, the buyer is offered an option to buy another item at a reduced price. It’s something like One Time Offer. If the buyer miss the offer, he/she will have to buy the item at the full price later on.

8. Continuity Plan

The last tactic is continuity plan. The marketer will think of ways to make the buyer keep on coming back and buy more. Common methods you may have seen are coupons, points, discount voucher etc.

For example, when a buyer bought something, you can give him some eDollar, which can be used to offset his future purchase. Even though the amount may not be a lot, many buyers are likely to remember that he has some ‘money’ with your website and will come back to buy more whenever they need something that is offered on your website.

Generating sales is not luck. It’s science. By using a combination of these sales tactics we’ve discussed here, it’s not hard to come out with a sales process that works. Coupled with a good product and service, making money online is inevitable. BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

Best Free Website Promotion Tips With No Product By Kenneth

The best free website promotion strategy is joint venture. But for joint venture to work, you need to have a product that people are willing to promote. Most online newbies start off without a product of their own, so joint venture is not something that they can do. In our discussion today, we will look into the best free website promotion tips and strategies for website owners who do not have a product of their own.

1) Build a list

The first free website promotion tip is to build a list in multiple forms. In the past, building a list is limited to email list. But with the advancement in social media, you are able to build a list without actually owning the list. For example, you can get people to subscribe or like your Facebook page, so that whenever you post something, their will be notified.

There are pros and cons in different forms of list building but generally, you want to build list in as many different forms as you can handle. The reason is simple. People may change their email addresses or their preferred social media. By building a list in multiple forms, you increase the longevity of your list.

2) Blogging

The next best free website promotion strategy after joint venture is blogging. Blogging serves three purposes.

i) It builds trust between you and your traffic.

ii) If done right, it will bring you free traffic from the search engine.

iii) It is used to engage first-time visitors.

The first two purposes should be obvious. Let me explain the third purpose a little further. When someone comes to your website, you need to quickly make them feel that this website is a good resource they should revisit. There are a few ways to do it. One way is by having a good blog that is full of tips and strategies on the topic concerned.

3) Content Marketing

Content marketing includes article marketing, video marketing, forum marketing, free ebook giveaway and blog comment marketing. The whole idea is to provide useful content on third party websites so as to channel the traffic to your website.

4) Social Media

Many marketers have raved about how easy it is to get traffic from social medias such as Facebook, Pinterest etc. The power of social media is in sharing. People are curious about what people share and what people like.

To get people to talk about your website, again, your website must provide something useful. That goes back to our second tip – blogging. For example, if you blog regularly, you can share the article on your Facebook page and encourage people to subscribe or like that page. People who do not want to miss your post will want to subscribe to your Facebook page. This will in turn arouse the interest of their friends to visit your website.

If you use wordpress for blogging, you can install a free plugin called Jetpack. It has a feature that allows you to automatically share your blog post on your favourite social networks.

5) Traffic Exchange

Traffic exchange is not just limited to traffic exchange networks. The traffic exchange I’m talking about here is exchanging leads with other website owners in the same industry. It is another form of joint venture actually, but in traffic exchange, you don’t need a product.

For example, if you have a list of say 500 people, you can approach another blogger in your industry with similar traffic size and propose a cross promotion. It can be in the form of a guest post or in the form of an email promotion.

6) Create Values

Last but not least, your website must create values. Internet marketing is getting harder than ever, and to win in the competition, you must provide quality content and/or tools. Don’t build a website with the intention to make quick money, instead, build one that focus on quality. If you do that, it will have a multiplying effect on your promotion effort.BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

How To Nurture Your Affiliates By Kenneth

As mentioned in my last post, I’m going to share with you tips on how to nurture your affiliates.

Those of you who have read the Insider Advertising Report will know that to be successful in advertising, you have to understand the characteristics of your prospects. Likewise in affiliate management, you have to understand the characteristics of your affiliates.

Here are the characteristics of your affiliates:

1. They are unmotivated.

2. They are uncreative.

3. They are lazy.

I believe these characteristics hold true for all affiliates, until you have their attention and interest in your program.

Once you understand the characteristics of your affiliates, nurturing them becomes a simple task of asking the right questions. The tough part is answering those question.

Questions that I keep asking myself are:

1. Why would someone promote our website?

2. How can we encourage affiliates to take action and start promoting our website?

3. What other creative tools can I develop to make it easier for our affiliates to promote us?

4. Since affiliates are lazy, is there a way to promote our program without having to promote it?

Let’s look at how we answer these questions in one of our websites, LeadsLeap.com.

1. Why would someone promote our website?

When our members promote LeadsLeap, other than making money, they are at the same time building 10 levels of leads whom they can advertise to.

In addition, whenever their referrals read ads, they earn advertising credits on autopilot. Many of our members earn thousands of advertising credits every month without reading any ad on their own because they have a team of people earning credits for them.

2. How can we encourage affiliates to take action and start promoting our website?

Our answer to this question is to have a Bonus Credit reward program, where members with just 20 personal referrals will receive 500 advertising credits every month, forever! Needless to say, many members try to get their 20 referrals by hook or by crook.

In fact, the rewards do not just end there. The more people they refer, the more bonus credits they receive every month. That’s why we have affiliates promoting our program on a continual basis.

3. What other creative tools can I develop to make it easier for our affiliates to promote us?

One powerful tool (or rather a system) that has brought lots of traffic to us is our blog referral system.

The way it works is quite simple. Our blog (which is the blog you’re reading now) is a viral blog. Our members can send traffic to any article in the blog with their affiliate ID. When the traffic signs up, it becomes their leads. When the traffic click ads, the members earn ad credits. This system alone has brought us lots of traffic because whenever we make a blog post, many of our members will inform their leads about the article. Sharing good information is always easier than sharing an opportunity.

To further leverage on this system, we create a LeadsLeap Widget that members can place on their websites. With this widget, our members will be able to send traffic to read the useful information on our blog while helping them to build leads and credits on autopilot.

4. Since affiliates are lazy, is there a way to promote our program without having to promote it?

Is it possible to get someone to promote your program without that person promoting it?

Definitely yes. Google uses this trick all the time.

The answer is to provide useful tools that webmasters can use. At the same time, those tools carry your brand.

We have quite a number of such tools and we are developing more. An example is our SlideSense advertising system. Members can use it for their own advertising purpose, but indirectly they are promoting LeadsLeap. Other tools we’ve developed include our Advanced Link Cloaker and List Building Script.

Some Final Notes

You may think LeadsLeap is an advertising system. That’s why we have the luxury of advertising credits and tools that we can leverage on to come out with incentives that address to these questions.

It’s not true. (At least you can’t allow yourself to believe it’s true.)

Regardless of which niche you’re in, you will be able to find a similar solution for your niche. Just believe and think hard. One day, you may wake up with an innovative idea that may just work.BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

How To Generate Leads Online – And Why Most Fail By Kenneth

Remember This: The key in leads generation is not how to generate leads online but what to do with those leads.

Everyone wants to know how to generate leads online. Honestly, the answer is everywhere. The key is not HOW but WHAT to do with those leads.

First, let me quickly run through with you how to generate leads online.

1) Advertise

There are lots of ways to advertise online, including PPC, email advertising, banners etc. What’s important in advertising is knowing where to find your prospects and then pay to reach them. It’s as simple as that.

2) Article and video marketing

Article and video marketing are essentially the same. Everyday, millions of people are searching for information, in the form of article or video. Your challenge is to make your article/video available to them, and then lead them to your website.

3) Search engine optimization

I don’t have to explain what is search engine optimization, do I? Get your website found in the search result and you’ll see lots of free traffic to your website. I’ve written lots of articles about it in this blog.

4) Joint venture

This is one of the fastest ways to generate lots of leads within a short time, similar to advertising. But it is risk free, because you usually pay your joint venture partners a commission rather than an upfront fee.

5) Make use of the media

How do you know when the lastest generation of iPhone is out? Is it through Apple’s advertisement, or through the media telling you that people are queuing outside Apple shop? The media is always looking for events with news value. If you can create such events, there is a chance that you can get the media’s attention and have some free publicity.

6) Affiliate marketing

Run an affiliate program and give your affiliates enough reasons to promote your website. The second part is the key. If you simply have an affiliate program, you are likely to fail.

7) Social media marketing

My definition of social media marketing is not about Facebook or Twitter. To me, it is simply an online version of word-of-mouth marketing. People interact, be it through Facebook, Twitter or forums. If you can get people to talk about your product, you will get lots of leads from everywhere. You can either leave it to luck, to plan to make it happen!

I probably may have missed a few ways to generate leads online. If you have other ways, feel free to list them in the comments session below.

The Missing Key – What To Do With Your Leads.

Knowing how to generate leads is not enough, in fact, it is NEVER enough. That’s why many people who spend lots of time and money in leads generation eventually give up.

As I mentioned, the key is in what you do with your leads, not how to get them.

First, you need to give them what they want. Don’t try to sell them. For example, if you want to sell them a business opportunity, give them a report on the step by step of how you or someone else create a million dollar business from scratch. If you want to sell them a software, show them how to use that software and give them a free trial.

Second, get their emails. Typically, you’ll give them what they want WHILE they give you their email address. This is a standard list building process. But it may not be always emails. You can have some online applications that your leads can use free on a regular basis and you can always reach them by posting a banner or an ad on your website. The key here is to retain your new leads, so that you have multiple chance to sell them!

Third, keep providing values. Forget about selling. The thing about humans is they always want more, and they are willing to pay to have more. So your job is to give them more values, some are free, some are charged. Just keep creating and providing more values and you will see takers for your charged values.

Forth, give them enough reasons to talk about you. This is the most important part that decides whether you will have a ‘struggling’ or a ‘thriving’ business. You may have a product that is really good and people are happily paying you to use it. But if all of them are simply using it without telling other people, you will have to work hard to get more leads on your own. On the other hand, if just 1% of your users talk about you in their blogs, Facebook or forums, you will eventually see your leads multiply automatically, and by then, your job is to make sure you continue provide good values to your old and new leads. Sounds good?

As you can see, the key in lead generation is in what you do with the leads, not how to generate those leads. Too many people simply get a turn-key website or start a WordPress blog, and then simply bulldoze their way to get leads, only to wonder why their business is not growing. I’m not saying turn-key website or WordPress blog is not good. They are just tools with standard features. You need to think of how to make them alive, alluring and more importantly, viral.BlogLinks

Regards,AffiLinks

How To Drive Traffic To Blog By Kenneth (Admin)

Now a days it seems that everyone is having a blog, but many have no idea how to drive traffic to blog. I hope today’s discussion can shed some light to bloggers who are struggling to drive traffic to their blogs.

From time to time, I get people asking me if they should advertise their blog to get traffic. My advice is always ‘No’. If you have a new blog, remember, advertising it is not the way to get traffic. There are some exceptional cases of course. But in most cases, advertising is not a good traffic source for blogs. (Blog plays a different role in advertising. I may discuss this next time.)

Have you heard of gurus saying that blogging is a way to get traffic?

Yet bloggers are scratching their heads wondering how to drive traffic to blog.

Shouldn’t blogging generate traffic? If so, why do you need to drive traffic to your blog? Shouldn’t you just keep blogging and your blog should generate traffic on its own?

Well, you know things are not that simple.

A new blog is capable of generating traffic on its own ONLY IF it’s optimized for search engine. Else, you’ll have to think of ways to drive traffic to the blog and that can be tedious and even frustrating to some.

In my opinion, if you were to start a blog, it must be optimized for search engine. That’s the laziest way to drive traffic to your blog.

How do you build a search engine optimized blog?

There are just two things you need to do.

1) Write search engine optimized posts

Most bloggers simply blog whatever they like to say. You can do that if you are Paris Hilton. If not, you’re not likely to attract people to read what you’re writing.

A ‘purpose-driven’ blogger will do careful keyword research and optimize his article for search engines before posting it to his blog. Almost every blog post is his arrow that aims to shoot down the top position in the search results.

2) Build backlinks

The objective of a blogger should be to turn his blog into an authority site.

My definition of an authority site is one with a high PageRank. To get a high PageRank, you have to get many backlinks to your blog.

The game of search engine optimization is unfair. Authority sites receive more attention and better rankings from the search engines. You can write very good content but if your blog has no backlink, you’re not likely to get much attention.

Link building is boring and tedious. And you won’t see the return immediately. But it is necessary.

Did I say ‘necessary’?

Besides the normal ways of getting backlinks, such as submitting articles, press release, forum marketing etc, there is an innovative way that you should explore if you are serious.

It’s to create a free online application that people are interested to link to. If you don’t know how to create one, you can always get a freelancer to do it. But you need to come out with the idea.

For example, in the blog industry, many bloggers create free WordPress plugins. Useful plugins get lots of recommendations from other bloggers and thus backlinks.

Final comments

Building a blog that can drive traffic on autopilot takes time and effort. In the meantime, you should look for other ways to drive traffic to your blog. The way I recommend is to build a list. You can easily build a list through advertising and offering something for free. Then you can send this list to read your blog.

This is the beginning stage, when you have to actively drive traffic to your blog. If you keep following the two steps above, your blog will eventually get traffic from the search engine automatically. This is when your blog can become your faithful and passive traffic generator. This process can take 3 to 6 months, depending on how hard you work.BlogLinks

Regards,AffiLinks

How To Write Text Ads That People Will Click By Kenneth

This is not the first time I get members asking me how to write text ads. There is a simple formula that I use to write text ad or almost any other types of ads. Today, I’ll share this formula with you.

My Simple Formula To Write Text Ad

Writing text ad is an art. Different marketers have different style of writing.

For me, I follow a simple formula. My formula is:

A-E-A

A – Attention

E – Expectation

A – Action

Most text ads are made up of a headline (or title) and a text body.

The objective of the headline is to grab Attention.

The objective of the text body is to build Expectation and call to Action.

For example, I may write an ad like this:

I Made $6K in my First Month

Learn Exactly How I Did It.

Free Download.

Can you see how I use the A-E-A formula in this example?

How To Write Attention Grabbing Headline Or Title?

There are many ways to write a headline or title that grabs attention.

For example, you can ask a question that invokes curiosity. You can also tell a story like I did in the example above.

One simple way is to use some power words that can capture people’s attention.

Some of these power words include: How To, Secrets, Free, Download, Exposed, Save, Amazing, Time-Sensitive, Proven, Step-By-Step, Shocking Truth, Cheap, Urgent.

Why Build Expectation?

Once you grab the prospects’ attention, you need to tell your prospects what they can expect from you after clicking your ad.

This is the hardest part and if it’s done right, 90% of the battle is won.

To build an expectation is to create a desire. As you know, once a person has a strong desire for something, he can do anything to satisfy that desire.

In this case, once you successfully build an expectation, your prospects will be motivated to click on your text ad to get what they’re expecting.

Again, there are some power words you can use to build expectation. These words include: Learn, Discover, Find Out, Increase, Reduce, Eliminate, Save, Loss, Gain, Heal, Change, Transform.

Call To Action – The Final Push

Many marketers put too much emphasis in the call to action. My view is, the most important element is Expectation building. Once the expectation is built, call to action is simply a final push.

Call to action is for the subconscious. What I mean is subconsciously, our hand react to some words.

For example: Click Here, Download Here, Instant Access, Start Here, Get It Now, Buy Now, Watch It Here, and … (i.e. ending your ad with …)

Anyone Can Write A Text Ad Like A Guru

No one is born an ad writing guru. Every ad writing guru I know has a habit of keeping a library of ads that they think is good.

Whenever you come across a good ad, keep it and refer to your collection whenever you need to write an ad. It’s just a matter of time before you become another expert in writing text ad.BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

How To Come Out With Innovative Ideas That Sell By Kenneth

Many people can come out with innovative ideas. But coming out with innovative ideas that sell requires some skills. Today, I’m going to show you how to do it.

There are only 3 steps to follow:

1) Find a hot market with lots of buyers

2) Identify the limitation of existing products in the market

3) Think of an innovative solution to overcome that limitation (Tips: the innovative solution is usually a combination of two existing solutions!)

That’s it. If you follow these 3 steps, you will be able to come out with innovative ideas that can easily make you money.

Let me show you how others, including myself, use these 3 steps to come out with profitable ideas.

In the 90s, someone came out with a viral lead building system known as a Safelist system. In this system, everyone in the system is able to send emails to each other, and hence the name “Safe List”, i.e. a list that is safe to send emails to. When it first started, everyone was excited because suddenly, they can reach out to thousands of people for free. However, what they didn’t realize was at the same time, they were receiving thousands of other emails from other members too!

Soon, people realized that their emails were flooded and they started to think of alternatives. A simple solution was to redirect those emails to free accounts such as Yahoo and Hotmail accounts.

Guess what, the trick soon spread throughout the industry and everyone started doing the same thing.

The end result was, everyone was trying to email to everyone but no one was reading any email!

As you can see, lead generation is a hot market. But the existing ‘Safelist’ solution has a big problem. People do not want to flood their emails.

Here comes the idea maker who thought of a solution to this problem……

In 2000, a renowned internet marketing guru, John Reese, came out with an ingenious system. He combined the idea of safelist and network system. In his novel system, members can send emails to their 10 levels of members. Let me explain……

For example, A1 recruits B1 and B2 who become A1′s level 1. B1 and B2 then recruit C1, C2, C3, C4 who become A1′s level 2 and so on. It’s something like your referral structure at EmailCashPro. To A1, he will be able to send emails to all the Bs, Cs, Ds, Es, Fs…. all the way to the 10th level.

This is a powerful system because in this system, the maximum number of emails each member can receive is limited to 10, since only the immediate 10 uplines can send emails to the member. But the member can email to thousands of people in his 10 levels of network. If you don’t get what I mean, take out a piece of paper and work out the maths. It’s not hard to figure out.

John’s ingenious system has shaped the lead generation industry. Today, many other lead generation programs use a similar system to build leads.

What John did was he took the safelist idea, which is an existing system but with a limitation, and combined it with network building system, which is another existing system. I hope you can see that nothing truly innovative is created here. He merely combined two systems into one in order to overcome the limitation of the safelist system.

John’s system solved the problem of members’ emails being flooded with thousands of emails. However, members in the system still have to receive emails from their 10 uplines in the system, which is still obtrusive and annoying. In reality, many people in such system still divert their emails to junk accounts.

There you have it. Another limitation that is waiting for someone to overcome.

This time, I grabbed this opportunity to create a system that allows members to build leads without having to receive any email from any member in the system. You may have guessed it by now. Yes, the system is called LeadsLeap.

Basically, I took John’s system, which is already an improved version of the safelist system, and combined it with contextual advertising system. For those who don’t know what is contextual advertising, go to Google.com and do a search for “birthday gift”. Look at the advertisements on the right hand side. Those are contextual ads.

In a nutshell, members of LeadsLeap.com will not have to receive emails from any other members in the system. They will only receive info-packed newsletters (now info-packed blog) from me.

The twist in the system is that I allow members to post their contextual ads in my newsletter. To a member, besides reading high quality newsletters, he will also see the contextual ads posted by his 10 uplines. He can click on the contextual ads in the newsletter if he is interested in the ad. If not, he can just read my newsletter and learn more about making money online.

Again, nothing truly innovative has been created. I simply combine two existing systems into one in order to overcome the limitation of John’s system.

That’s it. 3 simple steps you can use to come out with innovative ideas that sell!

Make use of these 3 steps. The next winning innovative idea can be from you! BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

How To Start An Online Business By Kenneth

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.

Regards, AffiLinks

Read This Before You Start A New Online Business By Kenneth (Admin)

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.

8) 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.BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

What I Did Right When I First Started Online By Kenneth (Admin)

Following my discussion on the Internet Marketing Mistakes I Made When I First Started Online, today I shall share with you what I did right when I first started online.

I hope my experience can help shorten your journey to online success.

Here we go…

1. Understand The Principles Of Success

I always find reading boring until I discovered a section called Self Help in the bookstore. Since then, I became a self help junkie, reading all kinds of books and attending all kinds of seminars on success, communication, sales, wealth creation, mind power, brain power and even spirituality.

All these readings eventually led me to quitting my job, starting a few brick-and-mortar businesses and failing at every one of them.

If I had given up my dream then, I may now be another skeptic of success philosophy.

But when I turned to online business, everything I’ve learnt began to apply. Be it the law of giving and receiving, the theory of delayed gratification, the concept of focus equals to power or the idea of think and grow rich, all the principles of success that I’ve learnt are now the foundation of my online business.

Personally, I think such foundation is very important because it keeps me focused on what is really important in building a successful business (or even building a successful life), instead of simply chasing after the money.

2. Learn Programming

Many gurus suggest that a marketer should focus on driving the business and should outsource other technical stuff such as website creation to others. For me, I prefer to learn and do it myself.

I’m not trained in HTML, PHP or Javascript, but I make it a point to learn enough so that I can communicate with my programmer at the same level and do minor programming or debugging work when necessary.

The advantages of knowing about programming are as follow:

i. I can save money on simple programming work, since I can do it myself.

ii. I can respond faster to any bug report and system improvement.

iii. The more I understand about programming and its strengths and limitations, the more ideas I can come out with.

3. Build Something

The idea of affiliate marketing sounds great – making money selling other people’s product, with no worry of customer support. Hence, many internet marketers started as an affiliate.

But what I do differently from other affiliates is I will make sure that in the process of promoting as an affiliate, I build something that belong to me.

The idea of building something is very broad. You can build a list, build a reputation, build a traffic funnel, build a network of people or build a virtual real estate.

For example, if I want to promote a forex product, instead of simply posting adwords to send traffic to the product or building mini site specially for that product, I will create a forex content site or even create a forex web service. I’ll promote my own website instead of promoting the affiliated product directly.

If the product that I’m promoting is discontinued, I can always promote other similar products. The most important thing here is I’m spending my time to build something that will give me traffic in long run.

4. Go Passive

Let me ask you a question. If you can spare 1 month of your time, would you spend that month doing something that will earn you $5,000 in one go, or do something that will earn you $200 every single month?

Some people told me that they’ll choose the $5,000 option, and they will repeat the process and earn more $5,000 every month. After one year, they would have earned $60,000!

But for me, I will go for $200 every month. I will repeat the process to earn more of such income. My first month may be merely $200, but if I spend 1 year to build the same kind of income, I would have established $2,400 every month by the end of 1 year, and $24,000 every month after 10 years. After 10 years, I can stop working and still earn $24,000 every month, whereas in the first case, once you stop working, your income stops.

You may think this is an ideal situation and things may change. You are right. There is no real passive income. However, with such income, I can stop working for weeks or even months and my income will still be pretty stable. More importantly, I don’t have to worry if I can pay my bills next month. This gives me peace of mind to continue building even more websites and earn even more.

Different people prefer different ways of doing things. What I’ve presented above is what I THINK I’ve done right. You may have different experiences. Whether you agree or disagree with me, leave your comments below, so that others can decide what is the right thing to do for them.BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

How To Write Good Blog Post Titles – With Example By Kenneth (Admin)

In this article, I’ll share with you how to write good blog post titles, with step by step example showing you how I would do it.

First, let me explain what is a good blog post title.

An effective blog post title is one that serves two purposes.

1) It helps to get the article ranked well in the search engines.

2) It encourages someone to click and read.

The reason for these two purposes are obvious. First, your article must be able to rank well in keywords that people search for and when these people see your title, it must capture their attention so that they will click and read your article. If your blog post title can fulfill these two purposes, it is a good title.

Writing great blog post titles is quite simple. In this article, I am going to show you step by step example of how I would do it.

1) Decide what you want to write

For example, today I initially wanted to write an article about ‘how to write a blog post title that can bring you traffic’. My purpose of the article is to highlight to you that you should do some keyword research before writing a blog post title.

As you can see, my final article is not titled that way. That’s because of Step 2. Read on…

2) Do some keyword research

Keyword research doesn’t have to be intensive. It just take me less than 5 minutes.

Once I decided on the topic to write, I went to Google and searched ‘blog post title’ and google’s auto-suggested the following phrases

blog post title generator

blog post title seo

blog post title examples

So people are actually looking for blog post title examples. Point taken.

Next I searched for ‘how to write blog post titles’ and google’s auto-suggested the following variations

how to write blog post titles

how to write good blog post titles

how to write great blog post titles

how to write an effective blog post title

Since ‘how to write good blog post titles’ is the second option, it means there are more people searching for ‘good’ rather than ‘great’ and ‘an effective’.

3) Put yourself in the user’s shoe

Now, ask yourself, if you were to search for ‘how to write blog article titles’, what kind of title will you click?

The answer to this question may vary. In my case, remember that in my previous keyword research, I noticed that people are actually searching for ‘blog article title examples’? That gave me an idea. Whoever looking to learn about blog title will be interested to see a few examples. In fact, people like to see examples. It’s human nature.

Now my article title becomes obvious. I am going to name it ‘How to write good blog post titles – with example’.

From SEO point of view, this article can be ranked for

how to write blog post titles

how to write good blog post titles

blog post titles examples

That’s not all. I’m going to use the word ‘great’ and ‘an effective’ in the article, so that the article can be ranked for ‘how to write great blog post titles’ and ‘how to write an effective blog post title’, if the competition for these phrases isn’t keen.

From human point of view, the title is what they search for, plus it offers step by step example of how I would do it. This makes the article different from other articles that simply titled ‘how to write good blog post title’.

There you have it. Once you get the title right, your job is simply to write a good and useful article that meet the user’s expectation.BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks

3 Tips On Writing Powerful Sales Letters By Kenneth (Admin)

I’m in the midst of doing some touch up for LeadsLeap sales letter. While writing the sales letter, I recalled some powerful tips Ewen Chia has shared with me (personally, over a cup of coffee).

Remember I told you that Ewen likes to compose and test different kinds of sales letters? Talking about writing powerful sales letters, I truly believe that he’s the MAN, not because he is famous but because a number of my successful clients (those who advertise with me) use his strategies.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to share with you 3 powerful tips that chances are, no one has told you before.

I’ll use one of his actual sales letters to illustrate to you how to use these 3 strategies.

1) Convert every testimonial into a headline

We all know that adding testimonials is a powerful way to increase the conversion rate. What most advanced marketers do when it comes to adding testimonials is to add a photograph, add an audio testimonial and highlight some of the important quotes.

One thing that Ewen did differently is that he will take one phrase from each of his testimonial and turn it into a headline for that particular testimonial.

Take a look at these testimonials to see what I mean.

Do you see that every testimonial has a red color headline?

Fact is, most people are not going to read every testimonial. These outstanding headlines allow the prospects to quickly grasp the gist of every testimonial. The idea is to quickly increase the confidence of the prospects in you and your product without having to go through every testimonial.

Brilliant strategy I am using now without fail.

2) Create a summary break down of the value of each offer and let the audience know what is the total value

Many marketers like to throw in lots of bonuses to increase the perceived value of their offer. This has been a known strategy to increase the conversion rate.

But when this ideas was popularized, what most marketers did was to overwhelm the prospects with so many bonuses that the prospects lost focus.

The idea of adding bonuses is to increase the overall value of your offer. To achieve this ultimate objective, Ewen created a table that lists down every offer that he’s made and attach a monetary value to each offer. He then summed up all the values and gave a grand total value of say $2,345.00. (But for a limited time, you can get everything at just $47. tha na…..)

Click here and SCROLL UP two pages to see what I mean.

You may think this is hype. It is. But it works!

I’ve been in the advertising industry for more than 2 years now. Everyone says they don’t like hype. But the truth is they do. A hyped up sales letter sells better than a no-hype sales letter, especially in an advertising environment, i.e. strangers selling to strangers.

3) Re-emphasize the main benefits of your product before asking your prospects to buy

After reading a long sales letter, it is indeed possible for someone to lose focus on what’s your main offer.

Also, have you ever come across a long sales letter with everything under the sun but the only thing that you fail to find is the price? This is not a joke. I ever read a sales letter in which I had to use the search function to search for the ‘$’ sign so as to find out how much the product cost!

What Ewen likes to do is to put everything into a box, just before asking the prospects to buy.

Take a look at how he did it here.

First he reiterated the main product offer. Then he re-affirmed the main benefits that the prospect will receive, the price of the product and the money back guarantee.

I like his style, both as a marketer and as a potential buyer. With this summary, I know exactly what I’m going to get and what I can expect.

One last thing to note is that his call for action is never “Buy Now”. His calls for action are usually reiteration of the benefit of his product, for example, “Yes, I Want To Become A Super Affiliate Now” or to create a sense of urgency, for example, “Get in now before the price shoots up soon without warning!”.

Do you have more tips and experience to share? Add your comments below……BlogLinks

Regards, AffiLinks