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.
hi Kenneth,
I like your idea of using the Review And Complement method, but I guess we have to take due care when using it. If we are promoting too many things at one time, it might confuse the user, or even make our sales page look desperate. Just my 2 cents thoughts. :)
That was what I used to believe. I used to believe that advertisers should only focus on 1 product in every presell letter. But my client’s result proved me wrong. If written correctly, your ad looks like a story showing the various products you’ve tried and tested. And more importantly, people buy that kind of story!!
Unwittingly, I use this method in my blog. The book I am selling is about alternative medicine.
I took the time to go into great detail about how I can remember my grandmother using this to help us stay healthy as we were growing up poor in the dust of Mississippi 50 years ago.
I didn’t think it was a marketing concept – I just thought it was a good idea to let people know the truth and give them some facts about ‘old’ medicine.
I guess it could be both, tho, because I compared it to an unappealing alternative – a life dependent on pills and potions.
SolarGoddess
I agree, too many people just use the generic posts that come with products and people want to see testimonials. Once people trust the information that you have they will believe your testimonials. Readers trust someone that gives more information than everyone else
This method actually works. I have created my own review page on 3 products and I actually got 6 sales. But which sale you get actually will have to depend on the product’s own sale page itself.
I have strongly recommend my visitors on product A but all eventually bought product C! Product C appear to have a better conversion rate due to the well written sale page.
One side note, I got my all sales from Google. But when I advertise on Yahoo using the same site with the same content, surprising I got no sales.
Yes, personal touch always helps. Getting quality traffic is tough. Today’s post will help many of us to understand importance of Preselling. Majority of sales letters are still faceless, so buyers feel more comfortable reading reviews from someone with a photo and contact email-id :)
This is a good marketing strategies, i always use blogs to write product reviews and its been working.i love the second method most but one needs to be careful promoting various product so the visitor who can’t afford all don’t loss interest seeing that he can’t succeed getting the main product itself.
This is excellent advice to those who are seeing poor advertising results from using the generic advertising pages.
Nothing comes close to the advertising power of a personal ‘been there done that’ approach.
It’s also suggested not to recommend more than 2/3 products/services at once.
If successful with picking up new subscribers, then of course you can extend this personal approach.
However, Always offer something of value and Always remain open and honest.
And most importantly, give them an easy way to contact you – don’t rely on email – it is NOT reliable.
Hope that helps.
Greg.
An easy way to contact me.
http://profitsdesk.com/?sponsor=galasal&r=Leads_Leap
By understanding who you are, who your customers are, and how to reach them, will assure you of spending your advertising dollars wisely. Computer
You know, it seems that every now and then… the new thing comes out and everybody starts talking about it as if it has always been some secret…just heretofore…undiscovered truth.
The new thing I want to rant about today is advertising with the personal touch. Everybody here agrees that a picture and a personal phone number on your blog is the only way to go. I don’t.
You seem to believe that it gives the customer a sense of reliance in you because they can see your picture and dependability because they have your phone number if anything goes wrong. I don’t.
I disagree with both of those assumptions. I disagree not as a seller…but as a buyer. I don’t give a flip who you are as long as you sell me what I need and it does what its supposed to do. But I will care if I look at your pic and you look like you just finished off a fifth of scotch or your wife-beaters are all stained and dirty. And people do post non-professional pics all the time.
I won’t buy anything from people like that. A pic of you at a backyard bar-b-que is very unprofessional and you are probably better off not posting a pic at all.
So, at the very least, put on a clean wife-beater and play with the kids or hug your wife after your photo.
Hello,
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Milton
Kenneth koh,
After reading your post, I now know better about the importance of advertising.
It is important to know how to advertise it.
Good post as usual Kenneth,
I know when I recommend a product to my list and give examples on how it helped me, I get a much better response.
Another excellent post kenneth with some sound advice.
Tony
Hi Kenneth,
I agree with you, good idea for my next step newbie guide.
Thank you
Hi Kenneth, Thanks for the information and definitely people trust testimonials
and look for other people’s experiences before buying in to a product.
Best wishes, Jenny
Hi Kenneth,Another great post from you guys .always informative
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I have made sales using a similar site like this http://www.youraffiliatearena.com/makemoneyreview The sale is higher than promoting a individual product. IF you need a free review site like the above, simple sign up as member. Message me and I can give you the text editor html coding. Just change your clickbank ID. :)
I am a newby and still crawling learning how to get traffics to my website. I have read all the tectics and all seems to be perfect….but i have read from many free advice too that we need time and initiative to learn more to get best traffic to our website. It’s not easy,….just like u open up a shop….it’s all depend how you advertise it, where you advertise and it can be you are unlucky if not even one from a thousand interested in your product. So i believe that it need TIME for the community of the world to know or to recognize ur SHOP/WEBSITE/PRODUCT. Some maybe lucky enough to get traffic at the first time they started their business, some may not be lucky!! So I believe TIME will tell PLUS our PATIENT & TOLERANT.
I want to start selling stuff online but do not know where to start….any ideas?
The “Personal Touch” approach is always the runaway winner to attract customers and not only passive but sticking customers.
Hi Kenneth,
Through this article you expose the best practices to better promote their business online. I want to thank you and tell you how this type of information is great and valuable for me.