12 Most Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

The main aim of blogging online is to attract readership. Through this readership, bloggers attract traffic back to their websites. Every blog post attracts varied reaction from different readers. It is this reaction that directly determines the amount of traffic the blog post attracts. Therefore, if you make blogging mistakes, you will not only be lessening your blog’s potential to reach your target audience, it can severely damage your online reputation as well. This should be avoided at all cost. Understanding, avoiding or rectifying these here 12 common blogging mistakes is one great way to enhance your online presence and to reach a wider audience with your blog posts.

1. Ignoring the Power of Headlines in a Blog Post: If they don’t grab attention easily, blog headlines are no helpful headlines at all. A compelling headline is really crucial for grabbing readers’ attention. But, if your headlines are weak or uninteresting, people may not readily click on your posts. That goes a long way to reduce your click-through rate and overall blog traffic.

2. Neglecting Content Quality: Your blog cannot easily attract traffic if the content is of low quality. A poorly written, uninformative, or low-quality content can damage your blog’s credibility and reputation. When your blog content is of low quality, it will attract fewer backlinks and shares from other websites.

3. Choosing the Wrong Blogging Platforms: If you make the mistake of selecting an unsuitable blogging platform, it can limit your blog’s capabilities and customization options. Such mistake may also impact your ability to monetize and grow your blog effectively.

4. Not Optimizing Blog Posts for Sharing on Social Media: Most bloggers have found social media to be a valuable channel for promoting their blogs. So, if your blog content is not optimized to make it easily shareable, that mistake alone is sufficient to hinder the reach and growth potential of the blog.

5. Ignoring Mobile Optimization: Google now reports that a huge percentage of internet users do so via mobile devices and many of these users browse blogs on mobile devices. That makes it imperative for you to optimize your blog website for mobile. If your blog isn’t mobile-friendly, it can lead to a poor user experience, higher bounce rates, and lower search engine rankings. That ultimately results in severely lowering the amount of traffic it can attract.

6. Failing to Directly Engage with your Audience: When your blog posts lack engagement, such as comments and social shares, it is a direct indication of a lack of interest from your audience. This development can harm your blog’s reputation and make it less appealing to potential readers.

7. Inconsistent Blog Posting Schedules: If you want your blog to have a strong online presence, you must be consistent in your blog posting. Irregular blog posting is capable of confusing your audience and this can lead to a decline in readership. In blogging, consistency is key to building a loyal readership and maintaining a strong online presence.

 

8. Not Using Multimedia Blog Posts: If you want your blog to appeal to most internet users, you must consider using multimedia blog posts. Experience has shown that text-only blog content can become monotonous fairly quickly. So, if you fail or neglect to incorporate images, videos, infographics, and other multimedia elements in your blog posts, it can make the blog less engaging and less shareable. That directly affects the traffic the blog is likely to attract.

9. Failing to Use Data-Driven Analytics Insights: You need blog analytics to gauge the performance of your blog at any point in time. If you ignore analytics and user data, it simply means you may not understand what works and what doesn’t in your blog. Not knowing what works and what doesn’t in your blog can lead to a lack of improvement and stagnation in your blog’s performance.

10. Inconsistent Blog Writing Style: Consistency is hugely important in blog writing. If you are inconsistent is your writing, you risk confusing readers and it can make your blog appear less professional. So, if you endeavor to maintain a consistent style in your blog writing, it helps you to build brand identity and trust with your audience.

11. Overlooking the SEO Potential of Blog Images: If you want your blog images to be found and indexed by search engines, you must make deliberate efforts to optimize them. Optimizing your blog images for SEO can help to enhance your content. But, if you neglect or overlook image optimization, it can mean missing out on potential traffic from image searches.

12. Neglecting SEO in your Blog Content: Just like images, your content needs to be found and indexed by search engines. That helps to enhance the content for organic traffic. If you fail or neglect to optimize your blog posts for search engines, you miss out on potential valuable organic traffic. Such mistake can lead to lower visibility and fewer visitors to your blog. Technically, neglecting SEO in your blog content is a significant error in blogging. 

Tested Off-Site Optimization Techniques for Beginners

Off-site optimization is extremely important for the overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of every online business. If you are new in digital marketing, never you forget this. Every online business craves high ranking in the SERPs of search engines. Off-site optimization is handy to get it done. The strategy simply involves several procedures geared towards building back-links to a website. These back-links are critical in the search engine ranking process. Off-site optimization is a technique involving procedures off a website that relate to how the site is linked to external pages. If such links point back to your website, they are referred to as back-links. For search engine marketing, off-site SEO is such an important technique that marketers cannot afford to ignore. For marketers who are determined, it takes quite a bit of vigilance and diligence to get results from off-site optimization strategy. But if they manage to get it right, the high page ranking and organic traffic will come with time. These results when they eventually come do make a huge difference in the fortunes of the marketing efforts of marketers.

Here are some tested techniques of off-site optimization that expert marketers recommend.

Be Consistent and Continuous

Being consistent and continuous allows you to stay on top of your game of optimization. It is not enough just to have a high search engine ranking. You cannot stay there if you don’t do things continuously to keep you there. It takes quite a bit of effort on maintenance to keep you there. Even if it is normal and expected to drop down the ranks by a few positions from time to time, no marketer wants to drop off the first page of Google, ever. The reasons are rather obvious. Ranking high on the SERPs of search engines means high organic traffic. Besides, if you drop down on this ranking, it makes it easier for competitors to acquire your customers. No good marketer ever wants to be in such situation.

Tracking and Analyzing Data

To be able to manage your off-site SEO efforts well, you need to focus more on what benefits your ranking most in the search engines. You cannot do that effectively without data, reliable data. This data has to be obtained by diligent tracking and data analyzing. You need the right tools to do this effectively. In that quest, Google Analytics readily comes to mind. This is a very wonderful tool that can show you, who visits your website, where they come from, how long they stay on the site and many other analytics details you need for effective marketing. If you obtain the right info from your website’s analytic report, you can use the info to better manage your SEO campaigns and monitor your traffic efficiently. If for instance you happen to know your traffic source, you can concentrate more efforts in that area to get more traffic. If however such additional work and efforts do not make any significant difference in the number of visitors to your website, you can then move on to other areas to see what comes from those sources.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is arguably one of the best off-site methods of building back-links and perhaps one of the oldest. Article marketing predates even the internet. Before the internet, marketers were promoting their products by submitting their articles to newspapers and other forms of print media. The advent of the internet gradually took the shine off such practices. Marketers generally moved on to the internet to market articles. If you market articles on the internet, you can get high authority contextual back-links and traffic when you submit your articles to major article directories like Ezinearticles.com and Articlesbase.com. Article marketing is a good off-site optimization method but it takes quite a while, diligence and hard work to get good results. It has proven to be effective but certainly not an overnight thing. This is because you may get back-links fairly quickly but getting the right traffic always takes quite a while.

 

Get Help from Your Competitors

Sounds strange, right? Not quite! Yes, your competitors can be of great help to you in your off-site optimization efforts. You can actually spy on your competitors to get some valuable marketing information. You can get valuable info about your competitors’ websites from sites like Alexa.com and SpyFu.com, among others. From these sites, you can easily find high quality links by simply looking at what your competitors do in obtaining their back-links then follow them. You can take advantage of the paid subscriptions many of the sites offer which will give you more detailed analysis about your competitor keywords and paid ads.

Seek Only Quality Back-Links

As many experienced marketers very well know, in matters of back-links, more is not always better. Quality is. Google does not rank back links on the basis of their number. It ranks them on the basis of their quality. Google will rank your website highly only if your back-links are of high quality. It is therefore not a matter of the number of back-links you have to your website, but how qualitative the back-links are. For effective off-site SEO therefore, link authority is of immense importance. For this reason, high quality back-links from high quality websites like Forbes.com, CNN.com, BBC.com and suchlike high quality and authoritative websites can give your website a much higher SEO boost than thousands of low quality back-links from some crappy run-off-the-mill websites.

Best Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners in the Business

Anyone can get involved in affiliate marketing because it is a very simple business model. What affiliates simply need to do is to introduce and promote a product/service. Once people buy the product/service, the affiliate as the marketer, earns a commission off the sale. By this arrangement, an affiliate marketer can be a company or an individual. Affiliates are not expected to be directly involved with the product’s manufacture, distribution, or other things. Their business responsibility is to just refer or recommend products/services on their websites, blogs, or social media pages to other people. Simple no doubt but for most beginners in the business, it is not exactly so.

Affiliate marketing is attractive to newbies as a low-cost business strategy and it is easy for anyone to join the program. But, even at that, many fail because they neglect to do the right things right and as appropriate. To succeed in affiliate marketing, everyone needs a guide, more so if you are new in the business. If this is your first time in the business, there are a few things you have to know to guide you to succeed. These here tips are some of the most important of such things.

Tip #1: Know the Product You Are Promoting

To succeed in affiliate marketing, you must know and believe in the products/services you are marketing. That may sound simple and basic but a lot of newbie affiliate marketers tend to ignore this vital tip. It is not easy for any marketer to successfully carry out a compelling campaign for a product/service they do not believe in. If you know your product/service well enough, that is good, but it is better still if you also know your target audience. If you do, you’ll have a more reliable marketing and your conversion rate will improve significantly. This is because if you know your audience well enough, it is easy for you to know the type of campaign strategy that can compel them to pay attention to what you are promoting. You will succeed better and faster if you can focus your marketing campaign on products/services you know and directly target a market segment where the products/services can be better appreciated. That is how best to make more impact and get more conversions by way of increased marketing efficiency.

Tip #2: Nurture a Relationship with Your Audience

In online marketing, relationship matters a lot. Affiliate marketing doesn’t start in a vacuum and you cannot market to a vacuum if you want to succeed in the business. This is why you must always aim to connect directly with your audience and to nurture and maintain that relationship. If an audience knows and trusts you, it is easy to effectively market to them. With that relationship, your marketing will impact your audience better particularly when that audience is already segmented for marketing purposes. With a segmented audience, you can specialize your marketing for better credibility since without specialization, it is virtually impossible for your product/service to have credibility. If you know your target audience, you’ll know the best way to market a product/service that they’ll likely purchase and your credibility helps that process a great deal.

Tip #3: Keep a Keen Eye on Your Stats

Marketing without engagement statistics is akin to marketing in the dark. You need these stats to be able to effectively track where your traffic coming from. Through these stats, you’ll be able to know if your traffic is coming from outbound links from other sites, social media, or from search engines.  You can use the information from such stats to rejig or strengthen your marketing strategy to enable you target your organic visitors better. Data from such stats can help you to find out the type of traffic that is more effective for conversion. You can also find out which copy or ad is more compelling, whether by geography or demographics. To get these insights and data, you can use your affiliate marketing analytics or Google analytics tools. The marketing aim for doing this is to always know where, to whom, and how you should use a specific strategy for your marketing campaigns. Successful marketing campaigns are indispensable for successful affiliate marketing. 

 
Tip #4: Post Only High Quality and Valuable Content

If you must market with content, be sure to market with quality content that adds value to people’s lives. Your content must not only be valuable, it must be unique. You must also figure out how to create something different and original to compel people to associate with you. Such content must have a unique selling point that appeals to your visitors making them to interact better with your website. That is the type of content that compels your content readers to return again and again to your website, page, or blog. When people keep coming back to your site, it is a pointer that you’re doing something right and great for their lives. It means you are helping them to solve vital problems in their lives. So, if you can continually create and post high quality and valuable content, you can build a loyal audience faster. And, if you can maintain that level of quality, in addition to a loyal audience, monetizing your content becomes a piece of cake. Doing well in affiliate marketing becomes a given.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate marketing is cost-effective and sounds simple in theory making it attractive to most people. Even if you are a newbie, you can succeed in affiliate marketing if you follow the rules and take the foregoing tips as guides. If you know the product/service you are promoting well enough, build and nurture a great relationship with your audience to establish trust, keep a keen eye on your marketing stats to gain insights and to gauge how well you are faring while habitually creating and posting quality content to attract good traffic, you’ll do great.

How to Boost Your Affiliate Commissions

Increasing digitization of business has opened many ways of earning income online. Presently, affiliate marketing appears somewhat prominent as one of the ways to earn income online. Through affiliate marketing, you can earn a good amount of income whenever you promote any product/service for product/service merchants. It is one great technique to generate unlimited income online. If you are creative enough in your affiliate marketing activities, and you are able to significantly boost traffic to your website, you can directly boost your affiliate marketing commissions as well. Some of these here tips and tricks can be of help to you in the quest to boost your affiliate commissions. 

Create a Loyal Community

Trust is quite essential in business particularly online business. If you manage to create a community that trusts you and your business, it will be loyal to you and your business. As an affiliate marketer, if consumers trust the brand you are marketing, you will sell more of it with significant increase in the commissions you earn. Because it always cheaper to market to a returning customer than a new one, you can deliberately set the machinery in motion to market more to returning customers. If as a consequence your website gets a boost in the numbers of returning customers, you sell more and earn more commissions. Only a loyal audience/community can guarantee that.

Establish Organic Traffic

Experienced marketers like to explore many ways to establish traffic to affiliate links. With organic traffic in mind, these marketers rely mostly on content marketing particularly blogging on their business websites and on social media. If your blog content is of high quality, you can better attract a good audience. Affiliate links embedded in such content that is optimized with SEO directly benefits from organic traffic. In addition, if you do PPC campaigns on very popular social media platforms, you can also take advantage of good organic traffic. Your commission earnings get a boost from these efforts.

Be Active On Social Media

Being active on social media particularly the mini-blogging platforms can help your affiliate marketing efforts. On these platforms, you can directly market to a segmented audience the products they are likely to have interest in. This is one of the easiest ways to attract an audience and earn good commissions by promoting products directly to them since the chances of the audience clicking on your affiliate links are greatly enhanced. You can better promote products on social media because on the platforms, making a post is easy as well as sharing, commenting and reacting to posts. That significantly eases up interactions and communications thereby paving the way for a better business relationship. For affiliate marketers, a better business relationship helps to boost commissions.

Keep a Keen Eye on Your Analytics

Most affiliate marketers like to market multi-channel. That necessitates having measurable performance metrics across these channels. If you have a complete overview of all the performances of the different channels, then it becomes easier to know how you are faring at any point in time. To do this well enough, you can deploy various analytical tools such as Google Analytics. These tools will help you to keep a keen eye on link statistics, traffic analytics and behavior analytics. This info can help you to take better informed marketing decisions which can significantly boost the commissions you earn in your affiliate marketing activities.

Regularly Check Your Links

As a vital part of your affiliate marketing strategy, regularly check your affiliate links to make sure they are working as expected. Any link not working, rejig it to keep it working. You need the data from your link statistics to be able to do this effectively. Link statistics allow you to know how the links you have provided multi-channel are performing. Through the data, you’ll know which is working correctly or not and what the stats are. You can create a workable strategy and a data base to help with close monitoring of your links performance. Fix what needs to be fixed as quickly as possible to avoid losing out on your commissions’ pay-outs due to lower conversion rates.

10 Ways to Drive Revenue to Your Pinterest Business Account

If you want to make money on Pinterest, you must have your own unique strategy that revolves around the content you create. Aside good quality, your content creation must be consistent enough to enable you to market your pins regularly. That is what helps to get the best results on Pinterest. If you have a sizeable number of followers and you include affiliate links of the products you are marketing in your pins, you can make good money on Pinterest. However, how much money you can make is directly impacted by the size of your followers, your reach and engagement. These here are some of the best ways you can use to reach more users and thus earn more money on your Pinterest business account.

1. Launch Your Own Website

You can launch your e-commerce store on your own website. Through it, you can earn money by selling physical or digital products. You can earn additional income from it by monetizing it through ads or affiliate relationship and if you actively drive traffic to the store through Pinterest free tools.

2. Find Your Niche

Settling for a specific niche is some kind of business specialization. If you focus your Pinterest account on the niche, you are more likely to attract a dedicated following. Whatever niche you choose, be sure you are knowledgeable about it and the products you are selling are relevant to it.

3. Fill in Your Pinterest Profile

Your business profile on Pinterest is very important for your unique identity on the platform. At the point of signing up for a Pinterest business account, be sure to create a unique name, followed by concise description, and links. If you optimize the profile with relevant keywords, it helps to draw in relevant followers who are most likely to be interested in what you are selling.

4. Sign Up for an Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are a great way to monetize your Pinterest account. To make money on Pinterest by way of affiliate marketing, you’ll need your own unique affiliate link. Hugely popular and reputable e-commerce websites like SFI TripleClicks, Amazon and RewardStyle, usually welcome online influencers to share their own referral links on pins. That brings in some revenue through affiliate commissions.

5. Research Pinterest Analytics

To know how well your Pinterest marketing is doing at any point in time, you need accurate stats. For this reason, as soon as you set up your own Pinterest account, you begin to monitor the stats to see what works and what isn’t. By monitoring the stats, it is possible to discover what type of pin performs consistently better than others. That is the style of content you must deliberately focus on for better results going forward.

6. Promote Pins on Other Social Media Sites

Social media platforms have a very powerful marketing tool in their share buttons. If you already have a lot of followers on other social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others, you can leverage them on Pinterest too by deliberate sharing. You can link them to your Pinterest account or individual pins or boards regularly. Doing so will help you to increase your followers and engagement.

7. Improve Pinterest SEO

Many online shoppers search for products online with specific keywords. This is how most Pinterest users often find content through Google or the Pinterest search bar. A good SEO on your Pinterest account makes this process result-oriented. You must therefore include relevant keywords in your profile and each pin description for them to benefit from organic search traffic.

8. Research Your Target Audience

You get better results from your marketing efforts if you know your target audience well enough. Whatever content you put out must impact your target audience to get results. For this reason, you can for instance deliberately craft your content to professional bloggers, holiday makers, home business owners, fitness enthusiasts, etc etc. You can carefully research your own blog niche or the demographics of your current customers to narrow down and better focus your targeting to get the best results.

9. Increase Your Pinterest Followers

The more followers you have on Pinterest, the larger the audience you have to market to just like other social media platforms. However, Pinterest isn’t exactly the same as other social platforms where you only rely on followers for traffic. But, the more followers you have, the more people are likely to come across your content through Pinterest search tool. You can therefore increase your followers by interacting with other users and linking more people to your profile.

10. Join Group Boards

Group Boards are important and effective marketing tools on Pinterest. Pinterest group boards are places where multiple Pinterest accounts can upload content of common interest. Many of these boards usually have lots of followers due to the consistency of content and communality. To increase your reach, you can join some of these boards in your niche.

How to Scale your Online Business for Global Market

For business expansions and increased revenues, many online businesses are going global. That warrants sudden growths in some instances. These sudden growths come with their own unique challenges. The reason marketers now pay more attention to scalability. Global expansion calls for an appropriate scalable strategy of business development. Such strategy ensures your business can manage a substantial increase in demand without a critical drop in quality of service. If your business is scalable, you can manage exponential growth over time even with sustained quality of service. Good management is key to guaranteeing that. With good management, you can effectively combine a high-demand product/service with solid support and production possibilities by scaling essential elements of the business. Some of these elements may be business-specific but you’ll do nicely if you can first fulfill these here universal requirements.

Make Comprehensive Plans

You must plan long term and comprehensively. That is very essential in global business expansions. Have substantial market research before drawing up a plan. This plan must include how to seamlessly reach and serve your customers anywhere they are in the world. Essentially you must plan for your teams, online ads, delivery systems, resources, including financing, international trade, tariffs, taxes and so on.

Automate all Processes you can Automate

To enter a worldwide online market and be able to make some impact, you need to have quality time and resources at your disposal. Both may not be readily available. That calls for automation. To save time and resources, you need to automate certain aspects of your business. Characteristically, automation allows for more efficient use of time and resources and it contributes to a positive customer experience. You can automate emails and deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, generously in your marketing activities. AI can help in automatic language translations, currency conversions, customer service and many other activities that you would otherwise have needed personnel to handle.

Provide Universal Solutions

One great way to scale your business for global audience is to provide products/services that are universally acceptable. What that means is that you can scale your online business worldwide by offering something that is needed across the world. If the product/service you are offering helps to solve a problem for different people from around the world, you can do profitable global business with it. No matter how effective your marketing campaigns are and how great your business funding is, you cannot successfully scale your business on the global market without a substantial demand for your product/service. Providing solutions with universal appeal helps to address that challenge.

Endeavor to Rank Well on Google SERPs

You can hardly market successfully online to a global audience without the help of search engines particularly a major search engine like Google. Google must like your content and rank it high enough for it to reach a global audience better. That calls for a good SEO on your website. A good SEO will help Google to rank your website well enough to send free organic traffic to it from anywhere around the world where keywords/phrases related to the site are used to make searches on Google.

Partner Reputable Logistics Companies

Unless your product is a virtual or digital product, you must arrange to have it delivered as is to any corner of the globe. That calls for partnerships with reputable logistics companies with global delivery experience. Damaged goods, pilfered goods, lost parcels and delivery delays are very bad for international business reputation. Partnering with reputable business services with extensive shipping, handling and storage capabilities can help with scalable growth for your business no matter the surge in future demands.

Fund your Business Adequately

Sudden and rapid business expansion that global reach may require has to be funded adequately. All sources of funding must be on the table at all times. You can get funded by investors, through bank loans or government funding agencies’ grants or a combination of two or more of them. Whichever you use, be sure it is reliable enough to be stepped up when demand suddenly surges. Doing international business successfully is near impossible without adequate funding and adequate funding helps the scalability of your business.

Take Advantage of Outsourcing

Outsourcing certain components of your business helps to bring down costs without lowering standards or outputs. No matter how efficient your business team is, a global business surge may task it to breakable limits particularly when the surge is sudden. So, outsourcing comes in to help out. Because there is a limit to the tasks your team can efficiently handle, you can consider enhancing human resources or outsourcing tasks that are beyond their field of expertise. If your business experiences sudden growth that overstretches your team, to avoid compromising on quality, you can outsource tasks like customer support for instance and still be doing great. Thus, you can always do well to avoid overburdening your team with any work that can be outsourced as and when needed.

Keep a Keen Eye on your Business Analytics

If you market online, without the benefit of analytics data, it is like marketing in the dark. Whatever marketing results you can measure online by way of analytics data should be carefully measured and analyzed. Your analytics data will give reliable info about inbound traffic, sources of traffic, sales growth, trends, conversions and other key performance metrics. The analysis of such data will allow you to develop predictions, attract investors, plan ahead, react to challenges, and make projections/forecasts. That gives you the much needed business confidence about the future of your global business. A good scalable strategy assumes that with such vital knowledge at your fingertips, you are willing, able and ready to take on any business issues as they arise even if occasioned by sudden business surge.

Concluding Thoughts

Even if you are experienced in your business, scaling it online should be deliberately systematic with good planning. Expect challenges like disappointing sales, sudden and unexpected growth surges that may induce loss of quality if adequate care is not taken. There are hardly any of these challenges you cannot handle well enough if you planned well. With a scalable development strategy, you can easily make adjustments as you go along. For so long as you have a good idea what you are up against, you can always take the necessary steps as needed to grow your online business reputation and for your global business to prosper in the long term. That no doubt demands from you quality time and efforts.

How to Create a Better Content Marketing Strategy for Your Small Business

Every digital marketer needs a good content marketing strategy to run a blog or an e-commerce website. If the strategy is effective, it greatly helps to generate unpaid or organic traffic to the business website. How do you measure this effectiveness? It is by using online marketing content analytics tools such as Google Analytics. These tools help marketers to better analyze the performance of their content types to determine which performs best in terms of cost-effectiveness and marketing results.

When creating a content strategy, one of the most important considerations is to know your audience. If you don’t know your audience well enough, it is pretty difficult to know what type of content you can create to attract their attention better. If for instance you know what your website visitors love to read on your web pages, you can then take deliberate steps to improve those pages or create similar articles to attract more of such people to your website. You can also approach performance based on segmentation. However, what matters most is to try to use analytics results from all these efforts to maximize ROI. Just keep a keen eye on the metrics and you can take better marketing decisions. That’s all it takes.

Here are 7 important marketing metrics your business needs to create a better content marketing strategy to maximize ROI.

1. Total Visits: This metric helps to measure the number of people who visited your web page or website.

2. Brand Awareness Metric: This metric helps to track how people get to know about your business/brand on search engines, your website content or social media posts.

3. Returning Visitor Metric: This metric helps to measure the effectiveness of your website in building an audience your web content directly influences.

4. Web Traffic Sources: This marketing metric helps a marketer to understand exactly where his traffic is coming from. The information is vital to help the marketer to focus content creation on those sources. 

5. Time on Site: This marketing metric measure the time visitors spend on a business website per each visit.  This is hugely important because the longer visitors spend reading your content, the better for your website SEO and your conversion rate.

6. Bounce Rate: This metric helps marketers to assess visitors who left their websites too quickly, maybe just immediately after hitting just a single page. A high bounce rate deeply hurts your website SEO, reduces overall conversion rate and even sales. Smart marketers always aim to reduce bounce rates on their websites to the barest minimum.

7. First Visit Metric: This metric helps marketers to understand how online users find business websites and how they engage during their first visits to the websites.

How to Understand Google Analytics Terms

Digital marketers have a lot of analytics terms they use in relation to their businesses. It is imperative to get a hold on these terms and to use them appropriately since analytics tools base their measurements/metrics on these terms. 

Here are some common terms you can measure using Google Analytics.

Keywords: Digital marketing relies on keywords as search terms to aid web users. These users find businesses if they use their keywords to search for products/services. Google analytics helps to identify and provide these keywords. Search engines use these keywords to improve the search engine rankings of websites.

Conversion Rate: Many web users habitually visit many websites. Of this lot, the percentage of visitors who do what you expect them to do on your website is regarded as “converted.” Such activities may include making a purchase or registering to download a free e-book, get a discount coupon, download how-to video or signing up for email newsletter.

Visit: This is any session in which a visitor interacts with your website irrespective of whether they do anything on your website or simply move on to another site.

Unique Visitors: This refers to the number of web users who visit your website within a specified time period. Irrespective of the number of times same person visits the site within that time period, the visitor still counts as one unique visitor.

Average Time on Site: This is the average time measured in seconds or minutes a user spends on your website.

Exit Page: This is the last page of your website that a visitor views before leaving your site. Knowing the last page your visitors visit before leaving your website can give you a lot of marketing insights into what works and what doesn’t on your website.

Traffic Sources: This refers to places sending the most traffic to your website. It could be referral sites, social media sites, search engines and traffic exchanges.

Referral Sites: These are sites where people come to your site by clicking on your link on the sites. If your website gets a lot of referral site traffic, it is an indication that your online presence is strong on those other sites.

Search Engines Traffic: This is the same thing as organic traffic. It refers to people who visit your site because it showed up in their search results. A measurement of your search engine traffic gives information on how effective your SEO is.

Page Views: Any time a web user views a page of your site, it counts as a page view. One visit may contain many page views depending on how long the visitor spends on your website and how many pages they visit.

New Visitors: This represents web visitors who are coming to your website for the very first time. The information is vital because marketers need different strategies to market to new visitors as against repeat/returning visitors.

Returning Visitors: Returning visitors are visitors who make a comeback to your website for one reason or another. Some of such reasons may include to get more information, make inquiries and even to make a repeat purchase.

Bounce Rate: This refers to the number of users who exit your website after only viewing just one page. The higher the bounce rate, the less the time visitors spend on your website.

Pages per Visit: This refers to how many pages users view on your website per each visit. The more pages they visit, the better your website engagement.

Direct Traffic: These are people who access your business by typing your URL directly in the address bar of their browsers. Direct traffic is a very good indication of your web authority and customer awareness. It also indicates how effective your marketing ads are.

Effective Digital Marketing Tools to Manage your E-Commerce Store

Digital marketers depend on in-house digital marketing tools to manage their e-commerce stores effectively. Even if they are marketing out of popular and reputable e-commerce marketplaces where buyers and sellers come to make wholesale transactions, they need these tools to succeed. Sometimes, it is the availability of digital marketing tools they helps marketers to decide which e-commerce platform to pitch their marketing tents with. E-commerce platforms like SFI TripleClicks.com, Alibaba.com. eBay, Amazon and a host of others offer an array of digital marketing tools to help e-commerce stores connect with the right buyers and propel their sales.

Here are some of the digital marketing tools that sellers have access to on popular E-commerce marketing platforms.

Analytics Tools

You cannot succeed in digital marketing if you are unable to accurately measure your results. That is where in-house analytics tools come in very handy for sellers to measure results. With the benefits of analytics data and information, digital marketers get to understand how they can best reach their audience with effective marketing. Analytics info enables marketers to see what is working and what is not in their marketing campaigns. Exactly why, analytics have become a very huge and indispensable part of digital marketing. Popular wholesale e-commerce platforms characteristically provide powerful analytics tools to give marketers real time insights into their target markets and the performance of their online e-commerce retail stores. These analytics usually provide accurate and real time information on platform-wide trends for the larger benefit of affiliated e-commerce stores.

Ads Management Tools

Affiliated e-commerce stores can run their own paid ads for the direct benefit of their own stores. To do this effectively, even if they want to run many different ads at the same time, they can take advantage of in-house built-in advertising tools. Marketers can run ads on the platforms and the tools help their products to rank well in searches for relevant keywords. These ads management tools also help marketers to target ads based on geography and click history. Arguably, the best part about these tools is that your business can benefit from Pay-Per-Click, PPC, advertising. Meaning, you are only required to pay for ads when users actually interact with your listings through verifiable clicks.

Lead Generation Tools

In-house lead generation tools allow marketers to target offers directly to one single prospect at a time. This lead generation tactics is unique in its own right and very effective too. It is a bit different from the other digital marketing tactics in mode of operation and effectiveness. One unique lead generation tool peculiar to Alibaba.com is a Request for Quotation, RFQ feed. It is an important section of their website where B2B buyers can post their wholesale needs. Sellers can browse these requests and try to match the needs as much as they can. Matching sellers and buyers easily is always a great marketing experience and mutually beneficial to all parties.

Digital Marketing Tips for Marketing a Local Business Online

If you run a local business, one of the best ways to grow it is by investing in digital marketing. With digital marketing, you can easily connect with prospective customers and customers, get good traffic, leads and make sales. This is because digital marketing leverages internet technology to reach a diverse audience of people that are also on the internet to do business and make connections. The influence of social media and the rising trend of web searches enable you to build a strong online presence for your business. Yes indeed, but thanks to internet technology and digital marketing that it enables. If correctly deployed, digital marketing can help your local business to connect with customers online and effectively promote your brand to them.

 
To market your local business successfully online, you must give it a strong online presence which these here tips can help you with.

Make a Digital Marketing Plan

To market successfully online, you must have an effective digital marketing plan right from the outset. Decide early on exactly what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. You must have clear objectives, goals and strategies to incorporate into your digital marketing plan. You may decide on such goals/objectives as increased traffic, increased leads, customers, sales and a strong brand. Next is to decide on which digital marketing plans that can best help you achieve your goals/objectives. After SWOT testing your digital marketing plan using analytics to be sure it will deliver on your expectations, you’re good to go.

Launch a User-Friendly Business Website

Your business website is the most important window your business has on the internet. That is where you first make contact with online surfers looking to do business. If your business website is both user and mobile friendly enough, it helps you to do good business online. It is through your website prospective customers get to have firsthand opportunity to learn more about your business. If they like what they see and are satisfied with their experience on your website, they will engage more with you. You can help your website to be user-friendly by making sure it is well designed, secure, loads fast and has relevant information about what your business is offering to customers through clear, concise, aesthetically appealing and persuasive content. For organic traffic purposes, be sure you use good SEO to help its search engine rankings. You can also optimize your website for mobile devices to make it mobile-friendly since Google now attributes a high percentage of searches to mobile devices.  

Invest in Quality Content Creation

In digital marketing, content is king. This content must be of high quality, informative, educational and even entertaining. If you regularly craft high quality and creative content and post it on either your website or social media platforms, it will help you to attract customers and build your brand online. If you have the skills, you can create your content yourself. If not, contracting your content creation activities to professionals is the next best option. Irrespective of whosoever writes the content, what is important is to make sure it is relevant to your business niche and provides very useful information to your customers. It is advisable to experiment with different kinds of content and see which one works best for your objectives before deciding on it. If you decide, you can commence pushing the content through infographics, videos, how-to guides, and blog posts with your objectives firmly in the picture.

Create a Google Listing

Google-My-Business, GMB listing with the tools it offers is very helpful to local businesses. The listing allows you to enter your business name, location, the products/services you market, contact address, day time phone number, and other relevant business details. It can be fully optimized for local searches. That is what allows searchers looking for businesses “near me” to hit on your website and hopefully make beneficial contacts with your business. If you have Google listing, when a prospective customer searches for a product/service that your business offers, the name of your business will pop up alongside others. That helps prospective customers to easily reach you.

Be Active on Social Media

These days, social media because of its peculiarities appears to have some of the best digital marketing services online. The reason it is advisable to have active social media pages for your business particularly on the most popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others. On social media, local business owners can easily interact with prospective customers since they are able to identify the platforms that they like to use. If social media is effectively used, you can better promote your business and grow your brand to generate more interest in the products/services you are rendering.

Market with Locally Targeted Ads

You get better results from digital ads when you are specific about the locality you are targeting. What you need to target are relevant factors that make it clearer for prospective customers to reach your business. Factors like street addresses, city names, county names, boroughs, district names, regions and countries. That helps to increase your reach and enable you to target more relevant customers. By having a compelling Call-to-Action, CTA in your ads, it helps to enhance the process for prospective customers to engage with you.
 
Win Customers with Offers and Discounts

Including offers and discounts in your digital marketing messages is a very effective way to win new customers. Many people will always be interested in buying your products if they discover that you have some really enticing offers or discounts. You can make these offers alongside your normal marketing info through your website, your social media platforms and even via emails and newsletters. If you notice products that are lagging in sales, you can specifically target such products with good offers and discounts to boost sales.

Evaluate Your Marketing Strategies with Analytics

It is with accurate evaluation of your marketing strategies that you can effectively determine if you are getting good value for every ads dollar you are spending. To accurately measure the Return On Investment, ROI in your business, you need good analytics tools. If you connect your website to Google Analytics, you can constantly check the reports from your marketing activities on social media pages and multi-channel ads campaigns. These tools help you to analyze and understand the impact of your marketing strategies, and which brings the best returns on your investment. With this information, you can plan accordingly and make necessary adjustments on your ads. Significantly, you can rely on the insights from analytics data to help you take vital decisions to rejig or repurpose your digital marketing strategies.

 
Engage with Your Customers

If you market online and you value customer reviews, comments, and complaints, you must explore all ways to constantly engage with your customers. It is the insights from such customer reviews, comments, and complaints that can help you to get a very clear picture of your business from the perspectives of your customers. It is through these perspectives you can get to know what you are doing great and what you need to improve upon. By doing so, you build customer trust and reliance and your business benefits immensely. When customers trust you, they are likely to stay loyal to you and you win more new customers in the bargain. It therefore makes good business sense to constantly engage with your customers, by sending them regular emails about the latest deals, price adjustments, promos, special offers, and giveaways, all great for customer loyalty and retention.  

Have Multiple Contacts on Your Website

Aside the landing page, the “About Us” page appears to be the next most important page on your business website. That is where your website visitors can get to know more about your business and to make contact with you because in online business, it is hugely important to make it easy for customers and prospective customers to easily reach you 24/7. For this reason, you must make sure you have multiple contacts on your website and even in all your social media platforms. Make it easy for your website visitors to have easy access to your email address, day time telephone numbers, and your handles across all the social media platforms where you have accounts. With these multiple contacts, customers and prospective customers can freely choose any contact method that they are comfortable with to reach out to you.

5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Local Business

The essence of a good digital marketing strategy is to attract traffic to your business using new and evolving digital technology. These technologies help your business to have a robust online presence, and help to attract traffic to your business. Growing your local business online takes effect from there, particularly as your digital footprints become firmer. If your digital footprints become effective, your business attracts more and more customers. By consistently sustaining your digital marketing strategy, you can effectively target the right audience and turn them into lifelong customers. Growing your online business takes a firm root from there, manifesting in more and better leads, more customers and better sales.
 
These five digital marketing strategies are tested and handy to help grow your local business online.

1. Optimize Your Business for Local Searches

For Google searches and good traffic, most small businesses benefit more from local advantages. If you optimize your business for local searches, and you use the right marketing tools to communicate with your customers, the results are great. The success and growth of your business hinges strongly on this. Many online searchers have a preference for, a “near me” search on Google to do business than any other. This is mostly because of convenience and ease of doing business.

2. Market Only With High Quality and Engaging Content

In digital marketing, content is king. Either by way of blogging or some other types of content, what matters is to ensure the content is authoritative, informative, educating and of very high quality. It must be regular and consistent too to attract readers’ attention better. Good quality content can help to boost organic traffic on your business website. You may choose to publish as content, a wide variety of infographics, videos, and images to enhance your audience’s connection but the qualities must be very good to be useful. You can use highly informative audio-visual tools and fact-rich blogs to capture the attention of customers. That translates to traffic, good organic traffic back to your business. If you keep posting such content regularly and using the right keywords to enhance your search engine rankings, you get more traffic, more leads, more customers and ultimately better sales.

3. Don’t Ignore Periodic Analytical Reviews
 
Having a good digital marketing strategy is not enough to measure results unless you have good analytics reviews in place. Free Google online tools can help you out with analytics data if you link Google Analytics with your business website. You can only get valuable insights into the performance of your business through these analytics tools. From the data generated, you can have reliable information to enable you to review your strategy and content periodically and as needed. With advanced analytics, you can get to know and understand what is working well in your campaigns and what is not. Armed with that information, you can make necessary adjustments, tweaks and even changes for better results.

4. Engage with Your Customers Meaningfully

The average human being craves recognition. Your customers are not different. If you factor in that no matter which industry you are currently operating, the competition is always very high, you cannot afford to ignore your customers. For that reason, you cannot afford not to meaningfully engage with your customers at all times. You must always do things to keep your business in the hearts and minds of your customers. Such things may seem small and little but the recognition and appreciation matter most. Periodically, you may choose to engage with your customers through discount sales, coupons and giveaways to boost your online visibility, enhance brand awareness and customer loyalty.  

5. Maintain Healthy Communication with Your Customers

In digital marketing, effective communication is very important and it must be a two-way type. It is not enough to just market to your customers. You must explore all ways to give them updated information regularly and encourage feedback from them. You can use effective online tools like emails and social media chats to communicate the latest updates in your business including discounts, new launches, promotions, and offers to your customers. By collecting and working on your customer feedback promptly and diligently, you can inspire more confidence in your business. That confidence gets a boost if you are always promptly responsive to their queries through good support services. You can somehow maintain long-term customer relationships based on good experience and trust arising from how you communicate with them. What you do easily gets passed around to others by word-of-mouth of your satisfied customers. That is one great way to use your existing customer base to gain new customers via a referral system.

Why Your Blog Needs a Good SEO Strategy

It requires a bit of technicalities to set up a good blog. Experts advise that no one should try to learn everything about blogging at once and right from the word go. The process is gradual and takes some bit of learning on the job.  It is best to begin with and to learn from the basics as you make progress in your blogging efforts. Once you begin and start getting some results, it acts as the tonic and motivation to encourage you to learn more and to do more. One of the things you’ll learn along the way is SEO strategy which from my own experience appears to be the hardest part of blogging. Every blogger really needs it because without it, search engines will tend to ignore your blog in its entirety. If that happens, your blog loses out in the much needed traffic which search engines would’ve been sending to it.
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No doubt Search Engine Optimization, SEO, involves a bit of technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you get a good SEO strategy in place. How the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent by search engines. Simply put, SEO is a way of playing around with and position keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.

When you are getting started as a blogger, it is very essential to have a good SEO strategy. With it in place, search engines will be sending you free and high-quality targeted traffic. This is about the best organic traffic you can get on the internet. You cannot afford to miss out on it. A good SEO strategy positions your blog in very good stead to receive this traffic steadily. If you are not too sure of what to do, don’t allow the technicalities involved to discourage you. There is a way out. You can arrange to work with WordPress because it has a content management system which is optimised for search engines by default. With a good web-hosting, lightweight theme and SEO WordPress plugins, it helps you to find your way around many technicalities involved in developing your own SEO strategy. With your blog linked to WordPress, you are all set to receive organic traffic courtesy of search engines.

That is one SEO problem resolved. The second is how to research the demand for various keywords related to your blog niche. This is where you’ll need to sign up with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. These tools will help measure your traffic inflow and even the sources of the traffic. They let you know exactly what keywords people are using to find your blog posts on the internet. As part of your own SEO strategy, these same popular keywords can be deployed to write more content for better search results.

Aside Google Search Console, you can also take a look at other keyword research tools to find out which works best for you. Some of such user-friendly tools are:

Google's Auto-Suggest: As you type in a keyword in Google, it will automatically show you suggestions for longer tail keywords. These keywords are showing up because people are searching for them in Google. The reason Google is suggesting them to you.
UberSuggest: A free keyword research tool.
Ahrefs: A keyword research tool for deep researches.

Last line! Even though SEO is a blogging technicality, you should not allow all the technical analysis to demotivate you. In blogging world, you can always manage to find your way around many technicalities even if you are a newbie. What is important is to first have a blog running. Along the way, you can learn about more technical things and how to go around some of the technicalities. That is what all bloggers are doing in our highly saturated and competitive blogging world.

 

Free and Easy to Use SEO Tools Every Blogger Needs

If you are a blogger, you must be aware that digital marketers have discovered that search engine optimization SEO, is one of the most important components of every digital marketing strategy. Every blogger needs SEO in most efforts to improve a website or blog’s organic search ranking. What that means is the much needed traffic to the site. Not every blogger can afford to pay for SEO tools so many really go for the free tools some of which are for measurements and others for monitoring. It need not be overemphasized why monitoring is extremely important for every website/blog owner. The reasons are rather very obvious. The following are some free tools which readily come in handy for every blogger to use.

Google Analytics

This is readily one of the most popular free web tools at the moment. When integrated on your site, it enables you to easily comprehend the organic as well as other traffic flows to the site. It allows you to compare the past performance in a better way. With the data it generates, you can easily notice any changes in your site traffic. Such information enables you take decisions to ameliorate the causative problem or to eliminate it all together. Great tool no doubt!

Google Search Console

This is an instrument that gives you the ability to visualize how your site may appear in a search and how to impact with other appearance components. With the information it provides, you can at any time decide to rejig or juggle your site appearances until you get what works best before you adopt. The tool also lets you get the information on your top search queries, landing pages, countries and how it performs across devices and web browsers. In addition, it advises you on various mistakes that happen from website crawls by Search Engine bots and recommends HTML improvements. Another great tool no doubt.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Because of the very large share by Google, about 65% of search results, many marketers tend to neglect the Bing search engine which houses over 20% of the Internet’s search traffic. For that reason, experts also recommend the use of Bing Webmaster Tools as a decent method to keep a tab on how your webpage is dealing with Bing. This tool also offers benefits beyond Bing by providing insights into crawling, indexation, on-page keyword optimization, and other components that can affect your performance even in Google. This is one more great free tool to have and use for your marketing efforts if you are eager to run with the pros.

How to Avoid Online Reputation Crises

Every business no matter how small or big thrives on its reputation. That is what makes reputation a closely-guarded and well-protected asset in business. Building a reputation for your business takes time, very valuable time! It however takes a very short while to lose and with attendant devastating impact to boot. Online, the impact is better left to the imagination of everyone. There are many simple things you can do to avoid online reputation crises such as:

Being extremely vigilant: Nearly everyone is online these days and just one scathing review undetected early can do tremendous damage to your reputation! That is because of the extremely quick pace information spreads online. The solution is real vigilance on your part. Detect-respond-and-promise line of action easily helps your vigilance efforts.

Astute monitoring: When you detect challenges, it is not enough to respond and leave things at that. It pays to keep monitoring to see if there are further negative feedback which you can quickly attend to. Tip: Do not ignore to pay special attention to niche review sites like Yelp and Trip Advisor where negative feedback can be really damaging.

Acting quickly: Regardless of whether online reviews recommend your brand or not, it pays to take quick action responding to them. This where your diligence and tactfulness can help you win back skeptics thereby enhancing your business reputation.

Being proactive: From experience, it is possible to anticipate customer reaction. The real reason for FAQ as part of your website displays. By anticipating customer reaction correctly, you can take proactive measures to shore up your reputation and avoid real damage. Appropriately deployed Analytics can help your online reputation if you know how to use them. If not, consulting experts is not a bad idea.

Routine evaluation/corrections: Taking a look back and going over what you have been doing online about your business is one way to get hints and clues about what works and what doesn’t to enable you make amendments and or corrections as you go along. Proper analysis of customer-feedback and online campaign results help a great deal here. A major benefit of constant review is to learn and that is what grows your experience. Nothing beats experience when it comes to doing business online. Just ask any professional marketer and you’ll get to appreciate my drift here.