How to Build a Sustainable Passive Income Online

Many people work online just to earn a second paycheck to supplement their regular income. This second income can come in form of passive income which you earn without having to put in too much additional effort afterwards. Passive income can come from as many different income sources you are capable of creating. If you are desirous to create your own passive income online, here is what many experts recommend.

Thoroughly Research the Market: You need a thorough research online to know the business environment you want to operate in and to identify your target audience. Your research efforts will help you to distinctly identify the people that you want to sell to and exactly what their needs, wants and desires are. Since you already know your own business, it helps to also know who your competitors are. That includes knowing what they are doing and how they are doing it including their strengths and weaknesses. This vital info will help you to decide on how to create the right product/service to bring into the market that could fill any gaps in the market you have correctly identified.

Focus on Your Skills and Interests: You need skills, practical skills to be able to create a passive income stream online. So, if you focus on your skills and interests, you can easily identify what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing, and what you’re passionate about. If you manage to create a product/service that aligns with your skills and interests, you’re more likely to succeed to earn passive income going forward. Combining your skills, interests and past experiences particularly with previous jobs and even hobbies you enjoyed in the past can help you to create something positive and passive income earning.

Choose the Right Marketing Platform: No matter how good the product/service you create is, without the right online platforms to market it, earning money from it will be pretty difficult. For this crucial reason, you must carefully identify and choose online channels where your target audience is most active and engaged. Even within the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others, the type of product/service you are marketing and the audience you are targeting will determine which of the platforms is best suited for your marketing activities. If you are selling physical products, your best platforms should be Strong Future International, SFI, and eBay, Etsy or Amazon.
 
Build a Responsive Email List:  During your marketing campaigns, since you’ll need to send regular emails and newsletters, it advisable to diligently build a responsive email list over time. This email list is a very effective way to stay in touch with your target audience and promote your product/service. With it, you have at your disposal, a very valuable marketing asset you can depend on to regularly send out newsletters and promotional emails to a large number of recipients with a view to keeping them informed and engaged. That way, your email tool can become a reliable marketing asset to help you generate more sales. You can build an email list over time by creating a lead magnet that your target audience will find valuable. Some of the most popular lead magnets with digital marketers are free e-books, video courses, and or discount codes for your product/service. After creating your lead magnet, you can then use a smart online tool like Mailchimp to set up a landing page and steadily capture email addresses of visitors to your website. That helps to quickly build up your valuable email list.

Automate Your Marketing Processes: Artificial Intelligence AI, is quite crucial to help automate some of your marketing processes and Automation is key to generating passive income online. Automation helps business owners to save time and resources and allows them to focus more on other aspects of their businesses. You can for instance, use smart online tools to automate your social media posts or email marketing campaigns. That is where autoresponders and chatbots become quite useful particularly since you cannot afford to be online 24/7. You can effectively use autoresponders to respond to your email inquiries while chatbots can handle customer queries and automate your customer support if you are unable to for any reason do so yourself real time.

Utilize Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is increasingly becoming popular among digital marketers as an effective way to generate passive income online. The marketing model simply entails partnering with product merchants to promote their products/services in exchange for a commission on each sale generated. You can succeed in affiliate marketing if you carefully select and vigorously promote products/services that are relevant to your audience and align with your brand. The more sales you generate, the more commissions you earn.

Consistently Create High-Quality Content: It is inevitable these days that if you want to make money online through content marketing, you must be able to consistently create high-quality and impactful content people want to read. Online, creating high-quality content is essential to building a successful passive income stream. Even if you are creating this content through a blog, a YouTube channel, or an online course, what is most important is that the content you produce must be highly informative, engaging, impactful and valuable to your audience. Content quality is therefore more important for marketing purposes than quantity. This is why it is always much better to focus more on quality over quantity if you are creating content for marketing purposes online. For more effective content, you can thus concentrate your efforts on creating fewer pieces of high-quality content that your audience will find valuable. Low-quality content can neither impact nor resonate well with your audience, the reason it is not good enough for marketing purposes.

Leverage Social Media: These days, social media because of its huge popularity and ease of sharing info has become a very powerful online tool for marketing and promoting products/services widely. This is more so with the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and the likes. By leveraging social media platforms with over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, you can easily reach a wider audience and generate more sales. More sales generated directly translate to more commissions earned if one of your income streams is affiliate marketing. To get the best out of social media, you must consistently create quality content and share it widely on the most popular platforms. If the content you create on social media is informative, engaging, and valuable enough to your target audience, it helps to generate more sales.

Wrapping Up

Because of the diligent planning and consistent efforts needed to accomplish it, creating a passive income stream online may take quality time and effort. If you get things right, it can be a powerful tool for eventually achieving financial freedom and independence. You can get things right by focusing on the foregoing tips. If you do, it is possible for you to create a successful and sustainable passive income stream online.

How to Use Automation to Boost Your Online Marketing Business

Experienced online marketers make money by embarking on such marketing activities that help to keep costs low and revenues high. Marketing automation tools are extremely essential in the task of achieving such marketing objectives. To hone their marketing strategies and increase efficiencies, online business owners are increasingly leveraging automation and reducing human intervention to manage routine daily tasks. Marketers now rely on automation to restructure the digital marketing activities that help them to nurture leads, sales and business communication messages. Automation also helps to reduce the tendency of task repetition and delayed timelines. These technologies help marketers to achieve high ROI by simply integrating data and processes that automate marketing tasks. That comes about through high operational efficiency that allows businesses to manage effectively and efficiently, multiple marketing channels with automated tasks.

Find below, some of the benefits digital marketers derive from automation that help boost their businesses in a great way.
 
Effectiveness in Spending

Every responsible businessperson always keeps a keen eye on costs. Personnel maintenance cost is always a major cost element for most businesses. When automation replaces human tasks, the spending on human resources is relatively less. That helps to free up resources for other business activities that help the overall increase in the ROI for the business.
 
Generating and Nurturing Leads

Generating leads and sales are crucial to the survival of any marketing business. Automation helps marketers to better focus on strategies for nurturing leads and customer acquisition. By using effective marketing automation tools, marketers can get great insights into customer behavior and their purchase journey. That vital information is essential for marketers to redesign or tweak their marketing strategies for better results. With these insights, they can customize follow-ups with customers in a more personalized and engaging manner.

Refining Marketing Strategies

Automation gives marketers ample time and information to enable them analyze better, customer behavior and their purchase journey. With that, they can evolve more strategies that better help and enhance customer experience. They can in addition create more personalized content to reach out better to potential customers, process and nurture the leads.

Integrating Marketing Strategies

Automation helps marketers to integrate and execute marketing campaigns better. Marketers rely on automation to handle mundane and repetitive tasks by eliminating repetition through template-based workflows and integration of marketing channels onto a centralized platform. In doing so, marketers save valuable time and resources while still getting very good results from their marketing activities.  When marketers integrate their marketing activities into dedicated platforms for social media marketing, email marketing, and data analytics, the results are great.

Improving Time Efficiency

Time as a vital resource is very crucial to the success of many businesses. For that reason, by leveraging automation tools, marketers can indeed handle better, activities that help to expedite time-consuming tasks. Doing so helps marketers to free up valuable time for other vital business tasks that require direct human intervention. With more time available to them, marketers can be more innovative, focus better on important tasks and be more result-oriented in managing their businesses.

Current Trending Digital Marketing Strategies

The best digital marketing strategies currently trending with marketers derive hugely from sophisticated technologies like Machine Intelligence and Machine Learning. These technologies are daily evolving very rapidly and smart marketers are latching on. Right now, this technological onslaught has greatly redefined the whole marketing ecosystem and even the entire cyberspace. Internet businesses are now compelled to look deeper into their marketing strategies and reinvent themselves continuously if they must survive. This is the reason they have to continuously innovate to keep pace with the changing lifestyles and future marketing trends. Business survival is and remains the bottom line in all these.

Here is what marketers are now embracing for survival in digital marketing world.

Repetitive Tasks Automation

It is smart to assume that repetitive tasks in digital marketing can be automated and they are being automated. With the use of technologically advanced software, you can now automate repetitive marketing tasks like email marketing, social media or website actions and many more. Time is of the essence in any business and software that help businesses to save time must find usefulness any day. The reason tasks automation is now trending. 


 
Inbound Marketing

 Content still remains king and with the deft combination of visual and written content, marketers still get inbound traffic from evergreen content which they have posted even a long time ago. Content still remains at center stage to get traffic from keywords searches largely responsible for organic traffic. Even now, fresh and original content remains a hot favorite for major search engines like Google. Searchers rely on them for marketing information and that translates to inbound traffic. Great content is thus still very relevant to marketing efforts even now.

Growth Hacking

As the name implies, how growth hackers manage to remain on the right side of the law is really amazing. It is a great credit to their professionalism. Growth hackers ply their trade by playing with data and creativity to give rise to revolutionary products. They craftily use some groups of small and simple techniques to stimulate growth and demand for businesses. Because of their high success rates, growth hacking has emerged as one of the best marketing strategies in this age and time. The reason it is trending right now.

Chatbots

Chatbots are smart internet bots which can be programed to do many wonderful and amazing things in digital marketing. Their potentials are enormous and marketers are still discovering them. They are smart and able to strike very intelligent and meaningful conversations real time with customers thereby doing effectively what the business owner may have been required to do all by himself. Many customers are comfortable speaking to chatbots instead humans because they find them efficient and are very quick in their responses to inquiries. Some chatbots are very cordial and helpful in recalling a whole purchase history. With chatbots helping out in automation of repetitive work, business owners can then free up their valuable time to attend to other more important tasks.  The reason marketers love chatbots even more right now. They are really trending.

Video Marketing 

In digital marketing, content is still highly valued provided it is original and visual content characterized mostly by original videos helps to enhance that value. Smart marketers know this, the reason they cannot afford to ignore video marketing in their marketing strategies. Visual content in a deft combination with written content tends to work wonders in digital marketing world right now. With the prevalence of smart hand-held devices everywhere, videos streaming has become much more competitive. Smart marketers thus cannot afford to miss this trend as videos are more likely to result in conversions than plain text. Right now, around the world, every second of the day 24/7, someone somewhere is watching a video. Can you see the huge marketing potentials therein? 


 

How Some Digital Marketing Trends are Fading Out

In digital marketing world, what is trending today may not be trending by tomorrow. The fast pace of these trends can at times be quite amazing. That is primarily due to the fact that the world of digital marketing is constantly evolving.  As a marketer, you must be conversant with this trend if you want to stay relevant in the business. You must routinely re-examine your current strategies and evaluate them in terms of their future relevance. Intensify what works well and discard what doesn’t. That is one great way to stay relevant in the highly competitive world of digital marketing.

Expert marketers have identified some notable trends which may be phased out due to less effectiveness. These are:

Marketing Automation

Customers now recognize that marketing automation lacks human touch and they find that unattractive. Not many people like dealing with programmed machines like autoresponders which are not as smart as chatbots. Personally, I don’t. It helps a great deal to make your customers feel that they are highly valued and each one of them matters. Wholesale marketing automation denies them that. The reason it is fast losing appeal.

Texts Optimization

Texts optimization used to be mostly for SEO purposes only. Now, Search Engines are becoming smarter and their algorithms keep changing very frequently. Because of this, the rules of optimization keep changing across the board. If you get caught in their web, the punitive actions could be very devastating for your business. The reason it has become extremely risky to just be playing around with texts optimization. It is fast losing appeal particularly with newbies in digital marketing. 


 
Shallow Blogging 

A good blog is expected to have great content which is informative, educating and even entertaining. If your blog lacks this, it can hardly make impact in the highly competitive business of blogging. It is no longer any blog but blogs with enough depth in the subject matter to help readers solve problems. Without enough depth, a blog reader may not go beyond a few seconds on your blog post to see if there is something different on offer. The world is now moving towards more innovative digital marketing ideas which bank high on quality. Shallow blogs now don’t stand any chance at all. The real reason they are losing out of appeal.

Long Video Ads

As things stand today, shorter videos have taken precedence over the longer ones because marketers have since discovered that shorter videos are more marketable. Popular video giants like YouTube have quickly latched on to that. They now have a preference for hyper-short video ads particularly the ones which adhere to tight time constraints. Experts now recommend ads in the 6-10 seconds bracket for commercials to match the unfolding future digital marketing trends. Exactly why long video ads are fast losing appeal!

Organic Reach on Facebook 

Due to abuse and loss of ads revenue, Facebook has severely limited by way of changes in algorithm the organic search of posts particularly on business pages. Chances are, it could be phased out completely in no distant time. Facebook now prioritizes meaningful conversations or points of interactions between closely related individuals over posts generated from business pages.

From the look of things right now, going forward demands a change in strategy and there is no better time than now to reinvent yourself and your digital marketing business. Get kicking!


 

How Small Business Technology Helps in Business Process Automation

Fact check: “Small Business Experts have established that technology is the backbone of a successful 21st century small business. They have discovered that technology allows small business owners to easily check email, monitor progress of jobs, and connect with clients outside the office and office hours. This is the flexibility that helps small businesses to build strong client relationships and business connections. Even though the tools needed to attain this level of satisfaction vary from industry to industry, the most popular are smartphones, tablets and laptop computers. These tools are extremely versatile, easy to use and highly effective modern technologies.” Here is how they help in Business Process Automation.

Business process automation (BPA) is advantageous to internal processes, marketing and product production. With internal processes, it streamlines lines of communications between departments and maintains consistency. This creates a business atmosphere that is easier to manage, complete tasks and make deadlines. The increase in efficiency creates a stronger bottom-line for businesses.

In addition also, marketing tasks can be automated. These require an expert to monitor, to maintain the business’ branding and to keep a strong focus on company goals. These technologies also help to target intended audiences which streamlines the process of reaching new and existing clients. There are many industry specific software options that can streamline business processes through automation. Automation allows a business to bid for larger jobs, and remain competitive. The bottom line for all small businesses is efficiency. Technology through automated processes allows a small business to operate more efficiently and lower operating costs.

 

Potent Methods for Winning Auctions in SFI

Many affiliates use manual bidding as well auto-bidding in their PriceBender’s auction bids for varied reasons. Some of these reasons do not really have anything to do with actually winning the auctions. Some bidders use them separately while others use them in combination. What probably determines which is better depends on what the bidder wants to achieve and what strategy he/she has in place. They both have their own strong points and weak points so everything depends on what the bidders are after. To determine which is better, it is best to take into account these strong points and weak points to arrive at that decision.


 
MANUAL BIDDING
Strong Points:
- More intelligent bidding.
- Tactful bidding.
- More and better control over your bids.
- Better implementation of your strategy.
- Better timing of your bids.
- Better control over the use of your TCredits.

Weak Points:
- Too much time consuming.
- Too much energy sapping.
- Bidding fatigue sets in faster.

AUTO-BIDDING
Strong Points:
- Saves time.
- Saves energy.
- More resilient bidding.

Weak Points:
- Excessive use of TCredits.
- Less control over bidding strategy.
- Poor timing of your bids.
- Lack of bidding intelligence.
- Tactless bidding.

 

 Like everything with automation, the level of human intelligence input is minimal so there is a tendency to misread the intentions of your fellow bidders and even to miss the trend at times. While bidding to win, the intention is to outwit and to outbid your fellow bidders and that requires some level of intelligence in your bids. That intelligence is something manual bidding can always fall back on as the bidding progresses. That alone makes manual bidding a better strategy to win these auctions instead of auto-bidding. If you have sufficient time and energy to spend on bids, I personally will recommend manual bidding over auto-bidding in auctions like PriceBenders taking into consideration the strong and weak points of both as highlighted above.

7 Ways to Automate Conversations with Your Customers

Maintaining an open line of communication with your customers is key to any successful business relationship. There is real customer satisfaction when your customers know that you’re behind them and are ready to support them every step of the way. This is a win-win relationship which does not necessarily mean you’ll need to spend extra man-hours to keep your lines of communication open. Even if there are a lot of customer service requests, you may not need a human being to handle them all. That is where automation comes in.

Putting automation to work in your business frees you and your employees up to continue to move your business forward, while still keeping a level of support that your customers expect. Here are 7 cost effective ways you can automate that process.

01. By Making Use of New Technologies: The commonest technologies that might assist in the automation process are the use of mobile apps. The most effective of these apps are those which help to walk customers through common issues so they can fix problems themselves without the need for your involvement. Others might use SMS to text a code to a number to get information on their account, a balance due, or to automate the payment process.

02. By Using Technology for Follow-up: Even after you’ve made a sale, it’s still important to keep the lines of communication open to your customers. The follow up helps to increase customer satisfaction by merely letting your customers know that you’re out there if they need you. That helps to address potential problems early on by addressing issues early. Common problems are easier to fix early on. For instance, using a simple automated email might be all that is needed to open a line of communication between you and your customer.

03. By Automating Your Social Media Presence: As many business owners have come to realize, Social media outreach is an important part of their business’ public face. It helps to give potential customers and customers a sense that they’re connected to you. Promotion of what your business offers through social media channels may open up new sales leads, while customers may turn to social media to contact you about issues. There are many social management systems such as HappyFox that can actually filter social media contacts based on the content of the message itself. That helps to take out the work of a middleman to direct queries to the right person. These same systems can also automatically post to your social media accounts, allowing you to automate your marketing strategy and give your content maximum exposure.

04. By Using Surveys: Surveys are fairly common methods of automation. Granted you’re not always going to get a high response rate, the data obtained from well designed surveys are great ways to not only spot potential problems, but also initiate a dialogue with your customers. It helps to keep them short, relevant, and to the point. You may also find it necessary to use your survey answers to initiate further automatic emails to gather additional feedback on areas where the responses might be a cause for concern.

05. By Using the Callback System: These days, even though many consumers may show a preference for using the Internet to communicate with businesses, many still appreciate talking to a human being. Call such people “old school” if you like but they are still out there and in large numbers too. It is because of such people the callback is still a worthy option to include in your customer relationship strategy. On the same pages where you might have a “Chat Now” button, a “Call Me” button might be just as useful. For example, MobiForge software has some great examples of Click to Call or Click to SMS solutions.

06. By Initiating Conversation without Prompting: Smart business owners do not wait for their customers to first reach out to them. They easily recognize such actions their customers may take that might be a clear sign of a need for assistance. For example, a website visitor spending a lot of time in your help pages probably needs some kind of support, while somebody looking through your products and services might benefit from talking with a member of your sales team to assure the sale. There are multiple great tools out there which can help initiate any conversation. Tools like LiveChat and BoldChat, both with customizable audience interactions can really be useful here.

07. By Using a Virtual Assistant to Handle the Simple Things: Just because you’re trying to be proactive doesn’t mean you’ll need to hire additional staff. A good portion of customer service requests are simple in nature, and with chat bots becoming ever more intelligent, automated systems can handle those issues quickly and easily. This frees up your employees to deal with more complex problems. Chat bots such as Botsify (for Facebook Messenger and other apps) can answer those simple questions that might arise from whatever actions your customer is taking on your site.