Potent Ways to Promote and Grow your Blog

Promoting your blog to give it online authority and a good following is a long term process. It is not even a one-time event or action. It takes processes, strategies and deliberate actions to get your blog noticed among the over 600 million active blogs online. If you want to grow your blog, be prepared to promote it as much as you can. To promote your blog, one of the most effective strategies expert bloggers recommend is to work to create as much valuable content as possible and syndicate the content in as many places/channels as possible. That way, the content stands a very good chance of reaching more people. The more people read your content, the more traffic you will get back to your blog. That appears to be the main objective of promoting and growing a blog. Here are some of the promotion techniques.

Use SEO to Promote Your Blog

If you want to get good organic traffic to your blog, you must think Search Engine Optimization, SEO to promote it. SEO is one very effective way to promote your blog on search engines. The higher the blog ranks on the SERPs of search engines, the more people see it. The more people see it, the more traffic the blog receives. Most content marketers rely on blogs to reach new customers and keep existing ones coming back for more. If you research your niche keywords well enough and take advantage of a keyword planner, you can carefully use these keywords on your content to optimize it. With a good SEO on your blog content, the chances of its ranking higher on major search engines particularly Google increases. By deploying the right SEO techniques as listed below, you can promote your blog with SEO to get amazing results.

Some Potent SEO techniques to Promote Your Blog
•    Create Valuable Content People Want to Read
•    Make Your Content Better Than the Competition’s
•    Optimize for Mobile Devices
•    Guest Post on Other Blogs
•    Create a Backlink Strategy
•    Optimize for Voice Search
•    Use more Long-Tail Keywords

Use Social Media to Promote your Blog

With presently over 4.5 billion active users on social media, it is one great place to promote your blog. The platforms are hugely popular and some of them have in-house tools bloggers can take advantage of to promote their blogs. Aside the huge popularity of social media platforms, the ease of sharing content/info on the platforms and the ease of interaction and communication is great for bloggers. Among the very popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, you can easily share your content with a huge number of people because the platforms allow people interested in what you have to say to follow along and keep pace with your posts. That way, the platforms can be highly effective to drive traffic back to your blog.

Last Line

Blogging is essentially a painstaking effort to write quality content regularly and build a strong community around your blog. Giving your blog a strong online presence to grow it for traffic purposes is what follows next. That is where promoting it multichannel becomes hugely important. The foregoing techniques are quite handy to do so effectively.

Salient Tips to Start an Affiliate Marketing Blog

Content marketing is hugely beneficial to affiliate marketing. The reason good bloggers like to use the tool to grow their audience and to promote their affiliate links. If you want a credible way to earn money online, think affiliate marketing. You can start a blog to market content and promote your affiliate links. Anytime your blog users click on these links and make a purchase, you earn a commission. You can thus earn good money with an affiliate marketing blog like this one. There are many different affiliate programs out there on the internet. That provides you as many great opportunities to make money with your site content, no matter who the target audience might be. Even you can start an affiliate marketing blog without delay by making these here tips your guide posts.

Choose a Unique Domain Name

It is imperative for you to ensure your domain name reflects your brand. It is the first thing your audience notices online. If it properly reflects your brand, it helps your online marketing a great deal. Names like Bobbysflowers, Kiddieswears. Auntypatcakes and so on can be good domain names which reflect what you are marketing at a glance. It doesn’t really matter much if you’re selling products/services, affiliate marketing, or PPC, domain name tells it first online. Your domain name is thus your first step on your path to marketing success online. A good domain name can make the real difference between a successful blog and an average one. It is that important. In choosing a domain name, you can always get a good one if you factor in your business niche and target audience, what’s not yet taken and your brand.

Choose a Niche

To succeed, you must concentrate your blog on a particular niche. So, you must first think of a great niche to focus your blog on for it to be relevant. When starting out on an affiliate marketing blog, you should factor in what you know, what you are good at, what you are passionate about what your interests are. Think deep before you make the plunge because it is that niche you’ll be churning out high quality content on to enrich and grow your blog down the road. Never make the mistake of limiting yourself unduly to just one thing be it a hobby or a particular topic. The wider and deeper your business niche, the more you’ll have to write about. If you have a genuine interest in the niche, it is all well and good.

 
Write High Quality Content

Online, blogging is hugely competitive. That is expected with over 6 million blogs active online. Blogging can be fun and straightforward provided you know what you are doing. Your aim should be for your blog to quickly stand out among the lot. Only high quality and informative content can guarantee that because you can’t afford to be just another blogger out there among the lot. What you do for your blog to stand out is to consistently and regularly churn out good content to enrich your blog. That is, the type of content that users love to read. It is such good content that helps your blog to rank higher in search engines. Higher ranking on search engine SERPs, translates to good organic traffic which helps your marketing efforts. With higher ranking, more people find your blog and click on your affiliate links. It also helps to build trust with readers, the reason many will keep coming back for more.

Choose a Suitable Blogging Platform

If you have a good domain name, and you churn out high quality content, your blog cannot make much impact if it is not well hosted. That makes the blogging platform you choose hugely important. The platform must be suitable for your type of blog and your blogging needs. Most of the available blogging platforms have their own in-house tools to aid your blogging activities. They offer analytics and some metrics too. All these must be factored in before you choose a blogging platform. The platform you choose depends on what type of content you plan to write, your target audience, and any other preferences. Among the many different blogging platforms available are WordPress, Blogger, and Tumblr which are hugely popular with bloggers. The blog you are reading right now for instance in on Blogger because of my own blogging preferences.

Powerful Tips to Improve Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Digital marketers can easily grow their businesses with the right affiliate marketing strategies. If used right, affiliate marketing can readily become an excellent way to enhance your business through increased profits, more leads and to easily forge connections with other brands, and lots more. Affiliate marketing is all about mutually beneficial partnerships between product merchants, affiliates/publishers and consumers. When consumers access and purchase a product through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale as determined by the product merchant. Quite a simple relationship no doubt!

 

Here are some powerful tips that can help you get more value from the affiliate marketing strategy you have in place for your business.

Create High-Quality Content around Your Offers

This you can do by deliberate efforts. The content you create should not only be of high quality, it must bear some relationship with the products you are promoting. The aim of such content is to attract potential customers to your site, offering them valuable information or advice, then directing them through the right CTA to buy your products. With the right links, you can also direct them to your affiliate partners. In digital marketing, blogging is about the best way to create and distribute content to promote your affiliate offers. If you can get visitors to read content on your website, it becomes easier to generate an impressive commission from your affiliate partnerships. If your content presents as authoritative and valuable information in your business niche, and appears to offer powerful, actionable content, then readers are more likely to click the affiliate links within the content.

Connect with the Right Affiliates

To succeed with affiliate programs every product you offer should resonate with one or more of your buyer personas. That can only happen when you connect with the right affiliates who share a similar passion in the products you are promoting. Buyer personas are essentially what help business owners and marketers define the goals, needs, and interests of people who visit their websites. That way, they can effectively market to them and get good results. You get more clicks and sales from your affiliate links if each product you offer appeals to at least one segment of your audience. With your buyer personas in place, you can then look for patterns in pain points or aspirations, and use this information to connect with the right affiliates for your business.

Optimize Your Content for Relevant Keywords

This is important because you want to receive valuable organic traffic from search engines. That brings search engine optimization, SEO, into the mix. If your content is optimized with the right keywords, it helps its ranking in Google SERPs. When these keywords are centered on search intent, you get better results. Google’s free Keyword Planner is a very useful tool that can help you to select the best keywords for your business niche. These are the ideal keywords to insert in the content you create. The quality of this content is enhanced if you focus more on conversational posts that educate and entertain users. By strategically connecting your affiliate links to relevant keywords, there’s a good chance that most of your posts will rank higher in the Search Engine Result Pages, SERPs of search engines particularly Google.

Significantly Market on Social Media

It is smart to make your social media engagement a very important part of your marketing strategy. Aside its huge popularity, sharing marketing messages on social media is like a piece of cake. With over 4.5 billion people currently using social media regularly, it is one huge market marketers cannot afford to ignore. If you factor in that many of these people use many social media platforms for shopping inspiration, it becomes more obvious why affiliate marketing works so well on the platforms.  If you use social media as a marketing channel, you have access to very many ways to reach your audience. This is in addition to the many free in-house marketing tools they place at your disposal. Through social media, you can build an audience real quick, promote new products, and see more sales through your affiliate programs. You can therefore take advantage of very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, to easily connect with your target audience.

Segment Your Email List

If you already have a credible email list, it is more useful if you can segment it for marketing purposes. By segmenting your email recipients into separate email lists, it becomes easier and more effective to market to them. Segmenting gives you the all-important freedom and flexibility to create custom offers, both affiliate and otherwise, for your subscribers. Better still, you can also take deliberate steps to personalize the leads because personalizing and segmenting your leads can have a noticeable impact on your affiliate sales. That in combination with well-made buyer personas significantly makes it easy for you to create multiple campaigns geared towards customers with specific interests, goals, and problems. 

How to Generate Awesome Content for Your Blog

Great content always makes great blogging. On the part of bloggers, great content means coming up consistently with topics that are engaging and constructive. Such topics that can keep your readers devoted to your blog and grow your audience. It means always finding hot stuff for your blog that will interest if not amaze your readers. The Internet is the collected knowledge of all humankind and with it comes the best ideas that humans have ever had. The real challenge to bloggers however is to be able to tap into this potential and to find something to write about that will make some impact within this body of knowledge. Once your audience likes the content you write, you are bound to make some impact.

Even though the Internet is well equipped to give bloggers a load of information and solutions, there are times they suffer from the old writer’s block and unable to write good content. If you are a blogger, any time you find yourself in such a situation, try these here tested strategies to help you write good content.

Think, Observe and Take Notes

In whatsoever you do and wherever you go, always think content. Be observant enough as not to miss out on anything or any information that may be of help to you when creating content. For this reason, always be prepared to take copious notes and to record any information that you may need later when writing content. It helps to carry around a portable notepad and a pen/pencil to jot down any information you may find useful later as you move around your daily activities. Such notepad comes handy to record the details of any idea in case your memory fails you as it often happens. Ideas that come around this way usually flesh themselves out pretty quickly when crafting your content.

Repurpose and Repackage Old Content

Once in a while, you can single out an old content for repacking as a new content. You repurpose and repackage such content as new and it continues to pull traffic. Repurposing and repackaging is not the same thing as copying and pasting such content. That is a no no.  You can actually give a new lease of life to an old content by taking the salient points out of the old post and combining them with new ideas and good images to make a brand new content. Repurposing old content and repackaging it remains a very good strategy to generate content.

Read and Note Comments in Niche Blogs

If you are diligent enough, you can get good content from comments on your own blog and comments on other popular blogs within your blog niche. The most popular sites usually have comment storms of hundreds of comments all saying what they liked or disliked about any blog post. You can note all the comments asking for more information or clarifying information on the original post. These are treasure troves for more content. A good content is one that gives readers what to want to read. Knowing what your audience is looking for helps you to craft content to meet their needs. Comments from your blog niche readers give you a unique insight into what the readers in this particular niche care about and are talking about. From these comments, you can get new ideas and inspiration to write more effective content. Through your content, if you manage to give your readers something they probably haven’t heard about yet and are yearning to know, you’ll have them hooked on your content.

Base your Post off Other Successful Posts

Style your posts around previous posts that are doing well and pulling good traffic. These are posts that bloggers like to call evergreen blog posts. You can also target the best performing posts of the top five or more blogs you follow. Determine what makes them unique and why they’re doing well. If you are able to correctly figure that out, it becomes simple to craft a post that mimics the style and the structure of the successful post. That’s one relatively easy way to give yourself ideas for new content in a short space of time. Even if the content may not perform as well as the original, it still has a lot of potential to do well.

Experiment with Ideas

By experimenting with new ideas in your content, you can always manage to come up with new thinking and new direction in the ever evolving world of blogging. A good blogger always utilizes all information at his disposal to craft content that appeals to his audience. The more he experiments with ideas, the more he arouses this appeal. No matter how skilled you are as a blogger, you cannot maximize your skills if you are unable to experiment with ideas.

Use Content Ideas Generators

Good thinking and good observation may not be enough to give you all the blogging ideas you need. You can thus supplement your thinking with good content idea generators. Online, a content idea generator like Hubspot’s Topic Generator is a small app that allows you to input words or phrases and then randomly generate topics that may or may not be of use to you to create blog content. If you input say about two or three nouns, the app automatically generates topics that you can streamline to fit whatever blog niche you’re writing on. This app is far from being a sophisticated tool, but it saves bloggers the time they would otherwise have expended physically juggling some nouns around on a pad to make some sense.

Be Active on Social Media

Presently, nearly everyone is social media 24/7 around the world doing one thing or another. Smart bloggers are taking good advantage of the enormous audience of social media. If you are a blogger, social media links you with your audience in the most direct manner that has ever existed since the dawn of the Internet. This simply means that social media allows you to observe first-hand the things your audience is discussing with their social groups real time. This vital insight has a lot of potential for generating leads for great content creation by bloggers. By creatively using this information, you can easily craft content around the most important topics that your users have chosen to discuss on social media.

Use User Generated Content  

You can have awesome content for your blog from user-generated content. Do this by diligently following the comments from your blog audience. Observe how your blog community relates with and discusses with itself. Through this observation, you can determine what they care about then use their questions and concerns to craft great blog posts for their benefit. If you spend quality time monitoring the trend of discussions of your audience, you can easily come up with some blog topics to address their concerns. You can even play the devil’s advocate by directly posing questions to your audience to elicit responses. Based on their responses, you can then craft some riveting content to meet their needs.

How to Start, Run, and Operate a Successful Blog

You can start and run a private blog for fun or to make money. Even when you start your blog from scratch, you can monetize it and make a small business out of it. That’s exactly what bloggers who want to make money from their blogging do these days. Blogging may appear quite common now particularly among digital marketers who are running their own businesses. These people effectively use their blogs as marketing/promotional tools for their business. If however you are just starting out in your blogging business, you really need quite a bit of guidance to start, run and operate your blog successfully. These here tips can be of help.

 
Decide what you want to Blog About

Deciding on what you want to blog about is hugely important right from the outset of your blogging experience. What you can successfully blog about is what you know and are passionate about because discovering your passion early enough is the key to successful blogging. You must think deep and brainstorm well to come up with relevant subjects and topics for your blog. If your blog mission is well defined, coming up with relevant topics to blog about becomes fairly easy. What your blog readers want to see is high quality and informative content and they stay hooked on to your blog. Just give them such content regularly and consistently and your audience will grow.

Carefully Select a Blogging Platform

The blogging platform you choose to blog from is very important to the success of your blog. You must therefore take adequate care to select a platform for your blog. The right platform to settle for depends on the product you are marketing and the nature of your blog. It is a need based decision that also factors in your skills and your personal preferences. Most blogging platforms have various in-house tools that can help to enhance your blogging experience. These must be factored in too before you choose a platform. Among the many blogging platforms available, experienced bloggers do recommend WordPress, Blogger, Square Space, Wix, Tumblr, and Ghost. For beginner bloggers, WordPress and Blogger are great to use because they are text-based and search engines particularly Google love them.
   
Consistently Create Quality Content

In blogging parlance, content is always king. The more the content you create, the more following you get for your blog. That translates to good traffic too. Your blog can never succeed if you only manage to create poor and mediocre content. This is why you must pay special attention to content creation. In this wise, it is advisable to consistently create high quality informative and educational content that will interest your readers. Grammatical presentation is important too. For this reason, before posting any content, make sure you proofread it thoroughly and correct all grammatical errors as well as formatting mistakes.
 
Create a Brand

For marketing purposes, your blog must reflect your brand. You must therefore create your blog name, logo and even colors to reflect your brand. Figure out your unique storyline that will reflect your brand and be attractive to your audience. Come up with ideas and test run them to see what works best. By the time you get what works best for you, you can proceed to use it consistently and use it as often as possible to consolidate it as a brand.

Network to Build your Community

If you want your blog to quickly succeed, it is not enough to consistently post content, you must network well too. As soon as you start posting, you’ll have to spend a lot of time networking. This you can do by way of blog commenting, cooperating and working with other bloggers. In fact, you must carry out all activities needed to get audience for your blog. This is important because the audience will not just come to you except you work to bring them to you. To build a reliable community for your blog therefore, networking is the answer. For good results, you must spend quality time commenting on blogs, engaging on social media, communicating with your blog followers, reaching out to and collaborating with various influencers.

Be Diligent and Patient

It takes quite a while for your blog to get noticed online and indexed by search engines. For this reason, you cannot expect your blog to have overnight success. Waiting patiently for your blog to start getting the right traffic may be discouraging, but it is not sufficient to frustrate you out of blogging. You must be diligent and consistent at creating and posting content and with time, traffic will come. You must endeavor therefore to be patient with your blog and with yourself. Try to maintain your blogging schedule, create and post content regularly and establish your presence in as many social media platforms as convenient for your schedule. It may take a while but with time, your blog will be a success if you are diligent and consistent in your content creation.

5 Tips to Consistently Create Successful Blog Posts

Anyone can start a blog but not everyone can make a success out of it. The biggest challenge about blogging is not just starting a blog, but operating it and filling it with relevant content consistently. For some people, that could be really daunting. A personal blog is simply a platform on which the author can express their thoughts, communicate with readers, and indirectly promote particular products/services. These days, many bloggers even turn their blogging passion into a profitable business and they make good money for their efforts. Good blog posts on a regular and consistent basis make this possible. So, if you want to consistently create good blog posts to make your blog successful, pay attention to the following tips.

1. Carefully Choose Your Blogging Platform

For convenience and good hosting, you must carefully choose a blogging platform to create your blog. The blogging tools the platform offers are also very important in this consideration. Two options are really quite popular among bloggers. You can use a free platform or launch a website with your own domain and hosting. Alternatively as is increasingly popular these days, you also have another option of blogging on one or more of the very popular social media networks. Whatever platform you choose must help you to properly position yourself and your blog on the internet. That way, you can easily build up good following and audience for your blog. The bigger the audience/following your blog has, the higher the chances that your blog posts will be read widely.

2. Define and Stick to the Main Subject of Your Blog

Having a clear subject or business niche for your blog is also vital. You may choose to blog about your profession, a hobby, or any aspect of your life that interests you and you feel will interest bothers. Once chosen, you must adhere strictly to the theme with your blog posts to help build trust for the blog. Research and develop topics based on this theme with the interest of your readers uppermost in your considerations. Thereafter, you can write about anything and everything always making sure to highlight trending events and expressing your opinions about them with a view to arousing the interest of your blog readers at all times. By doing this consistently with high quality and information content, chances are, your blog will be in demand. This helps the blog posts to succeed exceedingly.

3. Provide only High-Quality and Informative Content

The content you share on your blog must be useful to your readers. Such content must be valuable to readers and informative enough to help solve their problems. It is such content you must post regularly and consistently to keep your readers hooked up to your blog. You must continue to be true to your blog and your readers by posting only valuable and reliable content at all times. That way, your blog will be easily recognized as an authoritative and trustworthy source of information. Adopt a writing style that is easy to read and understand while completely avoiding slang and vulgar expressions. Write only what you know to be true and factual and diligently research what you are not too sure of before writing about it. Above all, pay attention to readers’ feedback/comments and respond to them politely, factually and promptly. You can even filter good ideas from this feedback that can help you to craft more helpful blog posts.

4. Decide on a Blogging Plan/Calendar

For your blog to be successful there is a need to clearly outline your plan, purpose, and the main task of the blog. This you can do by creating a clear and concise blogging plan/calendar. This plan must be purposeful and with datelines for posting content. It could be daily, weekly and monthly in concept with specific times of the day depending on which audience you are targeting and in what part of the world. A list of probable topics and even some outlines for some of the topics helps to ease up the job and keep to schedules. That helps to display a reputation for your blog while showcasing your competence. Your reading audience likes that and it usually helps your blog posts to succeed widely. It is advisable to pay particular attention to a variety of content while making sure your content is not overly promotional of any product/service. Your blog content is successful if it attracts visitors to your blog. It takes other website marketing strategies like CTAs to get these visitors to make purchases. You should therefore endeavor to build a strategy that works in a way that makes your blog visitors wish to purchase something once they hit your website through the informative content and positive customer reviews your blog makes available to them.

5. Regularly Rejig and Improve Your Blog

Trends change and so are blogging tools and techniques. Therefore, you must regularly rejig and improve on your blog to keep up with trends and changes in techniques and technology. You can collect relevant data about the performance of your blog posts through in-house metrics and analytics tools. Info from the data helps you to decide what to improve on and what to discard all together to improve the overall performance of your blog. In addition, as you garner more blogging experience, your blogging skills improve as well. These skills come in handy to help keep your blog up-to-date with changing trends and techniques. A blog post that is not attracting traffic is not good enough. If you discover such posts, you can then consider among other things to see how you can improve the blog content with images/graphics because blog posts with images tend to increase the number of views significantly.

Conclusion

You must understand that successful blogging is not an immediate business. It takes time, efforts and diligent blogging to get good results. With time and effort, you are likely to get more consistent results in form of increased traffic, public recognition, and increased audience loyalty. Once you are diligent in your blogging efforts, these results will keep coming in to enhance the effectiveness of your blog. That by all accounts is blogging success.

7 Quick Tips on How to Make Online Sales

Expert digital marketers like to say, you don’t have to be a marketing expert or even have experience to succeed in selling online. Once you are able to master the rudiments and follow the rules, you too can sell online. If you can craft your marketing message well and make your pitch widely, you’ll get positive responses in no time at all. With that, you get a feeling of optimism and reassurance to ginger you to make more pitching. Pulling in more sales naturally flows from there. Here is a list of 7 easy-to-implement tips most expert marketers never fail to offer to anyone who is desirous to make sales online.

1. Offer Affiliate Opportunities

Affiliate opportunities help to increase the reach of a marketer online by leveraging the audiences of both the marketer and the affiliates. So, marketers can rely on affiliate opportunities to effectively share the huge task of selling products/services online. Affiliate marketing is simply when marketers allow other people, (i.e. affiliates) to market their products/services and send them website traffic. As a benefit, these affiliates are paid a percentage of any sales that are made from their promotional efforts as commissions. This arrangement is completely risk-free and low-cost since affiliates get paid if and only when they generate sales.

2. Build up an Email List

Email marketing may be “old school” but it still manages to get attractive sales results. Its effectiveness hinges directly on an email list which is a major marketing asset the marketer has to build up over time. Creating an email list is essential to generating sales through email marketing and it costs next to nothing to build. With a credible and segmented email list, you do not have to wait for customers to find your products/services themselves. Through the list, you can deliver your marketing messages and even offers directly to their inboxes. Your segmented email list of subscribers enables you to accurately deliver well-tailored product/service information and content to specific time zones around the world 24/7. That helps your sales a great deal.

3. Make Your Checkout Process User-Friendly

Online shoppers are characteristically very impatient. If the check-out process in your business website is cumbersome and not user-friendly, you risk losing a lot of sales opportunities. For this reason, you need to make your checkout process as simple as possible. Avoid giving your customers too many questions to answer or long-winded forms to fill in. Each extra step in the checkout process is a chance for your customers to change their minds and pull out of the sale. What follows is a huge pile of abandoned carts. Most customers shop online because it’s quicker and more convenient than visiting a physical store. If however because of the complexity of your check-out process many customers decide to back out, you risk losing many sales as a result.

4. Make Your Product Descriptions Vivid

Making shoppers to like your product at the shortest possible time span helps your sales. You can only make a sale if your shoppers like your products. A vivid description of your products helps that process. The internet is usually bursting with products and the competition is very stiff. For this reason, you must always make sure your customers and potential customers understand how your products will benefit them through the vivid descriptions you provide. This is complemented with very high quality images and or graphics. The more relevant information you can provide, the more likely your customers and potential customers will stay on your site long enough to decide to make a purchase. 

5. Start a Blog

Blogging is a very popular way of content marketing on the internet. If you don’t have a blog yet, you must decide to start one if you want to make more sales online. Without a blog associated with your online store or product, you risk missing out on the endless possibilities that come with content marketing. Just blog about an industry niche related to the products you are marketing and provide valuable information to your readers that will help solve their problems. Creating a good blog allows you to produce free and valuable content that builds trust in your brand and keeps people well informed. Good quality blog posts will also give you valuable content to share on social media and help your website rank high in the SERPs of search engines. That translates to good traffic, leads and sales.

6. Spread Word about Your Business

Never hesitate to tell anyone about your business. The more the number of people that know about your business, the better for the business! Start spreading the word from your social media circle to your family and friends. Encourage them to pass the word to their own social media circle, family and friends. You can make your first tentative sales from this inner circle. Through them, the word gets out to others in a wider circle and your sales increase as a result. Once you are able to establish that your product solves a problem for anyone in your circle, sell them the benefits. If it helps them out, they pass the word on in favor of your business. You can easily take advantage of your personal network on social media where you’re likely to be connected to many more people than in the physical world to pass on the word about your business.

7. Give Away Free Stuff to Influencers

A mutually beneficial relationship with influencers on social media is also recommended because many industry influencers have loyal audiences and large followings on social media. Sending influencers a free complimentary sample of your product is a great way to potentially get a mention on one of their platforms. If this happens, you’re almost certainly going to see some kind of spike in your website traffic and social media followers. That can directly ignite a spike in your sales too. Any form of relationship or interaction with influencers can affect your sales positively. If for instance you sell sports wears, interviewing an influencer about the industry and even playing a game with an influencer while they’re wearing your sports attire is good PR for your sales. When influencers actively engage with their loyal followers and even endorse your products to them, you are likely to witness a remarkable spike in your sales from that endorsement alone.

How to Make Your Personal Blog Profitable

Making your personal blog profitable depends largely on your knowledge, skills and proficiency. But first you must be ready to build a loyal following for your blog before you can successfully turn the audience into revenue. Admittedly, doing so takes quite a while and a lot of patience though. But with the right planning, marketing funnels and content development, even an average blogger can do so. Below are some tips how.

 

Go for Affiliates Revenue

Having your own blog running is not enough to make money out of it. You must actively promote and share it for it to be able to make money. By the time you successfully build a good following for your blog particularly on social media, you can develop an affiliate marketing strategy for it. This is one great way to earn recurring income from the blog. All you need is to embed relevant affiliate links of the products you are promoting in your blog content to enhance your reader’s experience. With these links in place all over your content, you earn a commission every time a sale is made through these affiliate links. That helps you to generate commissions in perpetuity from all sales made through these affiliate links. If your blog does this for you even on the short or long term, it becomes a success story you can build upon to make the blog more profitable.

Offer Sponsored Content

Most bloggers know that one of the best ways to generate revenue on a blog is to offer sponsored content. Bloggers must however ensure their advertising aligns snugly their audience to get the best results. Profitable sponsored content can be packaged in form of videos, podcasts, blog posts, roundup stories, reviews and interviews. Payment for sponsored content is usually swift. As soon as you create the content and it is published, payment is made. Earning from sponsored content is usually faster than affiliate marketing arrangements because affiliate commissions are paid at agreed intervals. On sponsored content, earned revenue isn’t directly dependent on clicks or views, unlike other types of blog monetization strategies. The earned revenue depends on how large the blog readership is and in what location the brand’s message is placed on the blog. 

Package your Skills into Marketable Services

As the traffic, audience and contacts on your blog grow, you can think about many ways to use those assets to earn income. You can for instance reach out to more targeted audiences and package your knowledge as service programs for those who are willing to buy. You can through these programs create a sales funnel to ensure consistent stream of revenue from your blog. It is possible and profitable to set this funnel up in such a way as to guide readers from social media, publicity, and Pinterest advertising (top of the funnel) to your blog posts/landing pages to your email list and funneling them to your sales pages (bottom of the funnel). This process may take a while and some testing to improve conversions. But, it is always worth it on the long run when the pieces fall in place and align properly. The revenues start flowing in directly from these efforts and your blog starts turning a profit.

9 Harmful Affiliate Marketing Don’ts

Affiliate marketing is readily one of the most convenient ways to make money online. The reason most online marketers never fail to add it to their portfolio. However, not many marketers get to make it real good with affiliate marketing for many and varied reasons. Some of these reasons hinge on the fact that many affiliate marketers tend to do certain things they should ideally not do. Some of these things do help to ruin most of their affiliate marketing efforts, the reason it becomes difficult for many of them to do great in the business. For instance, many affiliate marketers tend to focus more on the wrong aspects of affiliate marketing and end up losing some potential earnings because they don’t really know what they’re doing. Here are some of the things you should never do if you want to make some appreciable success out of your affiliate marketing activities.

1. Don’t Fail to Research your Competition

As an affiliate, it is required that you promote products/services by way of affiliate links. It is of utmost importance therefore to know what your competition is doing. You must through detailed research know at all times what your competition is up to. Make sure you know your competition well enough and how they are promoting. The aim is to do better than what they are doing that is working for them. If for instance they have more links than you do pointing towards their website/blog posts, then your chances of making money are going to be slim when compared to them. To match up, you will need at least as many affiliate marketing links that they have in order for your content/blog posts to be sufficiently competitive. You really need to stand out from the crowd if you want more people to visit your website/blog post and to buy anything via your affiliate links.

2. Don’t Fail to Know the Product/Service you Promote

It is a truism in marketing that you cannot effective sell any product you don’t know well enough. Not knowing well enough the product you are promoting via your affiliate links is a recipe for failure. This is why you must know what you’re promoting and why people should buy it if you want your affiliate marketing efforts to yield good results. If you don’t know much about the product you are promoting, how then can you expect to effectively market it to others?

3. Don’t Ignore Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO is extremely important if you want your website to rank high in the SERPs of search engines. SEO helps online searchers to locate you on the web. If people can’t find your content/blog posts, you can’t expect such people to buy anything via your affiliate links. Many bloggers tend focus more on other aspects of their websites but ignore SEO completely. That is one huge marketing mistake that could cause them to lose out on a lot of money. Without the right SEO on your blog content, it is lost completely in the deep sea of the internet. Affiliate marketers can therefore not afford to ignore SEO of their content.

4. Don’t Rely Only on Affiliate Traffic

For your affiliate marketing efforts to have the right traction and be successful, it is hugely important that you don’t rely on only one source of traffic. The more traffic sources to your website, the better for your affiliate marketing efforts. If you limit yourself to one traffic source, you lose out on traffic/visitors to your website and consequently your earnings. Taking advantage of many web resources/channels particularly social media to promote your content helps to diversify your traffic sources and it is good for traffic.

5. Don’t Pick Quantity over Quality

In affiliate marketing, you should never sell your visitors short. Always give them the best on offer. Promoting quality links is preferable to the quantity of links. Don’t focus on how many affiliate links to have on your content. It is better to focus more on the quality of those links. Too many poor links on your content can earn you a penalty from search engines. Too many poor links makes your content to look like spam and search engines hate spam. Your content cannot rank high in SERPs if search engines see it as spam. If your blog content does not rank high, it is difficult for many people to see it and as such, many people won’t buy products through your affiliate links.

6. Don’t Spam with Affiliate Links

Search engines are usually very sensitive to spam and there is always a very thin line between sending out affiliate links to people and spamming them. Never make the mistake of trying to send out too many affiliate marketing emails at a time thinking that doing so will help you to get more leads/customers. If you do, you risk sanctions from search engines if they classify your content as spam.
 
7. Don’t Fail to Have a Plan

In affiliate marketing just like any other business, if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. You must have a workable plan in place if you want your affiliate marketing efforts to be successful. Just like any other human activity, if you don’t know what you’re doing or where you’re going, you go nowhere fast. You cannot expect people who visit your content/blog posts to buy anything via your affiliate link if you don’t have a plan in place to lure them to do so. In affiliate marketing, planning and good strategy matter a lot. It is of paramount important to always have a good plan in place to help you make money via your affiliate links. You must know what you are doing before your content/blog posts can expect to rank highly in search engines. If they don’t, it will be pretty difficult if not impossible for many people to visit your website and do business with you.

8. Don’t Fail to Identify Target Groups

If you market content, your audience is your primary market. To market effectively to your audience, it must be properly identified and segmented. If you don’t, you’ll be making one common mistake many bloggers and content marketers make by not identifying their target groups when they do affiliate marketing. If you don’t know who your target group is, then how are you supposed to sell anything via an affiliate link? If you want people to buy anything via an affiliate link, it is of paramount important that you identify your target market very distinctly. You must know who you’re marketing to and how they are going to respond to your content if you expect them to buy anything. If you don’t, most of your marketing efforts particularly via affiliate links will yield very little or no results at all.

9. Don’t Copy-Paste Other Affiliates

If you have the habit of copying and pasting content from other affiliates, you risk penalties from search engines. For this reason, if you want to be really successful with affiliate marketing, then it’s important that you regularly create your own unique content and post consistently. If you copy-paste other people’s work, you risk being found out easily. That can lead to more sanctions including outright bans from some websites/services altogether. The rule is to regularly create your own unique content if you want people to buy anything via your affiliate links. Doing so helps you to grow your brand authority and influence and your audience grows in tandem.

8 Website Ideas to Earn Extra Income Online

Worldwide, internet users now top 4.5 billion. Meaning, more and more people are now using the internet for business and sundry activities and they access via websites. For people doing business online, they need websites that attract considerable traffic. Websites with good traffic inflow are well positioned for making money online with the right ideas. What that means is that a decent website can earn a significant income if the ideas are right. It is all a matter of ideas, good ideas and you can earn extra income from your website. In that quest, here are eight tested and proven website ideas that can help you earn extra income online.

1. Start an Affiliate Blog Website

This idea is to simply create targeted content that will drive inbound traffic to your blog website. If you embed affiliate links carefully on the content, any click through these links and a purchase is made earns you some affiliate commission. The more affiliate products you link to and the more of these products that are sold through your links, the more money you earn from your efforts.

2. Create a Recipe Website

If you have culinary skills, you can create a recipe website and earn some income. Thousands of people search online daily for recipes and meal inspirations. If you’re creative enough to come up with some unique recipes, you can share them online through your recipe website. That helps to create awareness and curiosity. If your recipe website starts to get good traffic, you can take the next step to earn money by selling online cooking courses, advertising, or even affiliate marketing to your audience.

3. Establish a Travel Website

Yeah, the human race is always on the move. That means endless travels. If you enjoy traveling and you like to travel, you can capitalize on something you love doing to earn money. You can take beautiful scenic and destinations photographs; graphically tell stories about the trials and tribulations you’ve experienced in your journeys. Such content will attract an audience with interest in travels to your website. When your following begins to grow, you’ll be able to collaborate with different travel products for sponsored content to earn money. You can promote affiliate products related to travels and earn commissions. In addition, you can sell your photos online as prints; contact various destinations or hotels for discounted or free reservations, and lots more.

4. Create an eCommerce Store

You can significantly increase your potential to earn considerable income online by creating an eCommerce store since more and more shoppers are now going online to make purchases. That comes down to about 65% of all internet users. Now, that’s a very huge market out there. An eCommerce store will help you to get a foot into this huge market at very limited costs and you’ll be able to attract international shoppers as well. If you choose, you can sell your own products and ship them directly to buyers. Alternatively and as a good way to save up on costs, you can implement a dropshipping program. Through it, you can sell products without bothering about warehousing and shipping. The products manufacturers will be responsible for shipping these products directly from their warehouses to the buyers.

5. Start a Personal Blog

A personal blog is content marketing in which anyone who knows something useful that others will like to read can start writing about it. What that means is that you can blog on virtually any niche. The idea is to create readable, engaging, and exciting content that attracts people back to your platform.  As your blog following starts to grow, then you can consider monetizing it. This you can do in many creative ways such as sponsored content, affiliate marketing, advertising, or through Google AdSense. The higher your website traffic, the more advertisers are willing to pay for placements on your blog and the more money you earn from the blog.

6. Build a Job Website

Ever heard of Jobberman.com? Yeah, that’s a great job website. Millions of people worldwide are online daily searching for jobs, any jobs. Having a job website is one great way you can earn cool income online. The approach is simple and straight forward. You can decide to post available jobs to your website and you earn residual income every time someone visits the site.  Or, you can decide to connect job seekers to jobs as a recruiter and you earn on fees. If you have a well-designed job website, you can create a membership page that allows detailed profile creation. This can include resumes, job preferences, personal information, and more. To build website traffic fairly quickly, it is advisable to consider keeping profile registration free, along with a personalized platform for fees paying members. You can make the site more attractive by including early access to job postings, salary insights, and on-going career tips as part of the content.

7. Build a Humor Website

No doubt most people like humor, real humor that helps to brighten their days in a world full of endless struggles and stress. A humor website can become very popular very quickly for this reason. Humor is a very delicate subject matter though. Make sure that the content you post isn’t protected by copyright to avoid being barred from search engine results. Be careful not to engage in humor that denigrates race, ethnicity or religion. These are no go areas. When launching your humor-based content, you can carefully search online for various types of humor and determine which niche you’d like to cover. As your following grows, you can then consider monetization by way of paid ads and automated ads campaign such as Google Adsense.

8. Develop a Review Platform

Most online users particularly on social media like to share personal experiences with restaurants, hotels, resorts, golf courses, businesses, and local travels/destinations. A review website can help interested people connect local establishments with considerable website traffic. You can earn income on a review website by offering highlighted locations, top search placement, and preferred business packages. As your membership grows, your earnings grow in tandem.

Wrapping Up

These eight website ideas may not be the only income earning ideas from a website but they’re certainly some of the easiest to implement to earn income. They all have great long-term earning potentials. What is common to all of them is good content which must be shared regularly and consistently to attract traffic. Your website visitors are the traffic and no visitor returns to a website if there’s nothing interesting on the website either to read or view frequently. To earn money online with website ideas, you’ve got to be very patient. A website takes quality time to establish authority and recurring traffic because it must contend with great competition which the internet is notorious for.

How to Get More Social Media Followers and Drive Sales

With now an estimated 4.2 billion active users on social media worldwide, the quest for followers can be quite challenging since it depends on many factors. The benefits are enormous as well if you can have a large number of followers on any of the social media platforms. Even though it can be pretty difficult to gather a huge following, the techniques and tactics you deploy in your social media activities play a very significant role in that quest. If for instance you are an active blogger, it is only when you have a huge following that you can profitably monetize your blog. Same thing applies if you want to become a social media influencer and join the league of good money-makers on social media. If you are able to deploy the right techniques and tactics you can easily generate a good following, build a great reputation from a loyal audience and drive sales for your business. Find below some tested and reliable techniques you can use to get more social media followers and drive sales for your business.

Have a Social Media Strategy

It is true that haphazard marketing on social media hardly ever yields good results. Therefore, you need to have a strategy that works well to help get the best results. This strategy must be such that can effectively help to drive more traffic to your website or blog. If your social media strategy is right and effective, a huge bulk of your readers can come from social media networks. You must therefore endeavor to formulate a social media strategy that helps boost traffic to your business website or blog.

Create Valuable Content

In social media marketing, content is king. Good content is what helps to attract readers to your page. The reason readers come to your page is because you are offering them something that they need. Therefore, you must endeavor to create content that is of value to your readers. One very easy and effective way to get that done is to think from your readers’ perspective and create content along that perspective.

Offer Free Stuff

Yeah, everyone likes free stuff. Nothing attracts people more than free stuff. You can offer up promotional coupons, eBooks, free templates, how-to guides, and other useful stuff to ingratiate yourself with your audience. They respond accordingly and that helps to attract traffic to your website/blog.

Choose a Specific Niche

A specific niche allows you to target a specific audience interested in that niche. The success of your blog depends on you finding your passion and your ability to create compelling content. Expert marketers advise that your niche should not have too much competition as your blog will need to compete against highly rated sites. If it does, the content can easily be stifled out and unnoticed by readers. That scenario cannot help your traffic. Be sure to choose a subject matter that you are very knowledgeable about and one that people can take insights from and with a demand that will impact your potential following. That means you will also need to get an accurate picture of your target audience in terms of age, level of knowledge of the subject matter, and other factors to make a meaningful impact on the audience.

Focus on a Few Social Media Platforms

It is quite impactful to focus your content on a few or even a single social media channel. If you don’t, you risk not capturing the right amount of followers to make your blog worth looking into. Carefully identify your target readers’ demographics and then identify the social networks that they prefer. If for instance your blog post is geared more towards professionals and businesses you might want to consider using LinkedIn. If however your target followers are younger and more visual, you may tilt towards Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest for best results.

Build Trust Diligently

In any human endeavor, trust building takes time and efforts. This is even more delicate when you factor in that you are dealing with all kinds of people with various backgrounds on social media. For most readers, it could take some very little things to get them to trust you or distrust you. All of it depends on the content they read from you and expect from you. If you manage to build a track record of creating useful content that serves them well, and you are diligent, consistent and reliable about it, it helps you to build trust.

Create Quality Content Regularly

This helps to establish and build your social media presence. If your content does not attract readers, it is not worth the while. Therefore, you must regularly churn out quality content that readers need. To sustain the interest of your readers, it helps to set out a calendar for your content creation and posting. Doing so helps to guarantee regularity and consistency in your quality content production.

Increase Engagement Rates

How people engage your content is directly related to the relevance and quality of the content. Therefore, one credible way to increase your fan base is to get more engaged followers. You can only get more engaged followers if your content is important enough or interesting enough that people share, link to, like, and even make comments on. To sustain this engagement, make sure to reply to comments as well as collaborate with other content creators for mutual benefits.

Use Analytics to Understand Your Audience

Social media analytics is all about feedback data. You can rely on this data to better understand your audience. Social media analytics data allows you to get the right insights about who your followers are. With that vital information, you can regularly tweak your content to align with their needs. If your content aligns well with their needs, it is better engaging and good for traffic. If you back that up with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you can maximize your audience and income with ad sales.

Use the Right Hashtags

Many social media users tend to ignore hashtags. Hashtags are hugely important to help direct more followers to your website/blog. This is because posts with hashtags have higher rates of engagement than posts without hashtags. To take advantage of this, you must make sure that the hashtags you use are relevant, funny, interesting, easily recalled, and in good taste. It is such hashtags that are really great for engagement.

How to Promote Your Service Business Online

If you are a service provider, just like every business owner, your business must have been adversely affected by the general restrictions occasioned by the covid-19 pandemic. What you should worry about now is how to promote your service business to create a better online presence or boost your existing online presence with a view to attracting more customers back to your business. However, the unique nature of service businesses warrants unique business promotion activities and somewhat different marketing strategy simply because services involve intangible products.

If you want to effectively promote your service business online, here are some tips for getting found online.

Create a Blog

Because of the intangible nature of services, every service business thrives on reviews, recommendations or word of mouth. Technically, the trial of a service is often impractical because it is an intangible product. This is why it relies hugely on recommendations to generate trust in its ability to meet the needs of customers. If you create a blog on your website and encourage user-generated content in the form of reviews and articles, it is one effective way to ensure visitors to your website trust and believe in the service you offer. By writing good content on your blog about customers’ experiences with your services, it somehow helps to build the much needed credibility for your business. Continuously writing in-depth, factual, and relevant articles in your blog posts is one great way to sustain customers’ interest in your service business. A good blog does that seamlessly.  

Invest in Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find your service business online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. If you are offering a service online, because it is intangible, you really need a very good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. As such, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links. Your website benefits from good organic traffic by these efforts. SEO is hugely technical in nature because of its complexity. Because of this, you can only implement a good SEO strategy yourself if you have the knowledge, technical skills, education, experience, and the right SEO software. Alternatively, just like many business owners do, you can hire the services of professional agencies or individual SEO experts to handle SEO for your business website. In terms of costs, doing it yourself is most cost-effective if you know how to.

Use Emails to Market

Email marketing is extremely effective to promote a service business. It is not only cost-effective, it is also very effective to get new customers. By using emails to market newsletters, marketers get better results for their service businesses than marketing on very popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The reason for this effectiveness is simple. Emails are direct, reduce noise, and are guaranteed to reach the intended audience in the form intended. It is however very important to know how to get your potential customers’ email addresses before you can optimize email results. By deliberate efforts, you can build a reliable email list of your customers and potential customers over time. Without this list, the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool is greatly reduced. Marketers can build this list from a combination of existing customer lists, lists obtained by offering webinars and physical meetings, and email lists of potential customers obtained by offering an incentive to them in exchange for their email addresses.

Collaborate with Other Businesses

Many service businesses need some form of synergy to grow. That calls for business collaboration with other businesses. Through faithful friendship and cooperation, a service business can collaborate with another for a mutually beneficial fruitful relationship. The symbiotic nature of this arrangement ensures that both businesses benefit from each other’s audiences without any encroachments. For instance, a logistics business can collaborate with a courier business and they both benefit handsomely from the arrangement. Same way businesses can collaborate and mutually benefit from business networks common to both.

Teach Online Courses

Service business owners can promote their businesses by teaching online courses/ tutorials related their business niche. If you offer such technical online courses/tutorials to your website visitors, and what you offer has high quality, it can help generate a lot of traffic for your business. This traffic comes in two ways for two reasons. The first is that people are always eager to learn, especially if it is free, qualitative and beneficial. Secondly, free courses and tutorials help to build some form of rapport with customers even before you offer your services to them. From these efforts, you can arouse the curiosity of your consumers. Next is to make your sales pitches and make your sales. Businesses operating professional services online can do so effectively by offering free apps, free software, or other types of training as a way to demonstrate their proficiency and to garner new customers. Free apps offers and the training to use the apps effectively can often lead users to purchase the apps. That is good business.

7 Proven Ways to Grow Your Service Business Online

Service businesses are now taking very prominent places online just like many other businesses. Many are still coming into the market daily thereby making the industry seriously competitive. Since everyone is struggling for space and attention to do profitable service business, businesses are always in search of viable ways to do better business. Online marketing is one of the best strategies service businesses can use to improve on their services and do better business. By engaging the best digital marketing tools and strategies, service businesses can better reach their clients/customers and be able to manage them better. That translates to more and better business.

Here are seven proven ways you can rely on to grow your service business online.

1. Know Your Target Clients/Customers

No doubt you know the service you are rendering. By knowing your clients/customers, you can serve them better. Knowing your clients/customers well enables you to draft and send the right marketing messages online. If you are able to define them well enough, know their needs through certain characteristics, features, and other salient facts about them, you then determine how your service business will fit them. The better you know them, the easier you’ll find it to reach out to them, with the right marketing messages, through the right channels and the right way.

2. Have a Well-Hosted Website

It may surprise you to know that these days, when people want to look for a service business to engage, their first point of call is usually the internet. They first search online for local service businesses near them or in their locality. That is the reason an authoritative website comes handy.  Such website helps to provide online, your detailed service business information which includes the types of service(s) you offer, how you offer them and any other useful content information. The website helps to support your brand, reinforce it and grow it online by providing a smooth and intuitive user experience to all visitors. That is good for business no doubt.

3. Build Your Brand

Most online marketers are always in the business of building their brands in perpetuity. Service businesses are no exceptions. Fact is, there are thousands of service businesses competing for attention online and your potential clients/customers know this. They know they always have lots of these businesses to choose from. That is why you must always stand ready to provide strong reasons why your brand is preferable to others. Doing so helps to secure good patronage for your brand if you position it well enough. So, you must consciously build your brand online. Building your brand simply means familiarizing your potential customers with your business as distinct from all others in its niche. If your service business is well branded, that will help to distinguish it from the other service businesses. Good branding helps to give your service business a friendlier, more recognizable and memorable outlook. Online, you can better help that by choosing unique brand colors, logos and fonts for your website displays and content. Somehow, these help to enhance your online presence by creating a consistent image for the consumers of your service to see and easily remember.
 
4. Create a Blog

Every service business needs a quality blog for the sole purpose of attracting more potential customers to its website. Marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the most important segments of a successful content marketing strategy. It helps to attract the much needed organic traffic to the website. So, if as a service business marketer you want to attract organic traffic to your website, all you need do is to create a quality blog. Regularly populating the blog with educational, informative and even entertaining content is one great way to grow its readership. You can through your blog answer trending and burning questions, become an authoritative resource for service delivery information to interest and excite your customers and potential customers. Marketers that are able to use their blogs to discuss versatile topics, share useful info about their business niche, publish tutorials, how-to posts, tips and tricks posts, case studies, statistics reports, and similar informative content tend to get a very good online attention and exposure. That helps with good organic traffic and increased business.

5. Get on Social Media

These days, the power of social media is no longer in dispute when it comes to promoting a business and reaching out to new clients/customers. Aside the huge popularity and ease of use of many social media platforms, they also offer different unique options to businesses. Your task as a service business marketer is to carefully search for and choose which social media platforms your target clients/customers are most likely to use. That is where you can successfully pitch for them to get the best results. For a growing service business, it is best to consider the most popular of these platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can easily use these platforms to promote your website, blog content, promote your services, introduce your team, personalize your business, communicate/interact with your clients/customers directly, and monitor their interest in your business. Smart marketers can use social media to have a direct link to potential clients/customers and an opportunity to show them why it is always a great idea to choose their service business.

6. Monitor Your Competitors

Whatever service you are rendering online, always have in mind that there are probably thousands of others out there doing about the same things. To get noticed from this crowd, you must invest in a strong online presence through a deliberate online marketing strategy. Even if most of your competitors may be doing the same things, if you do these same things differently, it can give an edge. You can only get that edge if you endeavor to monitor very well what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can design your own unique strategies to help stand your business out distinctly from the rest of them. That is what helps to give your service business an edge. You can easily monitor the activities of your known competitors from what they do on their websites, social media handles, their blog content, their types and channels of communication, their promos, pricing, guarantees/warranties and from any other online activities of theirs you can easily monitor.

7. Market with Email

Email marketing may be “old school” but, it is still a great strategy to promote a service business. Email marketing is particularly very effective to specially market to segmented audiences, creating and building brand awareness as well as increased customer engagement. Emails are great for breaking news, announcing new business additions, promos, sending newsletters, e-books, and price adjustments to specific audiences. Emails allow marketers to send personalized marketing messages that tend to make recipients of such messages feel like the marketer is writing to them specially. Many of such personalized messages usually get the desired results for the business.