How Affiliate Marketing Works

Essentially, affiliate marketing is a three-party business partnership which participating affiliates can leverage to effectively market products/services and earn income. This partnership is usually between Product Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers. Affiliates provide the useful and beneficial link between Product Merchants and Consumers. They help to bring products from products merchants to the attention of consumers. When consumers make product purchases, the affiliate earns commissions from the sales for his marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing is thus a performance-based business model. The more sales an affiliate generates, the more commissions he earns. 

Affiliate marketing relies on the skills of a range of people as affiliates who rely on their own audience and independent skills and marketing channels to widely promote products/services for merchants. For affiliate marketing to work successfully, there are three parties who must as of necessity cooperate for their own benefits. These are:

1.    Product Creators and Product Merchants
2.    Affiliates or Advertisers
3.    Consumers or Customers

1. Product Creators and Product Merchants

Every product creator and merchant always wants to sell products to make money. They need the services affiliates to do so successfully and they are willing to pay commissions for these services. A product merchant also known as a seller can be an individual, a company, a brand or a retailer who has a product/service to sell. Such a product could be a physical item or a service. When affiliates help him to bring these items to the attention of consumers and they buy, he shares profits with the affiliates in form of commissions. Since product merchants expect to make money from affiliate partnership because of increased sales, they are always happy to participate actively in and remain loyal to the partnership even though they may not be required to participate actively in the marketing. Product promotion and marketing is the main business of affiliates who are in the partnership. All the product merchant does in the partnership is to ensure the product is always available for sale in the quality and form it is advertised.

2. Affiliates or Advertisers

The affiliate in affiliate marketing partnership is also known as a publisher, advertiser or product promoter who helps to promote products/services for product merchants in return for commissions. Affiliates are the middle link in the partnership. Content creators, Bloggers and Influencers are foremost affiliates in affiliate marketing. They make product merchants happy by helping them to promote their products and also make consumers happy by bringing quality products to their attention. Technically, an affiliate is a person or a business that helps to promote a seller’s products to potential customers in an engaging manner. Affiliates do this by advertising the product/service with a view to persuading consumers that it is worthwhile or advantageous to them. If they in the process manage to convince consumers to buy the product, they earn a commission from the sales. 

3. Consumers or Customers

Consumers or customers drive affiliate marketing sales. If consumers don’t buy products, affiliate won’t earn commissions and merchants won’t sell products. Affiliates introduce consumers to products through several online channels such as emails, social media, blogs, YouTube videos etc. etc. When consumers purchase products, the merchant makes sales and the affiliate earns commissions. That is how affiliate partnership plays out. Affiliates promote products through various online channels using special affiliate links to products on a product merchant’s website. They use enticing CTAs on their content to get consumers to click on these links. If a consumer clicks on these affiliate links and makes a purchase on the product merchant’s website, the merchant makes a sale and the affiliate earns a commission. Affiliates market mostly to their own audience whom they’ve built some form of relationship with over time. Influencers leverage this relationship to endorse or even recommend products/services to their audience. That influence does instigate sales and the influencer earns commissions.

Last Line

If affiliate partnership is working well, Consumers buy good products which Affiliate Marketers promote to them. The Product Merchant thus makes sales and the Affiliates earn commissions from the sales. That in a nutshell is affiliate marketing.

How to Make Your Blog Content more Impactful

Blogging is the most common form of content marketing among online business owners. With presently over 600 million active blogs on the internet, the popularity of blogs as content marketing strategy is not in doubt. Amidst such a huge crowd of blogs, already in existence, the competition for attention is really quite high. Without a really outstanding content, produced consistently, it is quite difficult for any blog to make an appreciable impact on the Internet. So what to do? You must be ready to fix your content and improve its SEO, if you want to make your blog more impactful.

  

Following are a few things you can do if you are really keen on making your blog more impactful.
 
Fix Your Blogging SEO Errors

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a technique you can use on your content to make it more visible to Search Engines. SEO on your content could be fraught with many errors and even outdated if you do not take steps to check it out and fix any errors from time to time. Not regularly checking out your SEO is one common mistake many bloggers make from time to time. As a blogger, if any of your blogging mistakes impact the SEO on your blog, your blog traffic, particularly organic traffic will take a huge blow. This may linger on for quite a while if you don’t take steps to fix the SEO errors. The good news though is that SEO errors can generally be fixed if you know what you are doing.

Get Content Ideas from Social Media Comments

With over 4.6 billion active users worldwide, Social Media usually provides a wealth of content ideas for active bloggers. Millions of users regularly post content in form of blogs, videos, graphics, images and photos which generate comments and questions. These comments can help a blogger to generate blogging ideas and content to help make their blog more impactful on their blog audience.

Create Increasingly Better Content for Your Blog

As a blogger, the more and better content you create, the more your blog audience grows. Your main goal as a blogger should therefore not just to recreate content that’s already out there. You must strive to better what is already out there. That is the real challenge that helps to make your blog more impactful.
 
Find the Best New Blogging Tips

Blogging on the Internet is a hugely dynamic enterprise. Aside the huge competition, tastes and trends are changing rapidly and your blog must take these into account for it to be impactful. It is not enough though to simply make blog posts. These posts must be deliberately promoted and shared for your blog to be impactful. As you blog along, you’ll come across new ideas and tips. These must be brought to bear on the new content you create to make your blog current and impactful. As a blogger, you’ll always have a lot of promotion and improvement work to be done on your blog to enhance its impact on users.

Boost your Affiliate Marketing Earnings with Rich Content

Bloggers can monetize their content with Affiliate marketing links. The richer your blog content in terms of ideas, the more impactful it becomes and the more traffic it receives. Once these ideas support your affiliate links, the more clicks they receive and the more money your blog makes by way of affiliate commissions.
 
Hire only Quality Blog Writers if you must

Blogging is a skill. It is either you know how to blog well or you don’t. What makes your blog impactful is what really matters here. Good blogging is a foremost requirement for your blog to be impactful. If however, you are unable to blog well, hiring professional bloggers becomes a good idea. By hiring extra writers for your blog, they can help put out more content on the blog. If such writers manage to create content that keeps the quality of posts high, your blog becomes more impactful.

Hire a Local SEO Agency if you please

If you do not have the real technical knowledge to get a good SEO on your content, hiring a local agency to help you out is not a bad idea. Significantly, SEO is one convenient part of your blogging activities you can always outsource. Hiring a local SEO agency may actually be an efficient way to grow your blog and make it more impactful, all without wasting too much of your own time on it.

Know more About How Search Engines Work

If you want your blog to benefit from organic traffic, you must know how SEO and Search Engines work. If you do, you can always find ways to improve the SEO on your content to make your blog more impactful. It helps your blogging tremendously if you have a holistic understanding of search engines and how they work to generate organic traffic.
 
Improve Your Website Page Loading Speed

The loading speed of your website impacts its SEO. If your blog loads fast, your website visitors do not have to wait for much too long to access your content. Internet users are notoriously always in a hurry. For this reason, if your website loading speed is slow, many users can click off your blog page fairly quickly and probably move over to your competitors. That can mean loss of potential business. Additionally, page load speed is also important for search engines to rank your website content. It is hugely important therefore for you not to overlook your webpage loading speed when creating your website and when tinkering with it for SEO and content creation. The loading speed of your webpages makes your website more user-friendly and consequently makes your blog more impactful.

Don’t Ignore Off-Page SEO Strategies

In matters of SEO, most business owners always think of on-page SEO more than off-page SEO. That is not right. Never ignore off-page SEO if you want your blog to be really impactful. Most popular blogging SEO strategies involve some critical changes on your website proper. That is on-page SEO. If you combine on-page strategies with off-page strategies, it can help your blog to be more impactful.
 
Optimize Your Blog for Mobile

Google reports now indicate that over 60% of web data is attributable to mobile devices. That means many more people are accessing the Internet around the world via mobile devices, particularly smartphones. So, if you want your blog to be more impactful, it is smart to optimize it for mobile devices.

Tactical Ways to Get Blog Readers from Social Media

Smart marketers can always convert social media followers to regular blog readers and ultimately generate website traffic as a result. This they do by regularly posting quality and captivating content on social media and linking to their blogs. On social media, there is always the need for marketers to have brand awareness by targeting the right audience with relevant marketing messages. That helps marketers to develop and enhance their credibility by being able to convert their fans/followers on social media into regular blog readers. 

If you have a blog and want to get it recognized, your social media platforms can help immensely. This is because social media is one of the biggest marketing platforms that can help you generate traffic for your blog. It is much easier to have an excellent social media fan base and many followers. Your blog can benefit from that and get more traffic if you integrate it properly with your social media platforms. Because many business owners have become more aware of the benefits of social media to their business and skills, they can showcase their skills on social media to increase their sales and get more leads and customers. So, if you manage to put a lot of effort into creating more social media traffic, you can ultimately add value to your business. This is exactly why many marketers like to buy social followers to deliberately increase their audience and customers. Their sales increase in tandem as well. Posting quality content consistently on social media is a great way to generate more traffic for your blog posts. That is in addition to using social media to get more readerships for your blogs.

Therefore, if you want to convert your social media followers into regular blog readers, just pay attention to the following.

Increase Brand Awareness

When your customers and potential customers have in-depth knowledge of your products/services, it is brand awareness. How to increase brand awareness is always a major concern for marketers. A strategy to increase brand awareness through social media is always a very viable option. This is because increased brand awareness can directly help to convert your social media fans/followers into regular blog readers. Therefore, if you want to generate more traffic for your blog and want more readers from your social media fans/followers base, it is best to stick to the goal of achieving an excellent brand image and creating brand awareness on social media. Brand awareness will ultimately help you achieve the complete trust and confidence of your fans/followers on social media. They can thus easily move from social media to your blog to read your content.

Integrate Your Social Media Platforms and your Blog

Your fans/followers can easily notice your blog and get to read it or follow it if you integrate your social media platforms with your blog. Doing so helps to make your blog more visual. It directly helps to get more traffic to the blog and by implications more leads and conversions.  The more open and visual the integration is, the more your blog will be reached by your social media followers. The more of your social media followers you reach, the more you earn loyal followers who will end up being converted to your regular blog readers.

 
Know your Audience and Engage with Them

Creating content for an audience you know very well is usually more beneficial to marketing efforts. Both quality and relevance of the content you create is hugely dependent on how well you know your audience. You can only know your audience by directly engaging with them. That is how best to get to know their interests, opinions and peculiarities. By increasing your engagement with your audience, you get to know them better and thus market to them better. Your best engagement tool in this regard is your blog content. You can directly ask your fans/followers their opinions and interests, answer their queries, and get product reviews from them. When you use these to engage them better, you can build more trust and confidence which ultimately help in converting them into regular blog readers. The more trust you build, the more engagement you will get. The more engagement you get, the more of your fans/followers you can convert into your regular blog readers

Build Credibility and Trust

The content you create, its consistency, engagement, and its genuine contribution can help build credibility for your brand. If you are credible, you can easily earn the trust and confidence of your fans/followers on social media. If your blog content is qualitative and you’ve built trust and credibility for it, that will bring your fans/followers who may end up as regular readers to the blog.

Cross-Post your Content

Cross-posting your content across online channels and social media platforms helps to get it recognized and to reach wider groups of people. On social media, each social media account has its specificity, peculiarities, demographics, and a diverse and varied form of users. As they are different, so are their interests and their users. Therefore, posting your content on different social media platforms help you to build a diverse and varied audience with peculiar needs. So, by cross-posting content to the various platforms, you grow your credibility and reach. That helps to bring a motley crowd of readers to your blog.

Maintain and Develop Beneficial Relationships

Whenever you find yourself on social media, it is imperative to always be conscious that you are part of a huge worldwide community. It becomes crucial for you therefore to while out there to make deliberate efforts to understand this large community. This is all with a view to developing and maintaining beneficial relationships with others in the community. If you manage to build these relationships particularly with social media influencers and bloggers, it directly helps to increase your chances of getting more traffic for your blog. The people you have built good relationships with particularly influencers and bloggers can help to get your content shared and promoted for free. It is through such viral sharing and promotion you can get to convert your social media fans/followers into regular readers of your blog.

Ask Your Followers Directly

If you meaningfully engage your fans/followers on social media, there is nothing wrong to directly ask them to become your regular blog readers. Asking them directly shows you are confident in asking them to do so. You can skillfully use your social media handles as great tools to address and influence your fans/followers to do what you want. You can post your blog links on social media, provide interesting snippets of the content and ask them to click and follow the link to read details on the blog.  You can use Instagram Story, Facebook Story, or LinkedIn link to do this effectively. If your blog has already earned some credibility and good following, these invitations significantly increase your chances of getting traffic and readership for your blog.

Use Social Media Call-to-Action (CTA) to Get Traffic

You can increase your blog traffic by calling your social media fans/followers to action. It is possible for you to use CTAs to build your fan base and loyal followers on social media. Through these social media CTAs, you can get more traffic and ultimately more readership for your blog. CTAs on social media are very handy to call your fans/followers to action by directly asking them to share your blog and links further to their own audience. You can also ask your fans/followers to review your blogs and share them with their audience. Your loyal fans/followers will not hesitate do so on the go. Direct response to social media CTAs and viral sharing of your blog content can help attract more traffic to your blog.

Use Optimized Keywords

You can use specially selected keywords on both your social media channels and blogs to create a mutual integration between both. If you stick with your niche, content, and these selected keywords while writing captions or stories on social media, they can serve to convert your social media fans/followers into your regular blog readers. However, using your SEO keywords effectively is key to this conversion. The integration of your social media and blog if properly done automates your followers to read through different search engines. That helps to get more readers for your blogs.
 
Diligently Monitor Click-Through Rates (CTR) on Ads

Advertisements are no doubt some of the best ways to increase your online visibility and audience. You are at liberty to use different tools and promotional services to get your blogs on ads. If your followers see the ads related to your blog, it increases the chances of converting them into blog readers. This is more so when your blog content has sufficient quality info that interests them and they like. If they do, they can become regular readers of your blogs.  If you monitor the click-through rates, CTRs of these ads, they can be a direct indication of the viability and success of your ads and how much audience they have attracted. So, by advertising your blogs and monitoring the CTRs, it can help you with the vital insight about how many people are coming over to your blog.

 
Post Progressive Content on Social Media

Blog readers are notoriously curious. This is why one of the best methods to convert social media fans/followers into blog readers is to post progressive content on your social media accounts. The more progressive and intriguing the content you post on social media, the more interest it generates on the platforms. Sustaining the curiosity of readers is vital here. This you can do by sticking with your chosen niche by writing blog content that directly addresses your audience and is sufficiently problem-solving and informational enough. Once this content is perceived by your fans/followers to add real value to their lives by solving problems for them, they tend to like it. If the blog content manages to trigger real curiosity in their minds, making them anxious to read more, they tend to want to stick with it and read more from it. Converting such persons to your regular blog readers starts from there.

Post Consistently on Social Media

If you post consistently on social media, it helps to build trust and credibility for your brand. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube are particularly beneficial for creating a brand image and credibility. You can rely on all the formats available on these social media platforms to create the right content for your fans/followers. Your fan base is bound to decrease if you do not post quality content consistently. If however your content remains high quality and relevant, it will increase the credibility of your social media account. If your credibility increases, that will ultimately trigger a sustained interest in your content by your fans/followers. They will be attracted to read your blogs if they like and are happy with the content you post on your social media accounts.

Wrapping Up

It may not be easy to get traffic on your blog or convert your social media fans/followers into regular blog readers, but it is doable. If you consistently craft and post quality content on social media while managing and incorporating the foregoing methods with it, you can significantly increase the traffic to your blog. If you integrate your social media with your blog and cross-post content consistently, you can use your social media fans/followers to promote and grow your blog’s readership through the regular traffic from social media to the blog.

Tips to Grow Your Online Business with a Blog

Most online business owners now rely on blogs to grow their businesses and blogs are really proving very useful in growing many of these businesses. Intermediate parties may not be able to promote your products as much as you would prefer, so blogs come in very handy to fill that gap. No matter how competitive the internet appears to be for business owners, a good blog can help make a real difference. Blogs can help to effectively popularize your products on the internet even in today’s highly competitive market. This is why business owners rely on blogs as superb resources for branding and for creating general awareness for their products on the internet. Blogs are a great resource for letting people online know how excellent the products you’re offering are that they would love to use. Below are some great tips on how to use your blog to grow your online business.

 
 
Post Only High Quality Content

In online marketing, content is king. A good blog is all about crafting and posting quality blogs regularly to attract readers. Therefore, to attract more visitors to your blog, you need to post quality and compelling content regularly that people find interesting, engaging, and relevant to their needs. The reason they’ll keep coming back to your website for more blog information. If your blog content is well optimized with relevant keywords, it can help you with the digital marketing processes necessary to promote your blog and get it on top of Google SERPs. This is why the better the content you post, the higher your chances of attracting leads/buyers that could transmute to customers if well nurtured.

Build Email List

A credible email list is an excellent digital marketing asset for marketers. It however takes quality time and efforts to build one. Here is what expert marketers recommend to build a good email list. Make sure your blog has a contact form you use to capture the names, location, and email IDs of persons that comment on your blog through this contact form or comments section. To get your website visitors to part with such vital personal information about themselves, you must try to offer something of value to them in exchange for the information. You can for instance offer free newsletter, research information, eBooks, prize winning quizzes as well as promos. Offering such values is quite effective even though many visitors will freely part with their personal information if your content is attractive, has quality, useful, and relevant to their needs. Over time, the list will grow and become a very valuable asset for your email marketing activities. You can segment your email list for effective marketing and also use it to nurture leads to become customers.

Share Your Blog on Social Media

If you have accounts on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others, you can easily share information about your new blog posts to your followers. Your followers could in turn share this information to their own followers if they find the information useful. That way, your blog post can easily go viral thereby attracting many more people to share your posts if they find them interesting enough. On social media, you can seize the excellent opportunities the platforms provide to easily interact with potential buyers or others who may be interested in products. From these interactions, you can acquire some leads, prospective customers and even customers provided you are able to handle their queries and suggestions or comments correctly. If you do, your chances of converting some of them to buyers of your products are greatly enhanced.

Optimize for Digital Marketing

Every marketer wants his business to be visible online. Getting your business well ranked on search engines like Google is a great way to go about it. That calls for SEO, Search Engine Optimization techniques on your blog content and even your website. If you know how to, you can deftly use keywords relevant to your products on your content to make it visible to search engines. Because SEO is hugely technical, you may choose to hire the services of a good digital marketer to do various digital marketing processes on your blog. If well done, SEO can help your blog to rank in the topmost searches of Google SERPs. That is how your blog can get to attract more attention online and benefit from quality organic traffic.

Blog About Your Industry

Blogging about your industry or business niche is one great way to show expertise which in turn attracts readers. You can through your blog provide news, breakthroughs, research findings, trending issues and views about the latest happenings about your industry. That somehow helps to keep readers and other stakeholders in the industry interested in your blog. This is also one great way to increase your business blog following. Such readers will relate to you as a dependable authority in your industry and that could enhance their loyalty to your brand.
 
Provide Affiliate Links

Many buyers trust blogs more than online ads when buying products online that matters to them. Bloggers always latch on to that opportunity by providing affiliate links to the products they are selling in the content of their blogs. A click on these links takes buyers directly to where they can find the products. A great blog about your industry with the right affiliate links to your products is always a great idea. Providing affiliate links to your products is like an invitation to your website users to take a look and possibly buy from you. If links provide the real opportunities for you to make sales online, they help your business to grow.

Wrapping Up

A blog is a vital resource marketers rely on to make sales online and to grow their businesses. If your blog is of high quality, informative and educational enough, it serves this purpose very well. If you run a business online and you are not blogging for business yet, the time to start is now. The foregoing tips are very handy. When it comes to marketing online, you will never regret doing so with a good blog.

8 Online Marketing Tips to Boost Sales

Online marketing is hugely competitive. You must know the products you are selling and stay on top of your online marketing activities if you want to boost sales. There are many things you can do ranging from optimizing your website, choosing marketing channels, rebooting your marketing strategies, writing a better blog, getting more industry info and staying on top of the trends and so on if you want to boost sales online. You can also pay more attention to social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and any other marketing techniques commonly used to effectively market products/services online. Expert marketers advise that you can experiment with different marketing methods/techniques until you come up with the best mix. And, never be afraid to try something new provided it gives you the results you want.

Here are eight things marketers can do to help them boost online sales significantly.
 
1. Make your Website User-Friendly

Your website is your business window on the internet. That is where potential customers first make contact with your business and that is where customers return to for repeat business. It is the first place every prospective buyer gets to before making their buy decisions. To enable your website serve this useful purpose efficiently, it must be well-designed and hosted on the internet. The images, photos, graphics and videos on the site must be such that enables it to be visually engaging, load quickly and interactive enough for the convenience of customers. It must be optimized for search engines and mobile devices.
 
2. Write an Informative Blog

To write an informative blog, you must first figure out your area of expertise in your business niche. That is where you can develop great blog ideas and topics that will be informative enough to showcase your expertise and attract readers. For most marketers, writing a good blog remains one of the best tools to convey value to prospective customers and establish themselves as experts in their business niche. To make your blog content more engaging and shareable, you must optimize it for SEO and incorporate multimedia channels in it. You can in addition promote the blog via your email newsletters.

3. Create Buyer Personas

You need an ideal buyer persona to help you craft your marketing messages. This is because you cannot effectively market to your target audience if you don’t know who they are and where they are. You must take quality time to come up with detailed buyer personas for the people you think would get the most benefits out of your product/service. Exactly who are the people most likely to use your product/service and how you can package the product/service to appeal to them are issues your buyer persona must clearly address. From there, you can deliberately create content specifically tailored to each persona you have created.

4. Jack-up Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the best and most cost-effective digital lines of communication with customers and potential customers. Once you have a credible email list in place, you can efficiently use it to market new products, announce promos/discounts, nurture and qualify leads, close sales, collect valuable data and so on. The icing on the cake is that you can automate your emails through some email marketing platforms to make your marketing easier and cheaper for you. Through these email automation platforms, you can host your welcome emails, follow-up emails, and appointment reminders to save you valuable time and money. When you automate your emails, it makes it easy for you to time them appropriately, send a series of emails and maintain regular communication with customers and prospective customers.

5. Brand Yourself Better
 
Your online presence must be consistent to help your branding. For this reason, the branding you use must be cohesive across all platforms and channels. Your business logo, colors, font, aesthetic layout, and other design elements should match across your website, social media channels, and email correspondence. That helps to unify your brand voice making it the same across every platform you are operating from. In addition, your brand must be easily memorable enough to be in the minds of your customers and potential customers. A combination of all these elements will help you to create a brand that is reliable and that people feel they can trust enough to do business with. The real reason you must brand yourself and your business well online.

6. Make your Listings Complete and Active

It is not only recommended you get your business listed, you must make efforts to make the listings active. Keeping your business listing active is critical to ensuring you show up in search results. This is one great way to get more reviews and to engage with more reviewers. If you have not already done so, just get your business listed on GMB, Google-My-Business, Yellow Pages and Bing. Be sure your listing is complete, cohesive and detailed across all sites. Make sure your business hours, contact information like Skype, telephones, office location, business hours, photos, site links, and other relevant business information are detailed on your listings. All these help your business to generate feedback and reviews to enable you engage with customers positively. A good engagement helps your business to build trust, generate more leads and sales.

7. Be Conversant with Industry Terms

Every business has its own language of engagement. You must be conversant with the language of your own industry even if it is industry jargon. If you are conversant with your industry terms and how to use them, it can help you to look more professional in your chosen business. That way, you can build trust with your prospective customers better and faster. However, you must always be sure you really understand a term and its proper context before using it to avoid offending or annoying anyone. The reason you must use these terms sparingly to make sense the way industry experts do.

8. Stay on Top of your Industry Trends
 
A good grasp of industry trends helps business owners to be on top of their marketing game on the internet. For this reason, it is smart to keep close tabs on industry leaders and take note of how they’re marketing themselves. That way, you’ll get to know what they are doing that you can incorporate into your own marketing strategy and what they are not doing that you can drop from yours. Follow/friend your industry leaders on their social media-handles to see what content they regularly share. Identify the major influencers in your business niche and pay attention to what they’re sharing. Regularly curate and share quality content on your social media pages, watch out for what gets the most engagement, then model your new content off of that. Stay on top of the latest industry data to avoid quoting and relying on outdated statistics in your marketing material or social posts. You can do this by checking industry publications and sites regularly for the latest information, statistics and data. Always double-check the source of any statistics/data for credibility and take note of any relevant information that can be of help to your business.

Top Digital Marketing Strategies for Creative Online Marketing

It is extremely important to have a digital marketing strategy for your online business. If the digital marketing strategy is creative enough, it will help your online business to grow faster. Since we now live in a digital era, it is easier to get your business noticed if you have a credible digital marketing strategy in place to effectively market the business online. All you really need is a bit of creativity in your marketing efforts and you’ll get good results. 

Here are some digital marketing strategies that can help you out.

Deepen Your Blogs: If you blog for business, try to deepen your blogs with more information, data and statistics to attract more readership. Bloggers have since discovered that longer and deeper blog posts generate many times more success rate and help gain new customers when compared to short blogs. Expert bloggers recommend blog posts not shorter than 750 words but depending on your type of business, shorter blog posts as low as 250-350 words do really nice particularly on social media. However, search engines tend to have a preference for longer blog posts. For example on Google, the average word count for the top-ranking posts is 1100-1300 words. Make this info a very important guide when crafting your blog posts.
 
Research Your Competitors: It is not enough to just research your competitors, you can devise creative ways to even spy on their activities. It is of great help to your marketing strategy if you have a clear idea what your competitors are doing in the market and why they are doing what they are doing. To know what is going on in the minds of your competitors is a key intelligence digital marketing info you can use to distinctly differentiate your business online. If you know about your competitors’ strategies, you can use them to design your differentiators. In digital marketing, being different will make you stand out and apart from everyone else. Being unique and different can be of great help to help your business generate more traffic, leads and customers on your website. A quick Google search of the products/services you are marketing can help you to find out helpful info about your competitors’ digital marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile: Google now reports that about 65% of its search data is attributable to mobile devices. What this means is that your business website must be optimized for mobile devices to take advantage of this huge search data. Most people prefer doing business with websites they can easily interact with online. This is why user-friendly and mobile-friendly websites tend to get more and better traffic than others.

Personalize Your Marketing: Every human being likes to feel important and appreciated. The reason personalized marketing messages are very important in digital marketing. Even if you are suggesting similar products, using the customer’s name, or sending the deals that match their location, being personal will attract such customers more. You can use conversational tones whenever possible and be sure the message specifically addresses the needs of the recipient. Encourage customers to make suggestions and even specific demands you can meet to satisfy their needs.

Market with Email: Email marketing is cost-effective and delivers good returns on investment. You can segment emails, personalize marketing messages and optimize the mails for good results. Emails can also be well timed for delivery at appropriate times anywhere around the globe. This is why email is hugely popular with marketers and it now appears to be one of the best ways to promote most businesses online. By using AI, you can automate emails to help save time, efforts and other resources. The reason email is a great strategy of online marketing for most small businesses.

How to Create a Content Distribution Plan

If you want to be an effective and efficient content marketer, anything you do, you must have a plan for it. It is not enough to simply create good content. Without an effective content distribution plan, the content may not be too helpful in your marketing activities. It is great to plan your topics, write your content, confirm the quality of the content, optimize the content but when you hit “publish”, what comes next? Content distribution of course! That is hugely important for the success of your marketing efforts. After creating your content, you must have a good plan to distribute it multi-platform. That helps to get as many eyes on it as conveniently possible. You may choose to do your distribution manually or through popular online content distribution tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Next is to be sure that the places you distribute your content will be helpful in its sharing and engagement.

Below are some of such places you can share your content to generate more traffic, views, leads and engagement.
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Google Ads
•  Facebook posts
•  Facebook Ads
•  Instagram posts or stories
•  Email list/newsletter
•  Repurpose as YouTube video
•  Pinterest
•  Reddit
•  SMS (text message marketing)
•  Blogs
•  Messenger bots
•  Guest posting on third-party sites like Quora, Bing ads and Medium.com
•  HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
• Google-My-Business, GMB posts

If marketers have a good content distribution plan, together with improving their Google listings, improving their local SEO, and expanding their website marketing activities, their shared content can generate more traffic, views, leads and engagement.

How Blogging on Your Website Helps to Attract More Traffic

It now appears most digital marketers are deliberately taking to blogging mostly for traffic reasons. Blogs have become the single most important elements on a website that can generate the most traffic. Most digital marketers tend to blog about any topic of their choice in which they have something useful to say that readers are willing to read and learn from. Blogs prey on the curiosity of such readers to attract traffic back to the blog in return.

Here is what your website stands to gain if you have an active blog on the site.

Opportunities to Gain Traffic Organically

Most online surfers are always fired by unlimited curiosity. This is what an authoritative and informative blog tends to satisfy online. Adding more and more authoritative information to your blog is akin to weaving a very elaborate web of information online. Search engines never fail to notice this. As you add more pages to your blog, search engines note the keywords you are using. They send searchers using similar keywords to your website as a way of helping to satisfy their curiosity. That translates to very useful organic traffic.

Better Search Engines Indexing

Google reports that websites with good blogs tend to rank better in its SERPs than websites without a blog. The reason is simple. Search engines “deal” on information to remain relevant and useful. Blogging on a website supplies this information in form of content continuously. Search engines love that, the reason they send more readers who are looking for information to such sites. Therefore, running a blog on your website gives you more chances to have your site indexed by search engines. Better indexing translates to better ranking and better organic traffic.

Better Use of Organic Keywords and Phrases

Keywords and phrases embedded in the content of blogs help search engines in indexing such blogs. Once indexed, search engines send people searching online using the keywords and phrases to the blogs. That means more and more people will start coming to your blog to read your content and in the process they discover and explore the rest of your website. As you add more content on your blog, you populate it with more keywords and phrases. These keywords and phrases impress search engines and help to attract more readers. When you add a blog to your website, and you add more and more content to it regularly, it gets populated more and more with keywords and phrases. These keywords and phrases lead back to your web properties and serve as a big bonus in terms of inbound traffic.

Opportunities for More Links and Mentions
 
Blogging on your website with interesting content that inevitably attracts some citations and mentions culminate in some super valuable links trove. If your blog manages to assert industry authority online, other bloggers refer to it and like to link with it. That helps to grow its positive association and reputation online. Commenting on your blogs gives your readers a great opportunity to interact with you and delve deeper into the thoughts that you share. It gives them the chance to share theirs as well. Guest-posting and even contests are other things that you can do with your blog to help keep your content fresh. Doing so helps to generate more links, comments and mentions that inevitably help to increase your inbound traffic.

Provides Reasons for Returning Visitors

Even if you are selling products on your website or you just want to keep seeing your visitor count go up, a blog is one of the best tools that you can use to get repeat and new visitors to your website. As you write new posts to grow your content, you will have more and more people who enjoy your content come over to your website. For as long as you endeavor to create content that is visually beautiful, functionally impressive, or informatively sound on your blog, readers will be coming over to it. When visitors come to a blog they enjoy, most will want to come back. Looking back at archive posts on the blog, most visitors can have an idea when to expect the next post. That entices them to return to your blog repeatedly. That translates to valuable traffic.  

Brand Awareness Digital Marketing Strategies

Online marketers are increasingly depending on the internet to create brand awareness for their brands. Careful deployment of many digital marketing strategies helps to make that possible. This is because the whole world is now living in a digital era where more and more people are depending on the internet for practically everything they do.  Most people particularly online marketers are using the internet to promote their products/services, sell, socialize and build their brands while consumers depend largely on the internet for their shopping.  It is by far easier to create brand awareness for your brand by way of the internet than by traditional marketing methods. That is made possible by very careful deployment of well-chosen digital marketing strategies. 


 
There are many ways expert online marketers recommend for increasing brand awareness online but these here digital marketing strategies readily come tops in these recommendations. These strategies rely fully on cost-effective optimization techniques to deliver highly beneficial and very credible results for marketers.

Blogging

Many online marketers do blog as a matter of routine to support their brands. Marketers have since discovered that blogging is an excellent and cost-effective way to achieve Search Engine Optimization, SEO. In addition, one very effective way to keep in touch with customers is to regularly blog about your brand or related topics to it. With regular release of good and highly informative content, blogs have become very useful tools to increase the SEO rankings of websites. If you use the right keywords in your content which search engines like, they as a result boost your rankings in their Search Engine Results Pages, SERPs. When online searchers use these keywords in their searches, your website easily pops up alongside others for their attention. That helps to get the much needed traffic to your website by way of SEO.  It is one of the most reliable ways to get organic traffic to your website.

Search Engine Marketing
 
When properly used, online marketers derive a lot of benefits from search engine marketing. It is one of the cheapest ways of reaching a target audience. Either through content marketing or blogging, the aim is to increase the visibility of your brand online. Search engines are the “eyes” needed to detect and enhance that visibility. You can utilize this strategy by carefully designing and creating ads that appear on other websites or social media platforms. As the ads pop up on other websites and related pages people are browsing on, they help to increase the visibility of your brand. Such ads are usually structured to grab the attention of your audience at the right time making it fairly easier to increase brand awareness. Additional advantage is that you don’t have to be a guru to use search engine marketing. It can be done by anyone with a working knowledge of the computer and the internet at little or no costs at all. If well used, search engine marketing deploys techniques to entice surfers to click on your ads thereby helping to boost awareness and sales.

Boosting Online Ranking

To boost your online ranking, all you need do is to work on your SEO by means of keywords usage and deployment techniques friendly to search engines. SEO is best improved by posting quality content on your website on a regular basis. If you seriously want your website to appear on Google’s high ranking pages, just get your website and its content optimized for search engines. This is a simple technique for carefully placing popular keywords unique to your niche strategically on your website and its content. The correct use of SEO techniques helps to improve your digital ranking. By that, your website could manage to hit the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages, SERPs. This somehow helps to increase the visibility of your business. As people become more aware of your business, more people will click on your webpage to see what services you have to offer. That means good traffic to your business and inevitably, sales increase.


 

How to Use Websites and Blogs for Affiliate Marketing

 The business of affiliate marketing simply revolves around products promotions and sales. You can promote products and services on an existing website or blog or you can identify a product and build a website around it. If you already have a website with a sizable audience, you can start by partnering with affiliate programs that are relevant in your niche. Doing so could help you to get started real quick and to get a handle on affiliate marketing much faster. If however you do not have a website, all you’ll have to do is to build one especially if you intend being in affiliate marketing for the long run. You do not necessarily need a website or blog, but having one gives you more control and a real advantage over your marketing campaigns.

Online marketing experts believe that a website is the only ethical way to build your email list, which is the input of your sales funnel that will bring in highly relevant leads. Even if you do not start with a website, you can have it in your plans to have at least one website or blog. Experienced marketers routinely have multiple websites with each targeted to a niche and used to sell products and services relevant to the niche. It takes real practical experience and expertise to get that done for good results.

Expert marketers believe that a niche website works best with affiliate marketing. Because such a site is usually focused to a niche, it attracts mostly people interested in that niche. They are the only ones who will most likely visit the site. What that means is that such people will more positively respond to promotions if they are relevant to the niche they are interested in. Niches like trends, fashion, wines, foods, flowers, furniture, technology, jewelry, travels, resorts etc, etc, are very popular niches anyone can build a website around depending on your tastes, experience, likes and expertise.

Benefits of Guest Blogging

For the sake of my small business, I blog. Maybe, you blog too for same reasons. These days, nearly everyone who is doing business online blogs. Many people blog for one main reason, business exposure. Everyone else blogs for business exposure and customer attraction. Business exposure is what everyone blogs for. Besides updating your small business blog with fresh content that resonates with your website visitors, contributing articles to other blogs can further enhance your brand’s image. That is what is known as guest blogging. It attracts some good measure of exposure when properly done. Guest blogging offers several benefits which include:

– Building your reputation as an expert in your chosen field.
– Introducing you to industry leaders and influencers in your business field.
– Helping you increase the social media following of your business.
– Increasing the exposure of your brand.
– Providing the opportunity to link back to your business website.
– Helping your Search Engine ranking for SEO benefits.


 

Tips for Effective Business Blogging

Are you doing business online? Are you into internet marketing? Do you have a business blog? Is your blog attracting sufficient visitors to what you are offering? Does it help you to generate more and better sales? If it doesn’t, it only means you are not utilizing your blog to its true potential. These here tips can help you to get the very best out of your business blog. Irrespective of what business you are in, these tips can help increase viewership, time-spent-on-page, clicks, and sharing of your blog.

Be Careful with Your Headlines

The average Internet user is always in a hurry. You have a duty to arrest your blog visitors’ attention no matter how much of hurry they are in. Great headlines always help to do the trick. This is because roughly 80% of all people who may chance on and take a look at your blog will only manage to read just the headline. For that reason, you must endeavor to keep your titles simple, clear, catchy and self-explanatory. Only such concise headlines manage to attract the most clicks.



Make Your Content Fresh and Valuable

The quickest way to build a large community of devoted readers is to routinely add valuable content to your blog. Your blog content should focus more on issues that your target demographic is interested in and not necessarily on the products and or services you are selling. Even though your content may be related in some way to the products or services that you are selling, your readers’ needs must take priority. That is one great way to gain credibility and eventual followership.

Make Regular Posts and Updates

No matter how busy you are, be sure to make regular updates and to keep to schedule. That is what helps to sustain the interest of your readers because they are always sure to be rewarded with new content any time they come back to your blog. Even if you are severely pressed for time, having just a few paragraphs of regular fresh content added new can make a huge difference in sustaining your readership.

Have a Great Layout

This is very important to “arrest” your visitors’ attention and sustain it on your blog. The layout should be easily navigable to save time looking into your content. The use of two kinds of navigation bars usually helps out here, one for your blog main topics and the second for leads to articles by title, articles by contributors, and articles by date etc, etc. You may even consider a grid layout depending on what your blog is about. 

Use Photographs Effectively

With good photos, your business blog manages to create some great and lasting feelings in the minds of your readers. Be sure the photos you use are able to tell some story your readers can identify with. Avoid bland and all shades of photos which could be meaningless. It helps to periodically change and update your photos depending on the trends and the message you want to convey.

Link Your Blog to Other Blogs

It is a good SEO technique to link your blog to other blogs. This is because good links help to boost the Search Engine Ranking of your content. However, you must endeavor to find good and credible blogs to link to otherwise avoid linking altogether because poor linking may have the opposite effect on your SEO. Linking to blogs with similar content as yours could win you substantial linkbacks. That somehow helps new viewers find your blog more easily.

Structure Your Posts

This requires some skills and real blogging techniques. When your blog is decently structured, your content becomes more attractive to readers. If someone looks up at your posts at first glance, they get the feeling that your content is easy to read. That attracts more of their attention and if they discover they can navigate through and easily find the information they are looking for, their attention is sustained somewhat a bit longer.

Blogging Tips about SFI and TripleClicks

A blog is essentially an online personal resource whose main purpose is to attract the much-needed traffic of readers/viewers to the site. For online marketers, choice gateways are skillfully inserted on these blog sites to catch the attention of site visitors. The higher the traffic a blog attracts, the higher the chances of clicking on these gateways and possible conversions or sign-ups.

It takes a lot of personal efforts to add useful contents to a blog on very regular basis. It is therefore very wise to concentrate these efforts and resources for better results in one blog. For that reason alone, I will recommend that you can have just one blog to showcase your SFI and TrippleClicks gateways. That is what I did myself and it works very well for me.

Happy blogging!!!