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.

Effective eCommerce Business Tips

If you market online, particularly eCommerce, be prepared for stiff competitions because of the millions of others online doing similar things you do. You can succeed though if you listen to experts who are always willing to give some business tips to eCommerce stores owners. Many eCommerce stores are usually individualized. They require no costs to set up their stores and start selling from popular and reputable eCommerce platforms. Others can set up their own online store and sell out of it if they have the knowledge, skills and wherewithal to do so successfully. If either or both of the situations arise, business tips from experienced marketers are always very helpful.

Here are some four tested and effective tips to help you succeed in your eCommerce business.

Diligently Build Your Online Reputation

In online marketing particularly in the running of eCommerce store, online reputation matters a great deal. You can take quality time to build your online reputation diligently when you start marketing online. By posting quality content regularly and spreading it widely on many channels particularly social media channels, your posts will stimulate robust reviews online. Many customers first read reviews of businesses before purchasing from them to ensure that the businesses are legitimate and trustworthy. That becomes a plus for your online reputation. Your online reputation is a very essential part of the process of converting ordinary online surfers to leads and even customers of your eCommerce store. Satisfied customers never fail to tell others and the reputation grows exponentially from there.

Create High-Quality Product Photos

In eCommerce business, high quality photos of the products you are selling are very important. By having them on your website or store, they help to attract traffic to the store. The better the photos, the more the attention they get and the more traffic they attract. Some eCommerce stores now use 3D photos showing all sides of the products they are selling in rotation. Such rotations can even be 360 degrees thereby allowing the potential buyer to see every aspect of the product on display. Such views play a significant role in their buy decisions. 

 

Get a Good Brand Logo
 
Every business needs a good reputation to do well. Branding helps that reputation a great deal. A good logo is a very essential piece of your brand. If it is attractive and memorable, it helps you to build brand awareness fairly quickly. Online, when people see your logo, they easily remember you what your business is and what you do. If you do not have the skills to design a good logo for your eCommerce store, there are online services like fiverr.com or upwork.com you can use to get a good logo.

Highlight What Makes Your Store Unique

This is part of your eCommerce store identity and online reputation. You can skillfully identify what sets your store apart from others and put it into words. If well drafted, this statement can conveniently serve as an essential value proposition for your business. It helps to tell customers at a glance what you do and why it matters. If it is quick and compelling, it will be good to get quality traffic to your eCommerce store.

How to Get Email Marketing Right to Create Brand Awareness

Do you still want to get introduced to email marketing? Pay attention to the following. Email marketing is a digital marketing method that lets you personalize communication for customers. It allows you to promote your products and services as well as keep in regular touch with customers, both new and existing. It is a mass-appeal, digital communications method that is very popular with marketers. It always gets very impressive results even at minimal costs outlay if properly used.

For effective marketing purposes, email lets you segment your email contacts and personalize content per the needs of your target audience. Personalization can be via any way that delights your customers. Such as, catchy headlines, clear calls to action, personalized recommendations, discount coupons, exclusive mobile-only offers, and lots more.

Even if you’re new to email marketing or you are a veteran in the business, it pays to follow these simple tips to run a successful email campaign to get good results.

1. Never bombard your customers with emails. Too many unsolicited emails can make your subscribers to unsubscribe or many of the mails even ending up as spam. Always choose a frequency that neither overwhelms your subscribers nor hurts engagement for your business.

2. Track the results of your email campaigns diligently with online tools. With these tools, you can get to know how many subscribers opened your email, how many clicked on the hyperlinks and so on.

3. You must study, research and understand the needs of your customers before sending mails to them. If you do, you can then customize your email content to match their needs. That is what gets the best results.

4. Be sure to always obtain your customers’ consent before sending them any email. Make the right provisions for them to sign up themselves. Do not fail or neglect to provide a subscription form on your website where customers can voluntarily submit their email addresses to add in your very vital email list.

5 Ways to Effectively Measure Your Ads Campaign Success

In digital marketing campaigns, it is very difficult to judge your marketing campaign success without accurate measurements. Most marketers already know how important and critical measurement is to the success of their marketing campaigns. Because of marketing cost implications and ROI for marketers, it is hugely important for marketers to understand at all times, how effective their campaigns and promotions are. They can only leverage the right metrics to, accurately gauge how successful their digital marketing efforts are. These, here five ways are highly recommended by experienced marketers.

1. Automate Sentiment Analysis

You can manually conduct sentiment analysis or you automate it through a third-party tool. The insights you get from sentiment analysis allow you to know what your customers perceive to be good or bad reasons for these perceptions, as well as causes from a business or customer-service perspective. You can automate AI from third-party tools to help gather sentiments information over a long period of time. Apart from helping to gain valuable insights quickly from large volumes of data, automated sentiment analysis will also minimize error or bias that could easily result from manual analysis. By doing this, brands are able to understand what consumers are saying about the brand over this given period, what perceptions have changed over the same period, and reasons why. Without automation, marketers are saddled with manual analysis of a very huge amount of data from across multiple platforms. This can lead to avoidable errors, misinterpretation and even outright bias because perceptions could be highly subjective to human sentiments.

 
2. Using Emerging Smart Technologies

Emerging technologies are increasingly becoming popular in digital marketing. New smart technologies like Nativex’s XMP are very useful to track creative campaign performance across many different popular social-media platforms including Google. They help to save costs on operations and easily provide an aggregated understanding of which ads work best across social platforms, throughout campaigns and across all various markets. These technologies allow for unprecedented tracking, measurement and customer understanding by providing huge amounts of data to marketers for planning and directing ads campaigns.

3. Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Metrics

You can effectively measure the success of your campaigns if you have a good balance of both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Qualitative metrics help to measure customer sentiments online through third-party social-listening tools while quantitative metrics help to measure tangible commercial outcomes like volume of sales and purchases. A combination of both gives information about how customers perceive your business and how much business they are doing with you. From this information, it is easy to see whether a particular brand is actually driving consumer awareness and engagement as desired and how many customers are being led to your brand’s e-commerce website via a particular piece of ad content. These insights can be subsequently leveraged at the point of engagement and connection between your brand and its consumers to rejig your present campaigns or to design your future campaigns. The significant consequence is that the consumer audiences of your brand will feel heard and seen by the brand. That can help to build some loyalty with them even if they had initial negative misgivings and or perceptions.

4. Studying Brand Nuances

Just as brands differ, so are circumstances surrounding their marketing backgrounds. Every brand must therefore, be understood in tandem with its peculiar circumstances. A brand’s current market context must be peculiar to the brand. For instance, metrics for measuring brand awareness cannot be the same for newly launched brands and a brand that already has mass appeal or a stronger market presence. An adjusted approach has to be taken into consideration when deciding on which measurement metrics to be adopted to measure the success of both brands. Similarly, you cannot use the same parameters for previous campaign measurements for an older brand as against a newer brand in the market. The nuances of both brands if taken into account tend to give more equitable and balanced results to help the marketer measure the success of both brands from the campaigns. That allows brands to have a better understanding of what worked and what did not and to inform the design of future campaigns. All told, it is not only important to look at campaign success in isolation, but also to benchmark it against historical failures as well. Expert marketers know that because of the nuances of both brands, a suitable balance always lies somewhere between these two extremes.

5. Classifying Which Metrics to Measure

In digital marketing, the brand you are marketing largely determines the type of metrics you have to measure. For this reason, different perspectives tend to surround the classification of metrics. Most of these perspectives relate to importance, urgency, and time-frame, that is, short-, mid- or long-term perspectives. In bigger business concerns, different departments and functions tend to prioritize different metrics. That is what they specifically measure for their own departmental use. When metrics are taken over an extended time frame and classified, they add real value to ongoing campaigns and the design of future campaigns. Information from these metrics empowers marketers to be more creative in their content marketing activities and to engage meaningfully with their audiences over an extended time-frame, say for about 6 months or more. From this info, marketers can adequately develop strategic plans that fit perfectly into their immediate, short- mid- and long-term marketing objectives.

Tips for Creating a Viable E-commerce Brand

As most digital marketers very well know, e-commerce frontier is constantly changing. If you want your business to survive this constantly changing scenario, it is important to be able to adapt and ensure your brand has a competitive advantage over others. Your first step is to create an e-commerce brand that can help your business survive in extremely competitive business environment. What that means is to deliberate market your business in such a way as to enable more and more customers to know your name and, in turn, widely spread the word about your business online. This they can do mostly through product reviews and endorsements.

These, here tips can help you to get started in the quest to create a viable brand.

Regularly Post High Quality Content

It is just not enough to create a high quality content, you must endeavor to share it regularly and widely. That is what helps your brand to grow online. You can establish a posting schedule for your content. Doing so helps to, firmly establish that you are sharing high quality material often and that helps to boost the SEO rankings of your business. If your customers notice that, they take things from there and that is what helps to grow your reputation online as a relevant brand.

Provide Unique Value Product

It helps your marketing efforts online to establish your specialty by marketing a unique product. By specializing, you can clearly establish your niche as well as the value only you can provide to your customers. In addition, one unique type of product/service can easily help you with some competitive advantage over others. Competitive advantage is a great asset that helps your brand to beat your competitors. It can even serve as a very valuable USP, Unique Selling Proposition for your product/service.

Market with Authentic Branding

Is your brand authentic? If yes, that means the brand is true to all its intentions and what it delivers to its consumers. It means every action, product/service and advertisement all serve a common message linked to the brand. That confers authenticity and consumers easily take note. Product visibility gets a boost when consumers take note and that helps your brand.

Target Audiences Interested in your Products

With the right focus, you can easily build a thriving brand within e-commerce by deliberately targeting the right audiences/communities online. Your brand really needs people to properly survive and grow a target market. Take your business to them where they are if you want them to help your brand to grow organically. People can put out the word for your brand no matter which way they choose to do so. Online, you can locate the right audience through analytics, demographics and the statistics of the people who are buying your products and where they choose to place the reviews of your product. By simply running a Google search, you can easily see where your brand is popular. From that information, you can determine what you can possibly leverage to grow your brand better.

Leverage High Quality Content Across Multiple Channels

These days, consumers have more choices than ever before on what and from whom they want to buy. Many choices are also available to them about the content on your website and on your marketing channels. For these reasons, competing for their attention usually poses very huge marketing challenges for most marketers. What tends to make the real difference is how high the quality of your content is and from which media you are putting it out. That lends credence as to why you must always leverage high quality content across multiple channels. If you are leveraging mixed media, be sure to create a schedule for your videos and or podcasts. By doing so, you can reach consumers who might not otherwise know who you are. That can ultimately increase people's awareness of your brand. When it comes to channels selection, everything depends upon your target audience, your location and the goals you have set for your brand. For instance, your marketing mix can include the following channels used in whatever combination:

*Affiliate marketing
*Influencer marketing
*Search engine optimization (SEO)
*Pay-per-click (PPC)
*Social media marketing
*Email marketing
*Content marketing

These days, because your audience is inevitably scattered across many different digital channels, what works is multichannel approach to grow your brand. There are so many channels out there available to marketers. You can test them out to see what works best for your brand.

7 Small Business Online Marketing Tips

Effective small business marketing can undoubtedly help your business to thrive online. Through small business marketing, you can seize the opportunity to tell others what you do and why they should patronize you or become your clients/customers. Since you do not expect people to simply show up and start spending their money on your business, you must actively market to hem. Doing so need not be unduly expensive if you know what you are doing. The essence is to create a huge online visibility for your brand at the lowest cost. For cost-effectiveness, most small businesses rely more on social media and email marketing to help promote their brands.

To increase online visibility for your small business, these small business-marketing tips can help you out.

1. Have a User-Friendly Website

It is very essential in small business marketing to have a functional and user-friendly website. A website serves as your business window in virtual space. It is where online visitors first get in contact with your business. That makes it about the most important part of small business marketing. Your website must be hosted well, and with up-to-date information about your business at all times. Make sure your website is optimized with the right keywords to make it visible to search engines. If your website is visible to search engines, they send organic traffic to the site thereby making it easy online for your potential customers to find your business.

2. Define and Promote Your Brand

Your brand must be well defined online to enable it compete effectively. You get better results if it is the brand story you consistently share with your audience. Small business marketing relies and thrives better on a well-defined brand that your audience easily understands and remembers. For this reason, how you tell the story of your brand is hugely important. If well done, it makes it easier for your consumers to connect easily and engage with your product/service.

3. Be Active in Your Local Community

Many expert marketers like to say, “Every business is local.” All small businesses are integral parts of the local community. Therefore, actively engaging with your local community is a crucial part of small business marketing. If you are active in your community, your small business will no doubt thrive well in that community. Google reports that a very large percentage of online searches are now local searches for avenues to do business. You must explore all viable avenues to put your business in the hearts and minds of people in your local community. You earn better patronage as a result.

4. Market with Video Content

Video content on your website is hugely attractive to customers who want to find out about you and your products in an easy way. How-to videos are a quick and effective way to help such customers. The reason they are attractive and are increasingly the preferred way people rely on to quickly find information about your small businesses online. If the video on your website is authentic and informative enough, it can easily get people to click on your content to know more about what you are offering. To enhance that, you can pack your ideas and expertise in a 30 seconds video to share to your customers. You get better results from video content that way.

5. Engage in Social Media Marketing

For most small businesses, their marketing budgets are always hugely limited. They tend to make up for that by spending more time marketing on social media because social media marketing is cost-effective and very cheap. That is what makes social media marketing very attractive. Social media allows you to be a part of your local community and your industry community sharing your brand info easily. Social media is a great way to easily share what you are doing and what your business is all about to a huge audience at the touch of a button. By posting fresh content on your social media sites regularly, and using relevant hashtags to make sure you find your audience, you can use social media to attract people to your website. If you choose the right social media platforms, it allows you to take your business to where your potential customers are on social media. You get better patronage as a result.

6. Be Open to Continuous Learning

Internet marketing is a continuously evolving business. You must know at all times what is working and what is trending. That requires continuous learning and education if you want to improve on your marketing efforts. It is not only imperative for you to stay on top of the changes and trends in your business sector but also on top of the new tricks and tips of marketing online. It helps to be open to continuous learning by following industry experts on social media, taking free online courses, signing up for marketing newsletters and industry bulletins, reading great articles about the latest changes and best practices in online marketing.

7. Measure Your Efforts with Analytics

You need the generous use of free online analytics tools to generate and analyze data to measure the progress you are making in your marketing activities. Without this analysis, it is difficult if not impossible for you to know how well you are using your time and resources in your marketing efforts. Put bluntly, you cannot easily determine your ROI without analytics. By using Google Analytics and or other services, you easily determine how well you are doing in your marketing efforts. Data generated from the open-rates and click-through rates on your emails and the engagement and ROI you are getting from your social media and email campaigns, can be carefully analyzed for decision-making. These decisions revolve around what to change, what to drop and what to improve upon. You can easily decide on how to adjust what you are doing even if it involves changing your marketing message a bit. That allows you to take advantage of new search terms as well as deciding where to spend more time and money on social media depending on which of the platforms is doing better in terms of engagement.

Effective TikTok Marketing Strategies

TikTok may be a new kid on the block of social media but it is the rave of the moment because of its rapidity of growth. Many people are joining in large numbers purposely to display their creative talents to the world. The joiners cut across all human spectrums of age, gender and even communities. If you want to effectively use TikTok to market your brand, you must first open an account for the brand and use it to make and share your videos. Because of the rapidly changing times in our digital marketing world, the need and demand for traditional advertising is depleting and new modes of promoting businesses/brands are fast taking up the space. That is where TikTok is becoming hugely relevant.

In order to increase your marketing reach/success on TikTok marketing platform, you can try the following strategies.

Make Frequent Posts

If you intend to quickly build-up a large following in order to create a large and effective impact on the platform, you must continuously post fresh content. By posting frequently on TikTok platform, you quickly get a large number of followers as a reward.

Make Only Interesting Videos

Make sure your videos have very clear descriptions. Such videos must be capable of passing on your marketing message within 60 seconds that TikTok allows per post. Because you do not have a lot of time to get your message across, a clear, concise and captivating message on your videos helps to provide value to your audience and gives the best results all within the allotted time.

Use Popular Hashtags

It is best to use popular/relevant hashtags on your posts as against generic hashtags. By using popular TikTok hashtags, your business gets such great benefits as amplification of reach of your content, identification of competitors, more followers and lots more. TikTok like most other social media platforms uses hashtags to catalog videos. For this reason, when searchers click on “Discover” bar of the TikTok app, they are exposed to various videos sorted by trending hashtags on the platform.

Follow Current TikTok Trends

Trending is always where the main action is on most social media platforms. TikTok is no exception. For this reason, you can effectively strengthen your marketing strategy by keeping an eye on the latest TikTok trends and follow them. If you make your own videos uniquely different and interesting, they will stand out within these trends. The trick therefore is to always create and upload videos related to these current trends to help increase your brand visibility.

Factor in TikTok Influencers in Your Campaigns

No marketer on TikTok can afford to ignore help from influencers. Influencers are TikTok users who earn their reputations as influencers because they have gained a lot of reach and followers on the platform. Influencers usually build up a reputation from the quality of the content they regularly share. By factoring the effects of influencers in your own marketing efforts, your business gains from the large reach they command and effectively use to influence a very large number of your potential customers within their reach. That is how best to strategically use influencers in your TikTok marketing campaigns.

Comment Frequently and Regularly

Online, letting people know you are out there is one great way to earn their respect. The actions you purposely take and the comments you make help this reputation. On TikTok, you can actively engage with people via likes, views, comments, shares and followers. Doing so helps immensely to create your own positive and influential identity on the platform. Just like any other social media network, TikTok actively supports frequent engagement. Your constructive comments are an excellent option to achieve this engagement as a way of building up beneficial interaction with your potential customers.

Buy TikTok Followers as Needed

On TikTok just like other platforms, building up followers is like building up a very valuable asset. Admittedly, if your brand is new and still struggling to make a name, gaining followers on the platform can be very taxing. One way around that is to find ways to buy followers if you can afford to. Expert marketers recommend Tikfuel to do so seamlessly. Because Tikfuel is the leading provider for TikTok services like followers, likes, views etc. you can buy them from it. Doing so enables you to increase your reach within a shorter span of time than relying solely on organic building of followers. When your account starts to command a large and stable following, it will lead to legitimizing your account thereby making it more approachable to your customers. That helps in no small measure to make your videos go viral easily. Consequently, your business gets the much-needed exposure to be found easily by potential customers.

Balance Your Content

You get the best results from social media marketing when you make very conscious efforts to balance your content always. A balanced content is what helps to grow followers quickly because there is always something for everyone in the content you share. For instance, if you consciously balance your content with a healthy dose of educating, informative, entertaining and even humorous matters, the content appeals better to a very wide spectrum of persons irrespective of their age, social status, educational background et al. By doing so, it helps to create more and better opportunities for you to use your promotional videos to build your audience with relative ease.

How to Choose a Good Blogging Platform

Many digital marketers are inevitably into blogging for business nowadays. In fact, you cannot be in content marketing if you are not blogging. Bloggers have discovered that blogging is one great way to connect with customers and to attract potential customers even though many bloggers tend to blog for many and varied reasons all connected one way or another with content marketing. If you write a blog, it can help your business to create a following and to establish your brand. Blogging is one veritable marketing tool you can effectively use to increase traffic to your website.

Even if you are a good blogger and you do not have a credible platform to build your blog on, it will not be effective. Not to worry though! Online, there’s a very wide range of blogging platforms you can always choose from.



To help you make a good choice, you must put the following into consideration.

Beginner-Friendliness

If you are a blogging newbie, you cannot aim to compete with the pros in their blogging platforms. All you need is a blogging solution that is easy to set up, manage, and doesn’t need complicated coding skills to run. Easy i suppose? A good platform for you must have 24/7 support for your efforts in case you have issues as you blog along.

Cost Consideration 

Cost consideration is inevitable in any business proposition. The blogging platform you need must be budget friendly and gives real value for money. Even if the platform is free, it is worth nothing if it doesn’t meet your blogging needs.

Monetization Options

Blogging has become a money making business for many bloggers in this age and time. Before you start a blog on any platform, it is good to consider if the platform will allow you to monetize your blog and earn money from it.

Maintenance and Versatility

Every blogger needs a blogging platform that will in no way impede the workflow of the blog. It must have tools and features that are simple to use and helpful with hands-on blogging solutions. You can best avoid blogging platforms that are unduly restrictive and not too user-friendly.

Features Flexibility and Extendability

As your blogging experience increases and your business expands, it is inevitable that the needs and requirements in your blogging site will change as well. The platform you need is the one that will allow you make these necessary changes easily as the need arises. Even if you choose to modify or overhaul your blog design, add features, or make other drastic changes, a good blogging platform must allow you make these changes with ease.

Recommendation

No matter what your skills, goals and requirements for blogging are, your blog can be classified into one or more of the following categories:

Personal blogs
Business blogs
Online businesses
Small hobby blogs

For these reasons, your blog can best be hosted by any of the following platforms. Looking through the platforms and taking into account the requirements to help you decide as earlier canvassed; you can easily make a choice from any of the following tested and reputable blogging platforms which I recommend.

WordPress.org – Best for Self-Hosted Blogs.
WordPress.com – Best for Free Blogs.
Wix.com – Best for Small Websites.
Joomla.com.
Medium.com. 
Ghost.org. 
Squarespace.com.
Weebly.com.
Blogger.com
Tumblr.com

Decide now, sign-up and host your blog. Happy and profitable blogging!

How to Build a Community around Your Brand

 Most digital marketers always like to put their products/services where buyers can be found. Bringing people with similar interests to regularly interact with one another in a community is very smart digital business strategy.  Creating a community around your brand by deliberate efforts somehow helps such businesses to easily get traffic, leads and eventual sales. Since customers are more likely to be emotionally attached to a community rather than just a single product/service, building a community around a brand becomes a smart business marketing move. That is one sure way to have a stable and reliable sales-funnel at all times. Driving steady sales no doubt is good for any business that expects to thrive and thrive well no matter the competition. 


 
To create a community around your brand, you need to do these here 4 things.

#1. Create Online Meeting Space

Online, people rarely meet regularly unless there is a suitable meeting space. To create a community around your brand, you must carefully decide on this space where fans can meet and get together. In fact, you’ve got to provide things of value to encourage people to visit this space and very regularly too. If at first you are only able to start with a few select individuals of like minds, you can grow from there. Creating a centralized location for persons with similar interests and enthusiasm is a very smart thing to do. Online, with its gift of unlimited virtual space you have ample room to choose from such as forums, chatrooms, social media groups, and the like. What really counts is making the online space a worthwhile location for people to spend their time without feeling as if they are wasting it. With that, they get to build bonds and do business without much ado.

#2. Create a Takeway Benefit

Getting something for something is a natural human craving. The reason many people always ask what’s in it for me. You can explore a great way to bond a sense of identity that is so crucial to the community around your product/service by selling or giving away something of value for free.  As an alternative, you can offer them for sale on your site as well, something that provides interacting fans with the opportunity to show their affiliation to the community. You may decide to brand such items with your logo and other details and give them away as gift items to your best customers or giveaway winners.

#3. Build Superfans

Superfans are usually created organically, but it's also wise to take some action to help nurture them as well. When created, superfans become the most significant assets you can have when you create a community around your brand. Reason being that they are not only a near-guaranteed revenue stream, but they also act as good ambassadors who convince others to buy your products as well. You may choose to create a VIP mailing list with sneak peeks and special offers that only go to your most high volume customers. What you really need is any tactics that can help give some community members that feeling of importance and special treatment. One great way to garner very positive emotions around your brand! That alone quickly helps to turn people into superfans and very valuable business assets to boot. 

#4. Link to a Wider Community

You can link to a wider community even if offline when you get involved in social and humanitarian projects which may not necessarily be online. Deliberately do such things that are highly beneficial in promoting a sense of community particularly if they are very useful in humanizing your brand. There are many of such world-wide charitable and good causes such as Rotary International, the Red Cross, animal conservation, climate change, renewable energy or environmentalism. Be careful to select any one that is more local and really jells with the area in which your business is based.  Creating a community around these causes helps to create a very positive regard for your business, thus confirming to those that buy your products that you align with their views on the world. You must however choose these causes very carefully to be sure they align with and match well with your products/services and the working practices of your business too to avoid unwittingly hurting the community by way of reckless insensitivity. 

Why Your Business Needs Visual Content Marketing

Visual content marketing simply means marketing online with pictures/images. It is a very powerful content marketing tool which incites the human mind to deliver information and tell the brand story in a more compelling and captivating way. For compelling results, most marketers prefer packaging their visual content messages using images, videos, infographics and memes. These are the means needed to deliver valuable and relevant information in an engaging visual format compelling favourable responses. In comparison with written content, visual content always has a higher impact on a human’s mind and a combination of both gives fantastic results. The real reason digital marketers and business owners are making use of them as a real potent marketing strategy.

These here are the main direct benefits of visual content marketing for any online marketing business. 

Better Customer Engagement

 

The reason most social media sites are very popular is because of ease of use and engagement. They manage to combine visual content and written content for best results. Most marketers are aware that visual content is more engaging and powerful than written content. They take advantage of that by adding pictures and graphics to their written content. That combination helps to make marketing campaigns more interesting and effective. It enhances better customer engagement, leads and sales. 

Increased Inbound Website Traffic

 

Every online marketer always wants traffic and more traffic. Anything that helps to increase inbound traffic is always welcome. If you are able to deploy visual content effectively, it gives a unique touch to your website and helps to grab the reader’s attention much more readily. That is good for traffic. It is smart to play around with words to show the value of your products and services. It is smarter still to make use of visuals as well or you can use both to have a greater impact on your audience. That helps to generate inbound traffic for your business. 

Boosts Conversion Rates

 

Many marketers are beginning to realize the importance of visual content marketing strategy to increase conversion rates. Visual contents can even be more effective especially when added to landing pages of websites. It is no longer secret that when marketers implement a successful visual content marketing strategy, it greatly helps to generate leads and increase sales. It is now known also that Brand’s videos are responsible for influencing 80-90% of viewers to get to know about a product/service and even to make a buying decision by simply watching a video.

Easy Brand Recognition

 

There is credible research evidence that 65% of people learn more through visuals. “Seeing is believing” that is! Most people tend to comprehend better with images, videos, and other visuals than with written words. Because of that, if you want to raise brand awareness among your target audience, it is smart to incorporate visual content marketing strategy in your overall marketing plans. With time, such strategy helps to gradually increase your brand recognition. You can get the best results by making good use of infographics and banner images in your website/blogs to attract readers. For sustained results, expert marketers advise that you check your business website/blog and landing pages always. Update them with compelling graphics, icons, photos, videos and other visuals as regularly and routinely as every month.

How Best to Test Your Website for Usability

As most digital marketers very well know, your website is your front office online. It is the best place to showcase and promote your goods/services to attract customers. To be able to perform that function effectively and efficiently, your website must be easily usable. So, it helps your business a great deal if you can routinely and regularly carry out usability testing on your website to be sure it does for your business what you expect it to do. Most importantly, it is extremely vital to go through various types of usability testing for your website even before you launch it. If its various functional aspects like speed and flow are unable to enhance user experience, your business suffers the consequence.


 
Here is what to test

Customer Experience

Every business is online to get customers. You can hardly get a good customer experience without easy usability of your website. If you have an in depth understanding of the needs of your customers, you can position your website to meet these needs. A good customer experience usually translates to good customers and good business.

Easy Accessibility

Web users are notoriously impatient. Getting hits on your website is directly related to how easily accessible it is. When users encounter a bit of difficulty in accessing your website, they quickly move on and your business suffers the consequence. Easy web accessibility allows people with a wide range of abilities to navigate and interact with your website without stress and that is good for your business.

Brand Positioning

Your brand is your business. If your website cannot position and promote your brand effectively, it does not help your business. Poor quality of usability of your website cannot help you to gain the trust of your customers easily. That is the trust which helps the growth and popularity of your brand and your business. Doing a few right and proper things on your website helps to ensure a highly optimized user experience which can promote the overall perception of your brand.

Customer Conversions

It is just not enough to get a lot of hits and visits to your website. What matters most is how many of such visitors end up becoming customers. The higher the conversion rate, the better for your business! Customer experience plays a great role in increased customer conversion rates the reason it is a credible test for your website usability.

Productive Systems

Very easy to deploy and use systems greatly enhance customers experience. What your website needs are systems which are very easy to use and can be updated using simple but effective methods. Such systems if in place are extremely valuable assets for your business because they greatly enhance the productivity of your website. 

How to Blog Like a Pro

Do you know something others don’t know? Are you good at something? Are you passionate about something? Do you express yourself well in writing? Great if you do. You can be a blogger and a good one at that just like the Pros. Now, how badly do you want to blog like a Pro? Simple! Just do exactly what Pros do. The good news is, Pros don’t do anything much different from what other bloggers do. They only manage to do better and differently same things other bloggers do in blogosphere. That is what makes them Pros. Here is how you too can get started if you want to blog like a Pro:

#1 Decide on a Domain Name

You may ask what’s in a name. In blogging, the answer is a lot. This is more so when your domain name will automatically become your brand name. In choosing a name, don’t go with the Joneses unless you want to struggle for recognition over a long time. You may even be crowded out easily if you are not lucky. You must make this choice very carefully because your web success may directly depend on it when search engines come to recognize it. Any name which resonates with your chosen niche always gets better results. AnyName.com is ok provided it is brandable and memorable. It must align with what you’ve decided for your brand recognition and it is available for web registration. 


 
#2 Carefully Choose Your Blog Niche

If you want to blog like Pro, you must carefully choose a niche and stick with it over the long haul. Your blog can not grow if it is not known for something unique to it even if it is just one thing. That is the reason you should not go for something too general like blogging for food or fitness. You can settle for a unique type of food or for some brand of fitness unique to pregnant women, to athletes or the elderly. These unique types of niches are likely to earn you recognition faster than general niches. Any niche you choose must be a combination of your talent, passion and marketing opportunity if you want to blog like Pro. 

#3 Get a Custom Logo

You may choose to get professionals to design a unique logo for you with a little fee or you go for free themes available in the WordPress repository. Either way, what matters is to get a unique logo which fits the niche theme you’ve chosen. A unique logo adds to your professionalism too. You must therefore be careful to settle for a design that is not excessively colorful and distracting. It must easily appeal to the eye and good for readability and page load speed both of which can help the SEO of your blog.

#4 Install a Self-Hosted Blog

You can easily have access to many blogging platforms on the web but some are free while some are not. The platforms that are not free may require that you pay a small rental fee monthly, quarterly or annually. The choice is yours to make. Free blog platforms like Blogger.com or WordPress.com. appear to be most popular with many bloggers. However, there is some snag with many of the free platforms. Most of them do not allow commercial use of their platforms. Some others will not allow you to own your web-property. For these reasons, most Pros prefer to register and host their own domains with reputable Domain Hosts even at a premium.

#5 Write and Publish Your First Content

This is where what you know and are passionate about will come to the fore. Just relax, collect your thoughts and start writing something great. Be ready for the long haul because blogging is a marathon and not a sprint. The rules are no that strict, but always ensure the information you are giving out is authentic, rich, personal and unique enough for other persons to be interested in reading it. Your success as a blogger is heavily dependent on how much of rich, informative and educative information you can give out about your chosen niche in a prolonged basis. That is where your knowledge and expertise really come to the fore. It is this knowledge/information that helps you to acquire loyal readership and followership. Before making the first post on your content, be sure that your “About Me” page is carefully written out to tell readers who you are and what you can do and have done in the past. Most people always want to know who exactly they are dealing with before reading blog posts.

#6 Adopt a Good SEO Strategy

This stage involves some technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you adopt a good SEO strategy because how the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent there by search engines. Simply put, SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) is a unique way of playing around with and positioning keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.


 
#7 Install Web Analytics
 
Analytics are very helpful in measuring results, carrying out research and even spying on other bloggers. Google Analytics is most preferable here but be sure you configure its search console as well. It is simple to deploy and use. Just sign up for a free account at Google Analytics. After signing up, Google will send you a javascript code, which you have to deploy on all the pages of your blog you need to track and measure their performance. Once your Google Analytics is in place, you can daily track the number of visitors, to which page, sources of the traffic and even the countries and geographical regions of the world the traffic is coming from. The search console gives you essential data and insights about how your website is performing in Google Search. Through it, you will also be able to see the keywords that people search for when they come to your site. It gives you the right information you really need to rejig your SEO strategy from time to time depending on your blog readers’ behavior online.

#8 Install Essential Plugins

As soon as your blog is up and running, it becomes a very valuable web property which you must protect and enhance its functionality. That is when you need to install some essential and useful plugins. You may get some plugins free and you may have to pay for some others. What you use depends on what you aim to achieve or get from your blog. Here are some of the most popular plugins with bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that have links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. They get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Helps to back up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox.

#9 Get Your Blog on Social Media

As most marketers now know, social media is the place to be. This is because of the huge popularity of social media and the ease of sharing information and interaction. One blog can go viral in minutes via sharing to hundreds of thousands of persons all over the internet. As soon as you start publishing, just get your blog on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. That helps to put your blog before a very huge audience where you can easily source customers from the “likes” and “followers” you get on these platforms. If you do so, you will notice from your Google Analytics dashboard that your first set of visitors will be coming in good numbers from social media sites.

#10 Monetize your Blog

Yeah, this is the icing on the cake. Pro bloggers get to make real good money from their blogs when they monetize them. Some Forbes Research Results indicate that many Pro bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year with some posting much higher figures. That is good money no doubt. For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. Display ads as monetized with Google Adsense is readily one of the easiest ways to make money with your blog. But, there are many others which Pros have learned to combine into making multiple streams of income. It is also possible to earn money through Pay-Per-View, PPV, Pay-Per-Click, PPC and direct product ads on your website if your blog has become sufficiently popular by way of good traffic inflow. Other methods include, selling E-books, Lessons, Lectures, How-to videos, Webinars and many other electronic products which you can create yourself, advertise on your blog and sell to buyers online.