How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy for your Online Business

Digital marketing usually involves the use of digital online channels to promote products, services and even ideas. These days, businesses routinely deploy digital marketing for many and varied purposes online. For many online business owners, they rely on digital marketing mostly to generate traffic, leads and sales. Digital marketing is thus one great and effective way to build awareness and create a thought leadership position online. This is why digital marketing is essential part of the overall marketing strategy online business owners really depend on to effectively meet the needs of their numerous customers.

Here are some vital steps you can take to create an effective digital marketing strategy for your business.

Understand your Target Audience

This is one of the most essential steps to creating a digital marketing strategy. You must take deliberate steps to really understand your target audience before you can effectively market to them. If you don’t know your audience well enough, you cannot effectively market to them. Knowing your audience means you must know the needs of your audience, which marketing channels your potential customers prefer and exactly how to use these channels to reach them. Among online business owners, the most common channels of preference include social media, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and PPC advertising. To build an effective marketing strategy, you can focus on just one or a combination of two or more of these channels, depending on your objectives and the goals you’ve set for your business. The type of marketing content you produce will be directly influenced by the channels you choose to market with.

Define your Short and Long-Term Goals/Objectives
 
Just like any other business, it is hugely important in digital marketing to clearly define and set out your short and long-term goals/objectives right from the outset and make these goals/objectives an essential part of your business’s marketing strategy. When these goals/objectives are well established in your marketing strategy, they become a vital tool for reaching out to customers. They essentially help to build brand awareness and establishing a rapport with customers no matter how numerous they are. Bearing in mind that your main objective in setting goals is how to make your marketing efforts more effective, you must ensure that the goals are time-based and measurable. You can for instance have short term goals like doubling your traffic and leads in six months and long term goals like an increase in customer acquisition, higher conversion rate, increase in sales and revenue. It is best to set SMART goals, meaning the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Time-bound. If you set SMART goals as part of your strategy, you’re more likely to reach them within your set time frame. You can with such goals accurately measure or gauge how your business is doing as you progress along. That way, you can easily determine if you are making expected progress or if you are even succeeding at all based on your set objectives.
 
Identify your Ideal Buyer Persona

With research and careful analysis, you can clearly identify your ideal buyer persona. This is hugely important because your ideal buyer persona is a very essential party of your digital marketing strategy. A buyer persona helps you to better understand your audience and to relate to people you absolutely need to. An ideal buyer persona helps businesses to reach out to customers, build relationships, generate leads and increase sales. A buyer persona is some kind of abstract picture of what you think your ideal buyers are like. This is a picture you can build up using personal information and work details of who you expect your ideal buyer to be like. Details of such information include age, educational qualification, geographical location, job title and role outside of work, family, income level, gender and so on. These details clearly provide a context of your ideal buyer and therefore very important for your marketing strategy.

Create an Evergreen Content Strategy

All content that brings traffic to your website is great but evergreen content is best. This is because, evergreen content is content that remains relevant for a long period of time, and it brings good traffic for that period too. Evergreen content has the advantage of attracting new visitors while not becoming irrelevant or outdated over time. Search engines like evergreen content as well and they tend to rank it highly in their SERPs. That means good organic traffic in the mix. If you want to have evergreen content as part of your marketing strategy, make sure you consistently create content in form of tutorials, how-to guides, examples, checklists, and problem-solving articles which really attract traffic. These are the types of content that are likely to remain relevant and popular with readers over a prolonged period of time. If you are able to focus on content that has a long shelf life, it can directly benefit your marketing strategy. Such content helps to boost your keyword rankings, set up better SEO, and enjoy steady traffic growth. This is in addition to helping your brand to build online authority and credibility.

Use Earned Media

Your business benefits from earned media if your content is very good. If your content is good, it is shared more and via multichannel to boot. Earned media is simply content that is shared by others and links back to your website. It is usually in the form of written or video content. Earned media can also include organic search engine traffic. The more your content is shared, the more likely others will reference it. As a marketing strategy, earned media usually helps to get your content in front of fans, potential customers, and many others who share a common interest in the content. This process is really enhanced if your content is easy to find and share. Therefore, having a social media marketing strategy is a way to enhance earned media.

Use Pay-Per-Click, PPC Ads

Pay-per-click, PPC ads is the paid form of search engine marketing. PPC ads can therefore be a key component of your integrated marketing strategies. It is a bit technical in nature and you must have the resources to pay search engines particularly Google for the clicks it can arrange for you by way of PPC.  PPC ads are highly effective when used correctly. They enable marketers to reach a wide audience quickly since a vast majority of online experiences start on Google. Since your potential audience probably uses Google every day, Google PPC ads can reach virtually every person in your target audience pretty quickly. For effectiveness, PPC ads can be created in many different styles. You can have ads in form of simple text or images, and you can incorporate ad extensions too. If your ads have extensions, it can increase the click-through rate of the ads. Ad extensions tend to make your ads larger and more prominent on Google SERPs. That means more organic traffic. 

Insights & Quotes from Successful People

"Personal leadership must come from the inside out. You cannot wait for someone else to push you; you must motivate yourself through goal setting."
—Paul J. Meyer


"If you do not consciously decide ahead of time where you are going, you may very easily end up somewhere else."
—Laurence J. Peter


"A goal without a plan is just a wish."
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The reason most people never reach their goals is that they don't define them, or ever seriously consider them as believable or achievable. Winners can tell you where they are going, what they plan to do along the way, and who will be sharing the adventure with them."
—Denis Watley

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe."
—Anatole France


"First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do."
—Epictetus


"Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I'll give you a stock clerk."
—J.C. Penney


"You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there."
—Yogi Berra


"A successful individual typically sets his next goal somewhat but not too much above his last achievement. In this way he steadily raises his level of aspiration."
—Kurt Lewin


"The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you're willing to work."
—Oprah Winfrey


"The person with a fixed goal, a clear picture of his desire, or an ideal always before him, causes it, through repetition, to be buried deeply in his subconscious mind and is thus enabled, thanks to its generative and sustaining power, to realize his goal in a minimum of time and with a minimum of physical effort. Just pursue the thought unceasingly. Step by step you will achieve realization, for all your faculties and powers become directed to that end."
—Claude M. Bristol


"Failure is not in an unsuccess goal, but in having no goal to reach."
—Benjamin Mays


"The purpose of goals is to focus our attention. The mind will not reach toward achievement until it has clear objectives. The magic begins when we set goals. It is then that the switch is turned on, the current begins to flow, and the power to accomplish becomes a reality."
—"The Best of Success," by Wynn Davis


"The most important thing about goals is having one."
—Geoffry F. Abert


"Until input (thought) is linked to a goal (purpose) there can be no intelligent accomplishment."
—Paul G. Thomas


"You will now have a starting place and a destination, and you will be able to determine what it will cost you to get there...You will be going someplace."
—H. Stanley Judd

Article Source: SFI Blog Forum Time-Tested Tips

How to Enable Monetization of your Facebook Page, Tricks and Tips

Worldwide, millions of people are on Facebook for fun and to connect with friends. Many others are there to do business and to earn some extra income online. Many business owners and brands are deliberately taking their businesses to Facebook for maximum exposure. Facebook business pages and marketing tools are great business assets that can help marketers to make a bit of money on the side and online. If you want to earn some money on Facebook you too can deliberately enable monetization activities on your Facebook page.

Most digital marketers are very much aware that through your Facebook pages, you can build strong brand recognition. Even when you do not have your own products to sell, it does not stop you from enabling and monetizing your Facebook page. Following are a few things you can do to enable monetization on your Facebook page.

Sell Products Directly from Your Facebook Page

On Facebook, if you have something to offer to your audience, say a great product for instance, you can directly sell it on your Facebook page. Facebook in-house marketing tools can assist you to make sales on the platform smoothly. If you are selling on Facebook directly for instance you can use the different Hootsuite features for direct product sales to analyze your customers’ behaviors and requirements. Better still, if you have your own products to sell. If you do, Facebook will not just be a social media site of fun but a veritable platform for good business.

Optimize Your Facebook Page

For effective marketing out of your Facebook page, it must be optimized. So, if you want to monetize your Facebook page, the best technique available is to optimize your Facebook business pages. Making your website mobile-friendly is one of the most essential techniques in the monetization process. Since a very large percentage of business owners now access data from their mobile devices, it is imperative to make your website mobile-friendly if you do not want to miss out in this huge chunk of mobile data. From these handheld devices, searching is usually easy among internet users. So, if your Facebook page and website in tandem are not mobile optimized, you are going to lose a good number of customers and potential leads. That is for sure.

Create and Sell Digital Content

Facebook is a very effective platform to sell digital content. Digital content distributions and selling are easy ways to monetize your Facebook platforms. If you do not have actual products to sell, digital contents are easily saleable products. On Facebook, you can sell eBooks and other e-products/documents to make money. If you work with reputable affiliate platforms like Strong Future International, SFI and Amazon eBooks, you can get good products to sell as digital products. 

Use Facebook Page for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing sites are an excellent place to start your business from your Facebook business pages. Affiliate marketing is a perfect way to monetize your Facebook pages. You can create the content from the Facebook pages and send the traffic to the affiliate marketing sites through an affiliate link. You earn commissions when consumers purchase products through your affiliate links.

Promote Local Events and Campaigns

On Facebook, you have excellent opportunities to create good and attractive pages for your products/brands. If you want to promote local events from your Facebook page, the page must be optimized for local business. The reason is because local events always need local promotional work for good results. Anytime you are doing local event promotions, your Facebook pages are really handy because every business is local. These local events promotion are especially helpful to make your product/brand names hugely popular around the local communities. From your local events endorsements, you earn local popularity. Through this popularity, more local people begin to notice your brand, more of them start to visit the brand and your Facebook view rates increase as well.
 
Sell Third Party Products/Services

If you plan to monetize your Facebook page, third-party products/services are a good way to start. Even when you do not have your own products, you can still make money by selling third party products/services. Sometimes, these third-party products/services can be very quick and easy ways to make money on Facebook. All you need do is to simply promote these third party products links on your Facebook page and when sales are made through these links, you earn commissions from the sales.

Summary

Through monetization on your Facebook page, you directly popularize your brand and earn incomes as well. Brand endorsement begins from there. Through brand endorsement, you can grow your audience and get more loyal followers on Facebook. The best step towards monetization therefore is to make your Facebook page hugely popular among your followers. That translates to good traffic without which you cannot expect any worthwhile income from your Facebook page. The bottom-line is to make money from your Facebook page through monetization. Any of the foregoing strategies that do not directly help that process is not worth the while.

6 Best and Most Effective eCommerce Marketing Strategies, Experts’ Tips

To grow your eCommerce business, you need effective advertising. That’s about the only way your business can get to reach more customers. It takes many marketing strategies and tactics to effectively advertise online. Some of these strategies can be deployed either singly or in combination depending on the type of products you are marketing and the marketing channels you choose to use.

Based on expert recommendations, below are 6 best and most effective eCommerce marketing strategies to help you reach more customers and achieve your marketing goals.

1. Optimizing Your Website

If you run eCommerce business, your website is the first impression a shopper gets to have about your business. Well, that shopper had better be impressed or else you may lose his business. You cannot expect to directly impress a shopper on your website if your website design and aesthetics are poor and unimpressive. What helps to keep shoppers a bit longer on your website is optimization. If your website is optimized, shoppers stay a bit longer on the website to notice the wonderful products you are selling. If they notice these products, chances are higher that they may get to purchase some of the products. You can therefore optimize your website through a simple site structure that is easy to navigate. The right shopping information should be easily noticeable and CTAs very obvious to get shoppers to take desirable actions. If the website is optimized for mobile devices, better still because Google now attributes a very high percentage of search data to mobile devices.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple business model that thrives on synergy. Since the eCommerce business owner cannot afford to reach all prospects all by himself, he needs to combine the efforts of affiliates to do so. Business owners can therefore partner with publishers/affiliates that can help promote products for them on their blog posts, emails, social media, and videos. In the bargain, these publishers/affiliates earn a percentage of the sales made through their promotional efforts as commissions. That is affiliate marketing. Some product merchants can decide to work directly with reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI who can directly assist them with training, customer care, marketing tools, analytics and easy attribution and payment of commissions.

3. eCommerce SEO

It is expected that many customers research products well online before they even decide to buy. For this reason, if you want to give your eCommerce business the best chance of converting prospects, you must connect with them during the research stage. That is where eCommerce SEO becomes very handy. This is the process of optimizing your web pages to rank high for essential business keywords related to the products you are selling. To improve your eCommerce SEO, you must take deliberate steps to improve your Content Marketing, technical SEO, On-Page and Off-Page SEO. These improvements will help you to engage better in your eCommerce SEO campaigns. Doing so is one great way to acquire more leads and customers from the organic traffic coming from search engines.

4. Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising

With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, eCommerce business owners can reach their audience with targeted ads on Google. What makes PPC ads particularly effective is that eCommerce business owners can take specific steps and actions to improve the chances of the ads reaching their targets. Such steps/actions include conducting diligent keywords research, adjusting ads bids in line with set goals, building relevant landing pages, using Google shopping ads and using retargeting ads. After taking all necessary steps and executing these techniques, you can improve performance through A/B testing. Since you can’t expect a single ad to effectively work for every business, experts recommend that business owners must carefully test various ad campaign elements if they want to improve performance.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective marketing technique popular with eCommerce business owners. It is highly cost-effective too. Marketing with email has very many advantages for eCommerce business owners when compared to other marketing channels. Aside the cost-effectiveness, business owners can personalize email messages, segment the messages and even use email automation software to automate email messages to reach a wider audience reliably. All these help business owners to save time, money, and other resources and still be able to get impressive results from email campaigns. When business owners send relevant emails to their numerous subscribers, it helps to increase the open and click-through rates of the emails. In addition, because the emails are directing the recipients to a relevant web page, there’s a higher chance of converting such visitors. Therefore, if you want your eCommerce business to grow, email marketing is a must rather than a convenient option.

6. Social Media Marketing

Most people worldwide use social media platforms for fun and to connect with friends but many users also follow businesses and check out information and product offers on some of the platforms. eCommerce business owners usually provide value to their audience on social media through the type of content that can solve their problems. That is why many eCommerce businesses tend to focus on social media platforms credible locations where they can reach their ideal customers. In many business niches, there are experts and celebrities who have gained a big following on social media as a result of their excellent performance and prominence in their vocations or industries. As a result, these experts and influencers tend to have loyal audiences who trust their product recommendations. eCommerce businesses do take advantage of this relationship to promote their products. This is influencer marketing which directly compliments social media marketing. Presently, some social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram because of their unique in-house marketing tools allow business owners to sell products directly on their platforms. On social media therefore, there are many excellent opportunities for eCommerce business owners to promote and sell their products to a very wide and diverse audience.

Wrapping Up

Effective marketing is one of the best ways to give your eCommerce business the right exposure online. Having an excellent product is just not enough to do good business out there. Nobody will buy your product if they’ve never heard of it and they don’t know anything about it. By deploying the right marketing strategies as discussed above, it is possible to attract more shoppers to your eCommerce store and sell more products to them. If you need to boost your marketing results therefore, your best bet is to deploy these here strategies in the right way.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce Email Marketing

Email may be old school but it is still a very effective digital marketing tool for most eCommerce business owners. Email is highly cost-effective and very easy to use particularly if you already have in place a responsive email list. The ROI for email marketing is very high making every dollar spent on marketing by eCommerce businesses worth the while. Without a doubt therefore, email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to improve the performance of your eCommerce business. This is because email marketing for eCommerce has many advantages when compared to other marketing strategies. The reasons for this are simple and very easy to discern.

Firstly, through emails, your marketing messages will land directly in your email subscribers’ inboxes. What that means is more and better exposure for your marketing messages.

Secondly, you can segment email messages for different recipients. That makes it easy to send different messages according to your email subscriber’s interests. This leads to highly effective marketing personalization which can make a lot of difference in your marketing campaigns.

Thirdly, by the use of software, you can automate email messages for more reach and effectiveness. This helps to reduce time and costs while still very effective as a marketing strategy. The software is simple and easy to use too. The best and readily available email marketing software you can use today will allow you to personalize your emails based on many criteria such as:

Name
Gender
Location
Birthdays
Emails opened
Website pages visited
Purchase history

By using this personalized info to send relevant emails to your subscribers, you’ll increase their open and click-through rates. Because such emails help to direct visitors to a relevant web page, there’s a higher chance of converting such visitors. That translates to more and better eCommerce business.

Aside personalization, email marketing automation is quite effective as far as strategies go. This is because email marketing automation involves sending a series of messages to your subscribers based on a schedule or when certain conditions/criteria are met.

Here are some examples of automated email sequences popular with digital marketers:

Welcome emails
Up-sell and cross-sell emails
Onboarding emails
Re-engagement emails
Promotional emails
Abandoned cart emails
Lead nurturing emails

To create these emails, you’ll find the necessary tools in some email marketing software. Some modern software packages even provide automation templates marketers can use to create effective email campaigns. When creating email marketing sequences, it is possible for marketers to add triggers or special conditions either to add or remove certain subscribers from the email automation. Email marketing is thus hugely essential for any eCommerce business to thrive.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technical process of organizing your business website to make it visible to search engines.  eCommerce SEO is the process of optimizing your web pages to rank high for essential business keywords. Marketers expect that before customers are ready to buy a product, they must have done some diligent research about the product using related keywords. Those keywords help search engines to include the product you are marketing on your website in their search results made available to such searchers. Therefore, to give your eCommerce business the best chance of converting prospects, it must connect with them during the research stage. eCommerce SEO makes that possible.

If you have an eCommerce store, find below specific tasks you can execute to improve your eCommerce SEO:

Technical SEO: These are specific tasks you can execute in your website’s backend to help search engines to quickly discover the site. You can for instance submit your sitemap to index your pages and make them crawlable by search engine bots. Other technical SEO tasks include how to improve user experience on the website and making it mobile-friendly. User experience on a website improves if the site is fast loading and easy to navigate. If for instance, you can increase the loading speed of your website, it helps to boost its rankings, navigability and usability. Because most internet users now access the web via mobile devices, if you focus on making your website mobile-friendly, it helps it to benefit from the huge search data now attributable to mobile devices.

Content Marketing: Without content, no web page can benefit from the ranking on search engines.  This is why quality and highly valuable content is one of the most vital criteria for ranking high for a keyword by search engines. Quality of your content and its relevance to certain keywords are hugely important in this ranking. So, if you carefully use specific keywords on your content, that is SEO which helps the content to be visible to search engines and for them to rank it in their SERPs. Search engines consider search intent by matching the keywords on your content with the keywords searchers are using in their searches. That helps search engines to determine if your content provides the information a searcher is looking for, then include the content in the search results they make available to the searcher. Regularly creating pieces of content that solve your visitors’ problems is vital for eCommerce SEO.

On-Page SEO: These are essentially SEO tasks you carry out on your web page. Some of such tasks include, adding your target keyword to the page URL, title, meta tags, subheadings, and any other aspects of your website visible to search engines. Header tags are most essential. This is because they serve to break down content to help search engines understand the content better.

Off-Page SEO: Just as marketers can improve SEO for their eCommerce websites through many actions on their websites, they can also do things outside their websites for same purpose. One of the most prominent off-page SEO tactics is link building. This is a process of linking your website to other reputable websites in your niche to help its ranking. When other websites relevant to your niche link to your page, they help build web authority for that page. Search engines notice if that happens and they rank your website better for it. This is more so if the website linking to you already has a lot of high-quality backlinks to your pages. This too helps to boost your chances of higher ranking on the SERPs of search engines.

Last Line

If and whenever you decide to embark on eCommerce SEO campaigns, you can acquire more leads and customers through organic traffic from search engines. A great boost for your eCommerce business no doubt.

Best and Most Popular Niches for Affiliate Marketing

You want to do well in affiliate marketing? You better latch on to a good niche. That’s where the journey begins. You are best advised to look for the best niches for affiliate marketing. Success in affiliate marketing hinges on selecting and working in high-paying and profitable niches. As most marketers very well know, any niche with many customers and quality products can be profitable for affiliate businesses. Following are some carefully selected niches which research shows can be quite profitable if you have the passion.

Lifestyle

Worldwide, everyone alive has a lifestyle. Many people are always craving to improve on their lifestyles. Lifestyle is one of the most popular niches for affiliate marketing. This is because millions of people around the world always want to improve their way of living. Many of them always want to find better ways of living to their best. Lifestyle is thus one great niche for affiliate marketing. Marketers in the niche can profit from sub-domains like affordable housing, education, smaller houses, home designs and decor and suchlike endeavors that help people improve their life styles.

Hobby

Well, nearly everyone has got a hobby, making it a popular niche for marketers. If you want to market in this niche, you can focus on hundreds of diverse activities human beings like to engage in as hobbies. Activities like dancing, gardening, music, videography, painting, hiking, biking, photography and all suchlike activities people like to do as hobbies. For profit purposes it is best to market hobbies that interest many target customers.

Wealth Building

Somehow wealth building appears to interest many people. Most people always wish to be rich but hardly know how to go about it. Working within the niche successfully exploits that wish. Some want to make money directly while many others always want to have a side hustle to make some extra money as a second income perhaps. Many prefer some form of investment to get out of debt and live a happier life. Marketers that manage to combine any of these unique angles with commitment can always tap into the huge market of wealth-building.

Technology

Yeah, these days, with the advent of the internet, technology develops real fast making it a great niche for marketers. In this niche, you can focus on promoting web hosting, VPNs, smoke detectors, smartphones, computers, robotics, artificial intelligence AI, software, productivity apps, CCTVs and so on.  There are really high-tech products in this niche and affiliate products in the niche belong to the high commissions paying categories. This is because their referral fee is usually very high. As everyone knows, new technology comes on stream routinely and the niche is a real fertile ground for affiliate marketing. No question about it, fact is, technology as a niche is not about going out of style soon. That makes the niche some kind of evergreen niche to work in.

Security and Safety

As the world grows and becomes more sophisticated, safety and security concerns grow too in tandem. Most people now want more and better security for themselves and their families. Most homeowners are continuously looking for better security practices to ensure their properties are safe from damage, destruction and even theft. For instance, increased crime rates has necessitated increased interest in CCTV cameras, alarm systems, and apps that enable people to remotely monitor their homes round the clock. This is one popular niche that can be hugely profitable for affiliate marketers.

   
Fashion and Beauty

Yeah, everyone particularly women always want to look and feel good. That’s where fashion and beauty step in as a good business niche. Because most people always want to look and feel good, regardless of the state of the economy, fashion and beauty are niches that continue to flourish. Since most people always want to look their best even when their lives aren’t so, it directly creates an excellent opportunity for marketers who promote products that help people to look good. A great niche no doubt.

Health and Fitness

No doubt everyone I know wants to be healthy and fit. It is not an exclusive preserve of the rich and affluent. Most people, rich or poor cherish being fit and healthy. That makes health and fitness a great niche to market in. Because many people are ready and willing to pay a lot of money to stay fit and healthy, it helps to make health and fitness niche one of the most profitable niches out there.

Pet Care

Millions of animals around the world are under the care of humans as pets. A good number of people own and cherish pets. These people make a lot of efforts and spare no resources to care for their pets. Many pet owners go to great lengths to make these animals comfortable and healthy. They usually provide good housing for pets, buy the best foods, provide good medication, and other grooming services for the comfort and well-being of the animals. To make money in this niche, affiliate marketers can offer any products/services that align with the demands of pet care necessities.

Travels and Hospitality

This is another very popular niche since people are always on the move. Travel and Hospitality is readily one of the most prominent niches out there. It comes with a lot of lucrative deals for the economy and luxury segments depending on what everyone is prepared to spend. Choices and a combination of choices are quite infinite when it comes to travels and hospitality. It ranges from mode of transportation, style of transportation, foods, drinks, accommodation, fitness, sporting facilities and above all safety. On this niche, the bulk of the income comes from insurance, clothing, city tours, flights, luggage handling, food and drinks, massages and hotel reviews.

Non-Profit and Charity

People often wonder how people can make money marketing in a non-profit and charity niche. Yes, many marketers do and it is quite a popular niche to market in. Unknown to most people, non-profits and charity organizations operate and move around huge amounts of money regularly for charity work. They regularly seek donations to enhance their work. Charity organizations thrive when their good stories get out in public domain. Marketers do not only earn commissions helping these organizations to promote their works, they get the additional benefit of feeling good about helping to promote great humanitarian causes that benefit the society.

How to Choose a Profitable Affiliate Marketing Niche

It is at times a huge challenge for affiliate marketers to settle for a niche to work in. The reason is because selecting the best niche has a bearing on how profitable your affiliate marketing business can be. Success in affiliate marketing is more about selecting the most profitable niches. By way of careful selection process, this article will take you through the right steps you need to settle for good and highly profitable niches. You may need to combine one, two or more of these tips to get things right. What matters most however is to be able to select a niche that has many customers and quality products for sale. That is the type of niche that is most likely to make your affiliate marketing business profitable. These here tips and techniques can always help you out in making the right choice. 

Research Your Competitors

This is the best way to know what is trending and what is selling well. By researching your competitors, you’ll discover what they sell, how they sell it, through what channels and some of the unique practices that help to sustain them in business and to make profits. Your research attention must be specially focused on your brand competitors. By doing so, chances are high that you can increase conversions if you provide your customers with similar categories of products.

What Fits Within Your Niche
                                                      
As a marketer, you stand a better chance of making profit in your affiliate marketing business if you choose a niche you like, passionate about and enjoy promoting. What fits into your niche is what helps you to make money. That is the kind of niche that can help you to make profits. Your passion for the niche helps to determine how much effort you can put into marketing your affiliate products. So, if you choose products that fit into your niche, you can promote them better, make better sales within the niche and earn more commissions.
 
Commission Earning Frequency and Percentage

After settling for great products that sell well, your next consideration should be what level of commissions you can earn from the sales. The range is usually between 5%-50% depending on the type of product and the affiliate program you are working with. It is therefore prudent to always search for and choose programs like Strong Future International, SFI that are likely to earn you good returns in commissions. Affiliate marketing is all about earning some money online. This money is earned mostly through commissions. The more commissions you earn therefore, the more money you make.

Consider Program Reputation

Reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI are reputed simple because they have good track records and are known for marketing quality products with good commissions on sales made through affiliates. You may choose to work with individual product merchants but working with reputable affiliate programs has huge advantages. These advantages always help to make a great difference in the market.

Consider the Upsells

Upselling helps affiliate marketers to earn more commissions on sales. With upsells, a consumer is offered other packages only available upon purchasing a particular product. Like accessories to a car for instance! When a customer chooses to buy a car, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale of the car as well as a commission on the sale of the upsell accessories. Affiliate programs that offer upselling opportunities help with profits.

Factor in Vendor Support

Affiliate programs with strong support help to reduce marketing costs for affiliates and to make marketing easier for them. Affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI with great in-house marketing tools, training and customer support usually help to make a great difference in affiliate marketing experience and success. Affiliate marketing just like any other business has its own unique challenges. When affiliates have the assurance of great vendor support, it helps them to do business better and to make more profits. 

5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Can Directly Benefit your Business

Presently, Artificial Intelligence AI is readily one of the fastest-growing online technologies in the world. This is largely due to its versatility of use in many fields of human endeavor. Business owners now hugely depend on AI because of its proven capabilities to automate some business processes fully and some partially. AI directly helps businesses to stimulate growth and to stay competitive and that helps to increase its popularity among business owners. Behind this growing popularity is the efficiency of AI in helping to push businesses towards their optimum performance in growth rate and volume of business. AI helps businesses to make better operational decisions by automating many essential business processes and predictive analytics. This way, AI is presently directly responsible for changing the way businesses work and how business owners run their businesses.

Discussed below are some direct benefits of AI which entrepreneurs and small businesses in particular find especially useful.

1. Enhanced Cyber Security

If you do business online, no matter the size of the business, cyber-attacks are always a clear and present danger to the business. Daily, cyber criminals are becoming bolder and more and more sophisticated. What most of these criminals are usually after is to steal data, lock the data to ask for ransom, or to corrupt the data to simply ruin the business. If you run a small business online, a single cyber-attack is capable if wiping you out of business completely. That is why you need to have in place good cyber security measures to protect your business round the clock. This is exactly where AI comes in very handy. With AI, many cyber-attacks can be recognized, predicted, and countered in good time before they do any damage to your business. AI helps to automatically upgrade cyber security systems regularly to equip them with the capability to counter any attacks if and whenever they occur. AI can regularly scan system health by keeping watch on hardware and software systems to predict any kind of failures that might end up becoming the gateway for cyber attackers. That protection is round the clock 24/7.

2. Smarter Supply Chain Management

Supply Chain Management is at times a complicated business activity which AI can help make simpler and smarter. Business owners now pair up modern supply chain management processes with AI for better efficiency. From smarter inventory management systems to smarter warehousing, tracking and shipping, AI is very handy throughout multiple stages of the supply chain. Many businesses do find use for AI in customer service to collect data related to target markets while others are applying AI algorithms to their handling and shipping processes. With the help of predictive analytics through AI, it has also become easier for many businesses to predict accurate delivery duration and deadlines.

3. Predicting Outcomes

AI helps business owners to make better operational decisions. If you want to make better operational decisions, it is crucial to take possible outcomes into account before making any decision at all. This is exactly where AI plays very crucial roles by way of machine learning. Machine learning using historical data can help in identifying possible outcomes of an operational step. With its smart algorithms, machine learning can use events that have already happened in the past as references to learn and compare patterns. That way, these algorithms can assist business owners to predict with fair accuracy, possible outcomes in the future.

4. Better Ads Targeting

Effective ads online are ads that are well targeted. AI helps business owners to better target ads for effectiveness. With AI, it becomes easier for businesses to reach the right users directly. In this era of digitization, AI is one of the ways of making better performing digital ad strategies. AI can suggest the right target markets, average internet speed, average user income, and more vital user information based on the quantitative data collected through different surveys and sources in the past. AI can also provide useful suggestions, including the right steps to take to make digital ads more effective. In addition, modern SEO techniques effectively use AI to filter the right content/blogs and display them on the first page of the SERPs of search engines. That translates to good organic traffic for the business. The icing on the cake is that AI algorithms get automatically updated regularly and are thus always equal to the task of helping businesses to develop the right growth strategies.

5. Business Cost Reduction

AI engenders better and more efficient business processes. That tells on the cost of operating a business. Anything that helps a business to save costs is crucial for its growth. For instance, using AI for customer service is one of the most efficient ways to reduce the costs of running the business. Some research evidence suggests that AI is capable of solving 70% of customer queries on its own if paired with chatbots. That hugely helps to reduce costs on customer service operations. The good thing is that when most chatbots are uploaded on cloud servers, they do not require regular maintenance. That together with their effectiveness in customer service greatly helps to reduce costs for a business. It goes to show that AI generally is a major key to reducing the overall costs of running a business online.

Summary

If well deployed, AI has proven to be one technology that is capable of helping small businesses to grow rapidly online. This it does by helping businesses to reduce their cost of operation as well as helping to bring the best out of the businesses. When that happens, growth is inevitable. AI also helps businesses to keep a close eye on evolving strategies/trends as well effectively spy on competition. When businesses manage to keep cost of operation low and evolve workable strategies, they grow faster. AI is hugely useful for that growth.

7 Facebook Marketing Tools to Grow Your Small Business

Experienced social media marketers have come to recognize Facebook as a platform that allows brands to sell their products and services to a large audience through a range of highly targeted paid ads and organic posts. Many Facebook users only see the platform as a mere social opportunity to connect and interact with friends no matter where they are in the world. But online marketers see the platform differently. They capitalize on its huge popularity to do business online because it is a very resourceful platform to do business on. This resourcefulness is enhanced by many of the in-house tools the platform has for connecting and engaging with a vast audience to bring in good traffic, new leads and increase sales.

If you are a small business owner and you want to effectively grow your business on Facebook, you must first know and be familiar with the unique marketing features of the platform. If you know these features well enough, you’ll discover that through Facebook marketing and through its features, you’ll find it highly beneficial for precise targeting, positive SEO impact, increased website traffic, customer service, and various easy-to-use ads formats.

No doubt, Facebook remains the most-used social media platform among social media marketers. Aside its huge popularity, Facebook’s in-house marketing tools also directly help business owners to:

•    Generate and boost traffic to the business owner’s website
•    Use various ads formats
•    Reach a much larger audience
•    Have a better two-way communication advantage
•    Improve search rankings on the business owner’s website
•    Run Facebook ad campaigns in different formats
•    Schedule and publish content (by linkage) on many social media channels at the same time
•    Get real-time data
•    Easily segment the audience and identify the demographics for marketing purposes

Here are 7 Facebook marketing tools you cannot afford to ignore if you want to grow your small business online.

1. Facebook Business Suite

Facebook Business Suite is one great tool business owners can use to monitor all their Facebook and Instagram accounts at the same time. With this tool, you can manage all of your operations in one spot. That helps to save a lot of time and efforts for you to focus more on other elements of your business. Using the tool, you can even draft and schedule feed posts and simultaneously publish them on your connected social media networks. Through the home screen of the app, you can see the display of important business updates such as messages, notifications, and comments received from connected social media platforms. All these the Business Suite effectively does through its in-house features for messaging, posting, insights, and for advertising that help to improve the experience of running a business. These features allow business owners to develop and run advertising, see insights about the engagement and performance of the content they share on Facebook and Instagram.

2. Pagemodo

Pagemodo is yet another great Facebook marketing tool business owners can use to modify their Facebook pages with eye-catching cover images, custom tabs, and contests. With Pagemodo, business owners can easily run contests, schedule posts, design a visual post, create custom Facebook tabs and make a cover image. Pagemodo’s cover-making tool is uniquely efficient and very similar to Canva’s tool. It allows you to pick the template, customize it with your own content, publish it on Facebook and share it on other connected social media platforms.

3. InVideo

This is a very effective online video editing tool. It allows business owners to make amazing and interesting videos in a short amount of time. Such eye-catching and interesting Facebook videos help with good ads that easily catch people’s attention. That is hugely beneficial for effective marketing purposes. The tool offers pre-made templates that you may use to create any type of video for your Facebook and Instagram stories. With InVideo tool, you can customize each ad frame’s text fields, sounds, and graphics for good marketing results.

4. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma is a Facebook marketing tool with multiple functions. Business owners effectively use the tool for assessing the Facebook profiles which they use for marketing purposes. The tool effectively combines the functions of researching, communicating, analyzing, presenting, and publishing thereby helping to make marketing a bit easy for business owners. It helps business owners with the right info to quickly learn about bench-marking, page content, and engagement. Through Fanpage Karma, a business owner can easily write and publish posts, access important information on their posting, and keep track of an unlimited number of pages and profiles real-time. Through the app, business owners can study and compare critical data across several pages, including even those of competitors.

5. MobileMonkey

If you want to create leads and enhance engagement, Mobile Monkey is the right app you need for your Facebook Messenger marketing. The tool is a great chatbot builder. So, you can use it to build a chatbot, segment prospects, engage with customers, and generate leads for Facebook Messenger marketing. Once created, you can use the chatbot across several online platforms. Through it, you can enhance your communication with customers. It also helps business owners to automate their Facebook Messaging, SMS text messaging, Webchat, and on Instagram. Enhanced communication helps business owners to make more sales, get more leads, have better customer experience, and better overall business relationships. If you deploy Facebook chatbots properly, your marketing messages will benefit from high open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. These bots come in very handy for business owners who are keen on personalizing their customer experience.

6. Facebook Ads Manager

This is a great Facebook tool that aids in the creation and efficient management of Facebook ads. It helps business owners to target appropriate demographics. Facebook Ads Manager is a hugely versatile tool that helps business owners in the creation, execution and management of diverse ads on Facebook, Messenger, and other social media platforms. With it, smart business owners can streamline each ad campaign, provide analysis and insights for each ad set and improve the overall effectiveness of their ads. It helps to make ads cost-effective thereby helping business owners have a good ROI. Since Facebook offers a variety of ad options from which business owners can take a pick, with this tool, targeting and reaching out to specific groups is made simpler. You can also save costs by determining where to place ads and tracking how many people the ads reach.

7. ShortStack

ShortStack tool is really unique as the most powerful contest and giveaway marketing platform available on Facebook. It makes it simple for business owners to create and publish campaigns, and it combines campaign and email statistics into a single platform. That helps to save time and huge costs for business owners. ShortStack tool has the capability to track traffic sources, shares, views, and so much more marketing data real-time. Smart business owners can effectively use the tool to create great landing pages that seamlessly generate leads. Business owners can adopt ShortStack templates to use in their marketing campaigns if they are unable to create theirs. This is because the tool allows business owners to launch effective marketing campaigns in a matter of seconds. That greatly saves time and valuable resources. ShortStack contests and campaigns can be easily turned into lead-generation landing pages for a business owner’s website/blog.

Last Line

If you are a small business owner, you can through these tools reach new customers, engage with them, and build lasting business relationships. If you want to quickly boost growth for your small business, the time is now to choose and engage the foregoing tried and tested Facebook marketing tools.

Trending Products to Sell Online

 

E-commerce business is often thrilling, exciting and can be profitable if you are selling the right products. With so many product options available to sell online, making a choice of which products are best to sell can be hugely tasking if you are not too experienced in e-commerce business. If you don’t choose right, your business is likely to struggle or even risk outright failure. The key is to go for trending products at any material time. Trending products usually have a good market potential, the reason they tend to trend in the first place. If you concentrate on selling trending products, you stand a very good chance of boosting your e-commerce store sales significantly.

Online, there is a huge array of amazing products that you can choose from to sell. While at it, be sure to search for and select products with good customer demand. That is where the money is. Below are some selected samples of such products.

Health, Fitness and Wellness Products

Most people worldwide are now actively looking for ways to stay healthy and fit. Online search results testify to this trend and the global health and wellness industry is booming with sales.  The hot items that really sell well online are trainers, jerseys, hoodies, joggers, leggings, sweatshirts, yoga mats, mesh shoes and suchlike fitness accessories and equipment. Google Trends clearly indicate that worldwide searches for most of these items remains high and the people selling them are making good sales. For as long as health and wellness products remain trending online, making money out of selling such products remains good business.

Digital Products and Accessories

As the internet grows and deepens, so is the need for digital products. Our world is now in digitized era where people depend heavily on digital devices for their daily needs. For this reason, digital products and related accessories have as expected become highly sought after products. E-Commerce stores selling these products no doubt do experience a boom in line with internet growth. A review of Google Trends reveals a consistent demand for digital devices and accessories, a clear proof of their popularity online. When it comes to specifics, we note that some digital products and accessories are particularly in high demand in the global market. Products like phone screen protectors, wireless earphones, mobile phone cases and covers; wireless phone chargers, wireless charging stations and phone tripods fall into this category.

Home Beddings

These are products that are easy to acquire and sell online. Everyone needs a home and with it comes beds and beddings. Most people hugely depend on the general functionalities of these products which include helping to improve sleep and hygiene in homes. That is aside the aesthetic purposes which they also serve to make homes desirable places to be. All these help to increase the demand for home bedding products such as blankets, pillows, pillow cases, sheets, duvets, quilts, linens, mattresses, cushions and suchlike products.

Groceries

In recent years, the internet has completely changed the way most consumers shop for groceries. Everyone depends on groceries as essential necessities. Since we all need them, as our appetite for them grows, so is the demand. The internet currently presents a safe and convenient purchase and delivery opportunity for groceries right to our homes. Really convenient if you ask me! This convenience tends to fuel the demands for groceries particularly in times of severe pandemic restrictions like the covid-19 restrictions the world witnessed recently. During these restrictions, e-commerce stores that sell groceries particularly food and other essential items necessary for human survival and well-being witnessed a significant surge in sales.

Self-Care Products

In times of hardships and general restrictions, there is usually a noticeable change in people’s behavior and attitudes to self-care. In such times, most people like to show more concern and elect to invest heavily in taking care of their physical and mental health and well-being. No surprise therefore when Google searches on "self-care" clearly identifies this trend at such times. Significantly, vitamins and biotin products, hair and skin creams, natural health products, skin and hair care accessories, soaps and soothing bath products and other essentials are great products to sell online when in high demand.

Toys

The global toy market naturally remains upbeat most times of the year particularly in countries with large populations like the United States and China. Google search trends never fail to identify this fact. Selling toys online remains a good business globally, year in year out. If you have an e-commerce store and you are desirous to witness a surge in sales, think of selling infant and toddler toys, sports toys, dolls, action figures, arts and crafts, building sets, mini games and puzzles, youth electronics, plush toys, explorative toys, outdoor toys, remote control vehicles and miniature vehicle replicas.
 
Baby Wear and Childcare Products

People by nature bear and raise babies through generations and all these babies need care. That usually affects the demand for baby wear and childcare products. If for any reason there is a surge in child bearing, the demand for these products surges too. At such times, there is usually accelerated consumer demand for common baby products like bath towels, diapers, bibs, baby carriers, baby swings, baby monitors, feeding essentials, wardrobes essentials, bathing products and nursery essentials. Data from Google Trends reveals that selling baby wear and childcare products online remains a good business.

How to Improve Your Small Business Website Design

If you want your business website to excel, it must have a design that feeds your website user experience, functionality and appropriately complements your content. This encompasses its fast loading speed, easy accessibility, aesthetics, layout and easy navigation. Professional webmasters can help you design a business website if you are unable to do it yourself to meet these standards. A high-performing content on a well-designed website helps to guarantee exceptional user experience. For this reason, no matter how awesome your content is, it risks getting unnoticed on the web if it lacks a good design, layout, and navigation.

Here are a few things you can pay good attention to if you want to improve on your website design for better performance.

Make a Plan

If you resolve to improve your website design, you must have identified issues with it you plan to resolve. First is to sit back and create a plan detailing how you’re going to deal with these issues. Many of these issues have to do with how customers relate with and interact with your website. Map your customer journey on your website and put plans in place to improve the pages they are viewing, time they spend on the site, content they prefer to read and what offers they’re going to convert on. This is the knowledge you need to help you decide who really your customers are and how you can sell them.

Organize Your Website Navigation

How easy it is for customers to navigate your website hugely helps its conversion efficiency. Essentially, great landing page, site maps and internal links help customers to quickly access what they are looking for on your website. They help users to easily dive deeper into very important areas of the site like what your business is about, your services/products, blog content, pricing, promos, discounts, etc. You can greatly enhance the navigation of your website by avoiding poor design practices, such as overloading your navigation with vague or confusing hypertext. These together with lack of proper organization can greatly hamper your website visitors from easily finding where they want to go and what they want. To enhance customers user experience on your website, you must pay good attention to how easy it to navigate the site.

Make Your CTA Conspicuous

Your call-to-action CTA buttons must be conspicuous on your website to ensure no visitor fails to notice them. CTAs help to guide your visitors to places on your website that will help them convert. What exactly are these conspicuous places? Marketing experts recommend the first column of your navigation, which is one of the most popular places for CTAs to be put. You can position these CTAs to link to a free guide where visitors can learn more under sections needing action and at the bottom of your website pages. That can be great for conversions.

Showcase Product Reviews

Customers experience with products helps others to make their buy decisions. That experience comes by way of product reviews which you can showcase on your website and around the products you are selling. Most buyers gain more confidence by merely looking at these reviews. If they see a product which others say it does what it promises to do, it prompts buyers to buy it. How marketers showcase reviews depends on the products they are marketing and the versatility of their business websites. It could be in form of texts or videos even though video testimonials are generally more effective because of their captivating visual content. Naturally, media tends to hold users’ attention longer and establishes a stronger human connection because people hear voices and see real people’s faces real time.

Don’t Ignore Sitemaps

Sitemaps on a website help its navigation and generally enhance user experience. It is these maps that display the main places that users can visit and to dive deeper into areas where your products and prices are displayed. The aim is to help direct new and returning customers to key areas of your website where they can convert. What really matters therefore is to improve your website with sitemaps in such a way that with just one click, users can easily access these key and important places in your website where they can do business with you.

Optimize the Website for Mobile Devices

As at today, you risk losing out from a huge percentage of web traffic if your website is not optimized for mobile. A good way around that is to make sure your site performs well on mobile devices and larger displays because from Google reports, about 80% of web users now access the web from mobile devices like smartphones. As a marketer, that is one huge chunk of traffic you cannot afford lose out of. Many more people are now doing business online any and everywhere and on the go. Their main gadgets of choice are smartphones.

Minimize Browsing Distractions

Browsing distractions as the name implies are time-wasting for web users. Therefore, on your website, you must do away with any elements that can distract users. Some of such elements are complicated animations, overly long content and chunky/gaudy website images/gifs. The attention span of most web users is notoriously short. So, what you want your visitors to see should be easily visible to them short of unhelpful distractions. All you want is to avoid anything that creates distraction or visual confusion for users trying to convert. If you are not getting conversions, your business struggles.

Make Product Prices Easy to Find

This is inevitable because it is products you want to sell anyway. If buyers cannot access your products and their prices easily, they quit your site and look elsewhere. If buyers spend quality time finding your products and they are required to spend more time looking for the prices, you risk losing such buyers to your competition. Online shoppers are notoriously hasty as most marketers very well know. To avoid frustrating buyers and risk losing them to your completion, be sure your products and their prices are easy for them to find on your website.

Use the Right Stock Images

When choosing stock images to use, strive to avoid the cheesy and poorly lit stock photos that are common on the internet. Buyers are very smart people and many are everywhere online. Many recognize cheap and common stock photos when they see them. Some of such photos that are well choreographed with fake and exaggerated smiles won’t help your business. They affect the credibility of your business if many other websites feature the same images. Users subconsciously project their negative experiences onto these stock photos, reducing confidence and adding friction to the conversion process. If convenient, try to use original photos on your website. You don’t need too much expertise to do this. These days, even smartphones can give you good photos you can use on your website.