How to Select a Profitable Affiliate Program

If you are a digital marketer, one of the ways you can earn extra cool income online is affiliate marketing. Even if you already have a successful e-commerce business or some great blog running online, you can still earn some extra money by promoting products/services on your website for product merchants. When buyers buy these products directly related to your promotional efforts, you earn a commission for your efforts. Simple! That is affiliate marketing. However, to succeed in doing so, you must first be able to locate and work with reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI. Here is how you can select profitable affiliate programs to work with:

Promote Products in Your Niche: If you want to make money in affiliate marketing it is advisable to promote products in your niche. An affiliate program that sells such products is therefore best to work with. That way, you can have a good opportunity to promote products that align with your niche and interest. For your marketing content to be effective, it must also be relevant to that niche. So, if for instance your blog is about hospitality and travels, you can do well to promote hospitality and travels related products/services.
   
Market High-Quality Products: A reputable affiliate marketing program must be known for high quality products. To join an affiliate program therefore, be sure they are reliable and are known for high-quality products. These are the kind of products you can market easily and earn good commissions. If your marketing audience gets to know that you only market good stuff, you quickly earn their trust. That translates to good sales and good commissions.

Diligently and Accurately Tracking of Sales: A good affiliate program must have in-house tools that are reliable and accurate to measure and attribute sales correctly to their numerous affiliates. These tools help the program and the affiliates to correctly check the performance of each affiliate link, sales, and all related metrics. This is what makes it easy to monitor the general performance of affiliates, track the sales generated and the commissions due to each affiliate.

Personal Knowledge of Products: In affiliate marketing, the individual affiliate’s knowledge of the market, trends and products is always a huge asset. This knowledge helps affiliates to choose the products they know and like to advertise. If you have a product you like and use, you can proudly share that product with your audience. If you describe your honest experience with the product well enough, it becomes easier for you to convince others to buy it.

Choosing Beneficial Offers: Beneficial offers are offers that sell well and have high commissions volumes. Since affiliate marketing is characteristically performance based, the more beneficial products affiliates sell the more commissions they earn. There are also other forms of pay-outs affiliates can benefit from. Affiliates can for instance receive money when people use their links and register on a website or take other desirable actions initiated through CTAs. Some affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI allow affiliates to grow downlines and to earn matching commissions up to 12 generations on the downline.

Last Line

No doubt the foregoing tips can be quite useful in a bid to choose a reliable and beneficial affiliate program. But first, you must choose a profitable affiliate program. If you become an affiliate and you work hard to promote products, you earn commensurate commissions to your hard work. You can only do so effectively if actively promote products/services in a mutually beneficial way. As you are helping to increase sales for product merchants, you are increasing your own commissions as well. If you put enough time and commitment into affiliate marketing, you can earn some extra income or even a full time income in the business.

How to Create Website Landing Pages that Convert

If you market online, getting traffic to your website is always a priority. Without good traffic, you cannot expect to make good sales. This is more so when you are involved in affiliate marketing. Strategies and techniques you can set up on your website are hugely vital to getting good traffic. This is because it is only when potential customers hit your website you can expect to have any conversions. Therefore, if you want to be a smart marketer, your primary goal should always be how to convert your website visitors to buyers. To be able to do so, you need to create a landing page that is effective to close deals.

 

The landing page is mostly where online marketers close deals. When marketers say a landing page is good, it simply means it coverts well. There is however no generally accepted formula for creating a high-converting landing page. What most marketers do is to simply try various techniques to find out what works and what doesn’t. Following are some tricks/techniques that can be very handy to create an effective landing page that converts well.

Write a Convincing Copy

If you must market to people, your content must interest them and capable of convincing them. Writing an interesting copy falls into that category. The secret to writing a convincing copy is to keep it loaded with information, simple but yet engaging. For it to be effective and convincing it must clearly highlight what your product offers and how it can directly benefit your target audience. That info on your landing page helps your conversions a great deal.

Use Catchy Designs and Quality Images

The attention span of most internet users is always very short. What quickly catches their attention is what helps conversions. Landing page design, color combinations, general aesthetics and good graphics/images help the attraction of a landing page. It is however advisable to be mindful of visual simplicity at all times. The CTAs on the landing page must be well isolated and clearly distinct from other elements on the landing page to attract potential customers and customers' attention. This can be further accentuated if you place other elements on the landing page that can attract and direct your prospects to keep reading and to take positive steps towards conversion on the page.

Include Social Proof

Social proof on your landing page shows authenticity and authority. You can thus highlight various forms of social proof on your landing page to enhance its conversion. Among content marketers, the most popular social proof are case studies, achievements, awards, testimonials, customer success stories, breakthroughs, reviews, milestones and celebrity/influencer endorsements. All these help to enhance conversions.

Create a Great Value Proposition

When used correctly, value propositions generally help conversions. What marketers generally mean by value proposition is what they refer to as a clear statement describing the unique advantages of what they're offering on their landing pages. It represents what is available for prospects to help solve their problems and why what is available is uniquely so different from others in its class. The unique features of an effective value proposition are mainly the relevancy and differentiation. If these glaring advantages are conspicuous and easily noticeable on the landing page, they quickly help to catch the attention of prospects. That helps conversions a great deal.

3 Fundamental Tips for Affiliate Marketing Success

There is hardly any marketer who gets involved in affiliate marketing without the desire to succeed at it. It is one simple business model anyone can get involved with and succeed if they follow the rules. All you need do is to simply promote products for product merchants and earn commissions for your efforts. Your main business is to simply drive traffic and collect commissions as products are sold through your efforts. This appears to make affiliate marketing the ultimate business model in terms of simplicity. It is one business you can start with little or no capital at all and cost-effective to operate. You do not even need to have any stock, no customer service and not even your own product to market. Now, that’s really cool for a business. Yes the business is really simple. That appears to be why there are thousands of affiliates out there all promoting practically same products same way.

Making it and having some measure of success in such a crowded environment requires that you stand out from the crowd any which way you can. However, you cannot stand out if you don’t know how to. These here fundamental tips will help you to know how to stand out from the crowd in order to corner your own sales share. Once your offers are right, they’ll be irresistible to your customers. If you want to create some compelling offers yourself, then follow these here tips.

Choose the Right Product(s) to Market

Decide on a niche and always choose products that relate to your niche to market. That may sound easy but it is not exactly so. Choosing a product can be quite challenging if you are not working with reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI, Amazon Associates, ClickBank and the likes. These programs already have their products in niches so they can always help you to choose the correct products to market. Aside belonging to the niche you prefer, it is always good to promote products you like and have got value from personally. These are the kind of products that can help you with affiliate marketing success. Choosing products in your niche helps to make your marketing content relevant for product promotion and you can better target the right audience that is in need of such products.

Use Targeted Marketing

As most inexperienced marketers do, it is wasteful marketing to be posting your affiliate links in online and social media channels then just stand by and wait for sales to come in. Without a deliberate marketing push, that will not happen. Making efforts to target your ads well enough and to drive traffic is part of that push. If you have the resources, you can easily drive more traffic to your affiliate links through paid ads. You can deploy your creativity in your marketing efforts to get good results. Any online marketing technique that helps you to get good traffic is OK and organic traffic is excellent. You can deploy well targeted email marketing to get traffic and leads.  In addition, YouTube review videos, tutorial videos and social media marketing can be of help to you in your marketing push. In affiliate marketing, building up traffic is a gradual process. Using targeted marketing helps that process a great deal. Even if it takes you quite a while to build traffic, don’t panic. Building up your own audience and nurturing their trust could be gradual but it pays off on the long run with enhanced traffic, more leads and conversions.

Endeavor to Stand Out

In affiliate marketing product promotion, it is not enough to just be posting your affiliate links to the product landing page on your social media platforms and your ads. You must explore all ways to stand out from the crowd and add extra value to your marketing efforts. This is because out there on the internet, competition is always very stiff more so with affiliate marketers who are struggling and strategizing 24/7 online to make a quick buck. To stand out from this huge crowd, you can always do something unique and is valuable to your prospects. You can offer free rewards through your CTAs and affiliate links. Things like eBooks, how-to videos, discount coupons and so on which you can offer to buyers who make a purchase through your affiliate links. You must think outside the box to come up with token rewards that can make you stand out among the huge lot of competitors.
 
Offering such extra value is one great way to stand out from the crowd. By doing so, you stand a better chance to generate more sales than your competing affiliates who are not offering anything of value extra. Through the CTAs on your homepage, you can use these free offers as credible baits to collect email addresses from prospects and build a responsive email list of your own. A responsive email list is one very valuable marketing asset that can greatly assist your marketing efforts going forward.

Best Ways to Boost Your Affiliate Commissions

No doubt everyone is in affiliate marketing to make money online. This money is made by way of affiliate commissions due to each affiliate from their individual promotional efforts that lead to sales. Affiliate marketing operates on performance based business model. For any affiliate to earn more in commissions, such affiliate must make more efforts to promote products. Each affiliate can boost their commissions when they do the following well enough.

 
Use the Right Marketing Tools

Without the right marketing tools, it is difficult to be successful in the ever-competitive world of affiliate marketing. You need these tools to save time, work smarter and to receive affiliate commissions accurately and quickly. If you are really keen on increasing your affiliate marketing commissions, you’ll need to discover and use solutions like smart tools and techniques that can help you to be more productive. Exactly why most successful affiliate marketers use specific tools and resources that allow them to reduce their efforts, work smarter and increase their affiliate marketing commissions.

Understand Your Audience

It is when you understand your audience you’ll know the right ads that can resonate with them. Online studies indicate that people don’t hate ads for the sake of it. Many simply despise bad and irrelevant ads. In marketing, irrelevance is one major aspect of bad publicity. When ads are not relevant to what you are selling, they don’t stand much chance of helping your sales. When you understand your audience well enough, it is then you can adequately serve them the sort of content that is not likely to confuse them, annoy them or make them lose interest very quickly in the content. If your audience has no interest in what you are selling, it is always pretty difficult to sell to such audience. You can boost your commissions in affiliate marketing if you routinely promote only items that meet the immediate needs and wants of your audience. You can do that successfully only if you understand your audience well enough.

Promote Products on Social Media Platforms

These days, social media is where nearly everyone else is doing one thing or another by way of social interactions. Presently, there are about 4.65 billion active users of social media worldwide. Now that’s one huge market out there! In marketing, smart marketers always go where the customers can be found. Once you get your business on social media, you have unlimited access to this very huge market worldwide. Once you choose the social media platforms that represent the best connection between the products you promote and your target audience, you can make more connections, more leads and conversions that can help boost your affiliate commission.

Always Look for New Offers

Marketing new offers in affiliate marketing can help boost your affiliate commission before other marketers wise up to it. If you are the first to introduce new tools and exclusive offers, you make the money first. So, always try to look out for new offers by looking through the control panels of affiliate networks like Strong Future International, SFI. If however you are using ShareASale for instance, you can view your “power rank” to find new affiliate products to promote. If a product is in the Power Rank, it simply means it is already generating huge sales. That is the kind of product to sell more of to boost your affiliate commissions.

Use a Variety of Ads

Even if created by yourself or supplied by product merchants or affiliate programs, you need to use a variety of good ads you can choose and deploy as you please. You can change them often and try different versions to see which ones work best for your customers. It takes quite some experimentation really and you need to constantly rotate the ads to get more attention. Whatever ads you choose to use should be suitable to use on your website, social media channels, and email. The ads that get the best results are the most suitable to use. It is such ads that help to boost your affiliate commissions. 

Create a Trusted Brand

Creating a trusted brand usually takes a bit of time and diligence but if done right, it helps to boost your affiliate commissions. Endeavor to create a transparent brand from scratch. The type of brand that instills trust and provides what the visitor needs, irrespective of the product you are marketing. Be sure to directly project your brand authority and honesty to a keen online audience. This is hugely important because most people tend to trust brands that are honest, transparent and consistent. If you make meeting these conditions a priority, it pays off on the long run with enhanced affiliate commissions.

Work with Bloggers and Influencers

If you can locate reputable bloggers or social media influencers in your niche who interact with your ideal buyer on a regular basis, you can consider working with them. Bloggers and influencers will help out with a wider publicity of your products to their own audiences. You can even benefit from direct product recommendation from an influencer. All these can result in more traffic, more sales and more affiliate commissions for you. Bloggers and influencers can even make additional income for themselves from the traffic they send to your website. If everyone benefits, it makes everyone to get more serious with the relationship.

Have a Coupon Site

If you want to launch a new product that is not yet widely known, forming a limited-time affiliate agreement with a coupon site is smart marketing. Since your product is new in the market, giving away a few free samples for testing purposes is always a good idea. It is one good strategy to encourage some new customers to visit your website and become your brand advertisers for free.

Build a Responsive Community

If you build a responsive community, it quickly helps you to establish yourself as a trusted brand. Brand loyalty first comes from your community. Most returning visitors come from the community and having returning visitors is about the best and most cost-effective way to grow your business. Once you start an affiliate site, don’t hesitate to deploy all strategies that can help to quickly grow your community. Some of such strategies include but not limited to building a responsive email list and becoming active on many social media platforms. To build a credible email list, just install a plugin on your site and create a simple form that allows you to collect the email addresses of all visitors who sign up to get your token offer. If you get popular on your social media handles, it helps to expand your ads network through your following. That ultimately results in getting on-demand traffic to your website. Good traffic leads to more clicks on your affiliate links and ultimately more sales and more affiliate commissions.

Optimize Your Product Pages for Conversions

If you want to increase sales, you need to provide a positive consumer experience on your website. That means optimizing the website for that purpose. To do this, you need to improve your product pages to increase conversions. Check the use of keywords on your content, how your ads and CTAs are placed, page loading speed, mobile friendliness, page aesthetics, graphics and color usage on the page as well as all other optimization techniques that can help enhance visitors experience on your website. When the consumer experience on your website is good, it generates leads and converts better. That ultimately helps to boost your affiliate commissions from more sales.

Offer Bonuses and Incentives

This is a given. You do better business when you offer good business incentives. Some of such incentives can be bonuses, discount coupons and so on. If consumers feel better treated by your incentives, they will appreciate your honesty and won’t mind doing more business with you. As an affiliate marketer, it is smart marketing to always provide an incentive for people to click your affiliate link. This is somehow a fantastic strategy that can turn out to improve your affiliate sales and distinctly set you apart from other affiliates in your business niche. That means more sales and enhanced affiliate commissions.

Post How-To Articles as Tutorials

Most people always go online for a reason. The search for information is about the most paramount reason why people go online. If you know a skill and can adequately teach it through high quality and informative articles, you attract people looking for that type of information or skill. Most internet users know that online articles/tutorials are a popular technique for quickly acquiring information and new skills. Such people often go in search of how-to articles or videos. You can deliberately write articles to teach your target audience a skill that requires them to use the product you are promoting. You can also write articles to instruct product users on how to in a step-by-step way use the product you are promoting. Such articles generate interest better, attract traffic and boost sales and affiliate commissions.

6 Viable Ways to Make Money on YouTube

Yes indeed? If you know what you are doing, you can make a lot of money on YouTube where nearly everyone else appears to be playing around with videos. If you get the hang of it, you can even make a full-time income by regularly posting quality videos on the platform. You must be sure to understand the community rules of YouTube platform and always watch out for any changes in these rules. Work in compliance with these rules and be consistent at posting quality content on the platform always. That’s about the best way to make money on the platform particularly when you do the following. 

1. Create a Quality Blog

Blogging is all about quality content. You can write out your YouTube videos and make them into articles. With the written words on YouTube videos, blogs usually have a better click through rate on CTAs and on affiliate links as well as display ads. You can also have guest posts or promotional content on videos to gain some traffic and extra money from your blog.

2. Join YouTube Partners Program

Most marketers generally agree that this is about the easiest way to earn money from YouTube. But first, to make money, you must have to join the partners program. By joining, it simply means you have become a partner and allowed YouTube to run ads on your videos. Your duty is to post quality videos and YouTube runs the ads and you earn commissions from ads sales. However, what qualifies you to join the program is that you must have at least 4000 hours of watch time on your videos, and not less than 1000 subscribers. You have the option of choosing what type of ads you want appear on your videos. That gives you quite a big control over what is shown on your content. Usually, the commission payment is split 55% and 45% between the content creator and YouTube. When the numbers add up, this can translate to a huge income for you the content creator.

3. Promote Sponsored Content

There are very many reputable brands that love to work with content creators and you can be one of such creators. You can make money working with sponsors when creating YouTube content. It either you actively reach out yourself to such brands or wait for the brands to reach out to you. Sponsored content thrives on many rules. The most common of these rules is that when creating sponsored videos, you will need to get the approval of the sponsoring brand before publishing. Once approved, you must arrange the fees for your services before you go ahead to publish the content.

4. Create Your Own Branded Merchandise

By creating your own unique branded merchandise, you can earn some extra money on YouTube. But first, you must partner with a print on demand partner who will print and ship out your orders as they are made. To get started, you need to make a cute design to put on your merchandise items. If you have the expertise, you can create this design yourself but if not, you can hire a reputable designer to help you out. Once the merchandise is created, you can make a stunning photo-shoot for ads purposes before adding the items to your e-commerce shop on platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, etc. Your branded merchandise can be anything from trainer shoes, sweatshirts, t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, key holders, table mats, napkins, ballpoint pens and sundry other items on great demand which YouTube viewers like to see. Yours is to get the order through your YouTube video content and your demand partner will print and ship out the order. You make money directly from the sales of your branded merchandise.

5. Affiliate Marketing

Helping product merchants market their products on YouTube in return for commissions is affiliate marketing. What you do is to make sure you have specific affiliate links to products/webpages in your blog posts or YouTube video descriptions. When people click on these links and make a purchase on the site, you earn a commission from the transaction. You can get affiliate links directly from product merchants in your niche or you get the links by joining a reputable affiliate program in the mold of Strong Future International, SFI, Amazon Associates Program, eBay Partner Network, ShareASale and others.

6. Sell Specialized Courses

To do this successfully and make money from it, you must be some kind of expert at something. That means specialized skills and knowledge. This knowledge may touch on fitness, body building, singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, and any other human activity on demand by others. You can teach the skill directly through webinars or package it in form of eBooks for wider sales and distribution. You can promote your skills through YouTube videos to get patronage. You don’t even have to be the best or the biggest expert in the field to make money. You only need to know a bit more about the topic/subject matter than some other people and you get patronage. Talk about your chosen topic/subject matter expansively in your YouTube videos by giving out insights and tips from your own experience. Many people will appreciate that and pay more attention to what you are saying. You get patronage from there.

Final Thoughts

The foregoing are some of the most viable options to earn money on YouTube if you are a YouTuber. If you really want to make money on YouTube, it is advisable to explore all the options to see which of them is easier for you to handle and which earns better income for you. That is irrespective of whether you are experienced in YouTube marketing or you are new in it. Give them a try, stay on it and see what pans out for you going forward. Good luck!!

How to Optimize Your Business Website for More Conversions

Do you know why digital marketers always want higher conversion rates for their websites? It is good for business. In digital marketing parlance, any action a user takes on your business website is conversion. Getting users to your website is one thing, getting them to take other actions while there is another. That is conversion. Such actions can be to make a purchase, take a survey, subscribe to a newsletter or sign up for an event or webinar. Marketers deliberately boost conversions on their websites through optimization. Conversion optimization is the process in which marketers take deliberate and all the necessary steps to increase the percentage of conversions happening on their websites. If your website is optimized, it makes the website more capable of enhancing user experience resulting in increased retention rate and lowering its bounce rate. This makes your marketing efforts more effective.

If you want to have a high optimization rate and more conversions, here is what expert marketers recommend you do.

Optimize Your Content

Blogging is about the most popular form of content marketing among marketers. You can publish highly optimized blog posts if you want to increase conversions on your website. Optimized blog posts can attract leads, customers and sales since the optimization helps out with organic traffic from search engines. By optimizing your blog posts, the chances of them appearing in search results increase. That helps to generate organic traffic. Organic traffic is more likely to take positive action on your website since it is from people who are genuinely interested in the products/services you are marketing. This, in turn, means more conversions. If you know how to, you can optimize your content yourself through SEO with the right keywords. If not, you can hire the services of professionals to help you out.
 
Boost Credibility with Testimonials

Business is all about trust. Most people do not like to patronize websites that do not appear to be trustworthy. Marketers deliberately boost the credibility of their websites with testimonials. When marketers offer high rate customer support, stay committed to their offers and deliver quality products/services to their customers, they generate good testimonials. These testimonials as user-generated content can help with more traffic and to build trust. Encouraging your users to rate and review your website on Google is one very effective way of increasing trust amongst your users. In addition, adding user-generated content on your social channels is a great way to showcase the happy and satisfied experiences of your users with your products/services. Good for trust building no doubt.

Offer Live Chat Options to Users

Live chats enable hands-on real time marketing. This is important because when users land on your website, most are always undecided. This is the stage they might have several pre-sales questions to clarify. One critical stage before they make buy decisions. By offering a live chat option on your website, it allows your users to reach out to you with their doubts real time. Live chats are a great way to help users make critical decisions on your website that can lead to conversions.

Use Very Clear, Call-To-Actions, CTAs

CTAs are hugely important when optimizing your content.  Good CTAs help your users understand your message better. They encourage and invite users to take the all-important actions on your website. It is one practical way of telling people what to do next to achieve what you’re offering. For your CTAs to work well, you must use clear and concise actionable verbs/words like Subscribe, Download, Click Here, Buy, etc. Such CTAs help to boost conversions and sales on your website because they encourage your users to do what you want them to do.

5 Tips to Consistently Create Successful Blog Posts

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

1. Carefully Choose Your Blogging Platform

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

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

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

3. Provide only High-Quality and Informative Content

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

4. Decide on a Blogging Plan/Calendar

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

5. Regularly Rejig and Improve Your Blog

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

Conclusion

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

Why Consumers Tend to Ignore Some Marketing Content

Content marketing is one of the most powerful strategies digital marketers can effectively use to cultivate beneficial relationships with existing followers and to reach new customers. The snag is, far too many brands/marketers neglect or fail out rightly to utilize this powerful technique effectively because many consumers tend to ignore their content. For best results, there is always the need for brands/marketers to deliver more valuable and engaging content to their customers. If you are a digital marketer, you’ll have a much easier time meaningfully engaging your customers if you pay due attention to the following marketing mistakes many marketers often make.

 
Poor Headlines on Content

The antidote here is to always ensure you use attention-grabbing headlines and CTAs, Calls-To-Actions in your headlines. No matter how good the content you create is, many consumers couldn’t care less about it if they don’t notice it. Only attention-grabbing headlines and CTAs on your content are effective enough to arrest the interest of your consumers most of who usually have only about two seconds or even less for them to be convinced to check out your content. Therefore, the more powerful headlines and CTAs your content has, the more likely it will get the attention that it deserves from consumers. Credible research evidence shows that about 80% of consumers read the title of a webpage, but only 20% read the main post afterwards. That is instructive.

The real objective of a content marketing strategy is to make sure your content marketing campaigns gain the right traction. This you can do by ensuring that your consumers pay more attention to your content and do not ignore them outright. You must therefore make sure that each and every content piece you create gets the right attention it deserves among your target audience.

What to do to get this result:

- Test different strategies to see which kinds of headlines draw the most attention and get the most clicks for your unique content pieces.
-Always use properly optimized headlines that are much more effective at engaging readers.
- Make sure that your headlines are long enough to draw attention and convey your message without being unnecessarily verbose.  
- Use more power words that prompt better curiosity with your readers.
- Use more of list posts which are shared about twice as often and are read more often as other types of content.

Poor Knowledge of Your Audience

It is virtually impossible to market effectively to an audience you neither know nor understand. Knowing your audience well enough will enable you to better focus your marketing messages on their needs. Because your entire marketing strategy needs to revolve around your customers and their needs, you must ensure your content is fully tailored towards them if you don’t want them to ignore it.

What to do to get this result:

- For effectiveness, you must deliberately focus every single piece of content you create on the needs of your consumers.
- You need to clearly define your target audience. This means that you must specify the demographic that you’re trying to reach right at the planning stage of your content marketing strategy. 

 

- The voice/tone you use in your marketing message must clearly resonate with the audience that you’re trying to reach.
- You must clearly identify your customers’ problems and use your content to offer the solutions they’re seeking.

Excessively Self-Promotional

Never make the marketing mistake of being excessively self-promotional if you do not want your consumers to ignore your message. There is usually a very fine line between proving that you’re cool with your brand and endlessly boasting about it. You must strike a distinct balance between both if you do not want your consumers to simply dismiss your messages out of hand. That is usually a clear possibility because most readers appear to be really skeptical and suspicious of overly-promotional content.

What to do to get the best result:

- You must better engage with your readers and earn their trust. To do this, you need to maintain a certain level of objectivity.
- You can accomplish this and earn more of their trust by using quotes and studies from other brands or by leveraging unbiased user-generated content.
- Your promotional messages must be subtle and supported by valuable content at all times.

Wrapping Up

As a digital marketer, if your content is not attracting the right engagement, it must be for a reason. The most plausible reason is usually that consumers are ignoring your content. If that is case, the foregoing tips can really be of help to enhance your customer engagement. Do not ignore them if you are really desirous to move your digital marketing activities to the next level.

Effective Strategies to Create a Successful Affiliate Marketing Business

If you are thinking of making money online, think affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a very popular online business model that is relatively easy to set up and operate. It requires significantly very little or no startup capital and it can generate income relatively quickly. You must however have the right strategies in place to be able to get the full benefits of affiliate marketing. Below are some proven strategies many expert affiliate marketers recommend to create a successful affiliate marketing business.

Choose a Good Business Niche

The business niche you choose is very important because you cannot have a successful affiliate marketing business without having high commissions paying products to promote. The products too must be the types that people readily buy. That is why the business niche is of paramount importance. The niche you choose should be something that you are knowledgeable and passionate about, in addition to the products many people are interested in and are willing to buy. That done you may need a further strategy of narrowing down your niche to an area of interest that is under served online. That is what provides a very fertile ground for your affiliate marketing activities to thrive.

Create Innovative Ways to Reach Your Target Audiences

You cannot create a successful affiliate marketing business without creative marketing innovations. That is because the business is hugely competitive. You need some innovative creativity to match and stay ahead your competition if you want your affiliate business to succeed quickly. You need to constantly explore very creative ways to better engage your target audience. That includes serving them the right type of content through the most popular platforms they mostly like to use. TIP: In affiliate marketing, marketers do practically the same things but those marketers who do these same things in a special way tend to get the best results. It is creative innovation that helps to make that difference.

Work with a Mentor

In life and living, everyone needs a mentor. So it is in affiliate marketing. An experienced affiliate marketer can help you avoid costly pitfalls and guide you to success based on his own experience in the business. If you have the right mentoring and use the right strategies therefrom, you can succeed in affiliate marketing fairly quickly. Your personal determination combined with the bits and pieces of know-how you can garner from your mentor can help you create a successful affiliate marketing business with the potentials to generate passive income for you over a prolonged period of time.

Market Products with High Commission Rates

Affiliate marketing is all about promoting products and earning commissions. Depending on your business niche and the products you are marketing, you can hook up with programs that require that you sell huge quantities of products with minimal commissions or you sell fewer products with high commissions volume. The bottom-line is to make money and what fits your own business model better is what can help you build a successful affiliate marketing business. However, unless you have the advantage of significant traffic, you can hardly make huge quantities of sales. So, if you find creative ways to promote products with high commissions volume, you can be making more money with less traffic and less work.

Create and Sell Your Own Products

This is the ultimate benefit of affiliate marketing by selling your own specially created products. From your activities as an active affiliate marketer, you have the advantage of a unique insight into what people want in a certain niche/genre. If you manage to create a unique product that fills a gap in the market, you can add value for your customers. Ultimately, by doing so, you create an additional stream of income. You can additionally leverage the sales of your product to increase your affiliate sales. That is smart marketing no doubt.

Connect with Like-Minded Communities

As most digital marketers very well know, finding a community of like-minded people can be invaluable for any digital marketing business. You can benefit from the advice of other affiliates in terms of the right businesses to work with as well as the right campaigns to latch on to. Additionally, other affiliates can help switch you on to useful tools and resources that you can effectively leverage to boost your sales. Affiliate communities also help to keep each other informed about ever-changing algorithms affecting their marketing campaigns. This information can have a profound effect on your traffic and in turn, your sales. You can locate affiliate forums online particularly on social media platforms where you can easily interact with like-minded communities to glean info, tips and tricks to help build your own business.

Create Valuable Content

If you want your affiliate marketing business to succeed, don’t be content with creating only content that helps to drive sales. Such content is simply not enough except you want people to easily see through your sales pitch to be exactly that, sales pitch. You risk losing prospects if all they see is sales pitch in your content. You must create content that gives your readers something they can take away with them such as an answer to a question they may have, useful information about a product or service, or tips that they can use to make their lives easier. That no doubt is great value devoid of direct sales pitch.

Use Clear CTAs

Even if it is a no no to inundate your audience with sales pitches, you must still explore other techniques to give them the option to purchase the products you’re promoting. To make it easy for them to do so, clear Call-To-Action, CTA techniques come in very handy. Be sure these CTA buttons are easy to spot on your website and the short invitations they carry are captivating enough. You can use clear CTAs like “get a discount”, “buy now” buttons, tables that prominently display products, highlighted links, and images that showcase the products and encourage people to click. If you have a preference for creating and marketing with video reviews, be sure to let your audience know how they can purchase the products you are discussing. This you can do by including your affiliate link or promotional code on the videos.

How to Use AI to Acquire and Retain Customers

Online marketers are increasingly relying on Artificial Intelligence, AI for problem-solving in their marketing activities. They do this by using AI powered aps some of which are voice-activated virtual assistants, auto responders, CTAs, customer service and retail and e-commerce automation. Online business owners now depend more and more on the power of AI and machine learning to significantly increase brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, improve user experience, meet customer expectations and to find solutions to even more complex business problems. 

 
Direct Marketing Benefits of AI

You can achieve many milestones in your online business which allow you to acquire new customers and retain existing ones if you do the following.

Use AI-powered social media tools to help you monitor and gain valuable insights about your brand.
Use AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. That way, you can manage to create content that’s relevant to your target audience.
Integrate AI into your e-commerce site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Use AI to significantly improve your website user experience by making it intuitive, accessible, and easy to navigate.
Use AI to help you generate high-quality leads that are likely to buy your products and become customers.
Use AI to personalize and tailor-fit your product recommendations based on your customers’ preferences thereby increasing repeat purchases.

No matter the nature of your online business, it is possible for you to acquire and retain customers more efficiently than what it normally takes to get same things done manually. Here is what you need do.

Improve Your Website User Experience

As an online business owner, your business window into the internet world is your website. That is where visitors can interact with your brand, respond to your call-to-action, and to purchase products. To make these interactions smooth, it is important that visitors to the site have a great experience while navigating through the site. With AI, you can improve your website user experience several fold by way of personalized recommendations, search relevance and seamless customer service through AI chatbots. In particular, the presence of AI chatbots on your e-commerce website contributes to a great user experience on the site because they provide 24/7 assistance and support in the absence of human customer service.  They help users to get accurate answers to their inquiries more quickly and efficiently when compared to manually scrolling through text-based FAQs.

Evaluate the Performance of your Content

This you can do by using AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. If you’ve been creating content for a while, by deploying AI, you can easily identify the gaps, find fixes, and evaluate the performance of your content marketing campaign. Even if you’re into retail or e-commerce business, you can use AI to identify the gaps in your content marketing. Your content may be directly focused on your products and their features, but through AI, you can better determine the relevant content that addresses your audience’s needs and pain points faster and more accurately.

Pre-Qualify Prospects and Leads

When your new leads are not converting into sales well enough, you can rectify the situation with the help of AI. If you have a bit of experience in online marketing, you’ll know when you’re not getting good sales despite the high traffic your website is receiving. If you are experiencing this, it could mean you are not taking some marketing actions correctly. It could mean your CTAs are ineffective, your content marketing strategy is poor, you are targeting the wrong audience, you are promoting your products through the wrong social media channels or you are using the wrong type of Sign-up form. With the help of AI tools, you can extract relevant data to help you learn more about your target audience. These tools also provide predictive analytics on your customers’ behavior. By using them efficiently, you can improve your lead generation strategy because they’ll help you to identify which leads to pursue, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.

Cut Down on Cart Abandonment Rate

If you run an e-commerce business and you experience a high cart abandonment rate, it could mean certain things are just not right with some operations in your website. Many online shoppers may abandon their shopping carts because they’re not ready to buy yet, high extra costs, privacy concerns, complicated/cumbersome checkout process, privacy concerns and most commonly, not enough customer-friendly payment methods. AI-powered chatbots can come in handy to address these issues by diligently guiding customers through their shopping journey. AI chatbots can with smooth conversational approach give customers a nudge to prompt them to complete their purchase. They also act as a virtual shopping assistant or concierge that can let a customer know about an on-the-spot discount, a time-sensitive deal, a free shipping coupon, or any other incentives that will encourage them to complete the checkout. Even lost orders due to cart abandonment can be recovered with the help of AI. If AI does these for an e-commerce website, it can lead to an increase in conversion rate for the business.

Social Listening

Marketers can deploy AI for social listening for potential customers. This is simply a process in which AI can be used to analyze the conversations, trends, and buzz surrounding your brand across different social media platforms. Social listening effectively analyzes what’s usually behind the metrics and the numbers. It determines the social media sentiment about your brand and everything else relating to how people feel and relate to your brand. Such AI generated data/information you get through social listening can be used as a guide in your strategy to gain new customers. Without a doubt, getting this type of intricate data can constitute an enormous and very daunting task for human beings. AI helps out very nicely.

Increase Repurchases

Marketers can increase repurchases with predictive analytics made possible with the use of AI. Predictive analytics is the process of making predictions based on historical data using data mining, statistical modelling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other techniques. Through it, marketers can generate insights, forecast trends, and predict behaviors based on past and current data. Its practical use is when marketers rely on it to predict customers’ propensity to repurchase products as well as its frequency. When used to optimize marketing campaigns, AI-powered predictive analytics can generate customer response, increase repurchase, and promote cross-selling of relevant products. Predictive analytics helps marketers to focus their marketing resources on customer retention while targeting a highly motivated segment of their markets that may be happy to return and repurchase more products. This helps to save on ads costs for marketers. AI makes it possible.

Provide Personal Recommendations

Most online shoppers really value personalized marketing experiences. The reason brands are able to boost their sales when they tailor their recommendations based on consumer data. Recommendation systems’ algorithms typically rely on data on browsing history, pages visited, and previous purchases. Thus, smart AI can accurately analyze customers’ interactions with website content and find relevant products that will interest the individual customer. This is how AI makes it easier to target potential customers and effectively put the best products in front of the site visitors. With AI, recommendation engines are able to filter and customize product recommendations based on each customer’s preferences and correctly match the customers’ preferences with the right products. Because of this element of personalization, marketers can effectively acquire and retain customers with the help of AI.

SEO Content Optimization Best Practices

For most marketers, content remains key to any meaningful online engagement. This is exactly why content optimization remains hugely important particularly for search engine marketing. That is how Search Engine Optimization, SEO derives its relevance. To compete favorably online, businesses should focus on content optimization. This they can do by ensuring that their content is written in such a way that it can effectively engage their target personas. However, to engage these personas, the content has to first reach them. SEO helps search engines to locate and rank content searchers are looking for. If marketers infuse their content with the right keywords, tags, titles, links and images, it helps SEO. With Google as the dominant search engine on the internet, optimizing your content for Google’s ranking algorithms is the best way to go. If properly done, your business stands to benefit from increased traffic and conversions, lower bounce rates, higher search rankings and enhanced discoverability.

These here are about the best practices that can help in optimizing your content for better SEO.

Diligent Keywords Research

Keywords research is hugely important for SEO because keywords are the real foundation of SEO.  You can take advantage of free online tools for your keywords research. Doing so will help you to discover the right keywords searchers are using online to find your type of business. Once you get the right keywords, you can deliberately use them in your content for the benefit of search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Relevant online keyword tools can help you to find the best keywords related to your demographic. If you deploy these keywords in your content correctly, it helps your SEO.

High Quality Value-Filled Content

Marketers don’t just write content for writing sake. Marketing content is always written for a specific purpose and must be full of value. It is valuable content that helps to drive engagement, leads, customers and sales. Online, if your business consistently puts out quality content, your brand manages to gain some reputation for providing unique and quality content. That helps to attract more followers and a bigger audience. Your content can serve this purpose well if you optimize everything in the content.  These things are comprehensive but range from the keywords to the length of each blog post, web page or article. Expert marketers advise that blog posts should contain a minimum of 300 words to about 2500 words in order to rank well in search engines.

Earn Quality Backlinks

Google algorithms take backlinks into consideration when ranking content.  Links can thus make a considerable difference to your search rankings and SEO. You can earn backlinks by interacting with high-quality web platforms and institutions. If these links are from reputable, high-authority institutions like universities and research institutions, websites and reputable publications, so much the better. Strong and high quality backlinks do not only increase credibility for your content, they also help it to rank high in Google SERPs.

Generate Data to Drive Your Strategy

With the help of online analytics tools, you can collect as much data about your web traffic as you can. Through this data, you can discover striking patterns relating to volume of traffic, bounce rates, popular content, and much more insights into visitors’ behavior on your website. The data also allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your CTAs. You can depend on this data to design your marketing strategies and campaigns factoring in content SEO by optimizing your web copy for maximum engagement. If through this data you can generate reliable user-behavior reports, it is one great way to know which content is effective and which is not. With that, you can always redesign or rejig your strategy and marketing campaigns for better results.

Tips to Boost the ROI of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns are readily one of the most affordable and cost-effective online marketing strategies for most marketers. Marketers resort to email marketing to save costs, widely each out to customers and potential customers, drive sales/revenues, nurture leads, and gain more customers. Marketers rely hugely on emails to maintain a strong relationship with customers and to build their brands. You can easily measure the effectiveness of your emails. That makes emails ready marketing tools to drive Returns-On-Investment, ROI for your business. Emails allow you to optimize and fine-tune your marketing campaigns to drive ROI that outperforms many other marketing channels. For this reason, smart marketers are always in search of better ways to use emails in their marketing campaigns to make the campaigns more effective and profitable. One of such ways is to use emails effectively well to boost ROI. These here tips can be of help to you in your own email marketing campaigns.

 
 
Include Call-To-Action, CTA in Your Emails

If you’ve ever opened a marketing email and you find it difficult to understand what the marketer is really up to, you’ll realize the importance of CTAs in emails. A huge percentage of emails without CTAs usually end up in trash bins. I doubt if you can afford such huge waste in your own marketing efforts. Emails without CTAs don’t convert. If your marketing efforts are not converting, you are simply wasting your precious time and resources. For your emails to convert at a higher rate, you must include a conspicuous CTA to tell your recipients what action you want them to take. That action if taken helps your conversions. Simple CTAs marketers like to use are: “Click here for more info”, “Click here for Discount Coupon”, “Pre-Order Now” and suchlike messages.

Diligently Track Your Email Deliverability

Diligently tracking emails helps to measure their effectiveness and there are useful online tools to get it done in a fairly accurate manner. Metrics like emails opening rates, click-through rates, deliverability rates and revenue generated are all important metrics marketers need to measure to help drive ROI. When your emails are not reaching their targets, they are not even opened and they don’t help generate revenue for your marketing efforts, they’re as good as useless. Therefore, you must always make sure your emails are optimized and well-crafted with simple marketing language and with a dash of good aesthetics to make them attractive to recipients. That is the best way to get them to escape sperm filters and to reach their targets. These days, with more advanced sperm filters now in use, they can easily detect and filter out what they consider “junk” based on some spam-trigger words included in the subject line and body of email messages. It gets that technical so adequate care must be taken to always draft emails that are deliverable and can be tracked for effectiveness. Only such emails manage to help ROI better.

Segment Your Email List

If you want your email campaigns to help boost ROI for your business, you must divide and break down your email list into as many different segments as possible. Doing so makes marketing segmentation easy and effective. Find out what works best for your marketing campaigns and do your segmentation based on it. It is a marketing reality that not all your email recipients want the same things or are influenced by the same messages. Segmentation allows you to send different types of emails to different groups depending on what each group needs. The most effective emails are the mails specially created to cater to these needs. These are the emails that greatly help to boost ROI.

Humor Your Email Recipients to Action

For email effectiveness, you can tactically deploy humor and shock value in your subject lines. What you want is for your subject email line to easily command attention and trigger the recipient to click on it. You can achieve that if your emails manage to stand out from the dozens of other emails competing for attention in your recipients’ inboxes. Humor and shock value can at times help pull the tricks to earn your emails desirable attention even amidst strong competition from several other emails dropping in your recipients’ inboxes. For your offer to be noticed, your emails must first be opened. If not opened, you are simply marketing in vain. If humor helps to get your mails opened and not quickly trashed, so much the better for your email marketing campaigns. Trashed emails stand no chance at all of generating any kind of returns and therefore cannot be of any help to ROI.

Optimize Your Emails for Mobile

With increasing use of mobile devices worldwide, it is safe to assume that a high percentage of your marketing emails will be read on mobile devices. That has very significant marketing implications. Mobile emailing is growing so rapidly that it has become imperative for marketers to optimize their emails for mobile devices. You can do this by having a custom responsive email template design or by using a branded template which is essentially a very low-cost way to make your emails stand out in attractiveness and in aesthetics. What this means is that for your emails to be effective, your subject lines must easily grab the attention of recipients, your messages must be direct and to the point, and your design must be eye-catching and must flow seamlessly on small screens typical of most mobile devices. Optimizing your emails for mobile devices takes care of all suchlike marketing essentials that somehow help to boost ROI.

Proven Marketing Strategies for Conversion Rate Optimization

If you run your small business online, conversion rate optimization ensures you get the highest conversion rate possible by marketing effectively and managing your sales process efficiently. This warrants that you focus on all types of conversions to help the steady growth of your sales revenues. This also means a better focus on all marketing actions and activities that lead to conversion rate optimization. Many of these activities revolve around content marketing which greatly underpins conversion rate optimization. Your website content must be of high quality, educational and informative enough to be of any help to the conversion rate optimization of the site.

Here are some tested and proven content marketing strategies helpful for conversion rate optimization.

Leverage Social Media

Presently, social media because of its huge popularity appears to be one of the greatest tools for boosting business conversions available to business owners. You can leverage your marketing activities on this popularity to get good results. First thing is to get your business on social media and build a steady following for it. Next is to share your marketing messages and even promos widely on the platforms. That will help your business to better elicit engagement and interactions with its social media audience. With an engaged social media following, leads, conversions, customers and sales follow in logical sequence from your efforts.

Improve Your Website Content

The most effective marketing window for your business online is your website. By steadily populating your website with high quality content, you increase its ability to attract traffic. You must therefore endeavor to fill your website with the right content that is well aligned with your business niche. This you can do with effective and creative blogging on the site to address your website visitors’ needs for useful information. Blog posts that provide real value to readers are the most helpful as against those that overtly promote products/services which may be boring in the main.

Market with Captivating Videos

Having a captivating explainer or how-to video on the homepage of your website can be very effective to engage and convert customers. You can explore a range of different tactics to ensure that your video content greatly helps your conversions. If for instance, as with explainer videos you are able to provide value to show customers how your products help them to solve problems, it can be great for your conversions. Videos showing customers how to use your products can help to ensure buyer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction helps to increase recommendations and improves reviews in no small measure.

Personalize Your Content

As most online marketers very well know, personalized content is always a very effective content to market with. Therefore, you need to explore all ways to make things personal for your business customers. In this quest, you need reliable data and metrics which you can obtain through Google Analytics and Email marketing automation tools. You can effectively use this data to optimize your content to meet the needs of individual consumers. Doing so can result in higher sales figures for your business.

Improve Your Website Loading Speed

Online surfers are always in notorious haste. The reason smart marketers like to capture their attention as quickly as possible. To do this effectively, aside from improving on the content of your website, you also need to improve the loading speed of the website. Ideally, you should ensure every page on your website loads in just 2-3 seconds since many visitors have little patience with slow loading websites. A fast loading website helps to decrease the bounce rate on the site, while slow loading increases it. A decrease in bounce rate keeps visitors longer on the site and helps conversions better.

Use Strong Calls-To-Action, CTAs

It is not good marketing to leave it to chance that your website visitors know how to convert. Visitors must be “lured” to do something for them to do what is expected when they hit your business website. That is where the right call-to-action, CTA becomes imperative in effective marketing. With the right CTA, marketers can effectively lead buyers where they want them to go and to take the right actions they want them to take. Some of such actions include helping to commit your website visitors to a purchase by showing them exactly what they need to do. When your CTAs are strong and effective, they engender more conversions and sales.