Content Marketing Tools that Get Quick Results

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves creating and promoting any marketing content online. Marketers use content marketing primarily to generate brand awareness, increase social media following, increase website traffic, and ultimately to generate customer leads and sales. A good content is one that is educational, engaging, informational and even entertaining. Such good content helps marketers to attract traffic, get leads and customers. Practical examples of the types of content tools used by content marketers are e-books, blogs, online courses, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, glossaries, industry news, videos, images/graphics and banners, podcasts, and webinars. Digital marketers try to capture the attention of their target customers by publishing these content tools on their business websites, promoting them through social media, through email marketing, SEO, and even paid ads.

As pointed out by experienced marketers, some of the most popular content marketing tools that get quick results are:

Video Marketing: The use of videos online is hugely popular and widespread among marketers because it gets quick results particularly when promoted on social media. Many popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram encourage video content on their platforms. Now, videos are so important on YouTube that it has become the second most popular search engine after Google. Many shoppers now use it to find information about all kinds of products. Many rely hugely on YouTube product reviews to make their buy decisions.

Blogging: This is readily the most common content marketing tool among digital marketers. A good blog content spiced with relevant keywords for SEO helps to generate organic search traffic to business websites. If you blog regularly by writing articles in your business niche with informative content, it helps to demonstrate and firmly establish your industry expertise in the eyes of your readers. Blogs are very useful content marketing tools that have proved successful for creating some impact for increasing sales revenues. This is more so for products where customers can read reviews and write comments about personal experiences through blog feedback.  

Infographics: Infographics are a form of visual content designed to educate people. They often use charts, images, numbers, and minimal text, to communicate information quickly and clearly and give an easy-to-understand overview of a topic. The reason they tend to attract readers attention better and faster at giving out very important marketing info quickly. They get good results too just like videos.

eBooks: These are a long-form content type designed to inform and educate readers. They are similar to blogs in many respects except that they give more details in espousing a subject matter as well as the expertise on the subject. On business websites, eBooks find use as token gifts to get sign ups. That way, they serve as efficient lead magnets to collect the contact details of people who sign up to download the eBooks. That helps the marketer to build up a credible and reliable prequalified email list quickly. Every sign up thus represents a potential customer if followed up with appropriate emails from the marketer.

3 Practical Ways Digital Marketing Can Help With Advertising to Attract Local People

Recent Google reports indicate that over 90% of its users regularly search for local businesses. Now that is quite awesome and a very huge volume of search information.  Smart digital marketers cannot afford to ignore that vital information. The reason is simple. With the growth of the internet coupled with changes in consumer behavior, most consumers now habitually search for products online to find out where nearest to them they can find such products. Digital marketers quickly latch in on that to refocus their advertising to local consumers. They tend to do better business when they deliberately target local people, who are geographically around them. Deliberately targeting ads at such people becomes hugely rewarding business-wise.

Here are three ways small businesses can target local consumers with advertising.

01. Take Active Part in Community Events

Every local business inevitably draws patronage from local consumers. So, anything they do with and in the community usually benefits the businesses in the short and long term. Local businesses need to support their communities because they are part of the communities.  Being active in community service is good for business, as most small businesses very well know. Helping and giving back to your community usually secures very valuable ads mileage for many businesses. You can sponsor community service events for your community and your business benefits even if you did not expect to sell anything from the sponsorship. The community naturally gives back to you by patronizing your business.

02. Advertise with Local Targeting

People now search online for businesses near them first before they look elsewhere. Optimizing your website for local searches helps to target local consumers. However, if you rely only on organic engagement, it is difficult to reach a large number of people at the same time. That is why it is imperative to combine direct advertising with local online marketing for best results. For this reason, you must endeavor to be active in both social media and search engine advertising to promote your business locally. That is better enhanced if you focus on and target the community you are known and the language the community speaks to help create familiarity and ease of doing business.

03. Build a Loyalty Program

As experienced digital marketers very well know, digital advertising is not only to gain new customers. It is much more. You can do better business with returning customers than new ones. So, it is smart for business to always explore viable ways to retain current customers. That is where customer loyalty programs become very handy. When you remember customers, they in turn remember you. If you are loyal to them, they reciprocate by being loyal to you. Discount coupons, promos, outright gifts, buy-two-and-get-one-free rewards to returning customers help to cement customer loyalty.  A loyal customer is not only good for further repeat purchases; he is also a reliable brand ambassador and a most dependable word-of-mouth advertiser for your business.

3 Practical Ways Digital Marketing Can Help Grow Your Small Business on Social Media

It now appears that nearly everyone around the world where there is internet access is now on social media. Digital marketers have quickly taken advantage of that development in their digital marketing activities. Granted, many people may be on social media for many different reasons, smart marketers have found a very easy and reliable avenue to market directly to various strata of audiences based on known and very dependable demographics peculiar to many social media platforms. Visibility is hugely important to digital marketers and social media is a very ready source to easily acquire some appreciable visibility for your brand. The reason social media has become very important for digital marketers to grow their businesses. 

Here are three practical ways digital marketing can help grow your business on social media.

01. Makes Reaching Out Easy

Yes indeed! For ease of use and immense popularity, social media is it. Social media makes reaching out to a wide audience easy. Some social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for example provide some in-house analytics digital marketers can depend on to market their businesses. Nearly all of them provide accurate numbers of “Friends” and “Following” audiences, info that is very useful for marketing purposes. Social media platforms like WhatsApp and Messenger are not just for talking and interacting with friends only. They also make it easy for small businesses to communicate with target audiences. For instance, you can use WhatsApp Business App to “create a catalog to showcase your products and services and use its special in-house tools to automate, sort and quickly respond to messages.” Now, that gives a great advantage to digital marketers. Many social media apps can be downloaded into smartphones and mobile devices making them available to do business on the go. Inbox messages and messenger/communication apps go with many of the platforms, making it easy for a two-way communication with customers and potential customers. All these make reaching out to audiences something that is easy and even pleasurable to do through social media.

02. Creates Strong Bonds with Your Audience

Bonding helps to build business confidence. To quickly establish very valuable bonds with your audiences, social media becomes an indispensable part of digital marketing efforts.  Social media platforms provide very good business opportunities to become friends with your target audience and customers and to build long-term mutually beneficial relationships with them. The ultimate aim is to create strong and reliable bonds with your social media audiences and a great business relationship takes root from there.

03. Makes Your Target Audience Feel Important

You can make your target audience feel important if the social media content they read from you is mainly about helping them to solve their problems. By doing so, you can become a known problem-solver for your audience and they take you more seriously as a result. As most digital marketers very well know, social media is not an avenue to simply put yourself forward in an obvious manner. It serves well as a good opportunity for helping your audience and making life better for them. It somehow helps to make your audience feel hugely important for you to bother helping them instead of yourself only. To cement that impression, do not bombard your social media audience with products advertising. Take buying/selling out of the primary focus of your social media interactions. Offering a benefit to them first to show how your product will change their experience is what you need. Build trust and encourage your audience to relate freely with you. That tends to convince them to open up to you somehow what their needs really are. Buying becomes a logical consequence thereafter particularly if they sufficiently appreciate the efforts you are making to make their needs of paramount importance in your efforts.

3 Practical Ways Digital Marketing Can Help Grow Your Business with Local SEO

As most digital marketers very well know, every business now appears local. That is why small business digital marketing activities that tend to ignore local peculiarities hardly become successful. Google now reports that over 90% of its users regularly search for local businesses. The reason is simple. With the growth of the internet coupled with changes in consumer behavior, most consumers now habitually search for products online to find out where nearest to them they can find such products. Now, that is one very vital information no serious marketer can afford to ignore. That is why smart digital marketers deliberately target local people, who are geographically around them. Local SEO tends to help such marketers out in that quest. Here are three ways local SEO can help grow your business.

                

01. Create a Google-My-Business, GMB Account

If you want to create visibility for your business in your local geographical environment, get   your business on Google-My-Business, GMB. Visibility is the first target before creating engagement in local SEO. If you have your business account on GMB that will help it to be visible on Google searches. Google-My-Business account enables your target audience to see your business when they search with keywords like “business near me, local barber shop, local grocery, local plumber, local lawn mower, and so on” on Google. Once your information on GMB is accurate and up to date, clicks and visits to your website by searchers leads them on to your business. With that, your local online marketing efforts tend to show results quickly. That is good for business.

02. Create Content Based on Local Events

Every digital marketer creates content for the singular purpose of attracting audience attention. When that content derives from local events, it tends to attract more of local audience attention. You can list all the local festivals, sporting events and social gatherings in the region you are active in and create your content from them. Many locals will identify with you and your brand simply because they see you as a “local boy” of their own. That’s one very good opportunity to create some love and patronage for your brand.

03. Encourage Reviews

Local audiences habitually like to associate with local businesses. Many like to show their concerns by sending some encouraging feedback to the business. When it comes to a local business, many people care and pay good attention to other users’ experiences before they decide to buy or pay for any product/service. Most potential customers care too. It is good for business if a marketer pointedly requests customers to leave feedback and review about any product/service. If positive and helpful and Search Engines such as Google get to pick such reviews up, they become extremely beneficial not only to your online reputation, but also for local SEO. That is because Search Engines consider reviews as useful content. The reason reviews show up in their search results. Because of this, if your local business reviews are positive ones, they help to increase the visibility of your brand on Google search results. Now, that tends to do overall good for your business in a very positive way.

 

Effective Ways to Blend Creativity and Technology for Digital Marketing

If you market online, you must have noticed the increasing dependence on technology in digital marketing mechanisms/strategies. Daily, more and more digital marketing techniques are emerging, all engendered by changes in technology. To survive in a fiercely competitive digital space, marketers must rely on blending technology and creativity to make a difference. That requires some ingenuity to accomplish. You may rely on professional experts for assistance provided such experts have all the necessary tools to formulate an effective marketing strategy by blending creativity and technology. The ultimate is for marketers to use technology and creativity in dynamic ways to reach out to new customers and convert them to loyal customers in a profitable and cost-effective way. That is why digital marketers depend on technology to collect data, run ads campaigns, promote products, brand their businesses and do general marketing activities. They tend to get the best results from their marketing activities if they manage to utilize dynamic technology in creative ways particularly in the following activities among others.

Website Designing

Your business website is the marketing window to your business in cyberspace. It acts as your front office as well as back store out there. That makes its design hugely important as a suitable place to do business in cyberspace. For your website to serve this purpose well, it requires a blend of creativity and technology in its design and development. That blending enables it to be seamlessly interactive and for effective content creation, displaying advertising banners, sending/receiving messages, promoting products, selling products, developing applications, inviting new customers, servicing old customers as well as many other business activities required of a business office.
 
Branding

Every business is always proud of its brand. That is what gives it positive identity. You need a very good blend of technology and creativity to brand your business to be strong enough to face competition. Digital marketers effectively combine technology and creativity to create a new brand or to re-model an existing brand for better performance in the market place. When marketers effectively combine innovative marketing strategies with technology, a good brand emerges. A brand is good if it helps marketers to convert potential buyers to loyal customers.

Graphic Designing

This is about aesthetics and attraction. It involves the deft use of colors, design and a combination of factors to produce outstanding content and marketing messages to attract more customers. In a hugely competitive digital marketing space, businesses need compelling and attractive content to engage potential customers and convert them into loyal customers. That requires creativity and an ingenious use of technology. Most marketers rely on their graphic designers’ imagination and their smart use of technology to produce captivating content and messages. They offer creative and imaginative designs aided by technology to suit the marketing techniques for building a strong brand and increasing sales.

Content Marketing
 
In digital marketing, content is king. It must not only be informative, educational and even entertaining, it must be attractive and captivating enough to attract customers. Producing such content regularly requires a lot of creativity backed by technology for best results. The ultimate aim of any content is to engage and retain customers. The better it does so, the better it is for the business. Marketers need creativity aided with technology to design and deploy audio messages, video content, graphics/photos, webinars, email marketing, chat bots, pop up messages etc. etc. to meaningfully engage and interact with customers and potential customers 24/7.

Effective Content Marketing Tips for Ambitious Marketers

Content marketing requires skills, real online marketing skills if you want to make any impact. Out there on the internet, the competition for attention is very stiff for marketers. That is why, you must not only do the things other marketers do, you must do such things differently if you want to have an edge. Content marketing really works for marketers if skillfully done.

Here are some tips expert marketers readily offer for ambitious content marketing online.

You Must Be Creative

In a business like content marketing where almost every online marketer is involved in, you cannot stand out and be unique if you are not creative enough. Writing an informative, educational and even entertaining content is just not enough. Deploying such content at the right times and even through the right channels is very important as well. That requires a lot of creativity to be effective in terms of costs and results. By putting some creative spin in your content marketing strategy, you can spread your message better and more effectively.

Accept Mistakes and Correct Them

Making mistakes is human but accepting them and quickly correcting them is good for marketing strategy. It shows character and responsibility and consumers take note. If you make a mistake in your content as you are bound to anyway, it is best to accept responsibility, apologize and quickly take steps to make corrections. Your readers do appreciate that you are human after all and they will usually understand with you if you make corrections.

Sell Your Story

In content marketing, if you cannot sell your story, who will? You are the one who can accurately provide a backstory in your content marketing campaigns. That helps to make it easy for consumers to find out about the history of your business. The information from what they learn about your business can help them to make their connect decisions. It helps your content marketing efforts to make it easy for consumers to learn about your brand by having a clear and concise “About” page on your website that tells your story.

Repeat Your Marketing Message for Effects

A repeated marketing message tends to get better results than a one-off message because most consumers won’t remember your message if they only hear it once. It is not enough to have a good marketing message, you must repeat it over and over to get the full attention of consumers. Be careful not to overdo it anyway. Overdoing it may have the opposite effect of your desires. Even at that, the more ways you repeat your message, the more likely it is to stick in the minds of your current and potential customers. Therefore, you must spend quality time to compose your key message, and then incorporate it into your marketing strategy. This strategy may involve any or all of these ways, Infographics, Press releases, Marketing pitches, Email newsletters, Blog posts and Social media updates to get your message across to consumers and even in repeated times.

Make Your Content Discussable

When your content is discussable, it helps to attract consumer attention. They participate, make suggestions and help to share messages they are interested in. You must factor many vital things in as you go about creating your content. Things like how your message will be received and whether or not it will even make sense to your consumers. Whether or not it will be easy for your consumers to digest and understand your message, and even if they do, if they will be interested in sharing it on social media.

Re-Use Popular Content Creatively

It is a good marketing strategy to re-use popular content. Expert marketers call such content “evergreen” content. Digital, content-based marketing tactics require a lot of ideas and skillful writing which can be time consuming. The reason you can re-use good content to get traffic if you are creative enough. Content that tends to bring good traffic can thus be re-used creatively. You can do this in many ways such as:

+ sharing blog posts from your blog archives in your e-newsletter.
+ referencing previous blog posts in new posts.
+ turning one of your compelling, newsworthy blog posts into a media pitch.
+ sharing older content or photos as hashtags on social media posts.
+ editing and providing updated info in a popular blog post.

Market with Flexible Strategy

If your content marketing strategy is flexible, you can rejig it as you wish when results start coming in. Over time, you can make necessary changes as the situation demands. Avoid being stuck in a rut with ineffective content marketing strategy. If you are not achieving your marketing goals as projected, you can try new strategies until you get what works for you. Be open to learning news ideas and tactics about content marketing. By implementing what you have learned from the use of new tools and research efforts, you can avoid stagnation in your business’ content marketing strategy if you are flexible enough in your approach.

Don’t Ignore Timing in Your Content Releases

Timing of releases is very important in content marketing campaign particularly on social media. The reason is simple. Whenever you make a release, be sure you are targeting an audience anywhere in the world 24/7. If you are involved in email marketing, sending pitches or email newsletters must target the times that the recipients are most likely to read them. Updates on popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and others can be timed. Doing so is for effective targeting depending on the hours of the day and in which country you are working from. This varies from platform to platform but the bottom line is to ensure you make your updates when your targeted audience is most likely to be live on the platforms. For blog posts, you are at liberty to pick whatever day and time you like your posts to go live. If your blogging platform allows blog content scheduling, better still. What is important is to be sure your blog content is posted on your blog at the same time of day and same day of the week. Making such consistently and predictable posts can greatly help your online visibility and search engine optimization, SEO.

Top 6 Social Media Marketing Tips for Ambitious Marketers

As most marketers already know, our digital marketing landscape is always rapidly and constantly evolving. The real reason marketers must always have in place an effective and relevant social media strategy for their marketing activities. Ambitious marketers are increasingly taking advantage of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn to get their marketing messages massively out online. If not properly used, social media may constitute a huge drain on your time and resources. However, because of its effectiveness, a good social media marketing strategy is necessary for any ambitious marketer who is willing to follow the rules.

Here are some of my top tips that can help any ambitious marketer to hold their own in the hugely competitive social media-marketing world.

1. Carefully Choose your Social Media Platforms

Yes, because social media platforms have their own peculiar differences. The reason you must carefully choose which of them suits your business and marketing efforts among the thousands of social media platforms on the digital marketing world. Since it is practically impossible to create effective content across too many platforms, it is best to always focus more on a few very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. On these platforms, you can make quality content posts that resonate with your audience consistently.  That is what gives the best results for your marketing efforts.

2. Focus more on what is Trending

Social media essentially thrive on trends. Because audiences on social media are essentially yearning for human connection/interaction, you can latch on issues enhancing these connections. These are always the trending issues hugely important to marketers. If you set up an RSS feed in a place like Feedly, you can have a steady supply of topics to enable you find out what is trending by closely monitoring key hashtags. That allows you to create and focus your marketing messages more effectively.

3. Set Realistic Social Media Goals

Serious marketers don’t normally get on social media to simply fool around entertainments. You must define your social media goals and how you’ll go about attaining them. Most importantly, on social media, it is essential to first build an audience of loyal followers. The bigger the audience, the better for your marketing activities. Because it takes quality time to build an audience organically, you have to set clear goals with timelines how you intend to go about it. When the audience builds up over time, you can use the metrics of the social media platforms to find out what they care about and what interests them. Many social media platforms do have some fantastic analytics tools that can help you work out the effectiveness and rate of engagement on your content. This info helps you to effectively create marketing messages that get good results.  

4. Work with Your Social Media Content Calendar
 
In order not to unduly dissipate your efforts unnecessarily, you can decide to work with a social media calendar as an effective guide for your quality content posting efforts. Posting across multiple social media platforms is one very huge time-consuming process. Social media content management systems like Hootsuite allow you to schedule your content to coincide with when your audience is online. It helps to take the hassle out of posting across multiple platforms, which essentially saves quality time and efforts and very effective too.

5. Encourage and Embrace Feedback Engagements  

If you encourage and embrace feedback from your audience, it gives you a very good opportunity to engage with your audience meaningfully. The feedback helps you to quickly make corrections and to refocus your marketing message where necessary. Better results always come out from such efforts.

6. Regularly A/B Test Your Content for Effectiveness

In digital marketing, A/B testing essentially involves creating multiple headlines for the same piece of content and working out which generates a higher rate of engagement and reach. To measure the effectiveness of your marketing messages, there is need for you to always take advantage of A/B testing to gauge the effectiveness of the quality content you are posting. It helps to provide you some very useful insights on how people react to the content you are posting. You also get good insights to the effectiveness of the Call-To-Action, CTA phrase you’ve deployed on your site.

Why Content Marketing is more than Content Creation and Distribution

As expert marketers like to say, content marketing is much more than creating and distributing online content. It involves many techniques and strategies needed to get good content out there on the internet with the primary aim of attracting traffic to your website. The higher the traffic coming to your website, the better your chances of getting leads and sales! This is one of the inbound marketing tactics marketers really depend on to acquire leads. To generate revenue therefore, you need to do more content marketing campaigns than just mere content distribution which does not have that capability. Much more than mere content distribution, for a content marketing campaign to be successful, it must serve as a veritable and effective hub for attracting web visitors. That is the much needed web traffic by all marketers.

With search engine optimization, SEO, content marketing tends to be better placed on the web to attract the attention of search engines. Content distribution without SEO, does not have this advantage. The reason it is not searched and as such does not attract the much needed traffic by marketers. Therefore, optimizing online content with a clear goal in mind is always in the top priority list of any good marketer. Not doing so simply makes your content a merely distributed content without online promotional boost by search engines.

Content marketing directly targets traffic using inbound marketing strategies to attract, engage and delight your audience. Content distribution lacks this capacity because it is deficient of optimization techniques which will get search engines to rank and send traffic its way. This is clearly why content marketing is much more than just creating and distributing online content. To successfully market any content online, every marketer must strongly rely on his strategic and creative thinking skills. With that, you can always look at your content as is being viewed and used, then do things to enhance those goals no matter which marketing channel your audience is using. Content distribution does not require such technicalities, one more reason it is different from content marketing.

In content marketing, marketers know that their web visitors must reach them via their websites by using special keywords and searches to find answers to their web search inquiries. This is why marketers need to use the right keywords/phrases in the product descriptions on their websites. By using such keywords/phrases, you can start by optimizing your campaigns around solutions to search inquiries. Using inbound marketing strategies/tools, it is fairly easy to convert these web visitors to leads and even loyal customers by way of deliberate processes. Content marketing uses these processes to take web visitors through a buyer’s journey to become customers. This is something content distribution doesn’t have to bother about at all. A very clear difference, no doubt.

How to Use Your Content as a Creative Marketing Strategy

In online marketing, content is king. If you can create high quality content that is informative, educating and entertaining, you attract readers with ease. These readers become the bulk of the traffic to your website. They transform to leads and eventual customers. If you want to succeed as an online marketer therefore, it is extremely important and a good marketing strategy to always create content that people want to engage with. Note carefully that a good content is far more than just blog posts and press releases. It must be well crafted and creative enough to fit into your overall marketing strategy.

These here are great ways to use your content as a creative marketing strategy.

Emulate Industry Leaders: In any business you are in, look out for the industry leaders and endeavor to follow them keenly in whatever they’re doing in their business. Pay particular attention to what the leaders in your industry are doing by way of marketing themselves and their business. Doing so gives you the opportunity to discover certain things you can take away from what they do and how you can adapt such things to your own strategy. Think more of emulation and not outright copying to get results for your own business.




Use Industry Related eBooks: If you blog for business, well, nearly everyone does these days, you must already have a huge trove of content on your website. You can re-purpose this content to create a guide or industry related eBook. With that, you can then use the eBook to attract visitors through an invite form on the landing-page of your website. That helps to capture leads from among visitors who are interested in downloading your eBook.

Online Polls: Conducting online polls is one great way to get visitors interested in your website. By working through poll-maker sites online, you can specifically ask a target group of people some probing questions. Since these questions are industry-related, you will get some attention from people who are in the same industry if you report the findings on your blog or in a case study. Sharing such findings widely on social media helps to get traffic back to your website.

Use Fun Memes: Having fun is one great way to relieve tension. Good Memes do help your website visitors with some humor and to have fun. They help to give them a break from mundane business activities while showcasing the lighter mood of your business. That’s why many people love Memes and they are always attracted to good ones. Your website traffic gets boosted as a result.

Industry Trends Infographics: This is one great way to process data graphically for easy comprehension and digestion by your readers. Infographics help you to merge the statistics you get from your research efforts into an easy-to-understand visual presentation. If they are well-designed and well-presented, they attract the attention of online visitors.

Use SlideShares: SlideShares represent some form of online presentation strategy. They involve re-purposing your PowerPoint presentation in a more engaging way to attract visitors seeking preferred visual info. B2B persons mostly on LinkedIn social media platform tend to prefer the use of SlideShares as online marketing tools.

Use Comparison Guides: If you are marketing a product similar to that of your competition, you can create a comparison guide for it. Such guide helps in a strategic way to show your audience how you are different and what you do differently that warrants giving your product a try. Stating the naked facts about your product in a fair and objective way is an ethical way to go about it. Customers easily take note of that from among the several choices they have, and they reward you with patronage.

Offer Product Test Trials: It is one great and effective marketing strategy to offer money-back guarantees for returned goods and offering free trials as well. Allowing buyers to test your product risk-free is a great way to get them in. It demonstrates to buyers that you have implicit trust on the product you have in the market. For most buyers, if your product meets their needs during the trial period, they get converted as customers.

Teach with Webinars: Teaching with webinars is one impactful way to teach and to give more insight on any industry topic of choice. You can also use webinars to give a more detailed inside look at any product you are marketing. Webinar lessons can be delivered with synchronized timing at the same time around the world. They are very effective online marketing efforts which help to generate good sales and leads.

New Industry Intro Guides: Yeah, there are always new entrants into any industry on daily basis. People who are in a relatively new industry or branching into a relatively unknown part of any industry do need guidance and pathways. For this reason, beginners guides are a great piece of content that typically have very high engagement rates because such content has a way of making readers feel like industry insiders.

Use Pop-Up Opt-In CTA: Strategically using pop-up opt-ins as call-to-action just when visitors are trying to exit your website works very well to convert. That way, the bounce rate on your website gets lowered. For marketers, pop-up opt-ins on a website do serve as last ditch efforts to give visitors one last chance to engage with your website.

Use Interactive Quizzes: Online quizzes are very easy to create using free online tools. Many people love doing online quizzes mostly for entertainment and for solving imaginary business problems or answering imaginary questions. When such quizzes are good and challenging, they tend to attract visitors to the website.



Write an Online Magazine: Producing your own virtual magazine is a great form of content marketing. If your content is of high quality, you can quickly build up followers and subscriptions. That helps to get leads, customers and sales.

Produce Your Own Podcasts: To produce your own podcasts, be sure you really understand what your audience actually wants to hear and learn about. That’s the only way to produce podcasts that will benefit your audience. Make sure your podcasts are unique and outstanding not just run-off the mill podcasts everyone else is producing. If well produced, they can serve as strategic traffic earners for your website.

Make Online Comics: You can create good online comics using free web tools. They serve well as visual content marketing materials. Online comics are very popular with web visitors thereby helping to get traffic for a website. As marketing tools, online comics that relate to the surreal aspects of any business niche tend to be better liked.

Market with Videos: Videos are very effective visual content marketing tools. They tend to arrest viewer’s attention much faster than text content. Web visitors who view product videos are more likely to convert to customers because videos always present a more convincing visual message to potential customers. You do not have to be a professional to be able to shoot marketing videos. With the amazing cameras now available via smart phones, creating videos has become much easier than ever. Once created and shared on YouTube, they get the required exposure from one of the most searched Social sites in the world, which YouTube presently is. That exposure is good for traffic.

Cover Industry Events: Every business person likes to get quality information about the industry they operate in. The reason many like to attend industry events. For the benefit of people who are unable to regularly attend such events for one reason or another, they benefit by getting information from reliable sources that cover such events. So, by creating a guide, overview of an industry event, or even doing real-time industry updates on Facebook or Twitter, you can quickly build an audience of eager followers hungry for information.

 

How to Treat your Blog as a Business

If you are an online marketer, you must be aware that if you blog, you can make money online. Now that nearly everyone is forced to work at home because of the covid-19 pandemic ravaging the world, if you have a blog, you can generate some extra income right from the comfort of your home. You may even choose to blog full-time, meaning you can generate enough income to live on from your blogging activities. That is how to make blogging a full-time business and you can actually treat your blog as such.

To make blogging a lucrative income-generating business, you must be actively and professionally involved in blogging. To get going, you must follow these here some simple steps to bring it about.



Get some Training to Blog Professionally: This is a given. You can hardly make it in any business without the requisite training and knowledge. You can acquire hands-on learning by blogging and acquiring knowledge and experience as you blog along. Alternatively, you can enroll in any of the training programs available online or you diligently read and follow successful blogs online. Doing all these will help you to acquire the needed blogging skills and the tips and tricks of the business. There are also books you can buy and read to get relevant blogging materials and skills. As much as convenient, you can elect to attend offline blogging events to mix with bloggers and to acquire information.

Dedicate Quality Time to Blog: Just like any other business, blogging requires quality time and attention to gather your thoughts and to write them down. Blogging as a content marketing business remains a very serious business if you want readers to take you seriously. While making sure you give regular and dedicated time to blogging, be sure to blog only about content which is really informative, educating and entertaining enough to get readers to read and follow you.

Procure and Use the Right Blogging Tools: Every business requires the right tools to succeed. So is blogging. If you want to blog as a business, you must be ready to invest some money to acquire the right blogging tools. Some of these tools include but not limited to premium web hosting, premium blog templates, plugins, computer equipment, access to the internet, blogging resources, etc, etc.

Connect/Relate with like-minded Bloggers: You need this to be able to learn from the masters. In addition, you can hardly have a successful business without profitable partnerships. You need others to succeed the way they too will need you because cannot succeed as a one-man army or as an Island. In any meaningful business relationship, everyone needs real collaboration with other businesses in many areas of business endeavors in order to succeed.

Actively Promote your Blog: No matter how good your blog is, if you don’t actively promote it, it may appear mediocre for much of the time. No one lights a lamp and puts it under the table. Getting your blog out there on the internet for many readers to notice helps it to acquire the much needed readership soon enough. There are very many ways you can promote your blog to get good results. Some of these ways may be by way free promos on social media and even with paid ads if you have the resources to do so. The more you promote your blog, the faster it acquires readership which helps to grow your income from the blog.

How to Choose a Good Blogging Platform

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

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



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

Beginner-Friendliness

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

Cost Consideration 

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

Monetization Options

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

Maintenance and Versatility

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

Features Flexibility and Extendability

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

Recommendation

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

Personal blogs
Business blogs
Online businesses
Small hobby blogs

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

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

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

How Virtual Media Engagement Enhances Your Business

The internet now presents a highly favorable virtual media environment for most businesses to thrive. Depending on what your own business offers, virtual media is sufficiently versatile for good use and good results. What every business needs is online presence because that’s about the first place most people look at these days to get information about any business or product they’re interested in. No matter where you are in the world, when people easily find your business website online, it is an indication that the business is meaningful and legitimate. For your business to reach its full potential by reaching a very wide range of customers, it must be able to make good use of the tools and technologies of marketing which virtual media offers. Somehow these tools and technologies help to make virtual media marketing easy and inexpensive to undertake. 


 
To enhance your business, you really need these here creative virtual media marketing tips.

Content Marketing

The main purpose of having a website is to showcase your business online, welcome and invite people into your business world. The content you offer on your website is what really attracts people to it, and brings them back to it over and over again. It is through your website content if it offers something of high value you can get people to willingly leave behind their contact information. This is information your business greatly needs to keep close contact with them and to send regular promos their way. A good content offers how-to guides, step-by-step instructions and how to get the benefits of the products you are promoting. That is what makes content offer the real basis of inbound marketing that captures visitors, converts them into prospects, sales possibilities and eventual customers.

Social Media Marketing

In virtual media marketing, your social media presence is one great way to give a boost to your client conversions and brand awareness.  Popular social media platforms with huge patronage like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Instagram are very vital to enhance your business. If for instance you post fresh content in your website/blog regularly, sharing the content on these social media platforms helps in increasing its engagement from prospecting customers and existing ones. For effects, just as you update your website/blog regularly, you must also share such posts on social media. The more of your content you share on social media, the more engagement it receives. What makes the most impact is to ensure your posts are educating, informative, entertaining, engaging, creative and with lots of fun. These are the things that are very likely to get your audience hooked on to your content.

Blogging

These days, nearly every business owner in virtual space likes to blog about their business. Regular posting of good content on your blog is quite critical to maintaining an imposing presence of your business online. It helps in improving the ranking of your website by creating indexed pages. Blogging makes your website/blog to stand out from those of your competitors. This is very important in the hugely competitive business of virtual space marketing. Depending on what you know and the business niche you are in, you can blog about anything. What matters is to write what others are ready or inclined to read. You may choose to blog about the benefits of the products you are promoting and how they help solve problems for others. Such information helps in reaching out to your target audience and somehow helps to grow your business. You must make sure to post good content frequently and very regularly if you want to maintain your business exposure and digital presence.


 
Digital Ads

The only effective ads in virtual space are digital ads. Therefore, marketers who wish to achieve good results must invest in digital ads because it is one very effective technique of using internet technology to promote advertisements to consumers in virtual space. Some very effective digital ads which give good results include but not limited to Pay-Per-Click ads, paid search advertisements, banner ads, and affiliate programs. By investing some bit of resources to get these ads in place, your chances of getting positive results also increase phenomenally.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

No matter how good the content you have on your website/blog is, it will not get noticed in virtual space if Search Engines do not index it. That is where SEO becomes very relevant. Website optimization is the process of enhancing the performance of your website/blog with the help of Search Engines. By using SEO correctly, your content can become readily available to web searchers. That helps to get inbound traffic for your business and with a higher conversion rate to boot. SEO is a simple web technique involving the use of popular and hugely searched keywords on your website/blog and in your content. If used correctly, it makes your website to stand out in virtual space by way of optimized pages, search engine rankings, website design, and navigation. When you write blogs which are well optimized and they anticipate buyers concerns by providing answers to such concerns well in advance, such blogs attract good inbound traffic which helps to increase your chances of getting leads, closing deals and customer conversions.


 

Digital Marketing Tips to Drive Sales

Sales! Sales!! Sales!!! It is sales that drive digital marketers in their day to day activities online. Particularly during festivities, no digital marketer wants to be left behind in the great scramble for sales and bargains. Nearly everyone out there is looking to maximize their sales and the scramble remains huge and highly competitive. Everyone is always trying to outdo everyone in a scenario where potent digital marketing skills tend to make the difference.
These here tips if carefully and diligently followed can help to make the difference about who gets to make more sales no matter how huge the scramble for buyers becomes.

Deploy Relevant Affiliate Marketing Tools

If you want affiliate marketing to deliver impressive results for your digital marketing business, you’ve just got to deploy the right tools. Adequate care must be taken to select and use these tools to get results. If the tools you select can help you get better attribution and tracking while improving the quality of online traffic and leads generation, they are good tools. It is such good tools which help to ensure better conversion rates and sales which every online marketer wants. Additionally, working with integrated browser extensions, good affiliate tools can help your online business seamlessly sign on different types of publishers as affiliates. Such publishers may include but not limited to bloggers, celebrities and social media influencers who can use deep-linking tools on messenger/social media platforms. They work to help simplify links generation process. One great way to generate accurate and functional affiliate links which publishers can easily use in the contents they produce. 


 
Effectively use Mobile Marketing Strategies

In our world of today, everyone is in a hurry and always on the go. That is in no way slowing down or obstructing business. People now do business effectively on the go and in transit. Welcome to the world of mobile digital devices particularly smart phones. Many marketers now use over 70% of the time they spend online via smart mobile devices. That is one huge access which smart marketers can depend on to market and make sales on the go. For brands, smartphones now constitute a very unique marketing opportunity that is too huge to ignore. Equipped with mobile marketing apps, these devices can now effectively collect and track data which marketers can rely on and use in their mobile marketing strategies.

Use Different Marketing Techniques
 
In online marketing business, what works is what you use if you want to stay relevant. Deployed singly or in combination, what gets the right results is what you need. There is no right or wrong marketing technique so to speak. Every marketer simply needs what works well for the brand they are marketing. Smart marketers prefer a decent and healthy mix of different digital marketing techniques to create the maximum impact in a highly competitive market space. If you are looking to maximize your sales, you can devise ways to leverage on multiple outreach channels such as price comparison, chat messengers, blogs/forums, coupons, freebies and cashback, among others. Associating with credible affiliate networks to manage your marketing campaigns also gets satisfactory results. When properly incentivized, publishers associated with affiliate networks help to promote your brand through their audience capturing techniques to patronize your products.

Personalize Your Content

The peculiarities and backgrounds of every human being play a role in determining what they do and how they behave. That is the reason content marketing must take into account these peculiarities to direct the content it markets. In digital marketing space, content remains king anytime any day. When used correctly, it can become one of the biggest differentiators for your online marketing strategies. As a marketer, content plays a very huge role in defining how well your marketing campaigns are received by your target audience. When personalized and properly directed, the marketing results can help to make very huge impact on your sales volume. For that reason, even if you are essentially promoting the same product, personalizing your content to suit the aspirations and requirements of different target audiences is immensely important.

Target Differentiation in Your Marketing Campaigns

To be a successful marketer, you need data, credible and reliable data to help your marketing campaigns. Google helps with good analytics tools to help you generate very reliable data. With good data, you can gather intelligence about your competitors and spy on what they are doing. You can generate reliable marketing insights which you can depend on to unlock better opportunities to sell, upsell or cross-sell any product. With good data, you can plan well and be able to reach the right customer at the right time and with the right message. Your marketing campaigns can be specifically directed at different groups to enable differentiation in your marketing efforts. Whether by way of owned marketing initiatives or affiliate-driven campaigns, good data makes attribution across traffic sources more accurate. There is an added advantage of its being used to drive push notifications particularly on mobile devices. 

How Affiliate Marketing Platforms Help Bloggers

Successful bloggers rely hugely on partnerships and collaborations to make money online. The most prominent of these partnerships are affiliate marketing and e-commerce platforms. In the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing where bloggers ply their trade, everyone of them is always looking out for what works best for them in their content marketing efforts. It may be fairly difficult at times to determine what truly works, but, what is not in doubt is that affiliate marketing networks do offer enhanced and mutually beneficial support to bloggers. By collaborating with such marketing platforms, it is easy for bloggers to browse through a host of affiliate programs and campaigns before selecting the ones that are best suited to their needs and preferences. These choice options are always many and varied depending on what bloggers want to achieve.


 
Traditionally, affiliate marketing has been one of the most popular ways for bloggers to monetize their online traffic. These days, many bloggers are beginning to understand the value addition that partnering with affiliate networks can drive for them. This is the real reason why a growing number of bloggers/publishers are consciously linking up with affiliate marketing platforms. Doing so allows them to maximize their earning potential with minimal efforts. As more bloggers actively partner with affiliate platforms to seamlessly access new business opportunities, it engenders and enhances significantly the growth of the blogging industry and the affiliate marketing industry. A win-win situation for both parties!

As a way of helping more bloggers, some affiliate networks deliberately create innovative online solutions to make content marketing easier. Such very significant innovative solution is a type of Google chrome extension named Admitad Lite. This innovative tool can be leveraged to access several advertiser programs across the globe through a consolidated platform. Thus, by using a single account, bloggers/publishers can on one spot access multiple advertiser programs around the world. That spares them the hassles of having to register and deal with multiple affiliate networks. That arrangement helps to save bloggers valuable time, efforts and resources. When bloggers install the extension and register with the platform, they get easy access to a host of advertiser campaigns. They get this access even from advertisers that they are not associated with. That no doubt helps to open up a world of new opportunities for bloggers, who can now simply explore programs, request to be a part of them and create instant deep links to start earning post-approval. Just like that!

Several businesses/brands now leverage affiliate marketing to create referral programs and reward bloggers/content creators that drive the maximum value for their businesses/brands. This no doubt serves as a very valuable revenue stream for bloggers/publishers. In addition, affiliate platforms deliberately offer bloggers/publishers the opportunity to choose their working models, payouts, traffic type and geography in a more detailed and accurate manner while associating with a brand as affiliates. Associating and working closely with partner businesses/brands can, thus, lead to a very valuable relationship-building which enhances continued earnings for the blogger/publisher.

Online activities like traffic authenticity, user targeting and attribution which ordinarily should worry bloggers can be taken care of by the affiliate networks. That hugely helps bloggers/publishers to free up time and resources to focus more on creating and optimizing their content with the help of the extensive customer insights which affiliate networks provide for them. Through affiliate marketing platforms, bloggers/publishers can also accurately gauge campaign performance and returns-on-investment real-time. That is the vital information they really need to refocus and grow their content marketing business for enhanced income and returns.

Effective Strategies for Making Money Online

Making money online started with just experimentation. Right now, more and more people are increasingly depending on the internet not only to make money but to earn a living. Just as the internet changed the way we do business, it has also changed the way we make money which enables us to live better lifestyles. For some persons, the internet now provides a means to make a little extra cash on the side whereas for others, it provides real opportunities for sustainable business and even a career. Having said all that, it is worth mentioning that internet business is not for all comers because it requires specialized skills for success.

If you are desirous to make money online, your options fall into two main categories. First is earning passive income from investing or trading assets. Second is offering services by tutoring or creating media and content for interested persons online. Whichever technical languages marketers use for these activities don’t really matter much. What matters is how best to use the strategies to make money, period!

Here are some easy-to-use strategies to make money online.

01. Start a Blog

Many expert bloggers are making a good living churning out very good content regularly in their content marketing efforts. Starting a good blog and partnering with e-commerce platforms has become a very lucrative way to make money online. First be sure you know something you can write about which other people will be interested in reading. Next is to set up a blog website to market the content you are generating. By the time your blog starts getting good online traffic, you can then take steps to monetize it with Google adsense. You can earn income by selling ad space on your blog website, sell products, a survey or a course. You may decide to market other people's products as an affiliate and earn commissions. Simple!


 
02. Affiliate Marketing

You can choose affiliate marketing which simply requires that you use your website to refer people to products/services on e-commerce platforms which if they buy as a result of your efforts, you earn a commission. That works by actively partnering with e-commerce platforms like Amazon and Clickbank to help them promote any products/services of your choice which must be related to the niche subject of your blog. You earn commissions based on the products you help sell with your blog site affiliate links.

03. Get Outsourced Job
 
Working at home somehow helps to guarantee a very convenient and flexible lifestyle. It saves costs and travel inconveniences having to travel around the world to find work. Thanks to the internet, you can now work anywhere and service any business anywhere in the world by way of outsourcing. Many companies now find it cheaper to outsource service jobs to countries with cheaper labour rates. That is the reason remote work has become a very popular option for many employers of labour. Characteristically, remote online work helps to reduce wage costs and other overhead expenses particularly on office space. You can find any full-time job related to your niche interest at FlexJobs if you are keen on such jobs.

04. Selling Photographs Online
 
If you are a photographer or you are keen on taking good photographs, you can sell such photos online to make money. Alternatively, you can have a working relationship with good photography sites to help them sell photos and earn a commission.

05. Selling Paintings and Arts Products

If you are not an artist, you can have a working relationship with websites selling arts works to help them sell their paintings/arts works and earn a commission. If you are a good artist yourself, social media sites like YouTube and Instagram are good places you can easily display and sell your works to buyers.

06. Offer Paid Services
 
For most marketers, making money online doesn’t really mean working online. You can earn extra money as a tradesman from jobs sourced online. You can also ply any trade from your website, get invitations and you get the jobs done offline. That arrangement allows you to set your own fees and work schedule as convenient for you. If you are good at skills like fitness exercises, plumbing, gardening and landscaping etc, you can advertise your trade online and make money from the offers coming through from your website. Sites like TaskRabbit are very handy for sourcing tradesmen jobs with good pay.

07. Freelance Marketing
 
You can make money online by offering freelance services on well-known sites like Fiverr and Upwork. But, you must have marketable skills and be good at them. Such services may include but not limited to freelance writing, programming, language translator services, graphic designing and many others.

08. Sell Professional/Consultancy Services

Online, it is easy to turn specialist professional knowledge which covers a wide range of niches into money by plying your trade in popular Q&A sites like JustAnswer and LivePerson. Some of the niches requiring expert knowledge include but not limited to law, accounting, book keeping, medicine, mechanics, vets/animal care etc.

09. Teach Handy Skills

It is a truism that every person knows at least one thing better than others. Online, you can turn just about any skill/expertise into money if you are good at delivering it. From social media sites or on local classifieds you can advertise skills relating to music, cooking, fitness/exercises, photography, playing musical instruments and even academic exercises preparing students for SATs. You set your fees, get your enrolments, deliver the lessons and make your money. Simple!

10. Online Proof-reader Services
 
This is one very lucrative online business on demand from writers, authors and researchers. If you have the training and keen eye for details, you can make money online by way of proofreading. Using freelance marketplace sites like UpWork, you can easily take up proof reading jobs by bidding for them.

11. Online Surveys

It is possible to make a few hundred dollars monthly if you get involved in online surveys. You can offer your own website to run surveys for researchers or you join reputable survey sites which can offer you some means of generating a bit of money by helping them to run various surveys.

12. Websites Flipping
 
Some marketing experts and webmasters make money by flipping websites. What they do is to shop for websites to buy, touch them up a bit and offer them for sale in something akin to buying a run-down home, sprucing it up and selling it at a higher rate the way real estate professionals do. For websites, what you can do is to work on some general improvements on the site after acquiring it. Such improvements will help to enhance the amount of traffic the website receives if they make the design look nicer, more attractive and more responsive. These improvements help to increase the value you can flip it. If you are looking to buy or sell websites online, the best places to look are Website Broker and Flippa.

13. Websites Testing

One very popular platform for websites testing is UserTesting. Many people earn good money per hour helping web developers to test websites for user friendliness. The exact same way aircrafts manufacturers use test pilots to test new aircrafts so also web developers use websites testers to test their websites to see how user-friendly the sites are. Many businesses are always desirous to know how user-friendly their websites are on actual people. The real reason people get paid to try out these sites for user friendliness using beta testing techniques. 


 
14. Used Goods Garage Sales

Nearly everyone has discarded used goods which are still useful stacked away in stores/car garages in their homes. You can advertise garage sales online and make some good money selling off these used goods. Most people are guilty of hoarding unnecessary but valuable junk around the house in car garages and the attic. Some of such goods are used furniture, old clothes, cutlery, books, kiddie’s toys, golf clubs, hunting/fishing equipment etc. From well-known marketplaces like eBay, Etsy, and CraigsList, you can advertise such junk goods for sale and make cool money from your efforts.

15. Selling Artisan Products

Many marketers make good money from advertising and selling handmade items online. Some of such items range from art to furniture, goods people are actively surfing online looking to buy. The commonest place these marketers advertise and sell artisan products are e-commerce platforms like Etsy and eBay. These are amazing platforms through which anyone can sell artwork or artisan handmade items. Selling artisan products online is one great way to turn your hobby into a money-making business. That is, one great way to convert your passion to money-making opportunity.

 16. Sell Guest Posting Services

For online marketers, backlinks are highly valuable commodities. If you are a high value guest blogger, the backlinks from your guest postings alone are very valuable. If you are a reputable content writer, and you’re writing content for high domain authority sites, you can sell that opportunity to generate backlinks to clients just as many SEO agencies do. You earn cool money from such efforts.

17. Teach a Foreign Language Online

These days, many marketers make decent money teaching a foreign language online.  The pay is usually on hourly basis and good online foreign language teachers can make $30-$100 per hour. That is good money. That is the reason why working as a foreign language teacher is a real favorite of “digital nomads” to make money. For instance, many online agencies will allow you to teach English online with no formal requirements other than just being a native speaker. That is one easy way for native English speakers to make money online without any additional hassles.