8 Compelling Business Reasons to Attend a Virtual Affiliate Event

If you are a digital marketer, there are many compelling business reasons to participate in virtual affiliate events. Such events are gradually becoming veritable platforms for professionals to connect, collaborate, and grow their businesses. The compelling reasons to participate include but not limited to:

1. Reduced Environmental Impact: When compared to traditional in-person gatherings, virtual events have a significantly lower carbon footprint. Meaning, there is less paperwork and more digital information available to participants. Even the cost of travel to attend invents is completely eliminated. Eliminating the need for travel and reducing resource consumption associated with venue logistics, virtual events play a significant role in environmental sustainability. This is more so in an era where businesses are increasingly prioritizing corporate social responsibility. Significantly, opting for virtual events aligns with modern day business sustainability goals and demonstrates a commitment to eco-friendly practices.

2. Accessibility and Convenience: Technically, one of the most significant advantages of virtual affiliate events is their accessibility. Quite unlike physical conferences or seminars that may require travel arrangements and time away from work, virtual events can be accessed real time from anywhere around the world with an internet connection. This convenience eliminates barriers related to geographical location, transportation, and scheduling conflicts. This allows a broader and more diverse audience participation at the same time from anywhere in the world where there is internet access.

3. Enhanced Learning and Knowledge Sharing: Such enhanced learning and knowledge sharing is directly driven by advancement in technology. With these advancements in technology, virtual affiliate events can deliver immersive and interactive learning experiences to a diverse audience at the same time. By using live presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and Q&A sessions, participants can gain direct insights from industry experts, thought leaders, and even their peers. The diverse range of topics and speakers featured in virtual events usually ensure that attendees can easily explore new ideas, trends, and best practices relevant to their fields and with minimized hassles.

4. Global Reach and Networking Opportunities: Virtual affiliate events characteristically transcend physical boundaries. This enables attendees to connect with individuals from around the globe. With this expanded reach, more doors and business opportunities are opened to diverse perspectives, collaborations and potential partnerships that may otherwise not have been feasible in a local or regional context. Networking in virtual environments often involves features such as chat rooms, virtual lounges, and one-on-one video meetings. These help to foster meaningful interactions and relationship-building opportunities with fellow affiliates and business leaders.

5. Flexibility and Customization: One other major advantage of virtual events is that they offer flexibility in terms of direct participation and engagement. Attendees at such events have the flexibility to choose which sessions to join based on their interests and priorities, without being constrained by a fixed agenda or schedule. Such flexibility empowers and allows individuals to tailor their event experience according to their specific learning objectives and professional development goals.

6. Inclusive and Accessible Participation: Virtual affiliate events promote inclusivity by accommodating individuals with diverse needs and preferences. This is because virtual platforms have the ability to accommodate larger audiences without compromising the quality of engagement. This ensures that no one is excluded based on capacity constraints or logistical limitations.

7. Cost-Effectiveness: Virtual affiliate events because of their very nature typically entail lower costs for attendees. Participants can significantly save on cost of travel, accommodation, and other associated expenses. This makes attending virtual events a cost-effective arrangement making them really affordable for attendees. This affordability makes such events open to all who really want to participate, thereby making access to valuable networking and learning opportunities available to many. This cost-effectiveness directly benefits most professionals across different financial backgrounds.

8. On-Demand Access: You can have access on demand to any content for a prescribed fee at any time of your convenience. Once you purchase the on-demand ticket, it means you won’t have to miss a single minute of the seminar content. This ticket allows you to revisit panels and master-classes after the event. Alternatively, you can opt to watch them at a time more suitable for your own schedule. The ticket also allows you to enter the platform’s private Ask-Me-Anything Networking session. Such sessions are usually held after the main event in a private setting. In such events, you can directly engage industry experts who can help you to overcome your current affiliate program challenges.

How to Create a Viable Social Media Marketing Strategy

If you are a digital marketer, you can’t afford to ignore the power of social media marketing to expand your business reach, generate leads and make sales. These days, the internet appears to be a go-to place for anyone who wants information or wants to do business online. Unlike in the past, these days, not many people turn to books, encyclopedias, libraries, phone calls, or visits anymore when they need information/services. People simply log into the internet to search for what they want. Marketers take advantage of this because they know that most people turn to Google or social media for a quick information search.

What this means to most marketers is that social media channels are also valuable tools for driving website traffic, engaging with target audience, building confidence and trust in their brands. This is enhanced by the huge popularity of social media channels and the ease of widely sharing information on the channels. When a marketer puts out valuable, shareable content that the target audience really likes and enjoys on social media, the material doesn’t just stay on the marketer’s platform. The audience also shares it to their own networks, making it go viral in some instances. On social media, the key to reaching a very wide audience of potential customers is to consistently create shareable content. That requires the right social media marketing strategy to accomplish.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create the right social media marketing strategy that can help you to reach a wide spectrum of potential customers.
 
Understand Your Target Audience

It is difficult to create shareable content if you don’t know your audience well enough. You must know who you’re creating content for if you want the content to be shareable and effective. If you consistently create content that appeals to your audience and is shareable, it gets the best results.

Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

Marketers leverage the popularity of social media to promote their products/services. The more popular a social media platform is therefore, the better for marketing activities. This is why most marketers prefer Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes to promote their products/services. These platforms have their own in-house peculiarities marketers do take advantage of. So, if you really know your target audience’s age, demographics, and interests, it’s easier to figure out which social media platform they might be spending more time online. You can figure out where your target audience is at then go out there to market to them. For instance, older generations tend to favor Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn while Creatives enjoy Instagram. The younger generations have a preference for TikTok. For effectiveness, you can choose one or two platforms to focus on instead of dissipating valuable time and energy on all the platforms.

Set Measurable Goals for Your Social Media Marketing

Measurable goals help you to know how well you are doing in social media marketing. They help you to see if you’re on the right track or not. This is why you must set these goals right from the outset of your social media marketing campaigns. If your set goal is to get more traffic, clicks, leads or sales, set the goal with a time frame when you expect to achieve it. It could be a week, two weeks, a month or even a year. Make sure the goal is specific as well to enable you measure it accurately based on the time frame.

Consistently Create Engaging Social Media Content
 
On social media, you don’t just need any type of content. The content you really need must be valuable and engaging. What this means is that if you provide value to your audience, you encourage them to engage with you in return. Such content must fulfill a real purpose for your reader. It can answer an important question, solve a real problem, instigate your audience to think, give them new ideas or trending information, or may simply entertain them. What really matters is that the content is something that really attracts your audience and keeps them interested in your post. This can stimulate your audience to leave a comment, like the post, or share it for other people to see. That’s what is extremely helpful to expand your reach. This is the reason you must encourage people to engage as well, making sure to reply to and or like as many comments as possible.

Create a Content Calendar

Creating a content calendar allows you to plan and create your content upfront. Depending on your other schedules, you may choose to work a week, two weeks or even a month in advance. What this really means is that if through unavoidable circumstances you are forced to skip a day or two, you’ll still be left with plenty of content to go out. With a content calendar, you can put out any content you want, but always make sure it’s relevant to your audience and your niche. That is the relevance that will make your readers to relate well with the content particularly when it helps solve a problem or two for them.
 
Use Paid Ads on Social Media

Yes, it can be part of your social media marketing strategy to use paid ads on the platforms. With paid ads, the in-house algorithms in the platforms know who and who to show your ads to attract clicks and traffic. Through such ads, you can eventually gain enough organic traffic to boost your business. Paid ads can also be valuable to help grow your audience.

Use Effective Calls-to-Action, CTAs

You need well-designed and effective CTAs for good marketing on social media. If your content is valuable and engaging, you need to have a compelling CTA on it. CTA is like some kind of invitation for readers to deal. A good CTA can invite your readers to buy your product, sign up for your services, read a blog post, and check out your website and lots more. Be sure your CTAs direct your readers to exactly where you want them to go from your content. To do this well, you must give them a compelling reason to go there. That depends on how well-designed and effective your CTAs are.

Measure and Analyze Results

You may be wasting your valuable time on social media if you aren’t analyzing your own results. There is no way you can know if your social media marketing is having the desired results without diligently measuring these results. You’ll only know how well you are doing if you diligently measure and analyze your key performance metrics. You must at all times keep a keen eye on your social media metrics, as well as your website traffic, and particularly where the traffic is coming from. Do not lose sight of the goals you set right from the outset which will serve as your markers for success. Even if your goals change along the line, for as long as your data shows progress, you’re on the right track. Just keep going. You’ll only make impact in social media marketing if you are patient and deliberate in your marketing efforts.

Why Customer Segmentation is Important in Digital Marketing

If you want to be a successful digital marketer, you must at all times understand the perspectives, expectations, and behavior of your target audience. Your audience is composed of human beings with distinct individuality which affects their distinct behavioral patterns. This is what recommends customer segmentation as a requirement for effective digital marketing. But, as a marketer, you cannot effectively use customer segmentation if you do not fully understand what it entails.

 
Now What Does Customer Segmentation Really Entail?

Customer segmentation is a strategic marketing tactic that enables marketers to market to customers based on their unique characteristics. With it, marketers can categorize their audience by way of their unique psychographic and demographic characteristics. Doing so enables marketers to uniquely package and direct their marketing messages and campaigns to directly target specific customer groupings. This way, the right message gets to the right audience thereby increasing the effectiveness of your marketing messages. This ultimately helps marketers to optimize their messages to each group for better effectiveness. By so doing, individual customers would receive only messages relevant to them. This helps to maximize the power of the marketing messages and ultimately their effectiveness.

You’ll get to understand this well when you consider the commonest parameters for customer segmentation which include:

•    Demographic Categorization: This takes location into account in categorizing. So factors like where you reside comes into play. Whether you reside in rural, suburban, or urban area takes center stage here.
•    Personal Attributes: These are factors unique to the individual customer. You can thus target your customers based on gender, age, educational status, marital status, state of life, languages they speak and so on.
•    Shopping Records: This involves evaluating the shopping records of the customer, customer behavior, responses to product promotions, frequency of shopping, and the volume/value of purchased products and so on.

If you understand these parameters well enough, it will be easier for you to segment your customers, market specific messages to each group and get better results from your marketing campaigns.

Next is to consider the strategies that help make customer segmentation really effective in marketing. Therefore, if you are able to categorize your target audience based on the following parameters, it can help to make your marketing campaigns more effective.

1: Behavioral Segmentation: This customer segmentation strategy is largely based on customer behavior. It takes into account the customer’s lifestyle, personal preferences and habits. Marketers can diligently study the purchasing habits of their customers by harvesting data from different online media platforms. This data can give marketers accurate insights into how different age brackets for instance shop, what they shop for and their social media hangouts. When marketers know the buying behaviors or shopping patterns of their customers, they can then recommend special products to meet their needs.

2. Demographic Segmentation: This involves categorizing your audience based on their geographical locations. It is premised on the reasoning that people from a common location are likely to share some basic traits. So, when marketers have accurate data on the location, religious beliefs, educational status, marital status, age, gender and demographics, they can personalize their marketing campaigns better for customer targeting.
 
3: Customer Journey Segmentation: Customer journey segmentation focuses largely on the different stages of the buying pattern of a customer. The reasoning is that each stage of the customer journey requires specific marketing messages suitable for the stage. This is because at every stage, the customer/potential customer engages with different elements on your website. Elements like content, CTAs, product images, descriptions, etc. come into play. Customer journey segmentation helps marketers to identify the pain points and behavioral patterns of customers in their buying process. This information helps marketers to device ways to streamline and smoothen up this journey for the benefit of their customers.
 
4. Psychographic Segmentation: Psychographic customer segmentation largely focuses on the personalities of customers. It involves using psychographic information about your customers to categorize them based on their attitudes, behaviors, and opinions. As a marketer, if you diligently observe your customer interests and opinions, you can clearly identify their way of life and what they like to do and how they choose to do it. Accordingly, you can carefully design your marketing campaigns specifically for such way of life.

Last Line

Marketers choose customer segmentation to enhance their marketing campaigns for better results. Optimizing your marketing messages and directing them to identified groups that need the messages most helps the effectiveness of such marketing messages. This is the reasoning behind customer segmentation.

Best 5 Techniques to Monetize Your Website

If you are a digital marketer, I bet you already know how important your digital presence is and what it means to your business. If you want to make more profits and reach as many potential customers as possible, your digital presence must be sufficiently enhanced. That is where monetization comes into the mix. You can decide to advertise, campaign, and market your products/services strategically in an effort to directly grow your business. It is website monetization that helps to bring in the money. Following are some of the best five techniques to monetize your website, do more business out of it and make more money from it.

 
1. Affiliate Marketing

You can effectively monetize your website through affiliate marketing. This is one marketing technique of helping someone else to market and sell products/services and you earn commissions from your efforts. Once you sign up and join popular affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI, you can start promoting products and earning commissions right away. When you join as an affiliate, you are given a unique affiliate link/code to use for your products promotions. If any sale is made through this unique affiliate link/code, you earn a commission as a percentage of the sale volume. The more reputable your website, the more sales it generates. That is practical website monetization. However, to build a reputable website with online visibility, you need to deploy several techniques for reputation management and search engine optimization, SEO. That is what helps your website to get the much-needed traffic which affiliate marketing business thrives on.

2. e-Commerce Business

Running an online store is one practical and effective method to monetize your website. You must have goods in demand to sell out of your website to make this possible though. E-commerce store is an ideal way to reach an audience and showcase your products/services. Next is to optimize the website for maximum visibility, then do your marketing/promotional activities to attract good traffic and the sales start coming in.

3. Choosing the Right Strategies

Digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all affair. The marketing methods and channels that work for one person may not work well for another. So, you must be prepared to experiment with your own techniques/channels to know what best suits the products/services you are marketing. It is the strategies that work well for you that can best help your own website monetization techniques. For best results therefore, a personalized approach to a monetization strategy is highly recommended. With many options available for you to choose from, it is left to you to decide on what is best for your business. 

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Having an effective SEO on your website is your best bet to attract organic traffic to the site. SEO is a highly technical subject which if you are unable to handle yourself, you can hire the services of professionals to help you out. A good SEO on your website helps to demonstrate to search engines that your website is reputable, reliable, and trustworthy. That way, they tend to rank the site higher in their Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Higher ranking in the SERPs of search engines translates to good organic traffic back to your website. The more traffic to your website, the more leads you can generate from it and the more sales you make out of it.

5. Lead Generation

With lead generation monetization technique, you can reach out to particular demographics online particularly on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. What lead generation technique simply does is to bring an audience to your products/services by approaching them in an organic, professional manner and putting these products/services before them. If properly handled, lead generation technique can greatly help your website monetization process.

Final Words

The foregoing are just a few great techniques for monetizing a website. There are other techniques that can be employed as well if you are so inclined. 

Best Tips for Creating a Mobile-Friendly Website

Google reports presently attribute over 60% of online data to mobile devices. Now, that’s a clear indication that many more around the world people are accessing the internet from mobile devices. Digital marketers have quickly latched in on that vital reality to market online. Designing websites/blogs to be mobile-friendly is now smart marketing. What it simply means to have a mobile-friendly website design is that it prioritizes the design and development of a website suitable for mobile devices. The key elements in mobile-friendly website design involve optimizing the user experience on mobile devices. Thus, such websites must work optimally on smaller screens, at slower internet speeds and touch inputs which are peculiar to mobile devices. When websites/blogs are designed with the smallest screen in mind, it enables the website/blog to perform better on all devices, mobile devices inclusive. Here are some of the best tips that can help you to design a mobile-friendly website/blog.

 

Always Keep the User in Mind: You want your website to load fast and well on mobile devices, isn’t it? So, you must keep the users of mobile devices in mind when designing such websites. For a person holding a smartphone for instance, you’ll take into account at design stage what can help enhance the user experience of such a person. You must therefore focus on the user needs and wants from your website. You can then take deliberate steps to ensure that the website is designed to meet these needs.

Simplify Navigation: Mobile devices are small to handle and their maneuverability is rapid. This together with their small screens usually poses unique challenges for navigation on websites. So, if you want to improve their user experience, just simplify the navigation. This you can do by minimizing the number of navigation items and using a simple menu icon. This directly helps smartphone users to navigate the website more easily.

Design for the Smallest Screen First: If you design for the smallest screen first, it ensures that the website performs well on all devices. Pay special attention to designing for the smallest screen size. That’s about the only way to ensure that the website is optimized for mobile devices. Such designs can also perform well on larger screens too.

Prioritize Content: Content prioritization is essential if you are designing a mobile-friendly website. Since smartphones screens are really small, you must make sure that your website design prioritizes the most essential content that users are most likely to view on their mobile devices. You can simplify the content to ensure that it displays only the most important information that loads faster on mobile devices.

Use Responsive Design: A responsive design ensures that the website looks good on all devices particularly mobile devices. You can do this by using a flexible layout. This helps images to adjust to the screen size as they load.

Use Fast-Loading Images: When Images are too large and not optimized; they tend to slow down a website’s load time. This is more so on mobile devices. You can thus use optimized fast-loading images to ensure that the website loads quickly thus enhancing user experience.

Use White Space: White space is very essential for a mobile-friendly website design as it makes the content easier to read and navigate. If you use white space effectively, you can make the website more visually appealing. That directly helps to improve the user experience.

Optimize for Touch Input: Most mobile devices are operated essentially by touch inputs. This makes it imperative to optimize your website for touch inputs. You can therefore design buttons and other interactive elements that are large enough to click with a finger, but still have enough space between them to prevent accidental clicks.

Optimize Typography: You can optimize the topography of your website by designing it with the right font size and style suitable for mobile devices. You must therefore ensure that the fonts you use are not too large or too small. If for instance you use a font size that is too small, it becomes difficult if not impossible to read on small screens. Such scenario is not helpful for user experience. So, when a font is too small or difficult to read, it can make your website unusable on mobile devices.

Wrapping Up

Presently, nearly everyone around the world is clutching a smartphone and majority use these devices to do business on the internet. As a digital marketer, you’ll be losing out on this huge data if your website is not mobile-friendly. The foregoing tips can help to make your website more user-friendly and to greatly enhance the user experience of millions of mobile devices users.

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.

Tested Digital Techniques to Become an Outstanding Social Media Marketer

As the internet deepens and online marketing becomes more competitive, marketers must devise ways and means to survive competition. Doing so by various digital marketing techniques becomes fashionable. If you get your techniques right as a digital marketer, you can become an outstanding digital marketer with time. This is more so if you can successfully deploy these techniques on social media. Here are some of such tested techniques.

Blogging: Blogging is readily the most popular form of content marketing. It simply involves posting articles and valuable information about products and consumer experiences on your website and on a regular and consistent basis. You can have a good and beneficial blogging strategy if you get the assistance of online tools. Some of the best tools available for this purpose and effective on social media are Trello, Google Keyword Planner, Buffer, TweetDeck, Canva and MailChimp.
 
Marketing Technology: As digital marketing is evolving, so are the tools to enhance its operation. Depending on your type of business, you can deploy these IT tools to help out even in your multitasking operations. Technically, some of the best IT marketing tools currently available to marketers are Tracking software, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, Online Advertising Tools, AdStage and HubSpot Ads.

Social Media Management: Marketers can effectively deploy social media management tools to expand their customer portfolio. Good social media management IT tools available out there includes, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, Agora, Pulse and Sendible.

Website Promotion: Website promotion function is an integral part of webmaster management. What gets to a website and is effectively shared all over the web can contribute immensely to site promotion. That requires skills and the requisite knowledge of what works where and what doesn’t. Proven marketing techniques that can enhance a good site promotion are Social Media Marketing, Guest Blogging, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Google My Business GMB, and Online Communities.

Search Engine Ranking Tool: This is a very effective tool that offers marketers a complete set of options for comprehensive website auditing, backlink growth, competitor analysis, website ranking, keyword grouping and suggestions. It is a cloud-based platform for Search Engine Optimization, SEO.
 
Search Engine Optimization, SEO: Content positioning in Google SERPs is crucial in the ranking of websites and consequently organic traffic. It determines the quality of websites on the internet, the reason it is an excellent social media marketing tool. If you market content about your products on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, your business benefits from the high positioning these sites enjoy from Google. These benefits translate to increased traffic flow, more leads, customers and even sales.

Search Engines: Any good marketer ought to know how to spread commercial information strategically in search engines. If he does, his business benefits from the huge data flow through search engines. The best-known search engines for now are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex. Google alone accounts for around 60% of online data traffic making it the largest search engine so far.

Interactive Video Storytelling: As most marketers very well know, designing, creating and disseminating videos with informative and interactive content is an excellent strategy to convert users into leads and customers. The best IT tools for video creation and editing include PlayPlay, Powtoon, Animoto, Magisto, Wave Video and Videoshop.

E-commerce: This is the new popular way to do business online in this age and time. Brands can now take advantage of professionally run e-commerce portals to expand their business and grow their brand. Presently, the most popular e-commerce platforms are Strong Future International SFI, ClickBank, Amazon, eBay, Magnet Monster, Unbounce and Omnisend.

Web Design: IT professionals will tell you that web design is one of the most complex tasks requiring high technical skills to create good digital visual structures. The reason it is a business for skilled webmasters. IT tools that are handy to use in web designing are, Google Web Designer, Adobe, WordPress, InVision Studio, Photoshop and ProofHub.

Really Simple Syndication, RSS Feed: This is an XML format designed to distribute content seamlessly on the web. RSS feed is an excellent automation code to widely broadcast content on the web. It is a great marketing tool which you can use to massively send frequently updated information to subscribed users interested in your products.

How to Manage Your Affiliate Program to Maximize Earnings

If you are in digital marketing, you can create some passive income through affiliate marketing. Once you have a strong online presence, affiliate marketing can become your main source of revenue or simply as supplement to your other revenue streams. This appears to be why so many people are turning to affiliate marketing to make some extra earnings online. If however you are just starting out in affiliate marketing, you must carefully decide which affiliate programs hold the right prospects for you right from the outset. Even with the requisite experience in the business, you still need to re-evaluate your approach from time to time and scout around to determine whether or not you’re really making the most of the options available to you. Expert marketers advise that if you want to maximize your earnings in the business, you must keep a keen eye on the following.

Concentrate on Marketing Products you Know

By concentrating on marketing more of the products/services that you yourself know, believe in, and even have used, it becomes much easier for you to generate valuable content that leads to conversions. That way, you can easily link with retailers within your audience and sphere of interests. That is the kind of crowd that is more likely to be compatible with the existing niche of your blog or social media presence. If you want your audience/followers to take action based upon your advice, they must trust you implicitly. That is the best way to get conversions fairly easily.

Always Compare and Contrast Options

Out there on the Internet, there are always several marketing options available and these options are always evolving and changing. There are always emerging markets too worth having a peep into. Just as some markets fall away, emerging markets usually spring up to take their place each having something unique to offer. That calls for constant comparison and contrasting to determine what’s best for you at any time based on the most lucrative options available.

Don’t Shun High-Dollar Products

Among affiliate marketers, there is usually this misconception that high-dollar items are not worth the bother. This is because such products are characteristically more difficult to promote. Yeah, they may be but the big ticket returns that follow a successful sale cannot be ignored. As a general rule therefore, it is always advisable to include a mixture of products that span the price spectrum in your affiliate strategy. That allows you to take advantage of a wide swathe of the price spectrum. Doing so allows you to cover all bases and keep your earnings optimized at all times.

Diligently Research Vendor Support

Vendor support is really vital if you want to maximize your affiliate earnings. Fact is, not all affiliate programs are created equal in terms of the support they offer to their affiliates. It therefore follows that vendors that offer the best support, help affiliate marketing the most. Even if this support is by way of a dedicated account manager who is on hand to answer any queries/concerns, or simply a responsive email or phone system, it is important to make sure you have all the support you need. Some vendors even provide marketing materials like brochures, banner ads/links for you to take advantage of. It pays off to research vendors well enough to really know what they offer before you commit. That’s yet another great way to boost your affiliate program and maximize your earnings.

How to Build an Effective Email Marketing Campaign

If you are a digital marketer and you are presently not using email marketing as a major part of your digital marketing campaigns, you are missing out on a vital and hugely effective marketing tool. Statistically, email has more users than social media, so it is a very popular marketing tool with most digital marketers around the globe. You cannot have an effective email marketing campaign without the right strategy. Your email campaign strategy cannot be right if it does not allow you to open a direct and efficient channel of communication with your customers. But first, you must take quality time to diligently build a credible email list.

 
Even though building a reliable list of email contacts can be quite challenging, without it, you cannot hope to have any successful email marketing campaigns. If however you manage to get it right, it can yield great results for your business down the road. Here is what helps the process to make your email marketing campaigns effective.
 
Consistently Craft High-Quality Content

No matter whatever else you do, your email campaign will not yield any worthwhile results if you do not produce high-quality content very regularly and consistently. Such content even if written or visual must be optimized for emails to enhance its readability. In digital marketing, content is king. The better it is, the more traffic it attracts. The more traffic it attracts, the more leads, conversions and sales you get. It is good quality content that keeps your audience engaged. The content you create is effective if it is created around things and topics within your business’ niche. That is the kind of content that helps to attract more traffic and even sigh-ups.
 
Optimize your Website

You can integrate and optimize your website with strategically placed sign-up widgets and pop-ups.  If your email list is credible, the more email contacts you have, the more emails you can send and the more audience you can convert. To be sure your emails will be effective, you can do A/B testing on them. This test is about the best way to optimize, try out different widgets or pop-ups to get more signups. With Google analytics tools, you can closely monitor and track your progress and customer responses to your email campaigns. The insights from these tools can provide you the vital info you need to redirect, tweak or rejig your marketing strategy and campaign as needed. 

Sign-up with an Email Service Provider

Aside the risk of falling foul of sending unsolicited emails, signing up with a reputable email service provider is usually great for email campaigns. A good way around sending unsolicited emails is to make sure you have express or implied permission from the recipients.  Permission is deemed implied when you currently have some kind of relationship with the contact. Express permission implies that even if you have no previous relationship with the contacts, they have permitted you to send them your marketing emails. When you optimize the user’s points of contact on your website and social media handles, permission is deemed obtained from all sign-ups/subscribers to regularly receive emails through that window.
 
Automate Your Emails

This helps to create and use drip emails effectively. It is hugely effective for timing the release of emails. It comes in very handy to send out a planned and well-executed series of emails that can keep your customers sufficiently engaged. Once you have an automated drip campaign in place, you do not have to worry anymore about sending your emails manually. The automation takes charge as programmed and you’ll then be able to send your emails at the right times and in the right forms. Anytime anyone signs up on your website, automation systems once in place will begin to send them a set of emails at programmed intervals. The info from your analytics tools will enable you to determine what works, what needs changing or what needs modifying for better effectiveness. Your email marketing campaigns tremendously benefit from these efforts.

5 Cost-Effective Ways to Harness the Power of Social Media

No question about it, social media has made tremendous impact on digital marketing. Aside the huge popularity of social media, sharing marketing messages on the platforms is relatively very easy and effective. Even though the competition in digital marketing is tough and hugely challenging, social media helps to ease things up a bit for many marketers. With over 4 billion active users on social media at the moment with most logging into at least one of the platforms daily, digital marketers cannot ask for a more fertile marketing environment. The icing on the cake is that marketing therein is hugely cost-effective. If you visualize social media as some kind of Public Square where everyone interacts freely, you don’t really need to spend any money for this interaction since it is an open space for everyone. However, standing out and getting noticed in such free space for everyone has its own challenges. Marketers can always weave their ways around these challenges if they have the right marketing strategies and are consistent enough to make a real difference out there. That too is not at a great expense.

 

Here are 5 cost-effective ways to market on social media without stressing yourself financially.

1. Go Live on Videos: Marketing videos are very easy to make and easy to deploy on social media. You make more impact as a marketer when your audience hears directly from the “horse’s mouth.” This impact is more when you endeavor to go live on the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Marketing with live videos on these platforms is a great way for your audience to meet you live. That is hugely impacting and it is a free social media feature to boot.

2. Pay Genuine Attention to Your Audience: Make a habit of talking to and listening to your audience. By doing so, they feel cared for and do reciprocate as well. There is no question about it. Everyone likes attention particularly when that attention looks genuine. If and when your social media followers feel like you are giving them genuine attention, they will key into your content and support you. You can practically demonstrate this attention by devoting quality time to read comments/inquiries on your posts and respond to them all. By doing so, you are showing real concern and attention to what bugs your audience. They reciprocate and respond to your marketing messages as if it is person to person real time. That can be hugely impactful.

3. Be Consistent: There is no better way to show consistency than to show up every day. If you do, your audience will like and appreciate you better. Consistency helps you to build a connection with your target audience and imprint your brand in their minds. It makes you easily recognizable as a brand allowing others to find and notice you online with relative ease. Aside making regular and qualitative social media posts, you can ensure consistency in your social media profiles if you set them up using the same avatars, logos, descriptions and tone to make for easy recognition.

4. Make your Posts Creative and Interactive: Out there on social media, everyone is making a post every minute of the day. That is really a very huge trove of posts. For your posts to stand out from the crowd, you must endeavor to be creative in crafting your posts and making them interactive. No question about it, lots of people love the creativity offered by social media stories and marketing pitches. Always have that at the back of your mind when designing your posts particularly when such posts involve product launches, discounts, price adjustments, promos, and special announcements. If you are so inclined, you can post special snippets of your day-to-day life at work to give your audience some behind-the-scenes ideas about what you do and how you do it in your business. You can create quizzes, a poll, host a Q&A session and even make jokes to attract and engage the attention of your audience. These are all free but very effective marketing tools on social media.

5. Incorporate Hashtags Generously: Marketers use hashtags as little communities of content online. They do so by pairing their content with the right and appropriate hashtags. When they do this, the content automatically becomes part of these specific communities. That helps the content with very cheap online visibility. When your content is appropriately tagged, hashtags have the power and authority to help multiply your engagement provided they are correctly used. Many online searchers rely on hashtags to locate posts online that are relevant to their interests. That makes the use of hashtags some fantastic, cost-effective and incredible way to get your business noticed online. As a marketer, you can either create your own unique hashtags, or you latch on to any hashtags relevant to your business and content. Whichever you use, be sure it makes sense and relevant enough to help online searchers locate your business and your content.

Wrapping Up

Social media is now very deep and still developing. The reason digital marketers cannot afford to overlook social media in their marketing activities. If you are a creative marketer wanting to cut back on marketing costs, there is a lot you can do to leverage social media. The foregoing tips are very handy in that quest. Even if these tips will help you to save on some marketing money, to get good results, you must invest some more of your time and efforts. In the long term, it is worth the while for you to put some more efforts into finding the right tools, resources, and platforms that will help you build a sustainable online marketing strategy at minimal financial costs.

How to Choose Marketing Automation Software for Your Business

If you are a digital marketer and you are looking to save time and money, think marketing automation for your marketing campaigns. With the right marketing automation software, you can expand your marketing reach better, faster and cheaper. However, settling for the right marketing automation software poses very peculiar challenges because of the many options available on the internet.

To choose the best marketing automation software for your business, first find out if it answers the following business questions.

Can it provide an easier and more efficient way for you to market on different channels?

Does it have the ability to nurture leads?

Does it have a better integration with current sales and CRM systems?

Does it have the ability to send targeted and personalized marketing campaigns?

If the answer to all the above questions is YES, you can then look at some more key considerations like:

Ease of Use: This is very important. The ability to use any software easily has a bearing on the results it delivers. If you work with a team, can you and your team adopt the software easily? Or will it require lots of specialized training and configuration before your team can use the software?

Cost Element: Naturally, no marketer can afford to overlook any cost element. What you pay for the software and how you pay is important. Does it have a subscription plan for monthly/ annual payments? Or it is simply pay per user?

Scalability: Every business expects to grow. Will it be possible to scale up the services of the software in tandem with your business growth? Does the software offer sufficient features for your business needs as designed?

Mobile Capabilities: Is the software mobile-friendly? How well does the web app work when viewed from a mobile device? Does it have apps for iOS and Android mobile devices?

Integrations: How well does the software integrate with the CRM and email marketing tools that you are already using in your business?

These are the main considerations that will enable any marketing automation software you settle for to give the best for your marketing automation campaigns particularly when you factor in the direct marketing results you expect it to deliver. Below are some essential marketing technicalities it must be able to deliver on:

Email marketing
Landing-page creation
Social media management
Customer segmentation
Lead management and scoring
Form builder
Full funnel analytics
A/B Testing

Arising from the foregoing it becomes easier to decide what marketing automation software your business needs. Next is to make informed choices from among the many options available on the internet. You can check out some of the most popular marketing automation software like, Keap, Autopilot, Hubspot and Hatchbuck which many experienced digital marketers like to recommend and see how they can help to boost your marketing automation campaigns.

Digital Marketing Strategies that Get Steady Results

Every smart digital marketer always wants strategies that get good results. These results come by way of driving leads intermittently to their landing pages, websites, and social channels. Digital marketers know that most prospects already shop and work online. Strategies that really work relate to finding these prospects, grabbing their attention, and delivering value to them in digital space. Here is what you do to get these results.

Upgrade Your Website Design and Content

Every digital marketer who wants to get good results must acquire and design a website that is user-friendly, loads fast and optimized with specially chosen keywords. It must be aesthetically appealing and attractive to boot. Such website must be informative, visually appealing, and consistent. In addition, the website content must provide all the necessary information people need to make a decision. Such decisions are enhanced with the use interactive web elements like product recommendations, quizzes or video demos as well as a call to action, CTA. These help each visitor to know what to do next when they land on your business website.

Clearly Identify Your Target Audience

Identifying your target audience very clearly is one great way to market to them effectively and efficiently. You can develop effective strategies for doing this by using analytics web tools to your advantage. With these tools, you can always review the demographics of your target audience, analyze the web traffic of competitors, study your social media analytics and Google analytics, read reviews of similar products or services, send surveys to existing customers, use social listening tools to find trends. All these will enable you to understand fully your target audience’s behaviors. With this knowledge, you can design and deploy effective strategies to deliver ads messages to the right audience by way of various marketing media.

Provide Only Quality Content

In digital marketing, content is king. This content must be informative, educational and in some cases even entertaining. It is such quality content most marketers usually go for. They package it in different formats like image sliders, downloadable PDFs, videos and eye-catching infographics to mention a few.

Popularize Your Brand with Social Media Marketing

Nowadays, social media is where nearly everybody is. Marketers now take their businesses there to find customers. Gaining traction on social media is somewhat tough, but you’ll no doubt see a remarkable increase in website traffic once you get your business on social media. That is why smart marketers use a combination of organic and paid techniques to get the much-needed traffic. With a regular posting schedule of informative and interactive content on social media, you can boost post shares and get fans emotionally invested via conversations on your posts. That translates to good traffic back to your business website.

Market Widely with Video Content

With over 80% of consumers saying they prefer seeing more marketing videos, marketing with video content is increasing in popularity daily not only because of their huge effectiveness as marketing tools. When marketers combine video advertisements with targeted social content, consumers usually cannot help but notice. That translates to good traffic. For effectiveness, marketers have devised many ways to roll out video campaigns and repurpose video assets for different platforms. Common formats used by marketers include video ads, presentation videos, explainer/demonstration videos, sales videos, testimonial videos etc etc. On social media, marketers can effectively even use video content to simulate face-to-face interactions. Live videos on Facebook or Instagram for instance allow marketers to speak directly to their audiences and answer their questions/inquiries real-time. That helps traffic.

Deploy Search Engine Optimization, SEO Techniques

SEO is an excellent way to maintain the web presence of your business, keep your content relevant, and attract good organic traffic from search engines. When marketers focus on specific keywords relating their business niche, they can deliberately create educational, informative, and brand-relevant content with their customers in mind. By sharing high-quality content widely, search engine algorithms help to boost your website on their SERPs. That makes it easier for consumers to search for and find your brand with relative ease.

Design and Launch Email Marketing Campaigns

Among digital marketers, email remains a very reliable way to reach potential customers. If you have email as a campaign strategy, you can deliberately create campaigns specific to certain demographics and buying stages. You can automate your emails and add behavioral triggers to ensure that every message contains content relevant to your targeted recipients. You can use emails to send exclusive offers, promos, share updates, or simply say hi to your customers. These activities help with traffic, good traffic back to your business website.

Best Digital Marketing Platforms your Business Needs

Every digital marketer must know exactly from which platforms they need to launch their marketing campaigns online. Depending on your type of business, most of the platforms have something unique to them which can aid digital marketing campaigns for good results. That is where some experience counts to know exactly where to be to get your business in front of your target audience.

Here are some of the platforms many experienced digital marketers recommend.


 
Facebook

With around 1.5 billion active users, facebook commands such a huge audience around the world which digital marketers cannot afford to ignore. It is sociable, easy to use, easy for sharing and hugely popular. A good content out on facebook can easily go viral to the benefit of any campaigns. You can easily post written content, photos/graphics and videos. Get your business a facebook page and see what difference that can make in your digital marketing campaigns.

Twitter

Twitter is a short blog platform which is becoming increasingly popular to pass short promotional messages to a huge audience which you have built up over time. It parades diverse demographics where social and witty writers are very much at home turning out large numbers of short messages 24/7. Information can go viral on Twitter pretty quickly and targeted campaigns can rely on hashtags on the platform. Many Twitter users can share your content easily if it is sufficiently informative, witty, entertaining and or intriguing.

Instagram

Instagram is popularly known as an images/photos/videos marketing platform. Celebrities and popular sports personalities can help products promotion by using their pages on the platform for endorsements. The platform has varied and diverse demographics making it easy to target customers and potential customers with relatively good results. Digital marketing opportunities on Instagram are very huge and marketers who know how are using it to get very good results from their promotional efforts. Instagram is one great place to market businesses related to clothing/fashion brands.

TikTok

TikTok now appears to be a new kid on the block of social media. It is not yet as popular as facebook or Twitter when it comes to social media preferences but it is holding its own and growing fast. Content posted on the platform always stands a very good chance of going viral as well. If you are able to churn out good content on the platform regularly and consistently, you have a very good chance of attracting very valuable attention to your brand/business. For marketers involved in a clothing brand or real estate, TikTok is a great place to market your business. 

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is seen as a platform for serious business persons and professionals. It allows every account holder on the platform to interact and behave as they would ordinarily do in a formal office environment. People sign on to the platform primarily to further their careers or their businesses. On the platform, you can promote any business to like minds and to persons who are looking to do business within the same niche as yours. LinkedIn is one great place to market any businesses related to real estate.

Snapchat

As for demographics, Snapchat appeals more to younger persons because it leans more towards entertainment and gist. If you are targeting young people, you can push out very entertaining content daily to promote your brand image. If properly handled, Snapchat can become a veritable social media platform your brand/business needs to reinforce its brand excitement and create lifetime value for itself.