8 Cool Ways to Make Money on Pinterest

For most digital marketers, making money on social media has become routine. Many use Pinterest to indirectly promote their products/services and their businesses are better for it. The reason is, Pinterest isn’t just another social media platform like all others. It is much more than that since it serves as some kind of search engine too. The reason it provides ample opportunities for marketers to make cool money directly on the platform. Pinterest works by allowing users to create pins, which are usually images or videos with links to outside sites. By leveraging these links, you can learn how to make money on Pinterest. But first, you must have a good plan how to go about making money on Pinterest. Next is to sign up for a Pinterest business account. After that, you must factor in how you’ll direct other pinners to your website or another destination website where you can earn an income and boom you are in business.

If you have interest in social media marketing and you are desirous to make some money out of it, find below some tested and credible ways to make money on Pinterest.

1. Partner with Brands

Why not? It is brands that must pay commissions for your marketing services, the reason you must partner with them. If you have a business account on Pinterest, you can directly partner with brands to promote their products/services for shoppable idea pins. The strategy works well if you already have a lot of followers and traffic on your pins. To monetize Pinterest in this way, you must create rates you’ll charge brands for single pins and other content. That is where the earnings come from.

2. Sell Pinterest Templates

Millions of Pinterest users rely on the site to bring traffic to their online content or products. The platform is designed in such a way that only certain types of images and design elements are more likely to perform well on the platform. Very typical and commonly used examples are eye-catching pins that include an image with text over it. If you have templates that include the basic format of these images, it is easy for your customers to simply insert their own images and headlines and you earn money from selling these templates.

3. Offer Pinterest Consulting Services

Consultants make money by selling their knowledge to others. So, if you have the knowledge and experience for creating your own successful Pinterest strategy, you can offer it to brands as Pinterest consulting services and you earn money from it. However, for this work, you must first explore creative ways to demonstrate your ability to promote your own website using the visual search engine of the platform. You can then market to other Pinterest users looking to make money with their Pinterest strategies.

4. Teach Pinterest Marketing Online

Not every marketer knows how to take full advantage of Pinterest to earn money. If you have this knowledge, you can teach your strategies to other online business owners in exchange for a fee. This is a bit similar to consulting services in some ways. To attract patronage, you can launch your own site and create an online course with various modules to serve various needs. You may in addition decide to even include it with content about other social media platforms or marketing strategies depending on how wide the audience you are targeting is.

5. Drive Traffic to Your E-Commerce Store

If you own an e-commerce store and you sell physical products, Pinterest can be a perfect way to bring in more sales. What you need do is to create pins that include photos and links to the products you are selling. These pins can help to raise brand awareness and consequently bring more interested buyers to your website.

6. Become a Pinterest Virtual Assistant

Busy executives always need the services of Virtual Assistants and they pay handsomely for the services. On Pinterest, virtual assistants can run accounts for and on behalf of other users. As a Virtual Assistant, you can help create pins, promote them, and schedule content for brands. To earn money as a Pinterest Virtual Assistant, you need to create your own account to showcase your abilities. You can then market your services on your website or make contacts with your favorite brands to offer them your services and you make money from rendering the services.

7. Include Affiliate Links in Pins

Including affiliate links in pins is a proven and effective digital marketing strategy. On Pinterest affiliate marketing, this simply involves creating pins that include a direct affiliate link to relevant products/services you are selling. If and when other users click the links from your pin, they’ll be directed to a site where they can make purchases. When that happens, you earn a commission from each sale. But first, you must take steps to sign up as an affiliate with your favorite brands. Next is to embed and sprinkle in your content the right affiliate links to the products/services you are selling. You should be more particular about this on the content you consider extremely valuable to your audience. That is what helps to get more leads and conversions.

8. Drive Traffic to Your Blog

If you are a good content writer or blogger, you can use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog website. Increased traffic directly helps to increase blogging income particularly if you are using sponsored posts or affiliate links to monetize your site. The more traffic your blog gets through Pinterest, the higher your chances of running a successful and profitable blog.

Best Tips to Manage a Blog Successfully

Digital marketers see blogging as a very effective marketing strategy, the reason they embark on it. Many however do not realize that a blog is only as successful as the management of time and content put into it. You cannot simply write content and say you have a blog if it is not widely read. Your blog can only prove successful if it routinely brings in traffic to your website and helps convert readers into customers. If your blog is unable to do these things, it is simply an unsuccessful blog. It is quite a frustrating experience for bloggers if their blogs are not successful. Making your blog successful is hugely dependent on how well it is managed. This management is all about planning and knowing who you want to read your content, and what you want them to do afterward. Here are some great tips to help you set up and manage your blog successfully.

Find Your Niche

A good blog must have something interesting and important to write about. That is why you must settle for a well-defined niche. It is on this niche you can write content to attract readers who may translate to customers at some point. Of course your chosen niche must have a clear relationship with the products/services you are selling. This niche could be in form of a topic, industry, product, or service. You must write and develop content about all things related to the niche. Doing so consistently is one great way to connect with your customers and to attract the attention of search engines like Google.

Carefully Choose Your Platform

Your blogging platform is as important as the blog itself. You may choose to blog out of your business website or some free blogging options many of which are out there online. Even if you already have an established website of your own, you can still have a platform that will easily integrate into your website. One very popular example of such platforms is WordPress that has the advantage of making available to you lots of free blogging tools, themes, memes, graphics, SEO and even blogging tutorials and guidebooks. This arrangement allows you to have a blog that is managed independently, but shows up on your website seamlessly. That is great for blogging if you ask me.

Incorporate Images

Good images on blogs are like traffic magnets because most online users love images. However, any images on blogs must have real quality to be helpful. With this as your guide, you can carefully select and use images based on their quality and relevance to your niche. You can settle for high quality photos, graphics, infographics and videos. On this score, the more the merrier! Most successful blogs on the internet feature images that break up the text and add visual interest. This is a great way to expand your horizons, add interest, and alert search engines like Google that you are incorporating interesting media elements in your website/blog. If they notice, you get more organic traffic as a result.

Give Value Consistently to Your Readers

Content is king in blogging business. The more high quality content you produce for your readers, the better for your blog. Expert bloggers opine that one of the reasons why many personal blogs aren’t successful is because they don’t offer any real value to the reader. With this in mind, you must not only write about your opinion on current events even if hugely interesting and entertaining, but your blog should also offer value to the most readers possible. That is what helps to get the traffic you need. Whatever topic you chose to write on in your niche, your opinion, research, and insight into related topics in the niche is a great way to bring value to readers.

Incorporate Marketing Strategies

In digital marketing parlance, a blog is a great content marketing tool. You get better results from blogging if you are able to incorporate effective marketing strategies into the blog. Most business bloggers use their blogs as good marketing tools. They rely on their blogs to help drive traffic and get customers. Depending on the products you are selling and your blogging niche, you can incorporate some of the following marketing strategies into the management of your own blog for best results. 

•    Encourage interaction with your readers by asking for comments/suggestions.
•    Make interacting easy for users.
•    Leave valuable comments on other blogs/forums with a link to your own blog.
•    Contribute intelligently to e-zines, online news sources, and other reputable sources.
•    Avoid the temptation to respond harshly to negativity or criticism.
•    Write more on topics that are trending in search engines.
•    Portray yourself as offering solutions all the time.
•    Do not unduly delay in your responses to inquiries/comments.
•    Be absolutely honest and truthful in your responses.

Last Line

If you are getting a blog started or you want to revamp one, the foregoing tips from SEO experts can be of immense help to you if you are desirous to succeed in blogging. If you follow these tips, you could be well on your way to starting and managing a successful blog. Once you get the blog going with quality regular content, the results will start coming in through increased readership, interactions and leads, and with time, customers as well. That’s blogging success no doubt. 

6 Ways to Improve Domain Authority for your Website

Domain authority is a technical marketing metric digital marketers use to rate their websites. It appears to have first been developed by Moz but it is now widely used by many SEO tools. The rating helps website administrators predict where their website will appear on SERPs. The higher the rating, the better the chances that a website will be rated highly on SERPs because the Domain Authority (DA) of a website is based on a range of factors which search engines rely on to determine search rankings. Marketers can by deliberate efforts therefore improve the domain authority of their websites through these factors.

Here are 6 simple ways to improve the DA of a business website.

1. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Some Google reports now attribute up to 60% of web traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s some huge chunk of traffic no serious marketer can afford to lose out on. What to do? Just make your website mobile-friendly enough to give the site a very good chance to benefit from some of that valuable traffic. By doing so, you will not only make the user experience on your website better, you will also improve its domain authority. You can improve the mobile-friendliness of your website through its design and layout which many experienced webmasters are not likely to ignore in this age and time if you are unable to do it yourself.

2. Increase Social Engagement

Most website owners know that social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at these days doing one thing or another 24/7. Exploring ways to increase social engagement of your website therefore becomes highly imperative. If for instance any web page of your website has been liked, shared, and commented on several times on social media, that page is more likely to get organic links to your website as well as more branded searches. That helps its ranking a great deal. If you use social media to interact fully with users interested in your content, it will improve your DA. An improved DA helps to drive more traffic and improves your search ranking.
 
3. Improve Page Speed

Page speed is one of the vital factors contributing to the use-friendliness of your website. Page speed impacts where your content ranks in search results, which in turn impacts your DA and Bounce Rate. You can do some in-house tests on your website to determine its loading speed. If for instance your web pages consistently take more than two or three seconds to load, it is a pointer that you have a problem. You can by deliberate action improve loading speed of your website pages by taking a look at the following factors:

Check the website design and hosting provider.
Ensure there are not too many widgets and plugins.
Optimize your Theme or Content Management System.
Make sure the Images and Video files are not unduly too large.

If widgets, ads, or large images and video files are responsible for slowing down your website speed, you may choose to remove them altogether if you cannot reduce their sizes enough to improve the loading speed of the site.

4. Write Linkable Quality Content

Writing linkable content is one of the best ways to get backlinks. If you can create high quality content on your website that other websites will want to link to, that’s linkable content. Such content if SEO optimized can organically generate links on its own. You attract backlinks to your website by regularly providing original, useful, and relevant content in your niche/industry. That is the type of content that most likely generates good backlinks, improve your search ranking, and boost your DA score. Some of the best linkable content most popular with marketers are, Product reviews, Video content, Long-form blog posts,  How-to guides and informative web pages,  Original images, visuals, and infographics among others.

5. Encourage Guest Posting

If you encourage guest posting, you can determine where you want your backlinks to be. If your content is good enough and linkable, it helps to improve your DA since DA calculators do take into account the quantity and quality of backlinks. That makes it imperative that you must encourage only backlinks from legitimate, authoritative, and reputable websites. If you guest post on such websites and leave a link back to your website, it helps your DA score. Inevitably, consistently writing quality guest posts generates good backlinks. Such posts further help you to build highly beneficial relationships with other authoritative websites. Your relevant content out there on such websites shows users that you’re some kind of expert/authority in your industry/niche. That on its own helps to improve your website search ranking and it is good for business.

6. Improve Internal Linking and Backlinks

Internal links are links on your website that link to other pages on the site. They help search engines and other users to navigate the site. Backlinks are links to your website from other sites. Both types of links have marketing and search advantages the reason they are both vital to your DA and search ranking. However, backlinks are not that easy to get since it is not your website that’s providing them. What you do on your website helps to get them from other sites. So, if you consistently write high quality linkable content and guest posts, you can be rest assured that you’ll get high-quality backlinks as a consequence.

Last Line

The above steps will not only help to boost the DA score for your website, they’ll also make your website more user-friendly and enhance your search ranking. Irrespective of whether your aim is to improve your search ranking, optimize your website for users, or compare yourself to your competitors, improving your domain authority, DA is one useful metric you cannot afford to ignore on your website. However, DA only predicts success but does not guarantee it. But, it offers a useful signpost to measure your website with. Website success depends on some other factors among which DA is only an important one. 

4 Must-Do Things to Attract more Prospects to your Digital Marketing

Digital marketers can be extremely busy particularly through certain seasons. That at times prevents them from really thinking through the digital marketing tactics they really need to generate leads and sales. If these tactics do not allow them to better connect with prospects online, their effectiveness is greatly impaired. That is not a desirable situation. The way around this scenario is to deliberately invest a little more time and attention in their digital marketing strategies by doing more of the following activities to help them connect better with prospective customers.

1. Reputation Management

A good online reputation translates to good online business. Your online business reputation begins from the design and layout of your business website. That is where you put out marketing content that attracts reviews. Major search engines like Google really care about business reviews and by the way so are your customers and prospective customers too. Online reviews are reputed to drive local pack rankings for businesses through SEO. Getting ranked high on Google SERPs is hugely dependent on these reviews. Review ratings are the biggest drivers of clicks in local SERPs of Google. So, managing your online reputation is inclusive of all digital activities you have to undertake repeatedly to ensure your business website makes it high in these SERPs. For a business owner, it helps your business to respond to every single one of these reviews in a timely manner. If your replies show some empathy and care, it helps your online reputation a great deal. How well you handle reviews can help build trust with your customers and that translates to good business.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Habitually, major search engines like Google are constantly updating their algorithms. These algorithms help search engines to look for certain qualities within websites to determine if the sites are well suited to answer a searcher’s queries. To take advantage of this technicality, you must keep your website up to date with proper SEO to show search engines that your website is game for search queries. That however requires a bit of investment of your time and resources to get it done so as to keep it in a state of full compliance at all times. Doing so allows search engines to rank your site high in their SERPs to enable it benefit from the organic traffic search engines can send to it. That is a very valuable type of traffic and it is free to boot. For best results, it is recommended you supplement a strong SEO on your website with some other traffic strategies.

3. Social Media Marketing

If your business is not on social media, take steps to get it there as soon as convenient. Social media can be great for your business particularly in terms of getting traffic, online authority and reputation management. Since more and more people are spending time on social media, it is now one great place for digital marketing particularly within the very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes. It is smart marketing therefore to have a social media marketing strategy for your business and to devote a portion of your digital marketing budget to social media advertising as a supplement.

4. Paid Digital Advertising

To set a strong foundation for your digital advertisements, first you must get SEO right on your website.  That is what tells search engines that your website contains what web searchers think they’re going to find. Pay-per-click, PPC ads, one of the most popular digital paid ads works with SEO to get specially targeted traffic back to your website. Digital advertising requires marketers paying to show their ads to internet users on various networks such as Google, Social media platforms and Microsoft. These paid digital ads come in two main categories, Search ads and Display ads. Both are huge traffic pullers when paired with data science and internet technology which allow you to prudently allocate your digital marketing spend to the highest performing campaigns and advertising channels as determined from your analytics results.

Why Email Marketing is Important to Your Small Business

 

To some digital marketers, email marketing now appears “old school” but it still gets some great results. Email marketing is not only convenient, it is also cost-effective particularly for small business owners who are characteristically low on marketing budget most for the time. Crafting effective email campaigns requires some knowledge and skills. Once you get it right, the results are amazing. That is why email marketing is so important to small business owners who operate on low marketing budgets.

 

No doubt other messaging channels are also very important to business owners depending on their types of businesses. Notwithstanding that, email remains the main channel of communication for small businesses. Business owners effectively use email messages to lead consumers through the whole sales and marketing funnel, converting them to customers in the process. They rely on emails to assist their website visitors to interact with their apps, engage them more, and consequently increase their brand loyalty. Without a doubt, email marketing is one of the most efficient channels for customer retention. Ambitious marketers never lose sight of that fact. There is some credible research report indicating that “a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit” Profit motive is what largely drives most small business owners and anything they do that helps them to increase profits, gets done more and better. That is the lot of email marketing.

To create effective email campaigns, marketers must pay special attention to two big areas of crafting email templates and handling email recipients. Experienced marketers can manually build email templates fairly easily. However, to save time and to guarantee efficiency and effectiveness, delegating your database management and sending logic to a dedicated and reputable email marketing service can also be considered.

If you resolve to follow DIY route, please pay attention to the following tips. Before you start creating your email campaigns, decide firmly on the following:
Your objectives/motives
The goals you want to achieve
Your recipient audience
Your type of marketing messages
The role great content will play
How to segment your audience

This information will help you to make the all-important decision on the type of email campaigns your business needs. Your emails even if largely technical must be transactional in messaging to be effective. For as long as they have marketing, branding, and even sales purposes, they’re great to form part of your marketing and product strategies. Meaning? For your emails to be effective for proper branding and sales, they must have well-crafted templates and carefully worded and optimized messages with great aesthetics appeal to boot.

How to Market Online with Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find you online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. Irrespective of whatsoever you are marketing online, be it a tangible good/product or even if you are offering a service, you need a good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. By doing so, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links.

 

Every search engine may have its own proprietary algorithm but most tend to follow the one developed by Google since Google appears to be the largest search engine at the moment judging from the high percentage of searches attributable to it. Even though the exact components of the Google algorithm and the weighting factors assigned to each component may not be very well known to marketers, SEO experts spend a lot of time and effort conducting experiments to try to determine what these factors are and how they affect the weightings/rankings. What is well known is that links showing up on the first page of the search results on SERPs tend to garner most of the clicks especially those among the top three results. That really counts for something in SEO marketing. Web searchers click on these links first and the beneficiary websites get more organic traffic. Marketers must therefore place more emphasis on SEO with a very keen eye on what SEO experts believe are some of the most impactful factors/activities that determine website ranking. These are:

1. Website security through HTTPS protocols.

2. Gaining backlinks and linking to authoritative online sources, which act as a validation of your content.

3. Mobile-friendliness.

4. Site speed.

5. Providing a positive user experience.

6. Domain age.

7. Social signals, such as clicks from social and other forms of engagement.

8. Producing valuable content on a consistent basis for your website.

Besides these, there are other technical activities which play a role in getting found online. These activities have to do with the choice of and use of specific keywords throughout your website. A key SEO requirement is that the keywords you choose to represent your content must also match closely with user intent as reflected by the words used and the query. These are huge technical matters which may best be handled by SEO experts.

Because of the huge technical challenges in SEO, most business owners/marketers do hire the services of SEO experts to help them out. If however as a business owner you have the education, experience, the right SEO software and the knowhow to do it yourself, all well and good. This option may be less expensive and more effective to meet your business needs. If you do not know how to handle SEO for your website, you are best advised to approach professional agencies or individual SEO experts to help handle it for you. A good SEO on your website is very important and may even be indispensable to the success of your overall online marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing Strategies that Currently Excite Marketers

Every digital marketer wants to get his business out there on the internet to get traffic, leads, sales and customers. When it comes to planning their digital marketing strategies, most digital marketers start by identifying and defining their broader business goals. They know that it is essential to have a clear picture of these goals as they create their marketing strategies to support and reach these goals. In reality, digital marketers do try all kinds of marketing gimmicks to give them some advantages over their competitors. That is understandable in marketing point of view. Apart from knowing and working with strategies that tend to give the best results, digital marketers use a combination of paid and free digital marketing practices to achieve some of these results. For example, a Facebook or any other social media page may be excellent, but to maximize its effectiveness, paid advertising is necessary. What matters most which must be at the core of any marketing strategy is that marketers should be creating quality online content to attract and convert customers. Doing so consistently helps to increase sales and business growth. Depending on the type of products/services you are marketing, you must do with one or more and even all the following components of digital marketing to get the best results:

•    Google My Business, GMB
•    Content Marketing
•    Business Website
•    Search Engine Optimization, SEO
•    Search Engine Marketing, SEM
•    Affiliate Marketing
•    Email Marketing
•    Online PR
•    Marketing and Sales Funnels
•    Social Media Marketing
•    Marketing Automation
•    Pay-Per-Click, PPC

As expert marketers like to advise, in digital marketing, results are the bottom line. What gets these results is what is attractive to smart digital marketers. Most digital marketers do practically the same things in their online digital marketing activities. Nearly all marketers do these same things daily but marketers who get the best results are those who tend to do these common things differently. That is what tends to make the huge differences in results and in addition to the deliberate choices they make in relation to the above digital marketing activities.

Effective Social Media Marketing Platforms

Do you know why digital marketers love social media? The reasons are many but it is mostly because of the huge popularity of social media platforms and the relative ease with which info is shared on the platforms, among many other benefits. Most social media platforms allow you to run ads on their site. For that reason, marketers can easily build awareness for their products and brands even when they have a relatively small audience and reach. The primary goal of social media marketing is to increase brand awareness and establish trust through social interaction with the target audience, to generate customer leads and direct website traffic. A combination of social selling and influencer marketing allows digital marketers to take maximum advantage of social media to promote their brands and grow their customer base. No serious digital marketer can afford to ignore that.

Social media platforms popular with digital marketers include:

Facebook
YouTube
Messenger
Snapchat
Pinterest
TikTok
Twitter
LinkedIn
Quora
Instagram

These social media platforms are free to join and hugely effective for digital marketing. Depending on what you are marketing, and the type of audience you want to market to, there are some differentials among the platforms that should affect your choices. Each social media platform has a point of difference, and its main user-base depends on that. Some have their own in-house analytics tools that you can use to build your own marketing strategy to meet your marketing needs. For digital marketers, things keep getting better on social media.

Top 5 Ways to Develop Attractive Web Content

Digital marketers always want traffic, real organic traffic to help them with leads and sales. Good content is what marketers depend on to attract the much-needed traffic. Most marketers worry about how to develop attractive web content to get traffic. Developing and marketing with an attractive content is what helps marketers to get good traffic and to sell well in global cyberspace.  A good content is always deliberately planned, and developed, for it to be attractive to web users. Here is what to do.

1. Have a Plan

It is not just how your website looks but the content you put in it that helps it to attract traffic. You need a good plan to develop such content, not just about your website. You must expand the content and keep it fresh and relevant at all times. It must always be up-to-date as well to enable it stay in the rankings. For this to happen, your plan must include posting good blogs daily, weekly or at least once a month depending on the business niche you are blogging about. That way, you can easily stay in touch with your readers, educate and provide very useful information to your customers on what they need to know about your business. That helps your website to gain more traffic. 

2. Work with Professionals

No matter how experienced you are as a digital marketer, you may not know everything. You may need assistance from professionals occasionally. No matter how intelligent and educated you are, if you are not trained and experienced enough in writing for the online audience you need to work with professionals. Writing for the online audience requires specialized skills that many marketers do not have. To be attractive and readable, a good web content needs the services of professional web designers, content creators and or graphic artists to help create attractive web pages. With experience, many marketers are able to do most of these services on their own and may not need hiring professionals any more.
 
3. Adopt Relevant Keywords

For your content to be attractive to search engines and be found online, it must be embedded with relevant keywords/phrases. You must first find out using online tools, which words relate to people searching for your type of business. Use these keywords generously but cleverly on your website and throughout your content. That is what will make the content attractive to search engines. Search engines will in turn send organic traffic to your website. The better your website ranks in terms of keyword density proportions, the better it will score in ranks of search results of SERPs. The better organic traffic it receives.

4. Market with Influencers

Influencers are a delight to know in cyberspace. Many have some kind of cult-like following online. Their followers rely on their endorsements and even say-so to make their buy decisions. That is what marketers rely on to push their products using influencers. Procuring the services of an influencer to sponsor your products in a few posts has the potential to reach thousands of potential customers particularly on social media where influencers command tremendous following. If you know favorite influencers who can help promote your content, you can approach them through influencer agencies if you are unable to approach them directly.

5. Target Your Locations

You can deliberately create blog posts or you dedicate a web page to each location that your business wishes to service. This may be a bit tricky to do but it gets very attractive results because the wider a spread you have of service areas, the greater the number of people your web content will “arrest.” The more searchers your business attracts, the better it is for your inbound traffic. It is smart marketing therefore to, purposely dedicate a webpage of your blog to a town, city, or region, in order to catch the attention of people actively searching for your product in that area.

How Blogging on Your Website Helps to Attract More Traffic

It now appears most digital marketers are deliberately taking to blogging mostly for traffic reasons. Blogs have become the single most important elements on a website that can generate the most traffic. Most digital marketers tend to blog about any topic of their choice in which they have something useful to say that readers are willing to read and learn from. Blogs prey on the curiosity of such readers to attract traffic back to the blog in return.

Here is what your website stands to gain if you have an active blog on the site.

Opportunities to Gain Traffic Organically

Most online surfers are always fired by unlimited curiosity. This is what an authoritative and informative blog tends to satisfy online. Adding more and more authoritative information to your blog is akin to weaving a very elaborate web of information online. Search engines never fail to notice this. As you add more pages to your blog, search engines note the keywords you are using. They send searchers using similar keywords to your website as a way of helping to satisfy their curiosity. That translates to very useful organic traffic.

Better Search Engines Indexing

Google reports that websites with good blogs tend to rank better in its SERPs than websites without a blog. The reason is simple. Search engines “deal” on information to remain relevant and useful. Blogging on a website supplies this information in form of content continuously. Search engines love that, the reason they send more readers who are looking for information to such sites. Therefore, running a blog on your website gives you more chances to have your site indexed by search engines. Better indexing translates to better ranking and better organic traffic.

Better Use of Organic Keywords and Phrases

Keywords and phrases embedded in the content of blogs help search engines in indexing such blogs. Once indexed, search engines send people searching online using the keywords and phrases to the blogs. That means more and more people will start coming to your blog to read your content and in the process they discover and explore the rest of your website. As you add more content on your blog, you populate it with more keywords and phrases. These keywords and phrases impress search engines and help to attract more readers. When you add a blog to your website, and you add more and more content to it regularly, it gets populated more and more with keywords and phrases. These keywords and phrases lead back to your web properties and serve as a big bonus in terms of inbound traffic.

Opportunities for More Links and Mentions
 
Blogging on your website with interesting content that inevitably attracts some citations and mentions culminate in some super valuable links trove. If your blog manages to assert industry authority online, other bloggers refer to it and like to link with it. That helps to grow its positive association and reputation online. Commenting on your blogs gives your readers a great opportunity to interact with you and delve deeper into the thoughts that you share. It gives them the chance to share theirs as well. Guest-posting and even contests are other things that you can do with your blog to help keep your content fresh. Doing so helps to generate more links, comments and mentions that inevitably help to increase your inbound traffic.

Provides Reasons for Returning Visitors

Even if you are selling products on your website or you just want to keep seeing your visitor count go up, a blog is one of the best tools that you can use to get repeat and new visitors to your website. As you write new posts to grow your content, you will have more and more people who enjoy your content come over to your website. For as long as you endeavor to create content that is visually beautiful, functionally impressive, or informatively sound on your blog, readers will be coming over to it. When visitors come to a blog they enjoy, most will want to come back. Looking back at archive posts on the blog, most visitors can have an idea when to expect the next post. That entices them to return to your blog repeatedly. That translates to valuable traffic.  

8 Digital Mobile Marketing Trends To Look Out For in 2021 and Beyond

Resulting from the astronomical increase in the use of mobile devices worldwide, digital mobile marketing has also increased in popularity among enterprising digital marketers. Most of these marketers now have digital mobile marketing as very important components of their overall marketing strategies. With mobile devices now accounting for about half of web traffic worldwide, mobile marketing continues to grow in tandem. This trend is likely to continue in the coming years with even a predictable increase in popularity. That is exactly what experienced digital marketers are predicting. For digital marketers to stay current and competitive in the coming years therefore, they must effectively monitor and adapt to trends in mobile marketing. Going forward, no marketer can afford to ignore these, here eight trends.

1. Mobile-Based Content

Given the rising popularity of social media platforms particularly TikTok, there is a general expectation that we will see a rise in mobile-based content particularly in vertical video formats on mobile social media apps. Digital mobile marketing will thrive better with the creation of more online videos in the coming years. Videos are very popular with younger generations on social media. The exact same way mobile devices are popular with them. Now that this younger generation is growing into a significant market, marketers will need to connect more with them in their very popular hangouts, which is social media. That is the expected trend going forward.

2. Mobile-Optimized Content

Since more and more people are doing business from mobile devices, optimizing content for mobile devices will be in the upward trend. Every marketer needs quality content to grab consumers’ attention and produce conversions. Mobile marketers will be focusing more on putting out more high-quality content optimized for mobile, including interactive options to attract traffic. This trend is bound to continue.

3. Mobile Ads Automation

There has been a remarkable increase in the use of mobile devices in recent years. This trend has engendered a significant increase in the use of mobile apps. These apps have become extremely useful in mobile advertising and eCommerce in recent years. This trend is bound to continue and with the use of automation to save time and other costs. Digital marketers going forward will now be able scale better and more quickly with the aid of Artificial Intelligence, AI-enabled ads automation.

4. Video Content

In the coming years, we are going to be seeing more marketers pushing out more video content to please mobile users. Presently, videos make up over 60% of all mobile traffic. As this trend goes up, we expect more mobile-friendly content to come in the form of videos. This trend will entice more marketers to turn to posting more video content over and above traditional blog posts to meet consumer needs in the coming years.
 
5. Mobile Voice Search

Recently Google has found a way to index voices. That has led to increased use of voice search and voice control. Right now, there are more home electronic devices in use, such as Amazon Echo and Apple HomePod. It is projected that more consumers will buy these devices for their homes and continue using them on their smartphones. By using these devices, many more consumers will rely on speaking to receive search results and answers. This trend will continue in 2021 and beyond.
 
6. Structured Data

There is every reason to believe that structured data is going to continue to dominate in SEO results. With Google Search now becoming more and more intelligent, searchers now get structured data snippets on top of normal search results. This looks like a search bonus if you ask me because these snippets greatly help those looking to rank on the first SERPs of Google. This trend will continue, and could even, be improved upon in the coming years.

7. Push Notifications

There is likelihood that push notifications will continue to be popular with marketers in the coming years. This is inspite of their attendant nuisance value, if badly used. More marketers will likely add them to their communication strategies because they attract good results when used correctly. When used on mobile devices, push notifications help provide timely updates and other content besides marketing information on the go. They help to enhance the much-needed marketing interactions taking place online.

8. Chatbots

Chatbots are becoming the blue-eyed boys of Artificial Intelligence, AI, helping marketers online. With more and more people working from home because of one restriction or another, chatbots are becoming hugely relevant to marketers. This trend is bound to continue as AI becomes smarter and more popular in the coming years. Right now, many marketers rely on chatbots to make automated calls and to answer consumers’ questions out of a website or even on social media. These smart bots tend to make getting information and doing business faster and easier for consumers. Going forward, bots will come in very handy to remind consumers on time of repeat purchases and even to notify them of exciting new products, ongoing deals and promos.

How Artificial Intelligence Helps Your Digital Marketing Business

Digital marketers have come to accept Artificial Intelligence, AI, as very useful in digital marketing. Worldwide, the real use of AI is something many have been toying with since the advent of computers themselves. Across very many industries, the uses of AI differ very widely. However, what is generally known about AI is that it helps with better efficiency particularly in the use of time and resources. The uses of AI in digital marketing are many and varied. Marketers generally agree that AI is generally helpful in digital marketing business provided it is appropriately used.  Find below some of the most beneficial uses for AI in digital marketing as generally acclaimed by many experienced digital marketers.

Content Creation

In digital marketing, content is king. Good content is informative, educating and even entertaining. These qualities tend to attract readers to good content. The more of such good content a marketer generates, the more readers are attracted to his business. That is where AI becomes hugely important. AI can write entire pieces of content for marketers looking to increase engagement and broaden their digital presence. With only a vague brief provided, AI can write insightful, detailed and, at times very complex content that is of high quality. This can be done with very smart machines (robots mostly) technically programmed for such. It is at times very difficult to distinguish what these robots can do from what humans do directly and these machines have the added advantage of producing much more good content within the same time frame than human efforts. So, when marketers are confronted with any content job that is time-intensive, and requires continuous augmentation in order to prove valuable for brands, artificially written content is always a preferred choice for marketers in such circumstances.

Social Media Marketing

Worldwide, nearly everyone now seems to be on social media. Marketers have since latched onto that fact to market very widely on social media. As lucrative as social media is for digital marketing, it is way beyond the scope of any one person to bestride completely in their marketing efforts. It is virtually impracticable for marketers to realize the full potential of social media in accessing the full extent of their target market, without the use of some intelligent, data-sorting tools. These tools help marketers to cut through most of the noise and hassles to better position themselves to get more marketing traction from social media. Digital marketers now deploy AI for more complex, customers/leads targeting purposes. Specifically, AI is now of great use on social media for the creation of posts, monitoring live campaigns and gathering marketing intelligence. Marketers now deploy AI on popular social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and others to harness the huge marketing benefits derivable form their very huge user bases that is in the range of billions of active users around the world 24/7. Now, that’s quite a market!

Email Messaging

Among very experienced digital marketers, email messaging remains one of the most efficient ways of reaching out quickly to an engaged audience en masse. It is cost-effective to boot. Even with the use of emails, when marketers want to market to a large and diverse list of subscribers, it is time-consuming and not even as cost-effective as expected. That is where AI comes handy in the form of software for marketing automation. For example, MailChimp now has in its stable some very effective AI tools for email marketing automation. These are tools that can send emails directly to whom they are targeted at the right times and intervals and gather intelligence feedback for the marketer. Such AI tools help digital marketers to track and efficiently sort data gathered directly from the results of every email outreach and issuing ROI reports from the efforts. Pretty smart no doubt! That is how AI tools help marketers to deploy cutting edge and modern digital marketing techniques for great results in this age and time.

7 Ways to Get the Best from Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketers always worry about how effective their digital marketing strategies are. They worry about how these strategies help their businesses to grow. If at any point in time they discover that the strategies they are using are not working for them as expected, they take steps to rejig them for better results. In your own business, whenever you observe that your marketing campaign is not working well to your satisfaction, it is a very clear sign that your business is in a vulnerable position. That is when something just has to be done and done fast too. A good look at your digital marketing strategy is the first logical step in that wise. Smart digital marketing demands it as a basic step, since most businesses rely heavily on effective marketing for their survival and steady growths. To get the best from your digital marketing strategy, don’t ignore the following. 

 
1. Have a Formal Digital Marketing Strategy

You must first be sure to have a marketing strategy and it works for your business. Not having one is always a very grave marketing error that stunts business growth. If you have a digital marketing plan in your overall marketing strategy, your business benefits immensely. By putting all the elements together in an effective way, doing all you should do at the right and proper time, your strategy becomes effective as a result. Of course, you can only know how well you are doing, if you have the right tools in place to track your results and monitor your progress.

2. Use Your Marketing Budget Prudently

Smart marketers always have a very keen eye on marketing costs. This is with a view to better organizing their marketing budgets and in delivering higher Returns on Investments, ROIs. For this reason, budget analysis/management in digital marketing becomes hugely important. By relying more on the most cost-effective techniques in your digital marketing strategy, you can better manage your marketing budget more prudently.

3. Target the Right Audience

You dissipate energy and resources unnecessarily if you habitually “shoot at everything that flies” in your marketing activities. Effective targeting is what gets the best results. If you fully identify and understand the ideal audience for your products, you can market to them directly for good results. For this reason, if you know your audience well enough, you can effectively tailor your digital marketing activities to fit them. These activities entail the right content, the right type of marketing medium/channel and the right message you are conveying. It is always very important therefore, to have a plan for targeting customers and potential customers who share a lot in common in a specific and effective way. Targeting the right audience in your marketing efforts, is not only a cost-effective thing to do, it gets the best results.

4. Pay Attention to Search Engine Optimization, SEO

A good search engine optimization, SEO technique on your website helps to get it noticed by search engines. It requires a careful and tactical use of keywords and alt tags in your content and headlines. When correctly used, they have a large amount of influence on your SEO. They help search engines particularly Google to rank your website well in its SERPs. That is what easily becomes available to searchers first when in need of information. Your website directly benefits by way of good organic traffic from such search results. Because search engines tend to change their algorithms from time to time, be sure to keep an eye on these changes and to update your SEO techniques in tandem to avoid penalties from search engines. Such penalties may have adverse effects your business online.

5. Connect with Influencers

It remains a good marketing strategy to develop good relations with influencers and to depend on their large following to grow your business. Because of their effectiveness, making some investments in connecting with influencers is a good marketing strategy. Making this investment is usually worth the while because it tends to engender higher ROI for the marketer. This is why marketing with influencers is always worth it and a large percentage of marketers think so as well. Many see it as a very effective marketing strategy because of the good results it gives. For best results, it is advisable to make some deliberate efforts to source the right influencer to work with and who suits and promotes your brand better. That kind of influencer can easily help to create a huge awareness for your brand and help to boost sales/revenue for your business.

6. Use Paid Social Media Ads

Social media platforms have become very popular with digital marketers because of their immense popularity and ease of sharing information. They now serve as very important platforms for marketers to build and grow their audiences very quickly. With their customized in-house analytics, marketers benefit by building greater insights into their marketing efforts free of cost. These benefits can be boosted with additional paid ads that are cost-effective too. Promoting your brand on social media without any paid advertising is usually time consuming and may not even guarantee any appreciable increase in your audience. If your marketing budget can accommodate it, it is good to invest in paid ads on social media. Doing so will not only help you to better target your audience, but also, it will help transform your page into a very popular page and a top leads generator as a result.

7. Market with all the Platforms

Expert marketers like to advise marketers not to ignore any marketing channel/platform in their digital marketing strategy. All channels have their own advantages and peculiarities and the results they deliver vary as well. Content marketing, blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, inforgraphics, video marketing etc. must be part of your marketing strategy for better effectiveness. What matters is to be very active when using most of these channels. If you regularly post fresh and informative content related to your brand/product on daily basis, it will help your page to get more traffic and to build a larger audience. For better and direct audience targeting particularly on social media, it is very important to understand how their algorithms work. You can rely on hashtags to post information according to your audience’s online stats to get insights and a brief of your audience. Doing so will enable you to have a better use of hashtags and keywords to target your audience based on such hugely important marketing demographics like age, education, employment, profession, gender, marital/parental status, and interests. You get better results as well. 

Digital Marketers' Most Popular Digital Marketing Formats

Marketers who have unfettered access to the internet from a computer, smartphone, or any other connected device can easily get involved with digital marketing. They need digital marketing for their advertising and other business promotional activities on the internet. The concept of digital marketing has grown over time to include a wide variety of activities, platforms, and methods that can help marketers succeed in their online businesses in our increasingly connected world of the internet. Digital marketers depend on various content formats to get out their promotional messages on the internet. Before deciding on which of the popular formats to adopt for your own marketing efforts, there is a need to research your audience and determine what they are most likely to favorably respond to.



The most popular of these formats are:

Graphic/Display Ads

Graphic ads are carefully designed and attention-grabbing visual ads popular among digital marketers because of their effectiveness in advertising. The graphics in them are purposefully designed to effectively capture viewers’ attention even when they convey only some small amount of information. They are effective at arousing curiosity and encouraging viewers to click on the ads to get more information. That way, they greatly help to boost brand recognition and reputation online. They can be interspersed with video clips and other online content for better effects. Even if used directly on a website or used on social media platforms, the effects of the graphics help capture readers’ attention for the benefit of the promotional efforts.

Video Content

Now that major search engines have found a way to index videos online, they have become very effective promotional materials for online marketers.  When used on extreme popular online video platforms like YouTube, video content has become increasing popular with digital marketers. With the increasing popularity and prevalence of sharing videos on social media platforms and other places online, video content is now a significant and dependable marketing ally for major players in the Internet marketing world. Irrespective of the type of internet business you are involved with, you can deliberately shoot short marketing videos, teaching videos, fun videos and introductory how-to videos about any particular task or product of your choice. Such videos help to promote in no small measure, such businesses effectively.

Textual Content

This is about the most popular promotional format popular with digital marketers. Anyone who knows how to write a message or a description can promote with textual content. That is the real reason textual content now accounts for a majority of the digital marketing efforts used around the world today. When crafted professionally, textual content can be very effective as website page content, blog posts, social media posts, PPC ads, email marketing and much more. The effect of textual content is more and better if it is optimized for search engines. What that means is that, for every piece of text you use in your overall promotion strategy, it should include proper SEO and valuable information or solutions your reading audience really needs. These actions somehow have the effect of acting as some sort of cold actions which help to draw the attention of your reading audience closer to the end goal which in this case is a click, a lead and or purchase.