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10 Proven Strategies to Unlock Your Affiliate Marketing Potential

If you are in affiliate marketing to earn a second paycheck or passive income, don’t ignore the right strategies that can help you to your g...

Showing posts with label Digital marketers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Digital marketers. Show all posts

Thursday, March 09, 2023

Top Techniques to Promote Affiliate Products Effectively

An affiliate marketer working with a computer and smartphone to promote affiliate products.
Presently, affiliate marketing has become a lucrative opportunity for many digital marketers looking to earn some income online or to build an online business. It is difficult to succeed in the business though if you don’t understand the basics of affiliate marketing and the marketing techniques you have to use. Promoting products/services as widely as possible is a basic requirement of affiliate marketing. Ancillary to that is carefully choosing the right affiliate marketing network like Strong Future International, SFI to work with. However, succeeding in the business requires hard work, dedication, and a willingness to learn and adapt very quickly to changing circumstances and trends as you may encounter along the line. This is after you’ve carefully handled the basics of finding the right niche, selecting high-quality products to market, building a targeted audience, and establishing trust and reputation with the audience.



Here are some top techniques you can rely on to promote affiliate products effectively.

Content Marketing: The type of content you really need to promote affiliate products should be of high quality, informative and impactful. By creating such content, you directly provide value to your audience. It is this value that can help attract visitors to your website or social media pages. That means valuable traffic to your website. To promote affiliate products, you can embed affiliate links to the products on the content. When any of your website visitors clicks on the links and makes a purchase, the affiliate makes a sale and earns a commission on the sale.

Email Marketing: Email marketing is a cost-effective technique to market affiliate products. The reason it is very popular with digital marketers. First, you must build a reliable and responsive email list of subscribers. These are people who are interested in your niche. You can thus effectively use emails to promote affiliate products through email newsletters to these people. Product reviews sent through emails can also be effective. Both ways are great techniques to get leads, increase conversions, make sales and earn affiliate commissions.

Webinars and Online Courses: One other very popular technique to promote affiliate products is by hosting webinars or online courses related to your niche. During presentation, when every participant’s attention is riveted on the topic, you can surreptitiously chip in affiliate products promotion. If professionally done, it can be a very effective way to promote and sell affiliate products.

Paid Advertising: If your marketing budget can accommodate the expenses, you can run paid ads to promote affiliate products. Such ads are best run on platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Instagram Ads. These are very popular platforms that can help you to reach a wider audience and drive more traffic to your affiliate links.



Social Media Marketing: Marketers usually leverage the huge popularity of social media platforms to market affiliate products. Some of the platforms have in-house marketing tools to help marketers promote products cheaply and effectively. So, if you promote affiliate products through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes, it can help you to reach a very large audience and generate interest in the products you are promoting.

Review/Comparison Websites: If you can create a review/comparison website that focuses on a specific niche or product, it can be an effective way to promote affiliate products. Through such website, you can provide informative reviews, comparisons, and recommendations to your audience. Such info can help your audience make informed purchasing decisions about the affiliate products you are reviewing.

Wrapping Up

You can better market affiliate products if you carefully choose the promotion methods, techniques and channels that are most suitable for your niche and target audience. If you are promoting high-quality products that provide value to your audience using the foregoing techniques, you get good results. The ultimate aim of widely promoting affiliate products is to make more sales and earn more commissions. So, with the right mindset, right techniques and approach, affiliate marketing can be a profitable and rewarding online business venture to embark on.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Creative Ways to Boost Brand Awareness for your Online Business

BRANDING sign projected on a computer screen.
Savvy digital marketers are always in search of what gets their brands recognized by potential customers and to correctly associate the brand with a particular product/service. That in technical parlance is brand awareness. It can be directly linked to a name, a slogan, a logo, a peculiar color hue and any other distinguishing features that stand the brand out from others. Growing your brand awareness online is a way of making your brand better known and consequently better patronized. There are creative ways you can get it done to make your brand benefit from more searches by internet users.



Below are creative ways you can directly improve brand awareness for your business.

Creative Use of Podcasts

Even though Podcasts are relatively new form of media and inexpensive communication tools, they can help position your business as an industry thought leader. If your podcasting has good content and your listening audience enjoys it, it can help increase brand awareness for your business. Your business can creatively use podcasting to develop a distinctive voice. That way, your business can establish its unique character and identity to help drive its marketing goals. Quite unlike traditional advertising, podcasting allows businesses to build a more personal connection with their audience. This helps to build trust and creates customer loyalty for the business. Podcasts can directly help to increase brand awareness through podcast advertising and the use of audio snippets which podcast listeners can share easily and widely on social media.

Create Value Beyond Your Product/Service

If you want people to take you seriously online, you must be able to create value beyond the product/service you are selling. You can explore creative ways to educate and even entertain your audience before offering them a product/service to buy. That is about the best way to sell them something without making it overtly obvious that you are trying to do so. In other words, you can deliberately create memorable awareness first and selling follows closely behind. You can for instance present yourself as a thought leader and some sort of expert in your niche industry offering free education and advice. That way, you can directly get the attention of a lot more people who appreciate you and are willing to patronize you and even help to push your brand for free.

Guest blogging

If you are a good blogger, you can creatively use guest blogging to boost your brand awareness. Guest blogging helps you to gain immense publicity, increased credibility, good traffic and a lot more followers to grow your audience. Once the content you share in your guest blogs are of high value, impactful, engaging, relevant, and backed by incontrovertible facts, establishing you as an authority and thought leader in your niche industry, it can help to boost awareness for your business. However, for your guest blogging to be relevant, effective and authoritative, you must find a reputable blog/website to blog for. That helps to grow awareness faster, making guest blogging a great way to build brand awareness and generate good organic traffic.

Contribute Meaningfully To Your Community

If you aim to create brand awareness for your online business, it pays not to ignore your offline customer base. If you want your business to quickly become a household name in your local community, you must take active part in sponsoring and organizing various community events. Organizing local derby’s, clean ups, children’s’ picnics, games, sports and helping voluntary service organizations like the Red Cross and Boy Scouts are great for business awareness. You can offer branded items as gifts and corporate donations. Occasionally bringing out your employees wearing branded T-shirts and Face caps to participate in charity work and community clean-up is a great way to build awareness for your brand in your local community. During these exercises, your brand benefits from free press and good business reviews. Such events can help you to get more people talking positively about your business and your brand. Many more people really get to be more familiar with your business name, brand and logo as a result. This helps your brand awareness quite immensely.
 
Use Infographics Creatively

If you can creatively communicate with infographics, it can help boost your brand’s visibility. Human beings are naturally attracted to graphics, especially when they are entertaining and informative enough. So, you must take good care to design your infographics with attractive colors and aesthetics. They should have an easy-to-locate CTA button to help boost engagement and drive traffic to your site. To enhance this, your infographics must be easy to share particularly on social media. You can embed them in your website/blog in such a way as to make them effective to attract backlinks from reputable websites to your site thereby enhancing visibility for your brand. If well designed, infographics can help your brand stand out from its competitors through visible demonstration of expertise and dependability. This can be quite great for brand awareness.



Offer Free and Paid Plans Together

To easily get the attention of consumers, you must always find creative ways to offer free plans first which can be upgraded to paid plans if they like what they see. By offering a free version of your paid plan, you can get people to check out your services without having to commit yet. If they like what they see, it can help create a major buzz in the right communities, thereby boosting your brand awareness no end. You must always remember that it is awareness you want for your brand. So, when offering the free plans, make sure the package has your brand logos and name imprinted strategically across the product.

Build Rewards into Referral Programs

You can directly improve your brand awareness level if you habitually reward users for referring others to your brand/product/service. The average human being likes rewards and gifts. If you are able to creatively use rewards to appreciate the people who refer others to your brand/product/service, the word quickly goes round and many more people get involved in the referrals. That creates real awareness. Most users will gladly spread the word about your highly rewarding referral program, and others will quickly get involved knowing they’ll be rewarded as well. That inevitably helps to improve your brand awareness.
 
Tell Your Brand Story Well

As the saying goes, no one can tell your own story like you. In like manner, no one can tell your brand story as well as you. When building a brand, telling your brand story well is vital for success. It is more credible and believable if it is you telling your brand story as it happened. This story begins from its conception ideas, the people involved, history, challenges, mission statement, vision, achievements and even your bragging rights. Creating a credible story around your brand is an essential part of brand awareness. You can tell this story in various ways, such as through a narrative if you believe it is more convincing and believable that way. The more believable your brand story is, the more awareness it creates for the brand.

Run Awareness Ads

Awareness ads are really becoming very popular on social media and most of the popular social media platforms have in-house tools to help marketers run the ads. On most social media platforms, you can deliberately run ads targeted at raising brand awareness. Savvy marketers can easily capitalize on the available options to boost awareness for their brands. Because there is already a practical and effective segmentation of the audiences of most social media platforms, awareness ads can be used to target specific groups of people based on their gender, location, race, educational level, age, and so on.

Last Line

If you follow the foregoing ways/methods diligently, you can improve brand awareness for your business. It is best however to use creative ways to combine as many of these methods as convenient if you want to get the best results from your efforts. Good luck!!

Saturday, November 19, 2022

5 Reasons App Security is Important on the Internet

Floating virtual app symbols projected from a smart device.
Digital marketers who use unprotected and unsecured apps online risk their entire business. With hackers and cyber criminals everywhere on the internet, unsecured and unprotected apps are a huge risk for any online business no matter the size of the business. In this age and time particularly now that many more businesses are going online daily, security has become one of the most essential factors to take into consideration when your business is going digitized. Apps are indispensable to most online operations and most marketers depend hugely on them. But, significantly, Apps are particularly most vulnerable to cyber threats as they are linked with cloud networks. It is these networks make Apps easily accessible to everyone. This puts Apps at a higher risk of data leaks, hacking and cyber threats, making it imperative that they be protected and secured at all times. Irrespective of the size of your online business, securing your Apps is a very smart business decision you must have to make. If you are marketing products online, without a secure App, you lose the trust and loyalty of most of your customers.


 
Below are 5 of the strongest reasons App security is important on the Internet. According to expert webmasters, App security is important for:

1. Combating Security Breaches and Threats

With hackers and cyber criminals on the prowl on the internet, securing your Apps online has become hugely imperative. As most digital marketers very well know, marketing with unsecured Apps, can make your business really vulnerable to cyber threats and security breaches. No business owner can be comfortable doing business in an environment where because of App insecurity, cyber criminals can easily seize the business or wipe it out completely.

2. Avoiding Data Leaks

Online data are hugely valuable assets for businesses. The core and even the soul of a business may lie embedded in such data. If your App is secure, you can easily protect your data against any chances of data leaks. Because most Apps usually contain users’ data which cyber attackers and hackers are very much interested in, the threat is always there. But, if your App is secured, hackers and cyber criminals would find it very difficult to steal any data from your website without your permission.

3. Gaining User Confidence in the App

If an App is insecure and unprotected, it cannot be downloaded easily by anyone. That is what really tests user confidence on such App. In extreme cases, most users prefer to stay away from such App. But, if your app is secure, it will help build users’ trust and consequently help to increase the number of downloads. With downloadable App, user confidence is boosted making them more comfortable in sharing their information with your business.



4. Avoiding Phishing Attacks

As businesses are growing on the internet, so are phishing attacks. Significantly, it is only secure Apps that can effectively prevent phishing attacks. When your App does not have security measures in place, it is prone to these attacks. The good news though is that business owners can take advantage of advanced security tools online to prevent hackers from performing any phishing attacks on their Apps.

5. Meeting Country-Specific Regulations

App makers are always concerned about which region or country their Apps will be in use. They always need all the information that can help them to design and launch Apps with the right country-specific regulations. Granted security is important to online users no matter where they are in the world but advanced countries are usually more stringent about regulations covering these Apps. And, security is one of the most vital regulations that a country imposes on the use of Apps. So, before launching an App in the market, businesses must always make sure it follows the country-specific regulations. Creating a well-secured and protected App becomes imperative to meet these regulations.

Friday, August 26, 2022

Good Reasons to Choose Affiliate Marketing as a Business

A computer displaying digital marketing symbols, smartphone and a tea cup on the table.
Among digital marketers and people looking to make money from a side hustle, affiliate marketing is readily a business of choice. Presently, many marketers see it as about the best online business out there. The reasons for this notion are many and varied. Aside the relative ease of joining the business and relative cost of starting and running the business, you can operate it from anywhere you choose, even in the comfort of your home. Besides all these, you become your own boss when you are in affiliate marketing. That alone is quite exciting for modern day business owners. These and what follows next and very good reasons for anyone to choose affiliate marketing as a business.



You do not need any prior experience to get involved in affiliate marketing. Just reach out to products/service merchants, choose any product/service to promote and when the product sells, you earn a commission. Simple! You do not even need to have a product/service of your own to sell before starting up an affiliate marketing business. Just begin and when you become an affiliate, you can learn the right marketing strategies as you go along.
 
If you become an affiliate, you can manage your time as you deem fit. You work when you choose and from where you choose. You don’t even need to spend too much of your time in the business. You are OK if you can keep your website active and updated with fresh content consistently and the ads you run on it, active always. However, Internet marketing is quite similar to any other business. The more time and effort you invest in your affiliate marketing business, the more sales you generate and the more commissions you earn.

In affiliate marketing, you are your own boss and the working timing is also yours to manage and use as you deem fit. When your website/blog subscriber list becomes significant and with good internet traffic, you can become an affiliate magnet. Businesses who largely depend on affiliate marketing for promoting traffic to their website will then be offering you a bonus for signing up with them as an affiliate. A win-win situation really! You need their bonus, and they need the traffic you are bringing in.

Affiliate marketing is very simple to start. Just create a website/blog then commence posting quality content to attract readers and grow your audience. When this audience grows significantly, you can begin to post affiliate links to a product merchant’s website on your content. Once these links are used to purchase a product/service from the merchant, you earn a commission from the merchant.
 
On the internet, the competition for business attention is always very fierce. Many merchants sell similar products and they all want patronage from same market. With that kind of scenario, all advertisement and promotional activities are very much to increase traffic and to boost sales. This is where affiliates become useful to assist in the promotional activities and attract good traffic.  As an affiliate, you can sign up with product merchants to help out directly or join reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI by signing up FREE to help promote products/services in exchange for commissions.
 
In many traditional businesses, there exists a possibility to run out of customers/clients. But, if you get involved in affiliate marketing as a business, that possibility is very remote. Affiliate marketers never really run out of customers/clients because the business is leveraged on the internet. The internet enables affiliates to easily reach millions of people worldwide with just a single click on a computer button. Now that’s really awesome for a business. On the internet, the amount of business opportunities is quite immense. This is even more so when the number of online businesses increases daily making affiliate marketers to be in very high demand. This makes it easy for many people particularly stay-at-home Moms to work the business from home and make good money too.


 
Affiliate marketing business is a business anyone can get involved in and make money. It is a great business opportunity for all kinds of people irrespective of whether they are a student, young Moms, the elderly, people with regular 9-5 jobs, or any person looking for a side hustle or an extra source of income. No special training is needed to get started and once you start, you begin to earn almost immediately. All anyone needs to start an affiliate marketing business on the internet is a website and a good access to the internet. You do not need a brick-and-mortar store or even personnel to get started. With just a little investment to create and host a website and some basic knowledge to generate traffic to the website, as well some bit of efforts to promote products/services, you are in business. In some affiliate marketing models, it is even possible to generate traffic and sales without owning a website of your own.

Once you get started in your own affiliate marketing business, you will be able to earn commissions for every sales generated out of the referrals directed by the affiliate links/codes you are promoting. This commission payment has many variants. Some businesses pay per sale, some offer pay-per-click, PPC and some pay per view. The bottom line is, when a desired marketing action is attributable to your affiliate link/code, you earn a commission.

Last Line

There are very many benefits derivable from affiliate marketing many of which are actually the reasons people choose affiliate marketing as a business. The foregoing are just some of the reasons that are easy to comprehend and try out by anyone irrespective of their backgrounds. If you have been thinking of starting a business online, why not consider affiliate marketing? You’ll be glad you did.

Friday, July 29, 2022

Why High Quality Backlinks are Important to a Business Website

Backlink on a magnifying glass over a green field.
Digital marketers recognize high quality backlinks as very important website ranking factors on the internet. Major search engines like Google are always on the lookout for high quality backlinks in their ranking efforts. When search engines identify a link from a high-quality website, they pay more attention to such links. That helps to increase the visibility of the website on the internet. High quality backlinks can directly help a business website to attract more visitors and more effectively promote its content. Following are specific ways backlinks can be of great importance to your business website.



1. Best Way to Get Inbound Links and Traffic to a Website: Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. They help to increase traffic and credibility for your website. This they do by directly helping your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). If as a business owner you deliberately target reputable and influential websites and blogs, submitting articles or blog posts to relevant directories or forums to generate backlinks, it can help to boost your online reputation. High credibility, visibility and reputation of your website usually translate to more inbound organic traffic to the website.

2. Earn Trust and Confidence for a Website: Backlinks from authoritative websites can help a website earn trust and confidence. That leads to increased traffic and web rankings. Links from high-quality sources can also help to promote your website content thereby encouraging users to visit it. To easily earn trust and confidence for your website, when selecting backlinks, it is essential therefore to take into account the business niche, target audience and content of the website.

3. Important Website Ranking Factor: For most search engines, backlinks are some of the most important ranking factors they consider. Not only do backlinks help a website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), they can also help improve a website’s domain authority (DA), domain rating (DR), and trust score. They are about the best quality indicators on the web in the eyes of search engines. However, you must always exercise some caution when seeking backlinks. It is not the number of links that matters most but the quality. When the sources if the links are credible and reputable, the links themselves are bound to be credible and reputable. It is such links that serve as good ranking factors for your website.  

4. Help to Improve Website Content: Dofollow links are the type of links that are quite essential for any website that wants to improve its search engine ranking. When search engine bots visit a website, they look at the links on the web pages. It is these links they use to determine how important the website is. If you use dofollow links in your content to guide search engines to reputable websites, it can help to improve the credibility of your own website content.

5. Help Websites to Show Up on the First Search Results Page: Technically, a backlink is a link from another website to your website. Backlinks are very important for SEO for your target keywords. The quality of these links when combined with the SEO for your target keywords can help your webpage rank higher in the SERPs of search engines. A higher ranking on the SERPs of search engines makes people more likely to click on your webpage. This translates to more inbound organic traffic and consequently more sales and more revenue for your business.

6. Help to Generate Leads and Revenue: Backlinks from reputable and authoritative sources can help to legitimize your website, improve the site visibility and increase the trust of potential customers. Increased customer trust translates to increased leads generation, increased conversions, increased sales and increased revenue ultimately.



7. Improve SEO Rankings: For your business to succeed online, it needs a robust online presence derivable principally from its search engine rankings. That helps to bring more organic traffic and leads to the website, and really great for its SEO rankings. Backlinks to websites can be highly valuable not only because backlinks provide websites with more visibility and credibility, but also because they help websites to generate traffic and leads, all because of the good SEO rankings derivable therefrom.

8. Help to Generate More Web Traffic: When it comes to generating traffic, quality dofollow links can generate more organic traffic to your website than social media campaigns or even paid ads. This is because Google usually factors in authoritative sites when ranking websites. This is why good dofollow links can directly help your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). If your website does rank high, it can result in more organic traffic, more leads, more conversions and more sales.
 
9. Search Engines are More Likely to Index High-Quality Backlinks: Search engines are more likely to index high-quality backlinks. This leads to higher rankings and SEO visibility. Backlinks from websites in your niche business are a valuable source of contextual information for potential customers. Therefore, the more backlinks you generate from reputable websites in your niche business, the better your chances of ranking high in search results. Ranking high in search results helps your business to achieve more online visibility.

10. Ensure Growth from Niche Audiences: Link building and backlinks for your website help your niche audiences to grow. You can build these links by creating informative and useful content for potential customers, developing beneficial relationships with influential bloggers and attracting backlinks from other high-quality websites in the same niche as you. By targeting these key audiences and building strong links between your website and others in your niche business, you can progressively grow your business. 

Sunday, July 24, 2022

Significant Benefits of Email Marketing to Digital Marketers

Email marketer working from a computer with a smartphone on the table
Email Marketing may be “old school” but it is still very popular among digital marketers. Even as common as it is, it is essentially the most advanced and effective means of communication between marketers and their ideal customers. Email marketing does not require too many hassles to use even as it is cheap, reliable, and offers great marketing benefits to marketers. Many customers are really quite accustomed to using email when communicating with businesses and brands online. The reason email performance is usually a key factor in the success or otherwise of any digital marketing campaign. Emails happen to be among the most measurable, automated, and scalable assets in a digital marketer’s marketing strategy. Here is how marketing directly with email benefits marketers.



Engagement of Potential Customers at Every Stage of the Customer Lifecycle

With emails, marketers can engage potential customers throughout the customer lifecycle. Emails really work well and get good results at every stage in that vital cycle. Here is what happens.

- You can use emails to greet new subscribers/leads at the start of their shopping journey.
- For new paying customers, email marketing strategies help customers make payments or commitments by signing an e-contract with a view to transforming these customers into repeat buyers down the road.
- For active customers/subscribers, thoughtful email marketing is essential to entice this valuable group of customers with loyalty offers, bonuses, limited-time offers, and exclusive invitations to keep their patronage.
- For dormant subscribers or unsubscribed customers, through emails, it is possible to quickly detect this class of customers that is no longer interested in doing business with a brand. It is either they have stopped opening their mails or making any responses whatsoever. That means it is time to engage them more with emails with a view to changing the situation for the better.

Provides Key Insights into How Your Audience Engages

Simple email metrics can help you with the necessary information/key insights about how your email recipients engage with your brand and your marketing info. This vital info can help to rejig or redesign your email marketing strategy for better results. Through these insights, you can have a clear idea about email Click-Through-Rate (CTR), Email opening rate, Bounce rate, Unsubscribing rate, Conversion rate and suchlike vital marketing info that can help you to make strategic decisions about how to sell more in each segment of your email recipients.


 
Generates Very High Return-On-Investment, ROI

Every digital marketer always wants to keep costs low and returns high. Email marketing is particularly very good at this. Because of the relatively low cost of running email campaigns, it is easy to get a high Return-On-Investment, ROI. This reality on its own serves as a major incentive for digital marketers to fine-tune their email marketing strategies with a view to maximizing their ROI. As online marketing statistics generally indicate, among online marketing channels, email marketing is now well known as the marketing channel that generates the highest ROI for marketers. One surprising statistic is that email is about 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers than many very popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. This development is really good for email marketing business if you ask me.

Friday, July 08, 2022

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

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



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

Sell Products Directly from Your Facebook Page

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

Optimize Your Facebook Page

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

Create and Sell Digital Content

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



Use Facebook Page for Affiliate Marketing

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

Promote Local Events and Campaigns

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

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

Summary

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

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Best Practices to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

A marketer working on a computer with smartphone and a camera on the work table.
For most digital marketers, the commonest way to make money online is affiliate marketing. The strategy is really quite popular amongst online marketers. However, for most people who really want to make money online, numerous suggestions and recommendations available out there about the business tend to be overwhelming. Depending on who is behind the content, every blog post you read, every forum you visit gives you different ideas and methods for affiliate marketing that supposedly work. You can even get distracted or scammed online if you are not careful. If you are interested in the business and you don’t have an idea how to start, find below some simplified information and steps that can help you get started.


 
1. Decide on a Niche: A niche is where you can establish your marketing identity so you must carefully decide on it. The products you market must belong to a niche that you like yourself, making sure it is a place people like to spend their money. You can decide to market sports wears, vitamins and natural health supplements, travel and hospitality and such popular niches where people love to spend their money.

2. Do Diligent Research: With the help of keyword search tools such as WordTracker or SEObook, you can do some diligent research to find out the products people are actively searching for and with what keywords. You can find out how many people are searching using particular keywords. That is the information that allows you to know if what you are selling is on demand and from where. After identifying the right keywords/phrases, you can go to Google to search with the keywords/phrases. Google will throw up for you most of the sites using the same keywords/phrases and by direct implication, the sites you will be competing with when marketing your products. If the niche is not too crowded, your chances of making money from the niche are greatly enhanced. After identifying your competitors, you can “spy” on their marketing to know what ads they use and how they use them. If these sites display many Google ads, it is a sure sign that they are marketing in a money-making niche.

3. Start a Blog: Among digital marketers, the commonest content marketing strategy is blogging. Most marketers are into blogging to attract traffic to their blog sites. It is a direct way to lure internet users to notice the products they sell as well as the affiliate links in their content. If you don’t already have a blog, it is easy to set up a free blog on Blogger, Wix, WordPress and suchlike free blogging platforms. As you consistently create high quality and informative blog content, you attract more and more traffic to your blog and the blog audience grows as well. As the interest in your blog grows and starts to get more readers attention, your marketing begins when you add some affiliate links or banners to the products you are marketing.



4. Write and Submit Quality Articles: Articles marketing is another great way to put out your content in popular Article Directories to attract traffic to your website. If you are up to it, you can start writing quality articles related to your niche and submit to top Article Directories like EzineArticles.com, ArticlesBase.com and the likes. These directories allow you an Author Resource Box where you can create a strong Call-to-Action, CTA and leave your affiliate links for readers. With that, you can manage to get some click-throughs to your site. That translates to good traffic.

Final Thoughts

Affiliate marketing is quite a simple business model, but you must know what you are doing and why you are doing what you are doing to make money from the business. Once you understand and get the hang of the basics, making money follows from there. You need diligence and a bit of hard work particularly at the outset. Once you get started and stay the course, you’ll make money too.

Monday, May 30, 2022

How to Use Social Media for Website Marketing Strategies

Various social media signs and logos on display.
As many digital marketers have since discovered, social media is one great resource for their marketing activities. It comes in very handy to use in nearly all website marketing strategies. Social media is not only hugely popular, with over 4.65 billion users worldwide, it is easy and cheap to use. It is in addition a great fun and very exciting way for marketers to reach their audience. There are so many benefits marketers derive from website marketing strategies. If they explore ways to use social media for these strategies, they have additional advantage of not having to bother so much about making search engine rankings. Following are strategies that help out this process.



Cyber Marketing Strategies

Marketers derive two major benefits when using social media in cyber marketing strategies. These strategies help build relationships with customers and potential customers by directing them to your website. Secondly, if you use the right social communities, you can easily build backlinks to your website through social media. Because some of the major social community websites on Facebook and Twitter in particular use a “no-follow” tag with the hyperlinks on their sites, they disable the ability for websites to increase their search engine rankings by linking to them from the social sites. By this action, these popular social media sites become especially useful for directing tons of traffic to the marketer’s website. However, there are other social websites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, that don’t use “no-follow” tags. Marketers can effectively use these sites to get backlinks and to direct traffic to their websites. These benefits do not however compare to the benefits derivable from more popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Internet Marketing Strategies

Using social media for internet marketing strategies is a bit complicated. Marketers really need extra care when using these strategies on social media to avoid spamming label. Yeah, you can promote your business on social media but when updating your status, you must take extra care to avoid making your products promotion too obvious. If you do, you risk getting your audience bored and losing interest in your content updates. Once you recognize that there is a fine line between spamming and regular advertising, it is left to you to strictly observe some updating strategies in your social media posts that will respect this distinction. One of such observances is that you should never make every status update you make to link back to your website. If you do, you are clearly spamming. What is advisable is to make your updates as if you are serving valuable content then occasionally throw in a link back to your website. If you blog on your website, so much the better. You can make a blog post and share on social media. That automatically links back to your website without a semblance of spam.



Social Media Interactions

Ease of interaction and sharing of information are some of the biggest advantages of social media to website marketing. On social media, people know who they are dealing with as human. They are thus very free to ask questions, give answers, make comments, offer solutions and give feedback with ease. Social media puts a personal face on you the business person and that helps to put your audience at ease. Building a reputation for you and your business becomes much easier that way. You can maintain that reputation through every single update you make on social media. You should keep your content mostly focused on your niche and how the info you give can be helpful to your audience. On social media, if you want to maintain your reputation with your audience, avoid any content about race, religion and politics. Making social media updates about these subjects no matter how subtle can hurt your reputation and even your business. It is best to avoid them all together.

Friday, March 25, 2022

Popular Models of Affiliate Marketing Based on Affiliate Connection

Virtual Affiliate Marketing label in the backdrop of an open book.
As most digital marketers very well know, there are distinct models of affiliate marketing based on the affiliate’s connection with the product they choose to promote. The affiliate partnership arrangement remains the same and all the models of the programs offer several similar benefits to both the merchants and the affiliates. In all the affiliate models, the affiliate is paid a predetermined commission for the sale of a product they are marketing on behalf of the product merchant. Through the partnership arrangement, a product merchant can leverage the wider reach of all its affiliates to reach a wider audience to promote its products. The wider the affiliate network is, the better and larger its reach. The larger its reach, the more it helps the product merchant to build brand awareness for its brand. 



The following are the commonest and most popular affiliate models peculiar to most affiliate programs.

Related Affiliate Marketing Model

In Related Affiliate Marketing Model, the Affiliate has some relationship with the product they are promoting. The Affiliate’s niche where he has some knowledge and expertise becomes useful to promote products. That is where the relationship is even though the affiliate himself may not directly be using the product. The knowledge and expertise allow the affiliate to have some influence over the general targeted audience of the product he is promoting. That is the influence the affiliate relies on to drive traffic towards the product merchant’s website. When that traffic converts and generates sales, the affiliate earns a commission.

Involved Affiliate Marketing Model

Involved affiliate marketing model is the type of affiliate marketing where there is a deep connection between the product and the affiliate promoting it. The affiliates’ influence on their audience is essential for the success of this type of affiliate marketing. This is because each affiliate must know the product very well, trust the product and genuinely use the product. This helps the affiliate to build the requisite trust and influence over the audience they’re promoting the products to. That way, the product’s reputation is linked with the affiliate’s reputation. To maintain this trust, the affiliate thus needs to be very careful when recommending the product to the audience.



Unattached Affiliate Marketing Model

Unattached affiliate marketing is the primary advertising model in which the affiliate has no presence, authority, or connection whatsoever with the product he is promoting. There is also no connection between the affiliate and the consumer. All the affiliate is required to do is to advertise or place product links in front of the consumers for them to click and buy. This is the model of affiliate marketing that is most uninvolved because the affiliate does not have any known skill/expertise about the product they are promoting. On the surface, such affiliates are actually in no absolute position to promote the product but they do and get results. This is why this model is about the most popular form of affiliate marketing. The affiliate does not necessarily have to build up a targeted network’s trust, and they can widely promote products without any responsibility to the audience/consumers.

Monday, February 14, 2022

Blogging Tips for Beginner Bloggers

A lone blogger working on a computer with a notepad and pen, a smartphone and a mug of coffee on a brown table top
Most digital marketers always want to get into blogging but not many really blog right. Some do right but quickly hit a block, get confused and don’t really know what to do next. Many zealously get into the highly competitive world of blog writing only to realize that they are not quite making a success out of it as they would have wished. Some do get some bits of traffic inflow which may be disappointing to them. Many of such bloggers are perpetually struggling to get more traffic. If you are in this category of bloggers or you are just starting out on a long journey of blogging, pay attention to these here tips. Expert bloggers do not hesitate to recommend many of these tips which have one way or another helped them out in their very eventful blogging experiences. These tips have helped me tremendously too.



Write What You’re Passionate About

When you are starting out as a blogger, it is in your best interest to write something you know well and enjoy and are passionate about. That saves you the drudgery of writing on what you do not have sufficient information about that others will like to read. Writing about what you know will help you to easily give out quality info that will attract and sustain your blog readers’ attention. Doing so consistently translates to good traffic. Good blogs content must be uniquely written from your passion. Bland and uninteresting topics and subject matters are not helpful to quality blog content.

If you aim to promote products you love and make money on the side, you can embed a few links to these products in your blog content. Anytime a reader clicks on these links and buys a product, you earn a commission from the sale.

Write Purposefully

Write only what will interest your readers. You must always write with a clear purpose that will not be boring to your readers. That is about the only credible way to keep them interested in your content and to anticipate more. Avoid writing randomly about whatever you fancy or whatsoever comes to your mind. That is not very helpful to your readers and may even confuse them. If you write on purpose, you will not only educate your readers, you will entertain them as well. Problem solving for your readers should always be paramount in your mind. That helps to shape your content. If for instance you blog in the “make money online” niche like most professional bloggers, then the purpose of your blog should be clearly to help people make money legitimately online and to avoid scams and get-rich-quick schemes that abound on the internet.

Write Naturally and Simply

If you write what your readers do not understand, not writing at all is better. Write naturally and simply for everyone to understand no matter their level of education. Avoid grammatical complications and jaw-breaking words. Write conversationally as if you are having a one-on-one conversation with your reader. This is because most people welcome and enjoy conversational speak particularly when it is intent on helping to provide them with valuable information. Good blog content should not be presented like a college thesis, business report, or some complex legal document. The technicalities that characterize such reports are always a put off for most blog readers. Therefore, you must blog to entertain and to inform in a very simple style of presentation just as you are reading here.



Always Proofread Your Work

If you are a beginner blogger, do not unduly worry if your grammar is not perfect from the outset. Start writing and keep on writing to improve your grammar. If you aim to be a good and credible writer, proofreading your work is a must. Depending on the speed of your writing and your thought process, it is inevitable that your first draft in any written document will have errors. Such errors include improper punctuation, spelling errors, a lack of proper paragraphs, bad formatting, and improper words spacing. These are put offs for most blog readers. Proofreading your work thoroughly helps to clear most of such errors. It shows professionalism too. The more you write, the better you become as a writer. It is best to read and re-read your content thoroughly before publishing. That way, you can spot most of the errors and correct them adequately. In addition, you can use online tools to aid your proofreading process. These tools may not be 100% perfect but they are quite helpful and handy to use. Many expert bloggers do recommend Grammarly and ProWritingAid tools for proofreading. I do use such tools too but they have a few tolerable drawbacks even though they can help spot a handful of errors you never even thought your content had.

Be Consistent and Stick with Your Theme

If you want to succeed fast as a blogger, make sure you are consistent. Consistency helps to build trust and credibility for your content fast enough. By consistently sticking to your central theme and avoiding diversions, you build trust easily because your audience likes it. That is one of the best ways to grow your audience as a blogger. Starting with one theme and diverting into another is not professional. It manages to kill the interest of your blog readers. You must strive to give your original readers what they want at all times without diverting to something different. Writing about too many different things at a time could result in you losing track of your blog’s subject/theme. You lose the interest of readers as well. If you want to write about making money online for instance, stick with that. Anyone who is interested in making money online will stick to your content. That helps to grow your audience.
 
Have a Blogging Schedule/Calendar

Scheduling your content not only helps to boost your productivity, it also helps to release your content timorously. Your content writing schedule/Calendar could be set on twice a day, daily, or even weekly, during which time you shut off all distractions like phones and TVs to concentrate on writing. If your blog is designed and specially targeted, you can also time the release of your blog content depending on the audience you are targeting around the time zones of the world. That helps the effectiveness of your content. Blogging is hugely tasking no doubt. So, having a schedule/calendar can help to organize things a lot better and make your blogging easier and more effective. Through these efforts, chances are, your blog writing will start to come more naturally and effortlessly once habits begin to build even if you are a beginner.

Worry Less about Traffic Early on

Most new blogs usually go unnoticed for some period of time. This could extend to several weeks or months without any tangible traffic. There is no cause to worry. Do not let lack of traffic discourage you at the beginning. Avoid the discouraging feeling that you are writing for nobody and wasting your time. Just keep writing and publishing. It takes quite a while for search engines to find and rank your content. Brand new domains are always viewed with caution by major search engines like Google. That is why you need real patience to give search engines time to start trusting your content. In addition, populating your blog across social media platforms also takes quite a while before your content starts trending with enthusiastic audience. All you need is patience. Keep writing and the traffic will come in due time.

Brainstorm Regularly

Take it from me, everyone including yours truly struggles to come up with good ideas to write blog content. The antidote to that is to form the habit of brainstorming regularly. Doing so helps you to be more and better productive in your blogging. If you are brainstorming particularly in a very quiet corner of your home, have a pen and notepad handy to jot down any ideas floating around your mind. If you don’t get distracted, brainstorming can help to get your creative juices flowing unlimited. That way, you could come up with some credible new content ideas within an hour or two. If you go to work immediately after that, you may be able to knock out a few good blog posts from such ideas.



Avoid Becoming Overwhelmed

Focus and deep focus is recommended for beginner bloggers. It is best to focus on just one blog and theme when starting out. As most experienced bloggers very well know, writing about too many things can quickly become overwhelming. That scenario inevitably leads to poor productivity. If as a beginner blogger you out of excitement and enthusiasm decide to start several blogs related to many different themes/niches, you’ll quickly begin to fail once you realize how much work is involved to keep your many blogs online. Many new bloggers usually give up and quit at this point when they realize that updating and posting on too many blogs at a time takes quite a lot of work and time. The only viable solution to avoid being overwhelmed is to concentrate on one blog at a time and master it well. That helps to save valuable time and efforts and to have enough concentration to really improve on and master your blogging activities.

Write with Empathy

Yes indeed! As a blogger, you must realize early on that you are writing for others to read. So, you must put yourself in your readers’ shoes when writing your blog posts. You need to empathize with your readers while attempting to help solve their problems. You can win the trust of your readers faster if they perceive how empathetic you are in your content. That way, they’ll relate better with you as well. You can for instance think about how to help bald men. You can put yourself in the reader’s shoes by explaining a story related to how you handled your own balding problems. That way, you can better help your reader find that very cure you have used in treating your own baldness. By doing this, you are clearly letting it on to your reader that you are human trying to reach out and help another human and not just another fast talking salesman attempting to make a quick sale.

Maintain a List of Future Ideas

This is why as a beginner blogger, it is advisable to always have a pen and notepad with you anywhere you find yourself. As you walk around and network with people all day, any ideas that come up should be jotted down for future use. Experience shows that maintaining a list of future blog posts and ideas is imperative to your content creation strategy and resourcefulness. Sometimes, a random idea could pop into your head at a random time of day and anywhere. If you don’t jot it down for future use, you may forget about it. These notes can be of tremendously help to you when figuring out what to write. They could save you time too. That’s quality time that would have been spent trying to remember or figure out an idea/topic to write about. These days, nearly everyone carries around a smartphone. If the idea of carrying around a pen and notepad is not cool with you, you can install an app on your phone that will sync with your computer. That comes in very handy to jot down ideas when you are away from your computer.

Sunday, February 06, 2022

7 Quick Tips on How to Make Online Sales

E-commerce marketer working on a laptop computer with a smartphone and a credit card.
Expert digital marketers like to say, you don’t have to be a marketing expert or even have experience to succeed in selling online. Once you are able to master the rudiments and follow the rules, you too can sell online. If you can craft your marketing message well and make your pitch widely, you’ll get positive responses in no time at all. With that, you get a feeling of optimism and reassurance to ginger you to make more pitching. Pulling in more sales naturally flows from there. Here is a list of 7 easy-to-implement tips most expert marketers never fail to offer to anyone who is desirous to make sales online.



1. Offer Affiliate Opportunities

Affiliate opportunities help to increase the reach of a marketer online by leveraging the audiences of both the marketer and the affiliates. So, marketers can rely on affiliate opportunities to effectively share the huge task of selling products/services online. Affiliate marketing is simply when marketers allow other people, (i.e. affiliates) to market their products/services and send them website traffic. As a benefit, these affiliates are paid a percentage of any sales that are made from their promotional efforts as commissions. This arrangement is completely risk-free and low-cost since affiliates get paid if and only when they generate sales.

2. Build up an Email List

Email marketing may be “old school” but it still manages to get attractive sales results. Its effectiveness hinges directly on an email list which is a major marketing asset the marketer has to build up over time. Creating an email list is essential to generating sales through email marketing and it costs next to nothing to build. With a credible and segmented email list, you do not have to wait for customers to find your products/services themselves. Through the list, you can deliver your marketing messages and even offers directly to their inboxes. Your segmented email list of subscribers enables you to accurately deliver well-tailored product/service information and content to specific time zones around the world 24/7. That helps your sales a great deal.

3. Make Your Checkout Process User-Friendly

Online shoppers are characteristically very impatient. If the check-out process in your business website is cumbersome and not user-friendly, you risk losing a lot of sales opportunities. For this reason, you need to make your checkout process as simple as possible. Avoid giving your customers too many questions to answer or long-winded forms to fill in. Each extra step in the checkout process is a chance for your customers to change their minds and pull out of the sale. What follows is a huge pile of abandoned carts. Most customers shop online because it’s quicker and more convenient than visiting a physical store. If however because of the complexity of your check-out process many customers decide to back out, you risk losing many sales as a result.

4. Make Your Product Descriptions Vivid

Making shoppers to like your product at the shortest possible time span helps your sales. You can only make a sale if your shoppers like your products. A vivid description of your products helps that process. The internet is usually bursting with products and the competition is very stiff. For this reason, you must always make sure your customers and potential customers understand how your products will benefit them through the vivid descriptions you provide. This is complemented with very high quality images and or graphics. The more relevant information you can provide, the more likely your customers and potential customers will stay on your site long enough to decide to make a purchase. 



5. Start a Blog

Blogging is a very popular way of content marketing on the internet. If you don’t have a blog yet, you must decide to start one if you want to make more sales online. Without a blog associated with your online store or product, you risk missing out on the endless possibilities that come with content marketing. Just blog about an industry niche related to the products you are marketing and provide valuable information to your readers that will help solve their problems. Creating a good blog allows you to produce free and valuable content that builds trust in your brand and keeps people well informed. Good quality blog posts will also give you valuable content to share on social media and help your website rank high in the SERPs of search engines. That translates to good traffic, leads and sales.

6. Spread Word about Your Business

Never hesitate to tell anyone about your business. The more the number of people that know about your business, the better for the business! Start spreading the word from your social media circle to your family and friends. Encourage them to pass the word to their own social media circle, family and friends. You can make your first tentative sales from this inner circle. Through them, the word gets out to others in a wider circle and your sales increase as a result. Once you are able to establish that your product solves a problem for anyone in your circle, sell them the benefits. If it helps them out, they pass the word on in favor of your business. You can easily take advantage of your personal network on social media where you’re likely to be connected to many more people than in the physical world to pass on the word about your business.

7. Give Away Free Stuff to Influencers

A mutually beneficial relationship with influencers on social media is also recommended because many industry influencers have loyal audiences and large followings on social media. Sending influencers a free complimentary sample of your product is a great way to potentially get a mention on one of their platforms. If this happens, you’re almost certainly going to see some kind of spike in your website traffic and social media followers. That can directly ignite a spike in your sales too. Any form of relationship or interaction with influencers can affect your sales positively. If for instance you sell sports wears, interviewing an influencer about the industry and even playing a game with an influencer while they’re wearing your sports attire is good PR for your sales. When influencers actively engage with their loyal followers and even endorse your products to them, you are likely to witness a remarkable spike in your sales from that endorsement alone.

Sunday, January 23, 2022

6 Useful Tips to Run Your Small Business Profitably Online

Small business owner sign on  green billboard.
Do you run a small business online? Great if you do. The pandemic restrictions have forced many more people to take their businesses online. So, you are not alone. But, are you satisfied with the way things are with the business? Are you running it to your satisfaction? If not, there are some useful tips to help make your business successful if only you’ll pay the right attention. Running your own small business online can be hugely challenging, but it's not impossible. What you really need to do is to put in the necessary time and effort to get the right results. No matter how good your strategy is, make sure to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong. You’ve got to be able to stay adaptable to the situation at hand at all times. So, no matter how challenging running your own small business online becomes, you can still get very good results if you pay good attention to these here tips.



1. Update Your Website Regularly

If you are running your own small business online, your website is your business window to the world on the internet. This makes it hugely important for you to keep your website well optimized and up-to-date at all times. To attract more customers, make sure that you're offering new products/services as a matter of routine. Your website attracts leads and eventual customers if people who come to it find solutions to their problems. More and more people will return to your website if they find it informative and easy to navigate. Such people are more likely to do business with you if they always find what they are looking for on your website. The reason your website must always be up to date with information about the products/services you are offering.
 
2. Use Affiliate Marketing to Boost Income

You can boost your income with affiliate marketing right out of your business website. All you need do is simply to promote affiliate links from other product merchants on your website. Once a sale is made through these links, you earn a commission. Affiliate marketing is thus one of the best ways for small businesses to make extra income online. It is quite simple to set up and implement right out of your business website. All you need do is to try and locate other small businesses whose products/services complement yours and you agree to promote their links on your website. You earn commissions from their sales for referring customers over to their websites.
 
3. Engage a Virtual Receptionist

To free yourself from mundane and routine tasks like phone calls on your website you need the services of a virtual receptionist. That helps you to cut back on costs and save time for more important tasks of managing your business. You can simply scout around to get a service that acts as virtual receptionists to handle routine tasks for you. A good virtual receptionist is someone who's willing to work on their own time and handle tasks like answering phone calls as if they were your personal receptionist. With this service in place, you can cut down on your expenses and still be able give your customers all the service they deserve in a more efficient manner.



4. Take Marketing Advantage of Social Media

Most digital marketers now realize that social media is one great marketing tool no small business can afford to ignore. On social media, small business owners can interact and hear directly from their customers and learn first-hand what they want. You can share your own content directly with them to meet their needs. This stimulates the much needed interaction with your customers and potential customers to boost your sales. To reach a very wide and easily segmented audience, you need to have accounts on the most popular social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and the likes. These sites have around 2 billion active users and that’s one very huge market out there if you ask me. Small business owners can thus take full advantage of this huge popularity to reach a wider audience, market to and engage more customers and prospective customers effectively on social media.

5. Be Prepared to Make Necessary Sacrifices

If you want to succeed in running a small business online, be ready to put in the work needed and to make the necessary sacrifices to earn success. You must be proactive and be ready to devote the required time and effort to surmount any roadblocks that may stand between your small business and success. You must for instance be ready forgo other activities to have enough time and attention to handle your phone calls, attend to customers, market the business on social media sites, and deliver your products to customers and such suchlike business activities. Even if these activities tend to disrupt your kind of lifestyle, the sacrifice is worth it to grow your business. However, it is important to always have a backup plan in case things don’t pan out according to your plans. This is to avoid frustration which can drive you off the business altogether. The reason you must always be willing to adapt to any situation at hand to keep the business going. If it becomes inevitable that something untoward happens in the business, you can quickly make changes to remain on course.

6. Be Ready to Put in Quality Work

At the outset, you need to really work hard to successfully run your own small business online. That’s when you’ve got to roll up your sleeves, work hard and keep your eyes firmly on your goals. Sometimes, things could really be tough going though. You don’t quit even if that happens. You can simply adapt and keep going forward with your eyes firmly on your end goals. Experience has shown that small business owners that are willing and able to put in the adequate time and efforts needed to succeed in their businesses tend to succeed better in the short and long term.