Effective Guide to Affiliate Marketing Success

Among digital marketers, affiliate marketing is presently a lucrative avenue for generating income online. It is a performance-based business model that entails promoting third-party products/services and earning a commission for each sale generated. This sale is identified and attributed through a unique affiliate referral link/code through which the sale was generated. The more affiliates promote products/services, the more commissions they earn. Following are proven techniques that can effectively guide you to your own affiliate marketing success.

Carefully Choose Your Niche

To succeed in affiliate marketing, it is crucial to choose a niche that aligns with your passion and expertise. You must carefully identify your interests, hobbies, and areas of expertise to find a niche that genuinely excites you. Next is to conduct a market research to assess the demand and competition in the niche before choosing it. It is also important to consider the profitability of the niche by analyzing the average commission rates and potential earnings from the niche. Thereafter, you can narrow down the niche to a specific target audience. Doing so will guide you to craft and tailor your content and promotions more effectively.

Build a User-Friendly Website/Blog

Your website is your business window out there on the internet. If you create a website/blog dedicated to your chosen niche, it serves as an excellent platform to do business from. Through it, you can share valuable content, establish your authority in your niche, and seamlessly integrate affiliate links if you so decide. To create a user-friendly website/blog, it is important to choose a domain name that reflects your niche. Make sure it is memorable, relevant, and can be easily branded. Next is to host it on a reliable web hosting service then select for it a user-friendly Content Management Systems (CMS) like Blogger or WordPress which allow easy customization and integration of affiliate links. Be sure to create on the website/blog clear navigation menus to help visitors find relevant content and affiliate promotions easily. The website design must be visually appealing and responsive. It must provide a seamless user experience across different devices particularly mobile phones and Tablets.

Research Affiliate Programs

Research and choose a reputable affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI, to work with. Such programs that offer a wide variety of products/services are best to work with. It is also important to consider factors like commission rates, payment methods, and the reputation of the affiliate program to ensure a beneficial partnership. Make sure the affiliate program you choose aligns with your niche and offers products/services that resonate with your target audience. You can get very valuable information about affiliate programs by reading reviews and testimonials from other affiliates. Doing so will help you to gauge the reliability and trustworthiness of the affiliate program you want to partner with.

Consistently Create High-Quality Content

If you consistently create high-quality, valuable, and informative content, it can help you to attract and retain your target audience, encourage them to click on your affiliate links and even make purchases. This is why content is king in affiliate marketing. To create valuable content therefore, you must thoroughly research your topics to ensure accuracy and credibility of the information you are presenting in your content. You can present your content through various content formats such as blog posts, product reviews, video reviews, tutorials, and infographics. This helps the content to cater to different audience preferences. If you use eye-catching visuals and multimedia elements on the content, it helps to enhance the visual appeal and engagement of the content. By focusing the content on addressing your audience’s pain points and providing solutions, it can help to establish you as a trusted authority in your niche or industry. If you want the content to be visible to search engines, you can incorporate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. This helps to improve its ranking/visibility in the SERPs of search engines. This ultimately helps the content to attract good organic traffic.

Build a Responsive Email List

A responsive email list is a very valuable asset in digital marketing. The list can be built over time using lead-generation strategies on your website to encourage visitors to subscribe to your email list. You can in addition offer valuable incentives such as free e-books, exclusive content, or discounts to entice users to sign up with their emails. Once your list has grown in size, you can segment it based on subscribers’ interests and behaviors to enable you send personalized and targeted affiliate messages/promotions. You can rely on email marketing tools like Mailchimp or ConvertKit to manage your email subscriber list and automate your email campaigns. Next is to nurture your email subscribers by sending regular newsletters, helpful tips, and relevant content. This will help you to build trust and keep your subscribers engaged with your brand.

Widely Promote Your Affiliate Products/Services

To promote your products/services very widely and effectively, you can leverage various marketing channels particularly social media. Pay special attention to the very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest to widely share your content and affiliate links/codes. You can create compelling product reviews and comparisons that highlight the benefits of your affiliate products. To expand your reach and gain access to new and bigger audiences, you can arrange collaboration with influencers and other bloggers in your niche/industry. Finally, you must diligently monitor your marketing efforts and track the performance of your affiliate links to identify what strategies yield the best results. That is the information that can help you to make the vital decisions to redirect, rejig or modify your marketing campaigns for better results.

Wrapping Up

If you really want to succeed in affiliate marketing, you need careful planning, strategic implementation, and continuous improvement in your marketing techniques. By following the foregoing steps diligently, it is possible for you to establish a successful and profitable affiliate marketing business through which you can consistently earn a good income stream. Bear in mind however that success in affiliate marketing isn’t sudden. It takes quite a while for the business to take hold and to start yielding substantial incomes. 

How to Tactically Use Content to Propel Your Digital Marketing

In digital marketing, it is practically impossible to market successfully without good content. Marketers usually depend on specialized, high-quality content to propel their digital marketing campaigns. It is content that helps marketers to share vital marketing information with their audience. With good content, they can successfully nurture the audience, educate them, and convince them to buy the products/services they’re promoting. This is why smart marketers always explore many ways to add content to their digital marketing mix in a strategic way for best results.

 

Here are six tactics you can strategically add content to your marketing to propel your marketing strategy.

1. Landing Pages: The landing page is where visitors to your website first get to when they land on your website. That makes the page strategically important. You can thus create a selection of at least four landing pages that you can use to test different offers. With these four possible landing pages, you can direct ads from your social media accounts four different ways. This way, you can directly experiment with which kinds of messaging that will lead to the best conversion rates.

2. Monthly Guest-Contributed Articles: Practically, guest posts can help distribute your content to new audiences and bring more qualified traffic back to your site. This is their most important use by marketers. So, if you are able to create at least one guest post per month, you can earn valuable backlinks to boost SEO for your webpage. This helps to drive more organic traffic to your blog posts and the landing pages you’ve created.

3. Monthly Email Newsletter: Sending out content via email at least once a month is an effective marketing strategy. But be sure your emails aside helping to stay in touch, also incorporate other relevant pieces of your content. This content should have links to some of the blog posts or snippets of your most recent guest-contributed articles.

4. Monthly Blog Posts: If you can do at least four monthly blog posts, that is, one a week, your content will be effective. What matters most however is that these blog posts should be informative and of high quality. They must be regular as well. If these blog posts are optimized for the keywords you want to rank for, they help attract good organic traffic to your website.

5. Quarterly Piece of Gated Content: At least one quarterly piece of gated content can be great for your marketing strategy. Technically, gated content is high-value content that offer leads the chance to learn a lot in exchange for their email address. These pieces of content mostly infographics and or whitepapers should be tested for effectiveness before use. Doing so helps to identify what information is most compelling for your audience and is best to use.

6. Quarterly Press Campaigns: Press campaigns are great tactics for a marketing strategy particularly when carried out at least once per quarter. If professionally packaged, a press campaign brings multiple messages together in a coherent story. They are effective when they earn press mentions that can hopefully include backlinks to aid your SEO.

All told, content is not a separate strategy from digital marketing, it is an integral part of it. Content aids your marketing success when it effectively helps you to share important marketing information with your audience in order to nurture them, educate them, and convince them to buy from you. It helps your content strategy when you habitually test and tweak your messaging, try different versions of your content, and in different formats to know what works best for your strategy.

Last Line

Content writing and digital marketing are kind of inseparable. You can’t do one without the other. If you want your marketing strategy to succeed, just allow your digital marketing strategy to be fueled and fed by content and your marketing will be great. Once you understand how the subsections of your digital strategy work together, you can achieve marketing success.

11 Vital Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Website

Your business window into the wide world of the internet is your website. Your online business cannot succeed without a successful website. One major determinant of the success of a website is the amount of traffic it gets. Therefore, every online business owner who wants to succeed in the business must take deliberate steps to generate traffic and build loyal audiences. This at times presents a lot challenges to business owners largely because of the huge competition for attention out there on the internet. Despite that, business owners must generate traffic to their websites all the same except they are not keen on success. Here are eleven tried and tested tips that can help you to generate the most traffic to your website.

1. Market with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model that allows affiliates to help product merchants promote their products in return for commissions on the sales they generate. While the business owner has his own audience and traffic sources, the affiliates as independent business entities also have theirs. If affiliates are promoting any product of a product merchant, they help direct traffic to the website of the product merchant with a view to generating a sale from the effort. This they do mostly through embeddable shopping links and product reviews. For traffic purposes, effective affiliate marketing helps to draw traffic to a product merchant’s website. It can help the SEO of the website and increase its chances of attracting repeat visitors.

2. Implement Basic SEO Techniques

Basic SEO techniques on your website help it to get organic traffic. That is traffic sent to it by search engines particularly Google. The most basic of these techniques involves writing high-quality and high-impact content on your website, writing long-form content, fixing broken links and optimizing your URLs. If you get these techniques right, Google will rank your website higher in its SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic.

3. Prioritize your Website Security

A secure website is a trusted website because it is reliable to do business. You can therefore prioritize your website security to make users trust it sufficiently to do business with. That means traffic. Good security on your website protects your valuable data from hackers and cyber criminals. Since Apps and Plugins are quite susceptible to hacking, securing them helps to give your website users more guarantees and that translates to good traffic since many users will feel secure doing business with a secure website. To make sure your data is protected from cyber criminals, it is advisable to work with a publishing platform that offers 24/7 support and whose site network security measures are known and formidable.

4. Market with Video Content

High quality short-form video content is always very good to attract traffic to your website. You can use such videos in short-form tutorials, guides, product information, or any other content. If you choose to, you can even repurpose existing written content into videos for more effective marketing. For traffic purposes, after launching videos on your site, make sure to post them to your accounts on popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and others. If properly done, that is by including links in the videos back to your website, it can without a doubt result in significantly increased traffic to your website.
 
5. Create Evergreen Content

You can increase traffic to your website by maintaining and keeping traffic growth continuity on your website over time. Only evergreen content guarantees that. Exactly why evergreen content should be a must-have for your website! In content marketing, evergreen content is content based on topics that never go out of style and revolve around your site’s niche. Retouching, updating and publishing evergreen content is also great for your website’s SEO. At any point in time, if you manage to create quality evergreen content around the key phrases your website is known for, over time and with smart SEO techniques, your website can reap the benefits of consistent traffic from searches. You can thus make evergreen content to always be relevant to your audience, more so if you endeavor to update it from time to time.
 
6. Be Active on Social Media

One great way to attract traffic to your website is to be active on major social media platforms. With over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, social media now appears to be one great market out there on the internet. If you do business on the internet, it means your audience resides all over the web inclusive of social media. This is more so in the hugely popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. If you are active on these platforms, you’ll discover a natural audience that is already passionate about your message and mission and is ready to engage and even participate with your content. It is from this audience you attract traffic to your website. If you habitually post highly engaging content frequently on these platforms, you increase your content’s visibility and increase the chances that your posts are favored by social media algorithms. That translates to good traffic to your website. For this to be sustained, always make sure to include interesting or engaging photos/images in the content you post on social media. Doing so usually leads to higher click-through rates and consequently good traffic.

7. Write Guest Posts

The essence of writing guest posts on other popular and reputable websites is to promote backlinks to your own website. That is good for traffic. Here is the trick. If you write quality content for another site, you will reach new audiences that may have never heard of you before. That helps to increase your visibility. With increased visibility, you will also build credibility not only with your new audiences, but also with Google’s algorithm. Over time, your guest posts will generate more backlinks to your own site which will improve your search rankings and, ultimately, increase your website traffic. Simple!

8. Optimize your Website for Mobile

Google reports now attribute over 60% of web data to mobile devices. That means more and more people are transacting business online with their mobile devices particularly smartphones. This now makes it imperative for online business owners to spend their time and effort to ensure their websites offer a rich user experience on mobile devices. In fact, Google now takes into consideration for its website ranking purposes to factor in websites that are mobile-friendly. It is only websites that are optimized for mobile that can be mobile-friendly. These are websites that can thus really benefit from the huge traffic emanating from mobile devices. On your website, if you use a CMS that prioritizes performance and the mobile experience above all else, it will ensure that your site’s mobile interface is modern, fast, and built for repeat visits. That translates to good traffic.

9. Regularly Send Email Newsletters

Most online business owners now know that one of the most effective methods to grow readership for their content is through newsletter campaigns. Significantly, emails have been around for a while but they are still a great way to target niche audiences to convert them into loyal followers. Habitually, most people check their emails daily. This makes email communication a very effective way for marketers and business owners to pass marketing messages and updates to their audience promptly. So, if you want to build a successful email campaign, just create a newsletter experience that will make your niche users want to read more. You can take advantage of AI, smart software and technology to easily to transform your site’s content into dynamic and effective email campaigns. That translates to good traffic back to your website.

10. Continually Monitor your Website’s Analytics

Marketing online without analytics is akin to marketing in the dark. It is therefore not smart marketing to create content blindly then hope and pray it will be successful. That era is gone with the advent of Google Analytics. Analytics are smart online tools that can help content creators understand the kind of content that resonates well with their desired audiences. Data from analytics tools give the real insights into online marketing activities like from where traffic is coming and what the traffic is looking for on your website. Great insights that can help the business owner generate more traffic. If you monitor your site’s analytics regularly, you will be able to see which content is performing well and which is not. This vital information allows you to adjust your content strategy accordingly to enable it attract more traffic in the short and long term.
 
11. Decrease your Website’s Bounce Rate

Decreasing your website’s bounce rate automatically means getting more traffic. Technically, your site’s bounce rate is the percentage of users who navigate away from your website after viewing only one page. The best way to tackle a high bounce rate is by providing a user experience that makes readers want to stick around and read more on your site. Good traffic that is! Paying attention to your site’s bounce rate is about the best way to use the power of data to guide every step of your content workflow. So, if you deliberately set a goal to decrease your site’s bounce rate, you will notice a significant increase in general traffic to your website. You can only prove this through testing and retesting by leveraging A/B testing technique. Through this technique, when you subject a small percentage of your site’s traffic to a new layout, you can see how the new version impacts page speed and user experience. Then you can check how that compares to your current bounce rate, and then make the necessary adjustments for better results. Doing so significantly increases your traffic as the bounce rate decreases.

Top 8 Awesome Email Marketing Tools for Small Businesses

Among digital marketers, email marketing is one of their most widely used digital marketing strategies. The reason is simple. Email is cost-efficient to use and with a very good ROI. In addition, it is typically a simple, clear, and efficient way to communicate with customers and prospective customers. You can only get these advantages from email marketing if your emails get to their recipients. On that score, there’s a lot you must do to ensure that your messages reach the right audience. It is only when they do you can expect to be able to turn your leads into customers efficiently. Therefore, to ensure your emails get to the recipients and as sent, you need the assistance of smart software and tools. These tools are designed to make your marketing easier by helping you to automate several tasks to increase your chances of success. Email marketing tools can help increase engagement with your emails and improve the chances of success with your email marketing strategies. This is why you must carefully choose the most efficient email marketing tools without sacrificing dependability and security. Online, there are numerous email marketing software solutions available for marketers to choose from. Many of these tools offer flexible capabilities/solutions that can be tailored to practically any market. Choosing the right email marketing tools for your email marketing strategy can have a significant impact on the success of your email marketing campaigns.

 

Find below some of the best email marketing tools you can choose from to boost your email marketing campaigns.

1. Mailchimp Tool

Mailchimp is a very popular email marketing platform among marketers. It is a very sophisticated platform with fantastic features like drag-and-drop email editor, email notifications, contact segmentation into subgroups, and simple analytics monitoring. Mailchimp is popular with marketers because it has a free plan that enables users to deliver up to 12,000 emails to almost 2,000 recipients regularly. It also offers premium monthly subscriptions for marketers who can afford the fees. One main advantage of Mailchimp is that it enables marketers to configure delivery times depending on time zones and geolocation-based segmentation. In addition to that, marketers can readily integrate Mailchimp with Content Management Systems like Wix and WordPress as well as eCommerce platforms like Shopify, and a variety of other platforms to increase its effectiveness.

2. Benchmark Tool

Benchmark’s email marketing tool is free and comes with a robust marketing package. Benchmark’s email solution is ideal for ambitious email marketing campaigns. This tool provides some complex capabilities like Google Analytics tracking, social network integration, and heat mapping all for free. In addition and if you so desire, you can get a convenient drag and drop builder, minimal automation, and reporting capabilities with Benchmark tool.

3. ActiveCampaign Tool

ActiveCampaign tool boasts of a CRM option and live chats in addition to email marketing. It is a great tool that marketers find helpful to find relevant prospects using tools like lead scoring. This is made possible by integrating a CRM into their marketing operations. You can also use the system to add interactive content to your emails, thereby allowing your audience to have varied experiences depending on your segmentation. ActiveCampaign’s template designer is quite user-friendly and easily adaptable. However, you must be ready to pay subscription fees to take full advantage of ActiveCampaign tool.

4. ClickFunnels Tool

ClickFunnels is an email marketing program that is built around sales and marketing funnels. With ClickFunnels software, marketers can develop an automated succession of landing pages, autoresponders, emails, and webinars. They can do all these even without needing to know how to code. ClickFunnels allows businesses to design whole sales and marketing funnels. The main advantage of this is that the tool brings together automated advertising & distribution solutions all in one place. It provides you the tools and methods to market, distribute, and send messages over the internet. A higher grade version of ClickFunnels tool requires subscription fees to put into operation. Platinum version subscribers can contact customers by focused emails, social networks, text messages, and computer notifications at any moment and from anywhere.

5. MailerLite Tool

MailerLite tool helps marketers to personalize and automate their emails to connect with their customers. MailerLite is quite unique marketing software which stands out for its clear, attractive user interface and responsive customer care. You can easily connect MailerLite to other online programs that allow you to exchange information, simplify workflows, and improve your overall user experience. The tool comes with three editors to help marketers build dynamic and engaging campaigns. If you want to create sophisticated marketing processes, MailerLite is the tool you need. With it, you can use triggers to send emails or change custom fields regularly when interacting with your customers.

6. Instapage Tool

Instapage tool includes most of the things marketers need to create and optimize high-converting landing pages. The tool is handy to provide solutions that help to reduce cost-per-click and increase return on ad expenditure. With Instapage, you can develop appropriate mobile-responsive landing pages and interactions without using a developer. The tool makes it easier to increase visitor engagement and conversion rates by creating distinctive landing page encounters for each advertisement and target audience. A major advantage of Instapage tool is that it has a unique AdMaps function feature. This feature allows you to view your ad campaigns and link ads to suitable post-click web pages all in one location.

7. ConvertKit Tool

ConvertKit is a powerful email marketing tool that is really quite suitable for expert bloggers, content writers, and digital entrepreneurs. The tool is not only powerful, it is quite simple to use. Its most distinctive aspect is that it lets marketers give content and rewards to anyone who signs up for their email newsletters. The tool has simple auto-responders that let marketers generate drip emails using its emailing platform. ConvertKit allows you to send personalized messages to your segmented audience which help to enhance conversions. The tool allows marketers to create and execute email campaigns smoothly and provides them the ability to automate tasks and create customer marketing channels. When compared to other email marketing tools on the market, ConvertKit is really affordable but you can only have access to most of its fine features though, by paid subscription only.

8. GetResponse Tool

GetResponse is a great email marketing tool which is quite suitable for small business marketing. Online marketers use it extensively to create strong, simple emails within one easy-to-use interface. You can effectively use it for landing page optimization, conversion channels, and email automation. GetResponse is also very handy if you want to customize your email subject headings using your recipients’ personal information like the recipient’s identity, birth date, and postal code. If you simply pick this while composing your email subject line, it will be applied to all the contacts you’re emailing with the help of their email IDs. You can easily make email lists with GetResponse in an incredibly simple way.

Significant Benefits of Email Marketing to Digital Marketers

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.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce Email Marketing

Email may be old school but it is still a very effective digital marketing tool for most eCommerce business owners. Email is highly cost-effective and very easy to use particularly if you already have in place a responsive email list. The ROI for email marketing is very high making every dollar spent on marketing by eCommerce businesses worth the while. Without a doubt therefore, email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to improve the performance of your eCommerce business. This is because email marketing for eCommerce has many advantages when compared to other marketing strategies. The reasons for this are simple and very easy to discern.

Firstly, through emails, your marketing messages will land directly in your email subscribers’ inboxes. What that means is more and better exposure for your marketing messages.

Secondly, you can segment email messages for different recipients. That makes it easy to send different messages according to your email subscriber’s interests. This leads to highly effective marketing personalization which can make a lot of difference in your marketing campaigns.

Thirdly, by the use of software, you can automate email messages for more reach and effectiveness. This helps to reduce time and costs while still very effective as a marketing strategy. The software is simple and easy to use too. The best and readily available email marketing software you can use today will allow you to personalize your emails based on many criteria such as:

Name
Gender
Location
Birthdays
Emails opened
Website pages visited
Purchase history

By using this personalized info to send relevant emails to your subscribers, you’ll increase their open and click-through rates. Because such emails help to direct visitors to a relevant web page, there’s a higher chance of converting such visitors. That translates to more and better eCommerce business.

Aside personalization, email marketing automation is quite effective as far as strategies go. This is because email marketing automation involves sending a series of messages to your subscribers based on a schedule or when certain conditions/criteria are met.

Here are some examples of automated email sequences popular with digital marketers:

Welcome emails
Up-sell and cross-sell emails
Onboarding emails
Re-engagement emails
Promotional emails
Abandoned cart emails
Lead nurturing emails

To create these emails, you’ll find the necessary tools in some email marketing software. Some modern software packages even provide automation templates marketers can use to create effective email campaigns. When creating email marketing sequences, it is possible for marketers to add triggers or special conditions either to add or remove certain subscribers from the email automation. Email marketing is thus hugely essential for any eCommerce business to thrive.

Top Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Online Business

If you are marketing your business online, it does not have to be a complicated process. Once your marketing strategies are right and you get a handle on your marketing processes and tactics, it is smooth sailing from there. If you have been in the business for a while, you must know that some digital strategies do work better than others. That is expected. It is advisable to diligently test every strategy to see what works best for you. You can then invest more of your time and resources on those techniques that work best for you. As every online marketer very well knows, marketing a small business online is not quite as easy as it may sound. This is why many marketers struggle real hard to get some traction particularly at the beginning. Once these marketers get their marketing strategies right, getting good traffic and growing their audience becomes fairly easier. An effective online marketing strategy helps to boost your business. With it, you get good traffic, more leads, more conversions and sales. 

 
Below are some tested and most likely the very best digital marketing strategies you can use to get more traffic, reach more customers and earn more money online.

Web Design

To do business successfully online, you need a website, a well-designed and user-friendly website that is. If you are marketing out of it, it allows your business to reach more customers and earn more revenue online. The design of your website directly influences the amount of time and attention a user will spend on your content. It also has an influence on its loading speed and navigation thereby directly helping to improve user experience on the site. The user experience derives from making it easy for visitors to find the information they need on the site to become converted customers. Optimizing your website for mobile devices helps the over 60% of online surfers who use mobile devices to easily access the site. If you have the skills, you can build a website yourself using smart web tools. If however you do not have the design skills to do it yourself, it is advisable to hire the services of professional webmasters to create a versatile, attractive and user-friendly website for you.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an advertising technique in which a product merchant pays another person or affiliate to generate leads and sales. The affiliate gets paid a commission from the sales generated directly by the affiliate. What the affiliate does to deserve commission payment is to simply refer online surfers to products through the content they share on their blogs, social media platforms, websites and any other web channels. The affiliate makes money each time someone makes a purchase or signs up for something through their unique affiliate link. Both product merchants and affiliates benefit directly from this arrangement. The product merchant makes more revenue from increased sales and the affiliate earns a decent commission income from their promotional/marketing efforts. Most reputable and very large e-commerce programs like SFI, Strong Future International, ClickBank and eBay run decent and profitable affiliate networks.

 
Email Marketing

For effective email marketing, you must have a responsive email list. With it, you can send email marketing messages to thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds. You can regularly send emails to potential and current customers to sell, educate, and create affinity. Email marketing is readily one of the most cost-effective techniques to market products from an e-Commerce store. With the use of online smart tools, you can create automated email marketing campaigns to connect with potential customers and customers. Once you know the usual purchasing habits of your customers, you can use the info to develop a marketing strategy. Sending automated email messages with this strategy to a segmented email list is usually very helpful in terms of marketing campaign results.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a series of online techniques involving the tactical use of keywords on a website content to boost rankings on the SERPs of search engines. These keywords and phrases associated with your business help search engines to include your business in search results in response to queries from online searchers. SEO can be On-page and Off-page. On-page SEO is any optimization you perform on your website, including improving your site’s speed, adding keywords to your URLs, page titles, and headings, and creating and regularly updating content about your products/services. Off-page SEO is any optimization occurring away from your website. It involves the tactical way of earning valuable backlinks to your website from other reputable sites to improve your website ranking. If the SEO on your website is good, it translates to more organic traffic, more leads and more conversions.

Social Media Marketing

Presently, there are about 4.65 billion active social media users worldwide. What that means is that 58.7% of global population is on social media. Now that’s one huge market out there! Many of these people are on social media having fun, sharing information and doing business. If you want to grow your small business on social media, just get it on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. Share content regularly and engage other users interactively. That way, you can grow your audience, get more traffic and conversions.

10 Strong Online Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Business

With a strong online marketing strategy, you can reach many more customers and consequently increase your sales. The reason expert marketers never fail to recommend to online business owners to have a strong online marketing strategy. This is because they know from their own experiences that online marketing strategies do help many online businesses in their strategic marketing efforts. You too can apply these strategies in your own business and watch the results you get. You can effectively use these here strategies to get more customers and to retain the existing ones. 

1.  Start a Blog

A blog is readily the most popular content marketing strategy available to marketers. If you take to blogging to market your products, you can deploy your blog to many uses. A blog for instance allows you to post new keywords and optimize your search engine strategy from time to time. Through your blog, you can directly offer advice, share information and easily connect with your customers. It helps to build good business relationships by first building trust with the blog readers. From there, you can generate leads and even customers with time. If you want to build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with your blog readers therefore, start a blog. Lasting relationships start with trust and a blog can help you to build this trust.

2. Market with Affiliate Programs

It is smart marketing to get as many eyes as possible to see the products you are marketing online. Affiliate marketing comes in very handy to attract these eyes. In affiliate marketing, you can partner with people who believe in your business to help share information about the business. That way, many more people get to notice your business and you can increase traffic to your website as a result. Affiliate business partnership is simple to operate. When affiliates send traffic to your website, you pay them commissions for every visitor they bring to your website as well as any sales made as a result of the affiliates’ efforts. Affiliate marketing is very effective and can directly help to improve your online marketing efforts without needing you to do a lot yourself.

3. Take SEO Seriously

You must take your search engine marketing seriously because a strong SEO strategy can improve your site’s ranking and increase the chances of your site being associated with the keywords you use on your website. SEO helps your ranking in the SERPs of search engines. A high ranking on these SERPs translates to good organic traffic to your website since the ranking makes it more likely for people to choose your business over your competitors.

4. Deploy Email Marketing

Technically, for any online businesses, email marketing is not just about sending out emails. It is much more than that. For effective and efficient emails, you must look for ways to ensure that you cater for the needs of every individual you are sending emails to. It is therefore hugely important to carefully consider and segment your email lists to meet the recipients’ needs in a personalized manner. If you factor in the shopping characteristics and purchasing habits of your customers, you can use the vital information to develop an effective email marketing strategy. 

5. Get Your Business into News Stories and Articles
 
This is one great way to bring your business to the attention of many eyes on the web. If you cannot do it yourself, it is advisable to work with good public relations professionals to get your business into news stories and articles on topics related to what your business offers. If properly handled, it can help to establish you as a trusted expert and consequently make more people know about your business. You may choose to sign up for free online services that specialize in connecting businesses with writers looking for some information about your industry.
 
6. Write Informative Online Press Releases

This is yet another great way to get more eyes to see your business online. If you write online press releases about your business, it will help you get out very valuable information about your business out there in a formal setting. Through such press releases, blogs, newspapers or other media sources will get to see your information. These sources could rely on your information to write about your business/industry without you having to put a lot of effort to connect and claim a story.

7. Hold Regular Contests and Giveaways

Contests and giveaways are very powerful incentives to attract customers. Regularly holding contests and giveaways can be one of the most cost-effective ways to increase sales for your business. This is because most people love contests and giveaways since they provide good opportunities for them to get some freebies and discounted products. Characteristically, whenever a business encourages promotion from customers in exchange for a free product/service, it usually leads to a remarkable increase in sales and connections.

8. Build a Credible Opt-In Email List

You can easily build a credible opt-in email list through promotions and giveaways as incentives. Customers usually sign up on such lists to get email correspondence about promos, giveaways, discounts and suchlike incentives. The list helps you to better connect with potential customers and existing ones and you do better business as a result.

 
9. Engage a Consultant/Coach

No matter how good you are in internet marketing, you can still use some advice to do better. That is when consultants/coaches with proven track records become handy. Even if you are not that good in digital and internet marketing, you can still succeed in online marketing with such help. On the internet, you can find internet marketing and paid marketing consultants that can help you out. Many of these people are real professionals with good track records in their trade. You can rely on their advice to do most of the things you need to do to succeed in online marketing much better. Their advice can be hugely helpful, especially for small business owners who need to focus more on their core business for business growth.

10. Take Your Web Design Seriously

Your business website is your window to the wide world of internet business. That makes the design of the website of paramount importance for you to attract customers and make sales. In internet business, a great web design is one proven and effective marketing strategy. This is because the design of your website directly determines the amount of attention and time a web visitor will spend on the web page. Since your website is central to all your digital marketing efforts, make sure that it is well designed, well optimized, neat, easy to read and with good aesthetics to make it eye-catching and attractive. So, if you do not give the design of your website the seriousness it deserves, you may end up losing customers you would ordinarily have easily attracted to the site. Even if you don’t have the requisite skills to design a good website, you can hire the services of a professional webmaster to help you out. A good website designer will deploy his skills to help make your website attractive, fast-loading, modern and mobile-friendly. That way, the website will become quite effective and useful to help you attract more visitors to the site.

Email Marketing Tips for Current Trends in Communication

Digital marketers are increasingly relying on emails to do business. Because more and more people are taking to shopping online, marketers are also increasing the volumes of emails they are sending. This is partly to be able to reach out and accommodate consumers' constantly changing needs and to reach more people restricted by covid-19 pandemic. This trend is likely to continue even when the restrictions begin to ease off.

To sustain the current email marketing trends, these here tips can become very useful to email marketers going forward.

Using AI to Optimize Email Strategy

Email marketers can benefit from more effective emails if they skillfully deploy Artificial Intelligence AI, to optimize their email strategy.  With AI, marketers can easily and accurately analyze consumers’ behaviors and streamline their email marketing efforts for better results. Marketers can for instance utilize smart online tools to analyze consumer’s purchase habits and interests. By optimizing the email sending time with these tools, marketers can identify a more suitable angle for their emails’ subject line and content to improve the open rate and even sales conversions.

AI can help out to make your emails more captivating and readable thereby reducing the numbers that end up in trash bins. They help to accurately identify your customers’ needs thereby providing the much needed Intel to shoot them the right emails. CRM systems come very handy to make these processes much easier and time saving.

Personalizing Emails

Marketers can leverage automation and AI to create personalized emails that resonate well with consumers, making them feel connected with your brand. You can use online smart tools to accurately gather customers’ data. From this data, you can analyze their interests and preferences so as to design, craft and deliver more personalized emails that directly speak to their wants and needs. With that personalization, the emails tend to be more effective. These days, many more people are craving personal connection. Many consumers want to feel valued so they respond better to direct and personal touch from marketers. Therefore if you strive to personalize your emails, they help demonstrate your personality and care. That way, more customers can read your emails and really feel connected with you. It helps them to build trust in you as well as your brand.

Using More Interactive Emails

You can engage your customers better if your emails are interactive. The interactive elements in an email don’t have to be too complicated. They can be presented in form of clear and clickable CTA buttons, polls/surveys and quick quizzes to showcase products and or services. The idea is to remove boredom and to give customers the room to help lead the process. This way, customers may really feel that they’re being given options to take their own decisions. Whereas what smart marketers do is to make use of their customers’ choices to tailor-make the user journey that fits the customer preferences most. Such specially customized customer journey tends to convert more sales for the marketer.

Respecting the Privacy of Email Recipients

Customer awareness is now helping to place more emphasis on their privacy. Marketers must beware of this and respect it particularly on how customer data is being used. Trending now and going forward, focusing on customer-data privacy is hugely essential for any digital marketing business. Data privacy regulations may vary from one country to another and all require the right observances, respect and compliance. For this reason, marketers must constantly review extant legislation regarding data privacy with a view to ensuring their email campaigns are in full compliance at all times. If there are any changes in these regulations, as it happens from time to time, marketers must inform their customers of these changes and letting them know how their information will be protected. Doing so helps to increase customers’ trust in your business.

Incorporating User-Generated Content, UGC, in Emails

In digital marketing, UGC is any form of content created by the users of goods and services. The primary source of this content is user feedback. Incorporating UGC into your emails is one great way to increase consumer’s trust in your product/brand. UGC is free and unforced content making it highly convincing and believable. So, if you include customers’ reviews, polls results and photos of customers using your product/service in your emails, your emails resonate better with your recipients. Customers’ feedback is so impactful that it is said to influence over 90% of consumers to make their buy decisions. To get more UGC, you can cross promote your products/services on social media. That is one great way to gather more user reviews or photos. Many social media users are always happy and tend to appreciate your brand more when they too see their own reviews shared publicly by your brand.

Top Digital Marketing Strategies for Creative Online Marketing

It is extremely important to have a digital marketing strategy for your online business. If the digital marketing strategy is creative enough, it will help your online business to grow faster. Since we now live in a digital era, it is easier to get your business noticed if you have a credible digital marketing strategy in place to effectively market the business online. All you really need is a bit of creativity in your marketing efforts and you’ll get good results. 

Here are some digital marketing strategies that can help you out.

Deepen Your Blogs: If you blog for business, try to deepen your blogs with more information, data and statistics to attract more readership. Bloggers have since discovered that longer and deeper blog posts generate many times more success rate and help gain new customers when compared to short blogs. Expert bloggers recommend blog posts not shorter than 750 words but depending on your type of business, shorter blog posts as low as 250-350 words do really nice particularly on social media. However, search engines tend to have a preference for longer blog posts. For example on Google, the average word count for the top-ranking posts is 1100-1300 words. Make this info a very important guide when crafting your blog posts.
 
Research Your Competitors: It is not enough to just research your competitors, you can devise creative ways to even spy on their activities. It is of great help to your marketing strategy if you have a clear idea what your competitors are doing in the market and why they are doing what they are doing. To know what is going on in the minds of your competitors is a key intelligence digital marketing info you can use to distinctly differentiate your business online. If you know about your competitors’ strategies, you can use them to design your differentiators. In digital marketing, being different will make you stand out and apart from everyone else. Being unique and different can be of great help to help your business generate more traffic, leads and customers on your website. A quick Google search of the products/services you are marketing can help you to find out helpful info about your competitors’ digital marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile: Google now reports that about 65% of its search data is attributable to mobile devices. What this means is that your business website must be optimized for mobile devices to take advantage of this huge search data. Most people prefer doing business with websites they can easily interact with online. This is why user-friendly and mobile-friendly websites tend to get more and better traffic than others.

Personalize Your Marketing: Every human being likes to feel important and appreciated. The reason personalized marketing messages are very important in digital marketing. Even if you are suggesting similar products, using the customer’s name, or sending the deals that match their location, being personal will attract such customers more. You can use conversational tones whenever possible and be sure the message specifically addresses the needs of the recipient. Encourage customers to make suggestions and even specific demands you can meet to satisfy their needs.

Market with Email: Email marketing is cost-effective and delivers good returns on investment. You can segment emails, personalize marketing messages and optimize the mails for good results. Emails can also be well timed for delivery at appropriate times anywhere around the globe. This is why email is hugely popular with marketers and it now appears to be one of the best ways to promote most businesses online. By using AI, you can automate emails to help save time, efforts and other resources. The reason email is a great strategy of online marketing for most small businesses.

Effective eCommerce Email Marketing Tools

Digital marketers rely immensely on email marketing tools to enhance their businesses. When in search of email automation and Artificial Intelligence, AI, to boost your marketing business, you’ve got to think email enhancement tools. Many of these tools have special adaptations to eCommerce businesses making them more effective thereon. In reality, different email marketing tools have different capabilities. It is best to use the right combination of tools that help to enhance your email marketing strategy.

Here are some of such tools you can take a look at.

SparkToro Tool

What this tool does is to provide you with a platform that can help you find and identify all sources of influences your audience might be interested in. Meaning, the tool has audience intelligence capabilities. With SparkToro’s Audience Intelligence capabilities, you can have access to difficult-to-get data about your audience’s preferences. This is in terms of what they read, listen to, watch, and are generally interested in. Having access to such a database is an invaluable source of knowledge that helps you come closer to your store’s audience. Such information helps you to understand what your audience wants or might need from you. If through such research intelligence you get to know what your audience likes, it helps to increase your chances of creating engaging and compelling email content. If you do so consistently, you can manage to save valuable time, money and efforts in your marketing activities and still be able to get good results.

Mailtrap Tool

Marketers find Mailtrap tool very useful for email testing. It is a very powerful tool for email testing since you can basically use it to run your email tests and improve on the emails before they are actually sent out. By using this tool, marketers ensure their approved/final emails are near perfect. What that means is that after the testing, the emails have all the necessary elements, like a great subject line, the right text in terms of photos and graphics volume/ratio and so on are in the right proportions. That helps to make a huge difference in terms of email deliverability and marketing conversions. With billions of emails sent out daily, most marketers know very well that low-quality and spammy emails are most likely going to end up in spam folders. Mailtrap tool helps to prevent that.

Grammarly Tool

No matter what you do in terms of the visual aspect of your emails, they must be easily readable to be effective. That is where Grammarly tool comes very handy. This tool helps marketers to send clean email content with no typos and grammatical errors. Grammarly tool provides users with AI-powered writing assistance. That helps to make sure that your email content is of high quality and will thus resonate with your audience as expected. This is because when email content is well structured and mistake-free, it helps people to better focus on the content and the meaning behind it. If it does that, it makes it more likely that readers will understand what the marketing message is all about and what the marketer is actually saying. Even if you have limited vocabulary, Grammarly tool as an effective digital writing assistance tool easily provides you with vocabulary recommendations for your content. That helps you in no small measure to find the right words to express your brand’s identity and to capture the attention of your readers better.

WebFX Tool

WebFX tool is a very effective Readability Test Tool. As a great choice digital writing assistance tool, WebFX tool helps in enhancing the content of emails. It allows you to input content and test its readability at the same time. With that, you can easily create content that’s easy for your readers to read and comprehend. By creating readable and easy-to-get email content, you can significantly increase your chances of having your email subscribers engage more with your emails. If they do, chances are higher that they can get to take such desirable actions like visiting your web store more often and taking advantage of the offers you might be sharing at any point in time.

Designmodo Tool

Designmodo tool is an extremely versatile tool that offers a wide range of website and email design solutions that business owners can use to create their eCommerce websites. It is a particularly very good tool for designing beautiful and efficient newsletters that attract the attention of readers compelling them to read the newsletters. Such newsletters are very useful to marketers for audience engagement. What this means is that if you use Designmodo tool to build your email newsletters, it allows you to create responsive email content that somehow helps to boost awareness and engagement for your business.

Visme Tool

Visme tool parades very unique credentials. It is a design-software that can be used for creating all sorts of graphics, including infographics and videos. If you want to make your emails as visually compelling as possible, Visme tool is what you need. Given the fact that most people are generally better able to process visual information than text information, emails that appeal more on visuals are generally more engaging. If you want your emails to keep your audience more engaged, be sure you provide them with more interesting visual content. Visme tool is the right tool to help you out in that quest.

Finally, based on experience and recommendations from expert marketers, if you deploy these tools well enough as part of your email marketing strategy, they can help you to get the most out of email marketing as a very powerful and effective channel of communication.

Best of luck with your email marketing activities!

How to Structure Your Emails for Effectiveness

Email design is very important in email effectiveness. If your emails are well structured and beautifully designed, their ability to build customer loyalty increases significantly. Such emails also make it easy for marketers to implement their email communication strategy. If you are using the services of email service providers in your email marketing strategy, their services help to structure your emails. They make available to you, content features with short formatted text and the action button. You also benefit from their social media icons, links to mobile apps, the required sender details as well as access to subscription management options. As for email templates, these could be varied from campaign to campaign, depending on their type and purpose. All told, each email is structured in such a way as to contain certain important elements put in their proper places to enhance their effectiveness. Here is what that entails.

Email Content: This is the main part of your email message, and the heart and soul of the message. It can be structured for better acceptability but can’t be standardized or organized with any one universally acceptable formula. However, with practical creativity, a lot can be done on content to make it more effective. That creative ability varies from marketer to marketer. What really counts is to be sure your message looks clear, concise and easily readable. It should not be overloaded with unnecessary design elements which can cause unhelpful distractions. Even though you are at liberty to use good images, GIFs, videos, text formatting, and so on, this should be done with utmost care. Reactions/responses must not just be expected from email recipients, they can actually be invited to do so through subtle luring. To do that efficiently, it is recommended to include a CTA button somewhere along with the content.

Template Headers: Template headers are usually the instant attractions emails carry. They are not remarkably different from main message headers and they mostly serve as the email title. The main purpose of template headers is to attract readers’ attention, set association with your brand, and explain the purpose of the message at a quick glance. Your business motto, logo and bragging rights are major and very important elements of the template header. Depending on the type of emails you are sending, your template header can also include a branded design pattern.

Message Headers: Even though message headers may not actually be part of the email template itself, they are significant parts of the email structure worth paying attention to. It is important to structure email headers to include the sender’s name, message recipients, and the subject line. Because the decision on whether or not an email should be opened depends on the headers, marketers must always pay special attention to email headers, check and double-check them before pressing the send button. The reason for this extra precaution is to avoid spam label. For email recipients, a message header can become a spam trigger if the sender was negligent.

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.