7 Online Money-Making Opportunities for Newbies

These days, making money online is not as complicated as it once was particularly in the early days of the Internet. Even if you are a newbie in online business, you can make money if you have a working knowledge of the Computer, Smartphone and the Internet. As the Internet is deepening, many more people are exploring profitable ways to do business online. As more and more people are increasingly going to the Internet for their shopping needs, the business opportunities on the Internet are increasing in tandem. That impacts positively on the money-making opportunities on the Internet as well. So, anyone can make money on the Internet if they really know what they are doing. 

Depending on your inclinations, even if you are new to Internet business, the following are tested ways to make money online.

1. A Writer: If you have valuable information to share and you can write well, you can be a writer and make money with your writing online. As an online writer, you can write extensively about topics related to your chosen business niche. You can package this information in eBooks, Courses, and other Digital Products and sell online to make money.
 
2. Affiliate Marketer: Affiliate marketing is a simple business model involving product merchants, affiliates and consumers. It is a type of performance-based marketing in which affiliates help product merchants to promote products to consumers and the affiliates earn commissions from the sales they generate directly with their efforts. Affiliates do this by promoting unique affiliate links/codes on the internet to refer buyers to the products of a product merchant. The affiliate will earn a commission from the product merchant for each successful referral that leads to a sale. If you can do this, you can become an affiliate marketer and earn a commission from any product/service that you help sell on eBay, SFI or Amazon. Such products include physical items, digital downloads, books, electronics, clothing, furniture, toys, jewellery, tools, video games, homes, cars and so on. You can join a reputable affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI to do your marketing as an affiliate and earn good commissions for your efforts.
 
3. Influencer Marketers: The advent of social media has made influencer marketing really popular. With over 4.6 billion active users of social media worldwide, social media has become one huge market place on the Internet. So, if you are very active on social media, you can become an influencer marketer and earn a percentage of the sales generated by people who follow you on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others.
 
4. Podcast Advertiser: If you have the right equipment and a bit of practice, you can become a podcast advertiser and earn money whenever somebody listens to one of your podcasts.

 

5. A Publisher: By creating the right website and publishing content regularly, you can become a website publisher and earn money every time anybody visits your website to get information. If your website is monetized either by selling ads spaces on the website or through Google AdSense on the site, you earn money through the website visits and clicks on the ads displayed on the site.

6. A Blogger: Blogging is the most popular form of content marketing online. If you know something that others will like to read, you can be a blogger by publishing informative content regularly on your blog. If you create your own blog website and monetize it, you can earn money every time someone reads one of your articles or clicks on any ad displayed on your blog. You can also as blogger earn money by way of affiliate marketing if you promote affiliate links/codes on your blog.
 
7. Video Marketer: If you have the right equipment and a bit of technical knowledge of videography, you can become a video marketer and earn money every time somebody watches one of your videos. If you upload your videos, particularly how-to videos on YouTube, you can earn money out there as an influencer as well as affiliate marketer if your YouTube channel has a large following. That however depends on how many views your videos manage to garner on the platform.

5 Techniques to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers are independent business persons who work to earn commissions. They help product merchants market their products and earn commissions from their efforts. They are not directly responsible for product manufacturing, warehousing/storage, product delivery or customer service. These are the responsibilities of product merchants.  The job of affiliate marketers is to simply direct traffic from their websites, blogs, newsletters, and online posts to the brands they are promoting. Affiliates earn money in form of commissions in exchange for driving traffic and/or purchases to the referring brand.

Here are some tested techniques affiliates use to earn money in affiliate marketing.

1. Coupon Sites

When product merchants want to introduce a novel or underappreciated product/service into the market, coupon sites come in very handy. For a limited period of time, you can promote a reduction on first-time purchases in an affiliate arrangement with a coupon website. These coupons can entice buyers to visit your website and sign up to become supporters of your brand. Commissions are paid for connections made in this process.

2. Bloggers/Influencers

If you connect with popular and established writers or social media Influencers in your business niche, they can directly help you through their separate audiences to expand your own reach. That makes your reach exponentially wider. If these writers and influencers help to propagate your marketing messages or write articles to promote or endorse your products, it directly enhances your sales. What they write or endorse, because of the trust they have built with their separate audiences over time, can directly attract people from their audience to look up the website of the product merchant. When these visitors make purchases, the writers or influencers are then entitled to be paid commissions relative to the sales made.

3. Review Sites

Products merchants take to review websites when they have high-priced products to sell. It is customary for buyers and customers to desire more information about any product before making their buy decisions. That is where review websites become handy to provide this additional information by way of product reviews. When businesses and authors on review websites willingly give a referral link to your product and rate it highly, it usually increases the likelihood that potential buyers will click through and buy from you. The referring parties earn commissions from their referral efforts.

4. Search Affiliates

Search affiliates are mostly independent business owners who spend money on ads to have their products shown in search engine results. There are affiliates who earn commissions through PPC on their ads. The ads can also be placed on popular social media networks, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or other online advertising networks. The more searchers click on these ads, the more commissions the affiliates earn.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may have been around for quite a while but it is still a very efficient affiliate marketing technique. It remains one of the most efficient methods to get individuals to sign up for a brand, a survey, a contest or a webinar. Affiliate marketers can send out a huge mass of emails with the contents having affiliate links to the product they are promoting. Once these links are used to sign up or make purchases from the product merchant, the affiliate earns a commission. Quite an effective affiliate marketing technique no doubt!

Wrapping Up

Earning money with affiliate marketing is a simple business model that is performance based. The more you intensify your promotional activities, the more commissions you earn. It is however unrealistic to expect to earn tonnes of money overnight. If you have the diligence and patience to set up the right techniques, money will gradually start to come in with time. Affiliate marketing is really a very simple legitimate business that requires perseverance, ingenuity, focus, and devotion over time. That is when appreciable income is expected to start to accruing to the affiliate marketer.

Best Online Business Strategies for E-commerce Beginners

Yes, covid-19 restrictions are still somehow in place but people must do business all the same. If you are new to e-commerce, you must first recognize that some business strategies have high potential, and some don't. That is the way it is in the world of e-commerce business. For this reason, it is imperative to first thoroughly analyze the market space to discover which e-commerce business has great potential before you make your decisions, pandemic restrictions notwithstanding. Below are some tested e-commerce business strategies that can help entrepreneurs to earn money online.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a fairly easy business to start online even without prior experience. All it entails is to simply promote products online by sharing their referral links. These are affiliate links you can actively share on your blog, social media, email, or other online platforms. Any time someone clicks on your referral link or makes an order through the link, you earn a commission for your efforts. It is as simple as that. Online, there are a vast number of businesses looking for affiliate marketers to help them generate customers through effective links promotion or even word-of-mouth marketing. Large and very popular e-commerce websites like SFI TripleClicks, Alibaba and Amazon do offer affiliate programs that new e-commerce entrepreneurs can easily take advantage of.

Virtual Online Teaching

Teaching all kinds of skills online is a very lucrative business. Experience during the early stages of severe restrictions during the pandemic proved that businesses didn’t have to grind to a halt simply because of the pandemic. Online teaching and learning stepped up to help out. Many people were forced to study online. As a consequence, even offline-based institutions moved online. Many people with valuable and important skill sets in specific areas translated their knowledge into online courses and training and they started earning good money. More and more online learning platforms sprang up as well and the business continued to expand despite the pandemic. As a new entrepreneur interested in online teaching, there are many ways you can sell your online courses. Most common among them are by organizing online training sessions, self-publishing eBooks and making tutorial videos. You earn good money for your efforts.

App Developer/Web Designer

With improvement in technology, app and software development have become a great niche to start a business online. App developers now find good opportunities to create mobile apps and websites. If you are creative enough and have real interest in coding, HTML, CSS, and other aspects of web design, you can become a freelance webmaster/web designer. This is yet another great online business idea. Even if you don’t have the requisite experience in this field, you can leverage valuable web design resources, courses, and tutorials available for beginners and you’ll be in business pronto.

Social Media Management

SMM or Social Media Marketing is becoming increasingly popular with new online entrepreneurs. These are people who effectively use social media marketing to promote products/services online. They deploy social media efficiently as an integral part of their overall online marketing strategy. However, because of the diversity of many social media platforms, it could be hugely challenging to effectively manage them all for best results. One business opportunity this creates is that other businesses can outsource SMM to social media enthusiasts and experts who understand social media marketing and are able to manage social media platforms/pages well enough. Such experts get paid handsomely for their services.

Niche Market Retailer

Online, there are always buyers for almost everything. Even if you don’t have the requisite skills in social media management, affiliate marketing, or other online business ideas, you can create an e-commerce store to sell specific products like hand crafts, home made goods and even retail merchandise. If you promote the store well enough, you get good traffic, leads and sales. Comparatively, setting up an e-commerce store is relatively easy nowadays. Even if you are new in e-commerce business, you can create your hosting service with integrated e-commerce software or list your products on an e-commerce marketplace and you are in business.

Freelance Graphic Designer/Writer

Freelancing business online enjoys a lot of flexibility. Freelancers can freely choose what they do, how they do it and even who they do it for. If new in freelancing business, they can even decide to work with popular and credible freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, freelancers who can help you to decide what to work on and who to work with. Most businesses require the services of good designers to create infographics, logos, posters, and other visual designs. If you have a flair for writing and you have the requisite writing skills, you can use your talent to get job offers to write blog posts, eBooks, and sales copy from people across the globe. There are limitless opportunities for web designers and good writers online.

Handmade Craft Seller

If you have the skill sets for handcrafts, you can create an e-commerce store to showcase and sell handmade crafts/art. Even if you can’t make them yourself, you can get these products from a supplier and sell them online to make money. Other highly creative endeavors like photography, carvings, sculpture and painting and other beautiful works of art can help with good income online via an e-commerce store.

 

Dropshipping Business

Dropshipping business requires you to sell online by simply taking customers’ orders and partner with a third-party wholesaler/retailer who handles the inventory and order fulfillment side of the business. It is one of the best ways to make money online without the need to invest or buy products in advance by way of huge investments. To make your own money, you just need to sell the products with a bit of a mark-up over and above the wholesaler’s price. For e-commerce beginners, it is really lucrative since they don’t have to worry about cost of storage and inventory handling/management to run the business successfully.
 
SEO, Search Engine Optimization Consulting

If you have the technical know-how and a good knowledge of SEO, starting a consulting business for website owners is a good business idea. With more and more people taking their businesses online, the competition for search engine rankings is really becoming tougher. If search engines don’t rank your websites in their SERPs high enough, it doesn’t benefit from highly valuable organic traffic. For this reason, many companies/brands that are obsessed with staying ahead their competition through ranking high on SERPs and turning their searchers into customers need good SEO techniques on their websites. Because SEO is really technical, it requires some good expertise to be able to render the service by way of consultancy. Those who know how can render the service and make good money from it. Good SEO consultants help business owners to analyse how their brand’s websites are doing online. From the results, they can best prescribe effective SEO strategies that help to increase traffic and customers to such websites.

Becoming an Influencer

Most influencers earn money mainly through brand sponsorships. They work by helping brands promote their products/services on their page. This is a very effective marketing method because most influencers usually have a large following on social media, and people see them as some sort of experts in a particular business niche. You can thus become an influencer in food and hospitality brands, sports brands, logistics and travels brands, hotels and accommodation brands, fashion brands and so on. There are several social media platforms influencers can take advantage of to build a large following. The larger an influencer’s following is, the more he earns. To become an influencer, you can start a podcast, become a TikToker, or create a YouTube channel, Pinterest or an Instagram account through which you can be creating valuable content regularly for your followers who rely on your opinion as an expert. That way, you get to build a real online presence, have a lot of following, and you earn money through commissions by promoting/endorsing products for products merchants.

4 Ways Influencer Marketing Can Benefit Your SEO Strategy

Influencer marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies available to digital marketers. This is because it characteristically delivers such good results that you can hardly get from any other marketing strategies. If you have a direct marketing strategy of increasing your search engine ranking, influencer marketing is one of the easiest and most effective marketing methods to get the best results. A high SEO ranking can directly help to differentiate your business from its competition. The higher your business ranks in SERPs, the better your brand grows. However, you can hardly get these results if the influencer(s) you choose to work with aren’t right for your type of business. Therefore, before you start any influencer marketing campaigns, you must make sure the influencer(s) you settle for are right. Make sure the strategies you deploy to reach your influencer marketing goals are ethical at all times because there are strict penalties set by Google and other major search engines for websites that try to be overtly manipulative in their strategies. Allow that to guide your activities as you market along. Here are some of the best ways influencer marketing can benefit your SEO strategy.

1. Create Unique and High Quality Content
 
For most marketers, content creation can be hugely challenging. It has to be done all the same because you need to create good content to attract organic traffic to your website. If the content you create is good enough, it will help your website to rank well on the SERPs of search engines. To be good enough your content must fit into what major search engines like Google consider in content such as readability, keyword usage, and overall content quality. In addition, the number of its social media shares and audience engagement are also very significant ranking factors for websites that search engines consider. So, to regularly create content that your readers love, it won’t only be just high-quality; it must be unique to boot. Influencers can play a massive role in creating your website content that is widely shared to their large audiences. Some influencers can directly help to create sponsored content and share it widely for you. In some cases, influencers can ask their followers to create content suited for your brand and add your business’s branded hashtag to it. Such content is called User-Generated Content, UGC. The more of such contents that are produced for your brand the higher the awareness that your brand benefits from the efforts.

2. Increased Brand Visibility
 
Every digital marketer must always factor in stiff competition in its marketing strategies. That is the nature of online marketing. Marketers must always find ways to overcome such daunting challenges to have successful marketing campaigns. Traffic and engagement on a website are some of the critical factors used by major search engine particularly Google for SEO ranking. For this reason, if you are unable to bring traffic to your website and ensure that there’s enough engagement on it, your ranking would be affected. This is where influencer marketing becomes hugely imperative. It greatly helps your brand visibility. Much more than any other digital marketing strategy, influencer marketing can bring massive traffic and engagement to your website. That is why influencers are called influencers as a result of their ability to influence their huge followers/audiences to take desired actions. By working with influencers therefore, you give your content more spread and credibility. Thus, with a broad content reach, you inevitably attract more visitors to your website. That is good traffic. The more traffic you get, the higher your SEO ranking. The more visibility you get, the more the engagement you get as well.  More engagement also means more website traffic and that helps to boost your SEO ranking.

3. Build Brand Authority and Credibility

Even though there are no reliable metrics to determine brand authority and credibility, you can closely observe a few factors that makeup brand authority. These factors relate to how people perceive your brand to determine if they can trust you or if your information is accurate and verifiable. People can make informed decisions on these factors from your website traffic, engagement rates, reviews, on-site activity, purchase rates and such related factors. It is best to maintain real credibility across this various range of factors. When your website commands some brand authority, it helps its SEO ranking. Influencers have great potentials to improve your credibility when their own influence rubs off on your brand. They can use their credibility and influence to give real positivity about your brand through their large audiences. It is hugely important to make full disclosure to your readers when your content is sponsored through influencers. That helps to enhance your sincerity and credibility. By marketing with credible influencers therefore, you greatly enhance your business ranking and reputation.

4. Build High-Quality Backlinks

As most digital marketers very well now, link building is a very effective SEO strategy, despite the huge challenges involved in getting credible links. Influencer marketing comes in very handy to tackle these challenges. One major factor that can influence your ranking on search engines is the quality of your links, be they internal links or backlinks. The authority of websites that link to you is a major factor search engines take into account to rank your website. To rank high enough therefore, you need to get high authority websites to link to your website. Doing so does not come easy though. Again, you can rely on influencers to help generate good backlinks to your website as a way of boosting your website rating.

By working with credible influencers, you stand a very good chance of having access to several high-authority websites. Now that’s a huge plus for your back linking activities.  Influencers can create content on these websites and link the post to your website. That becomes one good backlink. In addition, influencers can deliberately share your links as a way of helping to build your link profile. If they do this, chances are very high that many in their huge audiences will do same. Increased sharing of these links means increased popularity for your brand. With the help of search engines the probability becomes greatly enhanced that your website will fall into high authority domain websites’ hands. If these websites like your content and attach some premium to it, they may choose to add the link to some content on their own websites where it is relevant. The good traffic these high-authority websites receive will thereafter rub off on your website through such backlinks.

Top 12 Ways to Make Money on Social Media

Yeah, billions of people worldwide are active on social media but not many people really get to make money on social media. Even though millions of people merely use social media to socialize and make fun, if you have the right business ideas, there is a lot of money to be made on social media. Out there on social media, many people are making money even without having to directly sell any product/service. That is possible because social media users who have a large following can use their profiles to get paid by brands, sell their knowledge, offer consultations, and much more. Below are some tested, tried and proven ways you too can use to make money on social media if you wish.

1. Promote Your Own Products/Services

If you are a small business owner, you can promote your own products/services to make money on social media. With social media accounts you can easily interact with others by sharing and creating content through communities. Promoting your own products/services through social media platforms is cost-effective. At little or no costs at all, you can effectively promote and drive traffic to your online store, get leads and make sales to augment your sales volume. Social media is quite an ideal place for small business owners to effectively promote their brand and business. Therein, it is easy to tell customers about your products and services; find out what they think of your business; attract new customers, and build stronger relationships with existing customers.

2. Promote Affiliate Products

You can join credible and reputable affiliate networks, promote affiliate products and earn commissions for your efforts. By joining these networks you can expand your reach to potential customers and make money through affiliate marketing in an easy and straightforward manner. Thus, you can earn money by just adding tracked affiliate links into the text of your social media content. Any sale made by way of a click-through in any of these links entitles you to a commission from such sale.

3. Sell Digital Products

You can create and sell digital products through your social media channels. Quite unlike business websites, social media platforms have in-house capabilities to help you sell digital products real time. On social media, it is easy to reproduce and recreate digital products that can be easily shared very widely and save costs associated with inventory, warehousing and shipping. Some of such digital products marketers like to share on social media, are eBooks, software, templates, photography, music and how-to lessons. These are typical e-products you can create and sell in an unlimited number of times and numbers with little additional efforts to make money.

4. Collaborate with Brands

In digital marketing, it now appears more and more consumers trust influencers more than paid advertisements. They tend to obtain better social proof from these influencers to help them make buy decisions. For this reason, if you are a blogger and your blog has huge following, you can directly influence this audience to look towards a product/service. Characteristically, from posting product reviews, hosting video tutorials, bloggers have the power to influence large segments of consumers in favour of a product/service. So, if you blog in a unique niche related to a brand and your blog has huge following, you can collaborate with the brands in that niche to market their products to your audience. Brands will benefit from these efforts by getting more customers and you will benefit by earning more commissions and endorsement fees from such brands.

5. Sell Your Music

If you have a good musical talent and you are creative you can make money on social media. If for instance you are able to create very good music which appeals to people, you can sell the music through SoundCloud. If you sign up on the platform’s SoundCloud Pro or Pro Unlimited subscriptions, it is possible for you to sell the original music and make money. Through this platform, you can get unlimited upload time; get paid for your plays, access to advanced audience insights, and much more.

6. Get Paid for Sponsored Posts

Many brands are always looking for social proof to market their goods and services. Bloggers and influencers always come in handy to help provide this social proof. As a small business owner, you can earn money by helping these brands to produce sponsored content. This you can do by way of product reviews, promotions and backlinks to a sponsor’s website. However, if you are blogger, it is an ethical requirement to let your audience know that you are offering them paid content. The amount of money you earn from sponsored posts depends on several factors, some of which include your reach, your niche, and whether or not your posts include images, graphics, videos, and audio.

7. Become an Influencer

In digital marketing terminology, an influencer is a person who has the skillset to influence people’s purchasing decisions through his or her authority, knowledge, or relationship with his or her audience. Social media influencers are people who have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic and offer regular posts on that topic on social media and in the process build a huge following. If you become an influencer, many brands will readily pay you to help them create trends and encourage your followers to buy their products.

8. Do Coaching Services

Yeah you can earn money online by selling coaching services. If you have a unique set of skills or are passionate about something, you can choose to offer coaching services on that unique skill/knowledge. Many people are out there looking for self-development or learning new skills in singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, learning a foreign language etc. etc. The demand can be really huge. You can make money by latching on to this demand if you have the knowledge and skills in a specific niche that is of value to other people. You are at liberty to set your fees and rates and you earn accordingly.

9. Earn with YouTube Partner Program, YPP

Many social media users don’t really see YouTube as a social media platform but it is. If you are a good blogger, you can unlock YouTube channel’s earning potential and make money. For instance, if you join YouTube Partner Program (YPP) you not only get a strong platform but also access very valuable YouTube’s in-house resources and features. These resources and features allow you to get access to ads being served on your content and you earn money as a publisher. However, to get worthwhile benefits from this, you will need to get lots of views and clicks on your YouTube content.

10. Sell Rights to Photographs/Images

If you are a good photographer, you can sell Rights to the Images on your social media accounts. If you have some great creations in terms of pictures or digital artwork that people are interested in purchasing then you can use your social media account to connect with the people and sell to them. You earn money from this effort as well.

11. Run a Facebook Group

Facebook has many valuable in-house tools that help marketers to make money. In addition, the platform offers marketers a huge reach complements to its over 2 billion active users worldwide. If you can create a Facebook Group to tally with your niche/interest, it can really be an inexpensive but hugely effective way to reach your target audience. With it, you can easily build a great community around common interests/goals with hundreds of thousands of like-minded people. Now that’s one huge audience out there that can help drive good traffic to your website/blog.

12. Join Influencer Networks

Sponsored posts remain one great way bloggers can earn an income on social media. It takes a great influencer blogger to earn good money from their blogs. Many brands are always looking for influencers to market their products to their followers in a genuine and authentic way. If however you are a blogger who does not command much influence yet, you can latch on to influencer networks which are third-party agencies that are designed to do the hard work for you. So, Influencer networks can be a great way to start in sponsored posts and paid social sharing opportunities that less influential bloggers can take good advantage of to make money. These networks will help connect you to brands and act as middle men. That way, you don’t have to be in direct contact with brands yourself. If you sign up with influencer networks like CreatorIQ, Upfluence and AspireIQ, they’ll provide you the valuable intro and give you the much needed sponsored post experience that you can include in your blogger resume. However, only brands who sign up to work with a particular network have access to analytics regarding campaigns run within that single network of influencers. By way of some restrictions, some networks may require you to only work with them exclusively. You can make your choices depending on what you want. The bottom line is how you can make money from sponsored posts.

Effective Influencer Marketing Tips on Instagram

Smart marketers always like to tap into the power of influencer marketing to maximize their social media marketing returns. Marketing with influencers on Instagram is becoming increasingly popular and hugely beneficial to marketers. This is because Influencer partnerships really have a huge impact on the success of marketing campaigns on the platform. When the partnership with influencers is right, it helps to give the brand a big boost in the market place. On this relationship, Instagram itself shares some tips which include the following.

Generously Share Customers Stories

Marketers can benefit immensely if they habitually use their stories to better connect, and communicate about their business. If marketers capture these stories, then pay to turn them into promotions, the rewards are great. Customers’ stories come from real people and real experiences. Marketers can experiment with many stories to design brand messaging then determine what works best with their marketing strategies on the social platform. If properly done, it can help boost the brand presence on the platform.

Market with Branded Content Ads

Instagram's branded content ad is potentially the most effective ad format marketers can work with to get results. They are very effective to maximize connective messaging. Technically, these ads help to combine the improved resonance of influencer posts with the platform's ad targeting tools. That helps to confer authenticity on those more personal messages with the focus of ads. These ads allow marketers to add Call-to-Action, CTA to their posts making them more responsive. That allows marketers to get the added credibility of the message coming from a person, as opposed to a brand handle. This gives marketers the capacity to focus their messaging directly to the most receptive audiences. Results from such efforts are great.

Take Advantage of Customer Creativity

Everyone can be creative in various degrees. When content is from real people, that makes it authentic and it performs. No one is better to create content that customers love than the customers themselves. The views and opinions from customers are always many and varied, and that makes the content rich and very valuable. Brands can therefore utilize this as influencer content through their campaigns to boost engagement and brand resonance. With so many customers already posting valuable content online, giving them a prompt to work with can be all it takes to get powerful, valuable branded material for your promotional efforts.

How to Turn Your Expertise into Lucrative Online Business

If you have valuable knowledge and you get your acts right, the internet can be a pathway to real financial freedom. With it, you can easily transform your side hustle into a lucrative business online, instead of being stuck in a 9-5 job you hate anyways. Fact is, just about everyone is an expert at something. That “something” could be knowledge, a skill or some expertise that can benefit others if you impart it correctly. If you resolve to make a fair amount of money from what you know instead of simply leaving it as a hobby, you can leverage the internet to turn your knowledge/skills into a legitimate source of income. Now, that becomes a business in every sense of the word. Here is what you can do.

Course/Membership Site

You can launch a course or membership site yourself. Through a site like this, you can leverage your knowledge, knowhow or expertise for the benefit of others and you make money. But, you must be ready to provide real value to make your course or membership worth the fees people will be expected to pay for admission. Your paid membership or online course must be able to provide such exclusive content that will be difficult for your course subscribers to find easily anywhere else. Such content must be premium content or such insights that are not readily available to regular site visitors or access to peer-to-peer networking. If your online course is unique and attractive enough, you could set up a series of PPC or social media ads to direct new traffic to your website. With that, you could offer class members a special discount or paid commissions if they refer others to sign-up for same course. That way, it is possible for you to earn passive income from a single piece of content for a long time. That translates into substantial monthly revenue even without any additional input of efforts from you.

Blogging Influencer

What makes an influencer worth its name is the magnitude of following he/she has. Even if the audience builds up from blogging, content marketing, social media, podcasting and YouTube channels, once it becomes substantial, it starts earning revenue. This revenue comes from traffic reselling, paid promotions, sponsorships and affiliate links. As influencers continue to grow their audience, their potential revenue earning capacity grows in tandem. More and better authoritative content from influencers helps to bolster their SEOs by driving more quality traffic to their websites. As a result, the audience grows and the earned revenue grows.

Business Consulting

Expert knowledge and skills matter a lot if you want to make money from business consulting. That is in addition to being able to generate quality results consistently for your clients. If you do, your clients willingly pay you for your efforts. Because business issues may be similar but not exactly the same, your ability to think and apply your knowledge to each unique problem or situation is very vital for success as a consultant. That is what largely determines the magnitude of your earnings. “Here Mister, just help solve this problem and we pay you.” It is as simple as that in business consulting.

Lucrative Career Options in Digital World

Many keep walking around looking for gainful employment elsewhere whereas in our digital world, there are unlimited opportunities to earn a decent living doing legitimate work online. The good news is that as at today, there is hardly any aspect of our lives that isn’t - in one way or another - influenced, impacted, or driven by digital technologies and tools. Ranging from such mundane everyday tasks as buying groceries to business processes to how we network and connect with our social peers, the opportunities are truly unlimited. Almost all things big and small we routinely do are being completely redefined in the wake of rapid digital adoption and usage. With growing digital connectivity and ease of use, there appears to be some steady evolution driven by digital technology affecting the way we now do business.  Clearly, that is what creates the lucrative opportunities for everyone to get in the groove of doing business online. 


 
These here career options are available if you too are looking to make your name and a career in high-growth and high-tech digital space.

Digital Marketer

Out there in digital space, brands are constantly in need of other persons to oversee their end-to-end marketing strategy by bringing together individual campaigns to ensure a maximum RoI for their business. This is where a digital marketer with cross-functional domain knowledge finds real relevance. When such a person has a working knowledge of the latest trends, developments, and strategies in high-impact business segments such as affiliate marketing, his relevance becomes really essential to brands. This is because such working knowledge enables digital marketers to leverage on many marketing channels to deliver better business outcomes for brands. Exactly why many businesses are constantly on the lookout for individuals with relevant competencies in the digital marketing space and are willing to pay good money to get the best digital marketing talent to help market their brands!

Data Professional
 
To be a data professional, you need both technical knowledge and critical thinking capabilities which you require to be able to visualize associations between seemingly disparate datasets to identify hidden value. One great skill no doubt! Data professionals remain in high demand in the digital marketing space because of their ability to read, understand and use massive volumes of data deployed for utmost effectiveness in digital marketing campaigns. Many data professionals also have the skills for building models and algorithms needed to help crunch through very huge data/available information for planning and marketing purposes.

Digital Media Influencers

These are real content marketers who ply their trade in digital media world. Anyone who has the talent for creating engaging user-generated content, likes to engage/interact with people over the digital medium can become an influencer. By routinely and habitually dishing out personalized and authentic content, influencers tend to hold a lot of sway over their target audiences. That is exactly why many brands are always seeking out partnership opportunities with influencers to maximize returns from the unlimited exposure for their brands which influencers can bring about. Influencer content can be text-based, pictorial, video, or a combination of all three for maximum effects on the audience. By placing this content on the right platforms, particularly social media, you can then work towards building your digital presence real good. Doing so, will enable you to earn unlimited revenues through ad streaming and brand associations. 

How to Productively Integrate Influencer Strategy in Marketing Plans

Influencers are increasingly becoming indispensable partners in most affiliate marketing business programs. These days, Influencers and the content they create help to support many initiatives across the various teams managing a brand. That is why you now find Influencer inputs into product development, PR, events, social media and even in affiliate marketing efforts/plans. That requires some creativity though if you want good results from such efforts in the medium to long term. That is the reason why integrating Influencer strategy in marketing plans now appears to be a very smart business strategy. 


 
As a marketer, the way you perceive and actually use Influencers in your marketing business is what determines how far their influence can benefit your marketing efforts. If you want your business to benefit maximally from influencer efforts, it helps a great deal to see and also use Influencers as:

Events Promoters

Planning events could be hectic and time consuming more so when the invite list must be thoroughly scrutinized to be sure it includes the right local influencers. These Influencers must be involved and notified in advance what the events entail and what roles they are expected to play. This is made possible by briefing these Influencers far in advance with the schedule, key messages, short lists and hashtags. By inviting local Influencers to your events, it is one fantastic way to spread awareness and excitement via the blog and social posts of such Influencers. These posts somehow allow Influencers to share their unique point of view and drive traffic to your social media channels. Inevitably, these actions help to create demand and interest in the event even before it occurs. Local Influencers also help to push e-commerce and retail sales by simply sharing affiliate links to products, site-to-store offers, etc.

Highly Creative Partners
 
Content marketing relies heavily on resource-heavy content creation. That demands a great deal of creativity to make happen. In creative output, partnership tends to get better results than solo efforts. Some persons may be highly creative at photos/visuals while others may be very good with written content. A combination of both can help get better results than from just the effects of one of them. With creative partners, you can easily obtain the rights to use Influencer images and content across many social media channels, websites, prints and emails. Adequate care must however be taken to ensure you discuss usage rights upfront with Influencers, how you’ll credit them, and the timeline and plan for promotion across various channels. That is one great way to come clean and be faithful to your partnership with Influencers.

Co-Content Creators

Online Marketers have since discovered that launching a co-branded product line with an Influencer is a very smart business strategy. This is because Influencers are advantageously positioned on the front lines with their audience. In that position, they can easily identify gaps in the market to create products that resonate with the audience. That is collaboration. It is Influencers who somehow help to provide a real promotional boost across their own channels, engaging their audience and driving new customers to the business. As an added boost, most Influencers like to support the endeavors of other Influencers and are always willing to help spread the good news because it is mutually beneficial to all parties. Some Influencers are both marketers as well as customers. For that reason, they willingly play a big part in the development of the launch plan, messaging, and promotional strategy of brands. 

 

Data-Driven Marketers

Most affiliates rely hugely on accurate data derived from metrics to measure their earnings and business growth. They thrive on earning commissions. This incentive encourages Influencers to share more often about brands, even when there’s no campaign going on. That enables them to make accurate data-driven decisions about what they share, how they share it and what results are coming in from where. Thus, most marketers have the ability to go deeper with their own metrics and reports on clicks, sales, new customers, understand the customer journey, and even measure cross-device types like Smart phones, laptops, tablets, and desktops with reliable affiliate tracking. More and deeper metrics far beyond social engagement give marketers the opportunity to prioritize Influencer partnerships for better revenues and ROI. With this, it is really very smart for marketers to take advantage of data derived from tracking as a veritable way to gain more business insights.
 
Virtually Everyone Who Knows Someone Else
 
Marketers must now take cognizance of the fact that for as long as someone knows someone, anyone can be an Influencer. With this notion, many brands now use their social media channels to repost user-generated content created by real customers who can become reps, have their own product page, and earn a commission. That enables even the brand’s own employees who naturally champion the business culture and morale both internally and externally to also play the role of Influencers and earn commissions too. Come to think of it, who wouldn’t want to join a viable marketing train and earn better incomes? All you need do is to be an Influencer in your own right irrespective of whether you are employed by the brand or not.


 

How to Earn Money on Instagram

As a user-friendly social media platform, Instagram has gained immense popularity as a photos-sharing medium. Presently it has over one billion active users. Instagram with its very high user-engagement and immense popularity has become a veritable platform for making money by its smart users. It is available to everyone irrespective of whether you have a business or whether you want to earn some quick cash for yourself. Even though new ways are getting discovered how to use Instagram to earn some money, some of such ways are already very popular with users. Experts now reveal these here as the best and most creative ways to earn some money on Instagram.


 
Selling Photos:
Are you a good photographer? Welcome to Instagram where you can make some money sharing and selling your photos.  Images/photographs are creative assets which you can have a patent on. You may decide to license them or simply print them to sell online. Instagram has become increasingly popular as the best place to showcase your portfolio and sell your images/photographs to individuals as well as agencies. That is irrespective of the fact of whether you are a budding photographer or a raving professional. Instagram is the place to display, share and sell your photos and you can make good money as a result. The money you make is directly dependent on how creative you are. Aside from direct selling of prints, you may choose to creatively print your images onto lots of different physical products before selling the products. Once physical items are photogenic, they sell well on Instagram. For that reason, you can also consider putting your images on physical items like calendars, T-shirts, tea cups, flower vases, handkerchiefs, towels, napkins, pillow cases, phone cases and mugs. The more of such products you are able to imprint your photos, the more of them you can sell and the more money you can make as a consequence.

Influencer Marketing:

On Instagram, every user consciously and deliberately builds a following. The higher the numbers of your followers, the higher and better your online reputation! By continuously sharing photo/images on Instagram, your online reputation continues to grow enabling you to gain influencer status as a consequence. With the good and sizeable following you now enjoy, that translates to good trust building which puts you in a vantage position to influence and convince audiences about trends and products. That enhances your reputation as an influencer. When you become a trusted influencer, you can make money from sponsored posts by mainly creating awareness about products and or services. With Instagram Analytics report, you can get to know more technical details and demographics of your followers. That information will enable you to specifically target them with suitable and appropriate brands. Sports personalities, celebrities and public figures with high Instagram following are the most well-known influencers. However even if you are not a popular figure offline, so long as you can work hard, make good posts and earn huge following on Instagram, you too can become an influencer and you can make good money as a result.

Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketers earn commissions from the posts they regularly make on their websites or blogs. By that, they are required to promote other people’s products and taking a cut of each sale by way of commissions. These commissions get paid by way of agreed percentages. On Instagram, if you post very attractive images of the brand’s products, you can embed the product owner’s URL on the images. When your site visitors click on this URL and by that action visit the site and make a purchase, you get paid a commission on the sale. Some producers even pay per click even if a purchase is not made at that material time. You can become an affiliate through various methods. What makes producers to accept you as an affiliate is directly related to the size and number of followers you have on your Instagram site. Therefore, the more followers you have, the better your influencer capacity and the more likely producers will accept you as an affiliate.

By Line:

On Instagram, what matters most is the size of the following everyone has. That’s why everyone consciously and deliberately grows their size of following in many ways like:

Regular posting: You must develop and deploy a practical routine on this. Meaning, you’ve got to post several engaging images every day if you want to build up your number of followers real quickly.

Posting Good Quality Photos/Images: On Instagram, quality is king. It is therefore really imperative to take good time to create the best photos you can because your size of followers won’t grow as expected unless you endeavor to regularly post high quality and attractive photos/Images.

Using Relevant Hashtags: Because you need more and more people to see your images, you must ensure to use relevant hashtags. With the right keywords wisely used in your posts, hashtags allow other Instagram users to easily find your interesting topics, which can influence them to follow your account.

Specific Marketing Strategy: A good marketing strategy will help you to quickly increase your number of followers. This you can do by setting specific deadlines and working real hard to achieve your goals by the deadlines. Everyone gets to set their own deadlines depending on their experience and capacity. Getting the right results is what counts here so it is these results that determine how good your marketing strategy is. Once you manage to increase your number of followers to influencer capacity, you can then start searching for companies whose products you wish to promote.

 

Creative Influencer Marketing Tactic: Boost a Newsletter

 Every active digital marketer knows or should know what a Newsletter is. When properly used, they are a very useful marketing tool. Marketers have since discovered that Newsletter services are an interesting (and more private) alternative to public blogging and social media. This is the real reason some influencers are using them on their own or as a supplement to their web presence. With Newsletters, promotion opportunities are similar to blogs, with branded content naturally woven into the influencer’s images and copy. That is the catch, using them to effectively get your product or service out there.

Just like public blogging, there are also many options with Newsletters. Aside from all of the options, it is very important not to be overly rigid in your marketing requirements. Influencer marketing works best when brands can be mentioned and promoted organically. This is the view of many experts in digital marketing. For real effects, it is best to establish permissions, goals and brand assets, then allow influencers to work their magic, whatever the medium. In the end, there are plenty of ways to go beyond the blog to hit your specific key performance indicators. Newsletters come in very handy as one of those very effective ways.

Creative Influencer Marketing Tactic: Gather, Analyze and Use Data

 If you want to succeed as an influencer marketer, one of the things you must do is to find ways to know as much as you can about your target audience particularly the behavioral patterns, trends, tastes and even expectations. The Internet is where to go to get real and authentic information in that regard. Using Analytics is also a very potent way to gather information and feed back about your target audience. Google Analytics is very easily accessible online and very influential too in the field of online data gathering. Easy access to the Internet also means easy access to credible data using Google Analytics. What matters is to be extremely curious as an Influencer Marketer.

If you are curious about how your target market will react to your new product or service, just get online and gather relevant data which on analysis will give you the right information you can rely on for your marketing efforts. If you know what you are doing, you can poll a like-minded influencer’s audience to get an early read on things. Easy one-click polls are a popular feature in Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and they are a great and reliable way to gauge interest. A note of caution! Gathering data is important but it is not as important as being able to analyze and use such data for influencer marketing purposes. Never you forget that!

Creative Influencer Marketing Tactic: Engage a Brand Ambassador

 In these days of Internet, Social Media and Television, news travels extraordinarily very fast and celebrities are easily created and promoted or at times even hyped around the world. Sports and entertainment industries somehow get to provide the bulk of the celebrities we see around us. For some fee or even pro bono depending on the product you want to promote, you can engage brand ambassadors to help push the product using their celebrity status. Engaging Brand Ambassadors can really be some very good influencer marketing tactics if expertly matched with a product or service.

Field experience has shown that Influencers can make perfect brand ambassadors at events like trade shows or conferences. They can participate in trade show booth appearances, host branded parties or receptions or simply attend with the goal of boosting brand engagement by posting photos, videos and commentaries about the event. Brand Ambassadors seen publicly using or endorsing a product is really good as influencer marketing and the results are quite good for most brands.


 

Creative Influencer Marketing Tactic: Plan a Social Takeover

 These days, there is a real and sometimes very aggressive crowd in the digital marketing world. To survive therein, you need some creativity because if everyone is doing the same things, they inevitably get the same results. To succeed as an influencer marketer, hunting with the Joneses is just not good enough. That is where creativity comes into the mix. One such highly creative move is to plan a social takeover which is somehow becoming popular.

Such move is for a brand to have an influencer temporarily take over their social accounts, which can coincide with a promotion (driving sales) or designed to boost engagement in brand follows and shares. That tactic is what many experienced influencers are really very good at. How do they do it to get results? Simple! They typically hype the takeover from their own social accounts, building trust by association. Both influencer and brand can benefit from this type of collaboration. How? The brand gets exposed to new audiences while the influencer gets the credibility of being publicly valued by the brand. In both scenarios, it is a win, win situation. The brand owners and the brand influencers are the happier for it.

Creative Influencer Marketing Tactic: Contract Content

 As an influencer marketer, you may not be a good content creator yourself but you can get others to do it for it. Blogging is all about content, good, current and relevant content and that takes some work. If you can’t do a good job of it yourself, not to worry, there are many professionals out there ready and available to do it for you. Many influencers are available to hire on a freelance basis to produce signature digital content on a brand’s behalf. Keeping up with the constant need for new, engaging branded content is sometimes not achievable with internal resources. 

That makes it imperative to bring in influencers to help with photography, writing and videos. The more the merrier and the sky’s the limit. If you hire a good influencer with credible online reputation, they can cross promote any resulting material from their working for you in their own platforms. That becomes an added bonus which inevitably helps to greatly increase your own reach. That scenario to me looks very exciting if you factor in the resultant effects.