How to Maximize Your Earnings with the Right Affiliate program

Affiliate program is a type of performance based marketing where product merchants reward affiliates for helping them to market their products. This reward is by payment of commissions to the affiliates for each sale they generate through their promotion efforts. For effective marketing purposes, business owners directly use affiliate programs to increase sales and significantly gain new customers. For successful affiliate marketing, affiliates need to work through credible and reputable affiliate marketing programs which they must carefully select.

How to Select the Right Platform

Research the Program. You must do diligent research to get vital and important information you need to select a credible program to work with. You can survey reviews from other affiliates and customers to get vital information about the program before you choose. Finding out information about their service or payment policies is also important. A credible program like Strong Future International, SFI is highly recommended here.

Read Through Their Terms & Conditions. These terms and conditions help the programs to maintain their credibility so you must take them, seriously. Take quality time to carefully read through all the terms and conditions before signing up. This way, you’ll know before signing up exactly what is expected of you and your earnings potential.

Verify Reputation & Credibility. You can easily do this through online forums and reviews, blogs, social media accounts and so on. This is to ensure that other affiliates have had success working with this particular program and what the drawbacks if any are. For business success and sustainability, it is important to verify the program’s reputation and credibility within the industry. An industry that is quite saturated and highly competitive!

Check Out Their Payment System. Affiliate marketing business is a worldwide 24/7 business spanning the globe. Depending on where you are operating from, be sure you fully understand how often the program pays out commissions and by what methods of payment. A reputable program like Strong Future International, SFI pays commissions once a month through wire transfers, Bitcoin, PayPal, Payoneer Credit card and so on.

Ask Salient Questions Before Signing Up. It is hugely important to clear all doubts about a program before signing up. If you find anything in the terms and conditions that don’t make sense to you or something you need clarification on, you can make more inquiries to get more facts.

Research Potential Products or Services to Promote

When you select a program, you can start researching their products/services to see how they sell. The aim is to decide on products/services that are in high demand and aligned with your target audience. You can do this by considering a range of factors such as pricing, availability, customer reviews, and marketing strategies used by the program.

Create Effective Strategies for Promotion

Many programs like Strong Future International, SFI for instance provide free marketing tools, unique affiliate links and free marketing methods to their affiliates. Therefore, as soon as you decide on the right products to promote, you can then decide on your promotional strategies. Depending on your own background and preferences, you can consider creating a blog, launching an email campaign, or utilizing popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes.

Evaluate Commission Rates and Other Key Metrics

Evaluating commission rates is of vital importance because that is what will determine your income. Since different programs offer different rates, make sure you choose the program whose commission rates align with your expectations. Commission rates usually range from 5-30% Sales Volume depending on the products and the program.

Track Your Performance and Optimize Your Earnings

Understand Your Goals. If you don’t have measurable goals, it is pretty difficult to track your performance. Before tracking your performance therefore, make sure you have measurable goals you want to achieve. If you know your goals well enough, the knowledge can help you to determine the right metrics you need to measure and how to track and measure them.

Monitor Key Performance Metrics. This is where Key Performance Indicators KPI, take prominence. If you have a clear understanding of your goals, you’ll know which KPIs metrics to track and measure. Metrics like clicks, impressions, conversions, and sales are important KPIs to measure. If you track these metrics over time, you can identify trends and customer behavior. This vital information/data can be effectively used to optimize your marketing.

Analyze Data & Identify Opportunities. If you are diligent in collecting data, you can effectively use the data from monitoring to analyze and uncover opportunities for improvement in your marketing efforts. Doing this can help you to maximize earnings from your affiliate program.

Test & Optimize Strategies. A/B testing is most important here. With it, you can test different marketing methods, strategies and channels to know which delivers the best results. This vital information can help you to optimize your marketing. With A/B testing, marketers do try out different marketing approaches such as changing up copy or experimenting with new ad placements then track the results for comparison. These tests help marketers to optimize future campaigns to maximize earnings.
 
Keep Up With Industry Trends. Every marketer operates in an industry. The reason you must always endeavor to stay on top of your chosen industry trends. To remain effective over time, be sure you are up-to-date with the changes in your industry particularly technology changes. It helps to always keep up with what’s new as well as experimenting with emerging tactics/techniques.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate programs are now well known as effective ways to earn income online. Selecting the right affiliate program to work with is vital for success. This success is maintained by optimizing your marketing strategies. The foregoing tips/tactics if deployed correctly can help you to maximize your earnings in affiliate marketing.

How to Build a Small Business Marketing Plan

If you run a small business, you need a plan for your marketing strategy. Without a plan, you’ll end up marketing in the dark without any tangible results. Marketing without a strategic plan is a recipe for disaster. You cannot have a successful small business if you keep it under wraps. If you do, you may not be in business for much too long. Marketing and exposing your small business is what helps it to grow. Marketing gets your products/services in front of people who need or want them. Usually, good marketing helps to convince buyers that you have the right solution to their problems. Through it, you can sometimes manage to convince consumers that they have a problem that needs fixing and you have the right solution to the problem.

To market successfully, you need a small business marketing strategy. That requires intentional planning. It must also be dynamic enough to be relevant since things move so fast these days. You cannot for instance expect last year’s marketing strategy to still work perfectly for you one year down the road. The reason your marketing plan needs to be up to date and effective at all times. If you want an effective marketing plan for your small business, it will help if you can stick with the following guide to create one.

Clearly Establish Your Marketing Goals: The first thing you do is to establish clear marketing goals you want to achieve and create key performance indicators (KPIs) you can target and accurately measure to determine if you are doing well. Such goals can include the volume of traffic, number of leads/customers, volume of sales and revenue target.
 
Identify Your Audience: Next is to clearly identify your audience. Who exactly do you want to market to if you want to achieve your set goals? Your marketing strategy is doomed to failure without a good understanding of who your audience is. You must put on paper and clearly define who your business is targeting and by what means/channels. You must figure this out correctly because if you don’t, you’ll be marketing in vain without tangible results.

Set Your Marketing Budget: As most marketers very well know, a marketing plan without a budget is a mere wish list. Therefore, you must accurately figure out expenditure costs and what you can achieve by what you spend on marketing. Figure out how much you can allocate in your marketing budget to, for example traditional advertising, email marketing, social media marketing and so on. Be sure the expenditure is measurable against projected results or achievements.

Decide Your Marketing Channels and Tactics: If you factor in the products you are marketing and the characteristics of your target audience, you can decide on the most effective channels to use. Knowing quite well that it is virtually impossible or even prudent to invest in every marketing channel or tactic out there, you must deliberately make choices in favor of what will yield the best results for the type of marketing you want. Depending on your marketing budget, you can pick a handful of channels and strategies to prioritize.

Draw up Your To-Do List and Make Assignments: This is one great way to keep to schedules and targets on formats you can see and use as achievement/progress guides. You can start this by making check-boxes and assigning names to tasks. You then outline everything that needs to happen in tandem with your plan then take each marketing strategy from idea to execution. Each completed achievement is marked off done before you move to the next.

Set Your Deadlines: For your marketing plan to be effective, you must clearly set out dates and even time for when you hope to accomplish your marketing goals. You must be able to clearly define and track all your marketing goals against the deadlines set. If for instance one of your goals is to increase sales and revenue, you must decide how much of that you expect to achieve in the time-frame of one week, one month or by the end of the quarter or the year. These time-frames will help you to know exactly when to track your actual performance against your projections with a view to knowing how well you are doing.

Last Line

If you stick with this plan, your marketing results will amaze you.

Marketing Tips for Brands to Cope with E-commerce Transformation

As e-commerce world is rapidly undergoing transformation, brands and marketers cannot afford to be left in the lurch. Just as more and more businesses as going online, global e-commerce is experiencing rapid changes in tandem. Brands must take steps to cope with these changes to have maximum benefits from the rapidly changing e-commerce business activities globally. For this reason, marketers now have an urgent need to prioritize e-commerce and to adapt their age-old promotion strategies for better results. That is the only viable way they can continue to reach consumers better and to drive growth for their businesses. Here are a few tips to help drive that quest.

Create Compatible Strategies

Now than never before, marketers need to locate and follow consumers better wherever they are in the world. Thanks to the internet, this is achievable without much stress. If marketers place consumer experience at the center piece of their marketing strategies, they can take advantage of the differences in digital advertising channels to reach them better. That calls for real compatibility in marketing strategies. Marketers thus require different but compatible strategies to effectively advertise across multichannel. These strategies involve how to be found by consumers already in shopping mindset and searching online and direct promos to segmented audiences to attract sales or a combination of both.

Match Branding with Performance

Promoting a brand to have a better brand authority online and growing sales are both desirable for any e-commerce business. Depending on the circumstances, some brands may even choose to prioritize one over the other. Some marketers at times prefer to focus more on performance or direct sales results while others may choose to focus on building the brand first. Both scenarios benefit the business but in different ways. When there is less competition, it is better to build the brand first and expect to reap the rewards much later. To cope with the transformations in e-commerce business worldwide, it is advisable to match branding with performance. Marketers can blend branding and performance strategies to reap the dual benefits of both.

Create Multichannel Roles for Your Team

If you have a marketing team, it is not enough to train them well. Giving them a good focus in addition is also desirable.  It is better to have multichannel roles for your marketing team than to have them focused only on mini roles of the entire marketing infrastructure. Now that e-commerce businesses are transforming rapidly, it is the right time for marketers to rethink their digital marketing methods and media choices. In addition to rethinking their internal organizations, they can effectively work with traditional multichannel retailers, online marketplaces and delivery partners in order to cope with the emerging e-commerce environment. Brands that can do this well in the emerging e-commerce market will be able to build valuable lifelong customer relationships and grow their brands as a result.

 
Focus on ROI

In any marketing campaign, the bottom line is always the Return on Investment, ROI. Even with the transformations in e-commerce business, this remains true. It is only through good ROI that brands can conclusively prove the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. It is smart marketing therefore for marketers to focus on and tie every ad spend to sales outcomes and measure ROI instead of merely relying on softer metrics. However, Key Performance Indicators, KPIs can also be looked at differently to get the overall performance picture of the business.

Be Nimble in Your Marketing Strategy

When things are changing rapidly in e-commerce business environment, it is good to adjust and change your marketing strategies too. That enables your business to cope well. It calls for brands to have nimbler marketing strategies by making necessary adjustments to their marketing plans on the go. It allows brands to easily move advertising resources from offline channels to online channels and vice versa depending on the circumstances they find themselves at any material time. Business communication channels, messaging methods, marketing methods, supply chains, products handling and delivery methods, all require real flexibility to cope with any times and circumstances no matter how they turn out. 

Exploring Free Digital Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business

If you are in digital marketing business, it is of utmost importance for you to understand the nuances of today's increasingly competitive online small business market. You get the best out of your digital marketing business if you truly understand your customers and your competitors well enough. That is in addition to being fully abreast of the latest market trends in your industry. This is a very useful knowledge to have no doubt. However, unless you have the right tools, all the digital marketing knowledge in the world may not be of much help in your business. If your business is still in its early growth stages, and cash-strapped to boot, it is best to rely more on free digital marketing tools to grow it.   

Find below some of the best free digital marketing tools that can help grow your business to new heights.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is one very useful tool you can use to find relevant influencers within your business niche. You can do this by analyzing bios, follower counts and engagement rates on popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Ubersuggest
 
Ubersuggest helps to provide insights into what people are actively searching for around the world. This it does by reviewing summaries of Google's "suggest" or autocomplete results in various countries. These reviews reveal some insights into what people are actively searching for worldwide within any industry or niche.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite digital platform allows marketers to easily program social posts and maintain a posting schedule weeks or even months in advance. It is a very useful tool for blog schedules and targeting. Hootsuite helps to provide the useful insights to enable marketers compare how well their social posts are performing in comparison to those of their competitors.

Trello

Trello is one very useful tool to track milestones and facilitate project collaboration. Digital marketers can also use it to remind themselves of deadlines in order to stay on top of their digital marketing campaigns, objectives and schedules.

These digital marketing tools can only be of help to your business if you know what you are doing and what your targets are. Granted it is a matter of trial and error before you discover which tools work best for you, such tools that help to drive engagement, build web traffic and hit your targeted Key Performance Indicators, KPIs, are the tools you really need. By taking A/B test of every campaign and changing the tools for each campaign, you can determine what works and what doesn’t. If the results you are getting from free tools are not satisfactory, you can try paid tools if you have the resources but, with a note of caution. Avoid paid tools that do not allow you to try out their full applications first before purchase.