How to Supercharge Your Conversion Rates

You know what? Most marketers are always not too happy about conversion rates. Many always want to have something done to increase conversion rates. This is because it is very important to the growth of any eCommerce store. Even a little increase in conversion rate can make a world of difference in the fortunes of any online business. This is why many eCommerce store owners always worry about what to tinker with to increase conversion rate no matter how little that increase is. It is usually a matter of tweak a little here and there, add here, remove there or try this or that to see what gets the required results. What you can tinker with is quite unlimited really.

Well, expert marketers like to caution that it is not right to attempt to make all necessary changes at once. It is best to make one or two tweaks then wait for the results to come in. You can then move on to the next tweak in an experimental order then see what that yields as well. Following are tested and proven ways that can help supercharge conversion rate for your eCommerce business if you handle them right.

Always Write Very Clear CTAs

Call-to-actions, CTAs are the “business magnets” on a website. Online, no doubt you have come across catchy phrases like “Vote here”, “Opt for coupon”, “Buy now”, “Subscribe to newsletter”, “Download eBook”, and so on. These are clear CTAs urging website visitors to take desired action. If you want to directly improve conversion rate on your website, your CTAs must be short, precise, clear and crisp enough to tell visitors exactly what to expect when they take the invited action. For best CTA results, the links must follow through. If you use a “buy” CTA, be sure it leads users to your checkout page and not to another service/product page. Similarly, a “download” CTA should give users direct access to the promised material without any barriers.
 
Diligently Build Trust

Only a business built on trust stands a good chance to grow and to endure. A vital element of any high-converting page is trust. Irrespective of how great your marketing message is, if the readers don’t trust you, your page won’t convert. As a marketer, you must therefore take deliberate steps to work on and preserve the trust element of your marketing messages. You can gain a lot of trust from social proof and excellent copywriting. Make sure all your mission-critical pages clearly show this. This is exactly why expert marketers always advise business owners not to joke with their business missions, business photos and brand logos. These and audience product reviews and testimonials are hugely important to the trust element of your business. They help conversions a great deal.

Avoid Shoppers’ Analysis Paralysis

Analysis paralysis is a marketing parlance that refers to the inability shoppers to make a decision for reason of either having too many decisions to make or having too much data to analyze and they end up not making any decision at all. A mild state of confusion really and many shoppers do become practically unable to take a decision. This state of affairs can be brought on when shoppers are faced with too many competing products at a time. Knowing quite well that internet users are notoriously snappy (only a matter of seconds per page) in their searches, it serves best to help them take a vital decision even within the short span. Usually, when online shoppers can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they quickly move on and in most cases to a competitor. So what to do? It is always advisable to follow a marketing rule of thumb: “one page, one central message”. If you have several products on sale, it is best to create a page for each of the products. That’s about the best way to avoid shoppers’ analysis paralysis and it helps conversions.

Regularly Tweak Your Copy

Online marketing is always a very dynamic and very fluid business because of the nature of the internet itself. This is why you must regularly tweak your copy for it to remain relevant. At times, this tweaking may just involve some changes while in extreme cases, it may be a complete rewrite of the entire message. If as a business owner, you may not be good at this, you can hire the services of professionals to help you out. This is because copywriting is a fairly technical marketing element closer to science than to art and it needs very clear formulas for it to be effective. What you want is to increase conversion rate for your business, so if you have professionals that can help you out, then that’s really great. All they need do is to make your pages high-converting and your conversion rate improves.

Make Your Data Forms Brief

I once read somewhere that internet users have the attention span of a gnat. Now that’s really fleeting if you’ve had the opportunity of watching that wonderful tiny insect go about its daily business. Many internet users don’t have the luxury of time to fill out forms with too much of their personal info. It is thus advisable to use the data forms on your homepage to collect only very vital info about your visitors. Leave out any info you do not immediately need to establish contact with your visitors. Skip info you can get later when the relationship begins to build up. It is advisable to add only essential data that you absolutely need in order to effectively communicate with them or deliver your marketing messages. Demanding for too much personal details can put users on their guard making them reluctant to share their data. That reluctance at times derives from lack of time and in some cases many of them trying hard to protect their sensitive personal data. If the data you collect is brief, you get more cooperation from users and that helps conversions.

Summing Up

For any eCommerce business, conversion rate usually increases when there is a clear alignment between message clarity and user intent. If this alignment is not there, there is a tendency for users to ignore the messages altogether and that affects conversion rate. What matters most therefore for the business owner/marketer is to be sure their marketing messages convey their products benefits clearly and succinctly enough and without distractions. If these messages benefit exactly what the buyer persona wants or needs, conversion is enhanced.

Best and Most Popular Niches for Affiliate Marketing

You want to do well in affiliate marketing? You better latch on to a good niche. That’s where the journey begins. You are best advised to look for the best niches for affiliate marketing. Success in affiliate marketing hinges on selecting and working in high-paying and profitable niches. As most marketers very well know, any niche with many customers and quality products can be profitable for affiliate businesses. Following are some carefully selected niches which research shows can be quite profitable if you have the passion.

Lifestyle

Worldwide, everyone alive has a lifestyle. Many people are always craving to improve on their lifestyles. Lifestyle is one of the most popular niches for affiliate marketing. This is because millions of people around the world always want to improve their way of living. Many of them always want to find better ways of living to their best. Lifestyle is thus one great niche for affiliate marketing. Marketers in the niche can profit from sub-domains like affordable housing, education, smaller houses, home designs and decor and suchlike endeavors that help people improve their life styles.

Hobby

Well, nearly everyone has got a hobby, making it a popular niche for marketers. If you want to market in this niche, you can focus on hundreds of diverse activities human beings like to engage in as hobbies. Activities like dancing, gardening, music, videography, painting, hiking, biking, photography and all suchlike activities people like to do as hobbies. For profit purposes it is best to market hobbies that interest many target customers.

Wealth Building

Somehow wealth building appears to interest many people. Most people always wish to be rich but hardly know how to go about it. Working within the niche successfully exploits that wish. Some want to make money directly while many others always want to have a side hustle to make some extra money as a second income perhaps. Many prefer some form of investment to get out of debt and live a happier life. Marketers that manage to combine any of these unique angles with commitment can always tap into the huge market of wealth-building.

Technology

Yeah, these days, with the advent of the internet, technology develops real fast making it a great niche for marketers. In this niche, you can focus on promoting web hosting, VPNs, smoke detectors, smartphones, computers, robotics, artificial intelligence AI, software, productivity apps, CCTVs and so on.  There are really high-tech products in this niche and affiliate products in the niche belong to the high commissions paying categories. This is because their referral fee is usually very high. As everyone knows, new technology comes on stream routinely and the niche is a real fertile ground for affiliate marketing. No question about it, fact is, technology as a niche is not about going out of style soon. That makes the niche some kind of evergreen niche to work in.

Security and Safety

As the world grows and becomes more sophisticated, safety and security concerns grow too in tandem. Most people now want more and better security for themselves and their families. Most homeowners are continuously looking for better security practices to ensure their properties are safe from damage, destruction and even theft. For instance, increased crime rates has necessitated increased interest in CCTV cameras, alarm systems, and apps that enable people to remotely monitor their homes round the clock. This is one popular niche that can be hugely profitable for affiliate marketers.

   
Fashion and Beauty

Yeah, everyone particularly women always want to look and feel good. That’s where fashion and beauty step in as a good business niche. Because most people always want to look and feel good, regardless of the state of the economy, fashion and beauty are niches that continue to flourish. Since most people always want to look their best even when their lives aren’t so, it directly creates an excellent opportunity for marketers who promote products that help people to look good. A great niche no doubt.

Health and Fitness

No doubt everyone I know wants to be healthy and fit. It is not an exclusive preserve of the rich and affluent. Most people, rich or poor cherish being fit and healthy. That makes health and fitness a great niche to market in. Because many people are ready and willing to pay a lot of money to stay fit and healthy, it helps to make health and fitness niche one of the most profitable niches out there.

Pet Care

Millions of animals around the world are under the care of humans as pets. A good number of people own and cherish pets. These people make a lot of efforts and spare no resources to care for their pets. Many pet owners go to great lengths to make these animals comfortable and healthy. They usually provide good housing for pets, buy the best foods, provide good medication, and other grooming services for the comfort and well-being of the animals. To make money in this niche, affiliate marketers can offer any products/services that align with the demands of pet care necessities.

Travels and Hospitality

This is another very popular niche since people are always on the move. Travel and Hospitality is readily one of the most prominent niches out there. It comes with a lot of lucrative deals for the economy and luxury segments depending on what everyone is prepared to spend. Choices and a combination of choices are quite infinite when it comes to travels and hospitality. It ranges from mode of transportation, style of transportation, foods, drinks, accommodation, fitness, sporting facilities and above all safety. On this niche, the bulk of the income comes from insurance, clothing, city tours, flights, luggage handling, food and drinks, massages and hotel reviews.

Non-Profit and Charity

People often wonder how people can make money marketing in a non-profit and charity niche. Yes, many marketers do and it is quite a popular niche to market in. Unknown to most people, non-profits and charity organizations operate and move around huge amounts of money regularly for charity work. They regularly seek donations to enhance their work. Charity organizations thrive when their good stories get out in public domain. Marketers do not only earn commissions helping these organizations to promote their works, they get the additional benefit of feeling good about helping to promote great humanitarian causes that benefit the society.

Tips to Overcome the Fear of Selling Online

Do you have the fear of selling online? If you do, you are not alone. Many digital marketers do but they all sell online all the same. The ability to face or manage the fear is what makes the difference since many people always face the fear of selling at some point in their marketing endeavors. In this article, I will like to discuss some tested tips for overcoming the fear of selling. These tips will help you to stay on the path of positivity and confidence to market your products successfully online.

 
Stay Focused Always

Staying focused matters a lot in confidence building. If you stay focused on your desired outcome, it will always remind you why you are doing what you are doing to make sales. Selling is a very significant component of every marketer’s marketing strategy. Since sales are an important part of the work you are doing to market your products, it pays to keep yourself reminded at all times the likely outcome of your efforts. That helps to keep you focused.
 
Make Selling Fun

If you can manage to make selling fun, you’ll be able to sell more products with less effort. In that quest, you can always think up fun ways to share your passion and knowledge about the product you are selling. It is easier that way to attract the attention of buyers and really get them to buy from you. You can try various fun formats like reels, graphics, animation, videos and posts you could use to showcase a product and attract attention to it. Use your imagination to create content that will have a long-lasting effect on customers and potential customers. Your creativity matters a lot when using fun to market products. There is however no cut and dry method of creativity. What works to get results is what you improve on and use more.

Believe in Your Product

Yes, if you believe in your product, you’ll have the confidence to effectively market it. That way, you can be genuinely enthusiastic why other people should like it too. If however you don’t believe in the product yourself, deep down you may feel that you are behaving dishonestly. That can adversely impact on your sales. It is thus advisable to choose and sell only products in your niche business which you have tried yourself and you have a pleasant experience with.

Build a Strong Relationship with Your Followers

It is difficult to make sales without having a good relationship with your followers. If the relationship is strong, there is a better understanding of their needs thereby making it easier to sell to them. For this reason, if you get to know your followers and take time to know about their needs as well, you are far more likely to find the perfect product that they are more likely to buy from you.
 
Try Figure out Your Selling Barriers

In human relationship, barriers create obstacles and fears. If you can identify exactly why you are scared of selling (i.e. the barriers), it will help you overcome your fears. Selling barriers come in a range of reasons. Are you shy to approach people? Do you lack confidence to deal with others or perhaps you don’t want to be seen as pushy? Or you are scared that people won’t like you? Do you lack confidence in the product you are selling? Or perhaps you are scared of rejection? All these are great barriers to selling and once you identify them, you can find your way around them. If you identify the source of your fear, it gives you a starting point for overcoming it. Even if you are scared of selling, just begin to sell. With time, you’ll gain more confidence and be able to sell better.

Learn to Accept Rejection

In sales, a rejection is nothing personal. As experienced marketers like to say, it comes with the business. Just accept that sometimes people may just not want your product, the reason they reject it. Nothing personal to it! If rejection happens as is bound to, from time to time, just move on to the next prospect. Give it another try or get them to check out another different product. You can never know, after maybe one or two rejections, the next prospect may buy from you. Accept rejection as part of the bargain and keep on selling, rejection or no rejection.

Change your Perspective as Needed

If you change your perspective from just selling to more creative processes, you make more sales as a result. Changing your perspective can always give you a better outcome than you could have imagined. For this reason, you should never focus on a certain number of sales. It is best to focus more on the process itself and try to make it as enjoyable as you possibly can. You get better sales results as a consequence.

Neither Fret nor Stress about Bad Days

You must understand that in marketing, everyone has their own share of good days and bad days sometimes. If you want to be successful in selling, expect them and deal with them as they come. Neither fret nor stress yourself unduly when bad days happen. Successful marketers often go through difficult times that may even last a while but that does not stop them from achieving their sales goals. They persevere even in the midst of tremendous stress. If you want to succeed, anytime you feel you are going through a bad patch, just keep your confidence and focus. Keep moving and make efforts to try to put the bad days behind you. Who knows? Tomorrow or even the days following may just turn out better for you.

Make Selling a Happy Experience
 
A great sale is considered made when both buyer and seller are happy. Once you have a great product that you believe in yourself, all you really need to do is to point out the benefits to your customers. Make them see the product as a perfect product that is best suitable solution for their needs. Since most customers are always looking to buy something that helps them to solve a problem or enhance their lives better, they pay attention to your product. When they buy from you, they are happy and you are happy. A win-win situation really! If you help your customers find the solution they need with your product, it saves them precious time and effort for which they will thankful to you. That means they are happy and when they buy from you, you too will be happy.

Diligently Track your Progress

Tracking is essential in sales. It helps you to know which ads, platforms and channels are doing great for your marketing efforts. If you have sales targets and your tracking shows you are meeting them, it helps to boost your confidence. Tracking your successes well has a way of helping you to stay on top of your game. Diligent tracking is what helps you to know exactly what you are doing right and what needs to be changed. It helps you to focus on your sales goals and how to achieve them.

Best Practices to Make Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts

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

Major Benefits of Affiliate Marketing

Thinking of having a go at making money on the internet? Think affiliate marketing first. You may have several business opportunities to make money online, but affiliate marketing appears to be the most highly recommended for many reasons relating to the huge benefits derivable from it. Any new marketer who gets to understand these benefits is bound to be excited about their prospects. Before getting carried away by the benefits, be sure to know the basics and what to avoid about the business. On the internet, it is not all that glitters that is gold. Yes, it may be quite easy to start affiliate marketing but it also involves a lot of dishonesty and scams. The internet is so full of scams and misinformation sufficient to discourage anyone just starting out in affiliate marketing. Not to worry though! Once you have the right knowledge and sound advice just like the one you are receiving here, you are good to go. 

Affiliate marketing is quite popular among online marketers because it is a low-cost and low-risk business model. Compared to other business models, you only need some little money to start and operate affiliate marketing. You need money only to set up a business website, obtain research info, acquire a domain name and have the website hosted by a reputable hosting provider. Then you are good to go by creating and sharing quality content regularly and promoting products/services out of your website. Yes, it may take a while to start receiving good traffic, leads and sales but for so long as you stick with it, they’ll come.

Following are the major benefits and attractions to affiliate marketing.

Affiliate Marketing Works 24/7

Once you set up your promotional activities on your website, you are in business 24/7. This is one of the most attractive benefits of affiliate marketing. If you sustain your promotional efforts for a while and your campaigns become profitable, it opens a great opportunity for you to make money round-the-clock and even while you sleep or on vacation. Now that’s one great way to make money online if you ask me. The reason for this is simple. Once you set up your campaigns correctly and they are live online, they are active and earn money for you regardless of whatsoever you are doing elsewhere or wherever you are.

Low-Cost and Low-Risk Business

Affiliate marketing requires very little or no start up fees, aside the minor costs associated with getting a website and hosting it. An affiliate marketer simply markets third party products/services in return for commissions. The affiliate incurs no costs for product handling, warehousing, customer care and products delivery. These are the responsibilities of the product merchant. The duty of the affiliate is simply to promote products as widely as possible. If a customer gets to buy a product attributable to the affiliate’s promotional efforts, the affiliate earns a commission as per agreed terms. Quite a simple business model really provided you do it right.

Operates from Anywhere

Affiliate business is one business you can operate anywhere there is internet service. In most cases, it is best done right from the comfort of your home. This is one huge benefit as well. You get spared the cost of renting office space, staffing and working regular hours. You can work the business at your convenience and in any hours you want. The icing on the cake is that you have no boss breathing down your neck. No commuting to and from work either. There is utmost time freedom to do whatsoever else you want to do. An ultimate work freedom and being your own boss if you ask me!

Focuses on a Niche

Affiliate marketing business is quickly and easily profitable if focused on the right niche. That focus is a huge benefit because it helps to shield you from the deluge of marketing information internet users are bombarded with daily. Arising from this information bombardment, without focus, you can hardly stay on track. Daily, most marketers receive emails promising yet another great opportunity to make quick money online. If you are focused already on a niche for your affiliate business, it is difficult to get distracted easily.

Tested Digital Techniques to Become an Outstanding Social Media Marketer

As the internet deepens and online marketing becomes more competitive, marketers must devise ways and means to survive competition. Doing so by various digital marketing techniques becomes fashionable. If you get your techniques right as a digital marketer, you can become an outstanding digital marketer with time. This is more so if you can successfully deploy these techniques on social media. Here are some of such tested techniques.

Blogging: Blogging is readily the most popular form of content marketing. It simply involves posting articles and valuable information about products and consumer experiences on your website and on a regular and consistent basis. You can have a good and beneficial blogging strategy if you get the assistance of online tools. Some of the best tools available for this purpose and effective on social media are Trello, Google Keyword Planner, Buffer, TweetDeck, Canva and MailChimp.
 
Marketing Technology: As digital marketing is evolving, so are the tools to enhance its operation. Depending on your type of business, you can deploy these IT tools to help out even in your multitasking operations. Technically, some of the best IT marketing tools currently available to marketers are Tracking software, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, Online Advertising Tools, AdStage and HubSpot Ads.

Social Media Management: Marketers can effectively deploy social media management tools to expand their customer portfolio. Good social media management IT tools available out there includes, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, Agora, Pulse and Sendible.

Website Promotion: Website promotion function is an integral part of webmaster management. What gets to a website and is effectively shared all over the web can contribute immensely to site promotion. That requires skills and the requisite knowledge of what works where and what doesn’t. Proven marketing techniques that can enhance a good site promotion are Social Media Marketing, Guest Blogging, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Google My Business GMB, and Online Communities.

Search Engine Ranking Tool: This is a very effective tool that offers marketers a complete set of options for comprehensive website auditing, backlink growth, competitor analysis, website ranking, keyword grouping and suggestions. It is a cloud-based platform for Search Engine Optimization, SEO.
 
Search Engine Optimization, SEO: Content positioning in Google SERPs is crucial in the ranking of websites and consequently organic traffic. It determines the quality of websites on the internet, the reason it is an excellent social media marketing tool. If you market content about your products on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, your business benefits from the high positioning these sites enjoy from Google. These benefits translate to increased traffic flow, more leads, customers and even sales.

Search Engines: Any good marketer ought to know how to spread commercial information strategically in search engines. If he does, his business benefits from the huge data flow through search engines. The best-known search engines for now are Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and Yandex. Google alone accounts for around 60% of online data traffic making it the largest search engine so far.

Interactive Video Storytelling: As most marketers very well know, designing, creating and disseminating videos with informative and interactive content is an excellent strategy to convert users into leads and customers. The best IT tools for video creation and editing include PlayPlay, Powtoon, Animoto, Magisto, Wave Video and Videoshop.

E-commerce: This is the new popular way to do business online in this age and time. Brands can now take advantage of professionally run e-commerce portals to expand their business and grow their brand. Presently, the most popular e-commerce platforms are Strong Future International SFI, ClickBank, Amazon, eBay, Magnet Monster, Unbounce and Omnisend.

Web Design: IT professionals will tell you that web design is one of the most complex tasks requiring high technical skills to create good digital visual structures. The reason it is a business for skilled webmasters. IT tools that are handy to use in web designing are, Google Web Designer, Adobe, WordPress, InVision Studio, Photoshop and ProofHub.

Really Simple Syndication, RSS Feed: This is an XML format designed to distribute content seamlessly on the web. RSS feed is an excellent automation code to widely broadcast content on the web. It is a great marketing tool which you can use to massively send frequently updated information to subscribed users interested in your products.

Tested Off-Site Optimization Techniques for Beginners

Off-site optimization is extremely important for the overall Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of every online business. If you are new in digital marketing, never you forget this. Every online business craves high ranking in the SERPs of search engines. Off-site optimization is handy to get it done. The strategy simply involves several procedures geared towards building back-links to a website. These back-links are critical in the search engine ranking process. Off-site optimization is a technique involving procedures off a website that relate to how the site is linked to external pages. If such links point back to your website, they are referred to as back-links. For search engine marketing, off-site SEO is such an important technique that marketers cannot afford to ignore. For marketers who are determined, it takes quite a bit of vigilance and diligence to get results from off-site optimization strategy. But if they manage to get it right, the high page ranking and organic traffic will come with time. These results when they eventually come do make a huge difference in the fortunes of the marketing efforts of marketers.

Here are some tested techniques of off-site optimization that expert marketers recommend.

Be Consistent and Continuous

Being consistent and continuous allows you to stay on top of your game of optimization. It is not enough just to have a high search engine ranking. You cannot stay there if you don’t do things continuously to keep you there. It takes quite a bit of effort on maintenance to keep you there. Even if it is normal and expected to drop down the ranks by a few positions from time to time, no marketer wants to drop off the first page of Google, ever. The reasons are rather obvious. Ranking high on the SERPs of search engines means high organic traffic. Besides, if you drop down on this ranking, it makes it easier for competitors to acquire your customers. No good marketer ever wants to be in such situation.

Tracking and Analyzing Data

To be able to manage your off-site SEO efforts well, you need to focus more on what benefits your ranking most in the search engines. You cannot do that effectively without data, reliable data. This data has to be obtained by diligent tracking and data analyzing. You need the right tools to do this effectively. In that quest, Google Analytics readily comes to mind. This is a very wonderful tool that can show you, who visits your website, where they come from, how long they stay on the site and many other analytics details you need for effective marketing. If you obtain the right info from your website’s analytic report, you can use the info to better manage your SEO campaigns and monitor your traffic efficiently. If for instance you happen to know your traffic source, you can concentrate more efforts in that area to get more traffic. If however such additional work and efforts do not make any significant difference in the number of visitors to your website, you can then move on to other areas to see what comes from those sources.

Article Marketing

Article marketing is arguably one of the best off-site methods of building back-links and perhaps one of the oldest. Article marketing predates even the internet. Before the internet, marketers were promoting their products by submitting their articles to newspapers and other forms of print media. The advent of the internet gradually took the shine off such practices. Marketers generally moved on to the internet to market articles. If you market articles on the internet, you can get high authority contextual back-links and traffic when you submit your articles to major article directories like Ezinearticles.com and Articlesbase.com. Article marketing is a good off-site optimization method but it takes quite a while, diligence and hard work to get good results. It has proven to be effective but certainly not an overnight thing. This is because you may get back-links fairly quickly but getting the right traffic always takes quite a while.

 

Get Help from Your Competitors

Sounds strange, right? Not quite! Yes, your competitors can be of great help to you in your off-site optimization efforts. You can actually spy on your competitors to get some valuable marketing information. You can get valuable info about your competitors’ websites from sites like Alexa.com and SpyFu.com, among others. From these sites, you can easily find high quality links by simply looking at what your competitors do in obtaining their back-links then follow them. You can take advantage of the paid subscriptions many of the sites offer which will give you more detailed analysis about your competitor keywords and paid ads.

Seek Only Quality Back-Links

As many experienced marketers very well know, in matters of back-links, more is not always better. Quality is. Google does not rank back links on the basis of their number. It ranks them on the basis of their quality. Google will rank your website highly only if your back-links are of high quality. It is therefore not a matter of the number of back-links you have to your website, but how qualitative the back-links are. For effective off-site SEO therefore, link authority is of immense importance. For this reason, high quality back-links from high quality websites like Forbes.com, CNN.com, BBC.com and suchlike high quality and authoritative websites can give your website a much higher SEO boost than thousands of low quality back-links from some crappy run-off-the-mill websites.

How to Make Your First Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

Want to make money online? Try affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a business model of promoting products/services that are owned or provided by others while receiving a commission for the sales produced. It is relatively very easy for anyone to get involved in irrespective of prior experience in the business. It represents a large spectrum of ways that you can use to make money online. 

In affiliate marketing business model, affiliates act like “middle man” in a business deal. They help link product merchants to consumers and they earn commissions from their efforts. It is through these commissions that many people begin to make money online. Affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model. The more sales you generate as an affiliate, the more commissions you earn. You have many options available to you if you want to become an affiliate marketer but the following is what you need to do to quickly earn your first income in the business.

Start Quickly and Easily

If you want get involved in the business of affiliate marketing, just start quickly and easily. Affiliate marketing as a business is perfectly simple even for beginners. There are a number of reasons for that.  Firstly, you don’t have to have a product or offer a service in order to make money with this model. Secondly, there is very little, if any, direct interaction between you and people that eventually buy the products you are promoting. Thirdly, you don’t have to bother about customer support. The product merchants take care of that. Finally, the business of affiliate marketing is cost-effective. So, you can actually get started in the business with little or no investment. Practically everything you need to get started in most cases is just a domain name and web hosting. They cost very little or nothing at all.

Carefully Choose Products to Market

To make your first income in affiliate marketing, the product you choose to market is hugely important. You must take ample care to decide on the product based on the type of commissions you’ll earn and how frequently the commissions will be paid. You can choose fast selling and high commissions generating digital products such as software or eBooks, or physical products from reputable e-commerce platforms like ClickBank, Amazon, Alibaba, eBay and other online retailers. Once you sign up with these programs, just do your promotion and make sales, you earn your commissions. Simple! However, you can depend on your own personal preferences to promote the products you know well and have used and you are passionate about particularly the niche.

Become a Solution Provider

If you want to make your first income as an affiliate marketer, don’t position yourself online as a product seller. Many marketers tend to make this mistake particularly when they are first starting out online. Affiliate marketers must never appear to be selling anything. They should position themselves as problem solvers for many people online looking for how to solve their personal problems. Yeah, there is the temptation if you are an affiliate marketer to feel like a salesperson, but the truth is, you are merely using affiliate links to lead buyers to the sales page of the products you are promoting. Your main duty is to make the link and the product merchant makes the sale. You earn your commission from simply making the link that led to a sale. It is therefore advisable to leave the selling to the product merchant while you simply provide your website visitors with the perfect solution to the problem they need to solve.

Last Line

Yes you can make money in affiliate marketing and it comes as fast as you can help generate a sale. If you have resolved to make money online, just give affiliate marketing a try. Affiliate marketing as a business model is where most people make their first income online even without prior experience in the business. If you get involved, you can quickly garner a great deal of knowledge as to the buying, selling, and marketing processes which marketers depend on to make money online. 

How to Get More Out Of Your Affiliate Marketing Plan

Affiliate marketing as a business is typically very vast and exciting. It is one business anyone can use any of many ways to enter then use their knowledge of the field to promote their own business. How you get involved and what you do thereafter depends completely on the individual’s choices. In affiliate marketing, anyone interested in the business has many possibilities, products, and techniques to choose from. You can start experimenting to find something new for yourself or to learn something new that you can do better to boost your business. If you want to become a great affiliate marketer with your affiliate marketing plan, here are some tips you cannot afford to ignore. 

Promote Great Products/Services: All affiliate marketers depend on customers for their revenue. For this reason, you must make sure that any affiliate ads you put up are for products that you can fully stand behind and support. Even if an ad is likely to generate a nice source of income, but the product doesn’t seem credible, it’s simply not worth the risk of promoting it.

Build Content: If you want to be successful in affiliate marketing, you need to build and manage a content rich affiliate website. It is good practice to have content which aligns with the merchant’s product offering. This ensures that your visitors are interested in the products your merchant sells. It helps you to send more customers to your product merchant.

Join High Paying Programs: It is generally advisable in affiliate marketing to join a two tier affiliate program. That is what can provide you with a steady income source that doesn’t require a lot of effort. In two tier plans, you can make a small commission on every product that the affiliate underneath you makes which will generally net you a steady income stream down the road.

Do Your Research Well:  You must do your research well to avoid vendors that are running scams. Presently, scammers abound online doing their own business of scamming any and everyone who has not taken precautions. If you are in the business of affiliate marketing, you must no doubt be aware that there are quite a few vendors out there running disreputable businesses. To avoid these scammers, you must check into the background of every vendor thoroughly to make sure they are actually doing what they say they do.

Be Current with News and Trends: To succeed in affiliate marketing, you must always check current news headlines to see if you can use them to your internet marketing advantage. A news story on new discoveries, better ways of getting things done and what is trending can always form the core of your content. You can use news stories for blog post ideas and real-life examples of why your product/service is a necessary purchase.

Work With Great Companies/Brands: If you want to make the most money from your affiliate marketing efforts, try to find companies/brands that can give you the best conditions for your affiliate relationship.  Such conditions include but not limited to credit for any orders you send them, high commissions, frequent commissions payment and so on. If the companies/brands you are working with have their own in-house tools to track emails, phone or fax orders so much the better for your affiliate relationship.

Don’t Fail to Appreciate Customers: Yeah, appreciated customers always have the motivation to come back for repeat purchases over and over again. For this reason, it helps your affiliate business if at the end of every year you make sure to send out a thank you note to all of your customers for working with you over the past year. Token gifts along with these messages are not a bad idea. You can also tell them that you would like to see them next year and give them a preview of what to expect. People always like it and respond appropriately when marketers connect with them, appreciate them and promise them better business deals ahead.

Carefully Set up Your Affiliate Marketing System: If you carefully set up your affiliate marketing system, you can always have affiliates promoting your articles for you in various platforms and channels. This is good for everyone and a win-win situation too because it helps promote your product/service and ultimately helps your affiliates earn money. If you can efficiently and effectively delegate the job of spreading your articles online, you ultimately widen your circle of readers and followers. That translates to traffic, good traffic to your affiliate website.

Affiliate Marketing Needs You Must Never Overlook

In affiliate marketing, if you know what to do and how to do it, it can save you several valuable hours of hard work before you start making money. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can spend a huge amount of time trying out bad strategies and promoting low paying products. Here are a few of such needs.

You need to carefully choose the affiliate products you wish to sell. If you like the products and you have bought and used them yourself, the better. Doing so is a good affiliate marketing policy since you can more easily create content around something you’re interested in and know well. In addition, you must make sure there is a need to settle for high value products as against low value products. High value products pay higher commissions of about 30%-50% on sales while low value products pay commissions in the range of 10% or less. A high ticket product sale can earn you the same as by selling hundreds of the lower value items. It is best to use subscription products, high ticket products and a product range, rather than low value products which only offer single commissions. With a product range you can benefit from subscription products, one off commissions and high ticket sales. In addition, you can also benefit from a built in sales team, who close sales on your behalf.

Most marketers prefer free marketing strategies unaware that if they use a product range, paid marketing strategies are much more within reach. With a high ticket product range, it is much easier to make a profit while running paid marketing. With it, market growth is much easier too. This is because once you’re profitable and you are running paid advertising campaigns, you can scale up quickly by simply increasing your marketing budget. If you rely only on organic and cheaper marketing strategies, scaling up is much more difficult.
 
Affiliate marketing as a business concept may look simple and many people believe they can always go it alone. That’s not quite true. To succeed better and faster in the business, you need professional help because it is quite difficult to build a successful online business from scratch. You need professionals with the technical know-how to help you build a user-friendly website, host it, optimize it and position it for effective marketing purposes. However, if you know how, you can build and host your website yourself with the help of online software. You can also get valuable help from fellow affiliates, friends, family members, coaches and mentors. You can look for help any and everywhere. If you join a community of online business owners, they can help you to build the much needed self confidence that you too can succeed in affiliate marketing. Now that’s one huge help many marketers never quite recognize as such.

 

In affiliate business, you need automation to save time and money and still get very good results. What readily comes to mind is Artificial Intelligence, AI. For communications efficiency, just get an email autoresponder. This is one great software that allows affiliates to collect emails from a website and automate the delivery of email messages to the email list they’ve built over time.  Because most customers will often need several contact points before they make a purchase, an autoresponder becomes highly valuable to keep them constantly engaged through AI.

As most marketers very well know, a single landing on a website rarely generates a sale. On a website, a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a buying decision. You can latch on that small window of opportunity to make a sale through autoresponder. Because you have your visitors’ email information on your email list, you can extend this time period by weeks, months or even years through constant customer engagement through autoresponder.

Last Line

Even though statistical data indicate a drop-out rate in affiliate marketing to be close to 95%, it is still a business you can make money from if you follow the rules diligently and work hard at the business. Always remember the reason you’re in the business, find a good affiliate program, do the needful and stick to it, you’ll be OK.

Expert Tips to Earn Money with Online Affiliate Programs

These days, many more people are trying to earn some extra money working from home on affiliate programs. With the increasing desire to earn some extra income online, coupled with the present harsh economic trends, more people are daily looking for ways to earn some extra cash by way of some online business opportunities. Affiliate marketing programs easily fits this bill since people can easily work affiliate programs part time and still be able to work on full time jobs. If such people manage to get a handle on affiliate business, it can even become a full time job at some point. Affiliate marketing is an excellent and one of the most popular ways to make money online. If you are keen yourself and you are up to it, here are some expert tips that can help you to make money online as an affiliate marketer.

Set Up Your Website: You need your own website to really make some money with online affiliate programs. That is not to say you can’t make money even without a website but, having a website of your own can make the business more lucrative for you. If you have the skills, you can design your own website as you please but if not, the services of professional webmasters can help you out. They can arrange the hosting for you as well. A professionally designed website gives you more and better features depending on your type of business. What matters most however is to always settle for the option that serves your purpose best.

Make your Website User-Friendly: If your website is not user-friendly, it cannot be traffic-friendly. For this reason, once you have your website in place, it is imperative for you to work on the website to position it to draw good traffic. Without good traffic, it is virtually impossible to make good money with online affiliate programs. For your website to be user-friendly, it must be attractive, fast loading and easy to navigate. That is what helps to keep visitors longer on the site to do business with you. To enhance this, you must deliberately create quality content on a regular and consistent basis, build up credibility and diligently work on attracting traffic to the website. With quality content and if you position your affiliate links well on the site and with the right niche, visitors will be returning to the site again and again. If they do so, it helps to increase your chances of making good sales from the site.
 
Choose a Good Affiliate Program: What determines a good affiliate program is a good niche, good platform, good products and commissions. With this in mind, you’ll find that there are many online affiliate programs out there to choose from. Irrespective of whether you are operating out of your own website or not, the opportunities to make money in affiliate marketing are infinite. However, you must make sure to work with a legitimate and reputable affiliate program. If not, you may end up wasting your time, money and efforts on a program that is not legitimate. That can be quite frustrating and even discouraging. Before signing up therefore, make sure to check well into the commission that the program offers. Most affiliate programs pay between 5%-50% commissions. You must therefore ensure you get a reasonable commission that is paid out regularly before getting involved with any affiliate program.

 
Promote Your Website: It is for the sake of traffic you must promote your website as best you can. Promoting your website becomes hugely imperative as soon as the site is properly set up. Online, you have many options you can choose to use to promote your website. Among these options are pay-per-click PPC marketing, link building, article marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and more. Once you start building traffic to your site, you will notice that your sales will begin to climb. This is a clear proof that the affiliate marketing program you have chosen is working.

Effective Small Business Public Relations (PR) and Traditional Marketing Methods

No doubt Public Relations (PR) still has a huge role to play in modern small business marketing even though it has been around for quite a while. Marketers still have confidence in it to get their marketing messages out here. This is in addition to the fact that consumers trust earned media more than brands, social media posts, or even influencers. If PR is handled by trained professionals, it manages to help build consumer trust fairly quickly. Below are the commonest methods these professionals use to get the best results.

Tested Public Relations (PR) Marketing Methods

What gets the best results is what marketers need in their marketing strategy. If you want to score your business with some positive earned media coverage, get cracking with:
 
PR Stunts

If you are a marketer, and you have no publicity budget restrictions, you can always pull off a PR stunt. It is one great way to organize a spectacular fun fare that attracts a lot of people from the local communities. If the event is well staged and massively attended, it helps to build brand awareness by generating free press.

Press Releases

Well timed press releases are also great marketing methods. The essence of press releases is to get a good story/message out through an appropriate medium to get wide readership. You can get messages out from your social media handles or by giving a good story to a journalist who can quickly and easily turn it into a career-building piece of content for both of you. You can always get good press releases if you focus on pitching only the most important stories that will attract good readership. If you do this consistently, you can build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with your readers and even news outlets.

Community and Industry Events

It is fantastic PR marketing if you can get your business involved in events in your local community. Same goes for your niche industry. You can consider sponsoring local a derby involving Soccer or basketball or baseball games. Sponsoring other sports meets particularly for children and young adults is also a great idea. Contributing employees’ hours to volunteer work in sanitation and cleaning, health and fitness walk in your community are great PR for your business. These volunteer service and sponsorship events do not only make your community a better place to live in, they also help to build your brand and expose your business to new customers.

Tested Traditional Marketing Methods

Traditional marketing may sound old school when compared to digital marketing, but it is still a very effective marketing strategy particularly in certain industries and geographical locations. Marketers do get appreciable returns in traditional marketing even though it is quite difficult to really track the ROI accurately. That is not to say it is ineffective though.

Below are marketers’ favorite traditional marketing methods that can be of use to you in your small business marketing.

Direct Mail

If you are a smart marketer, you can use direct mail to stand out even in this digital age. You can mail brochures, promos, how-to messages and other forms of messages through direct mail to consumers in their homes. If your messages are great and well timed, you can be lucky to break through the clutter and catch the attention of the consumers.

Billboard Ads

Yeah, everyone still finds billboards on the highways as they drive along. The attention catching giant constructions work to catch the attention of everyone passing by. Billboards may be quite expensive to erect over a wide area but you can cut your budget and concentrate on the ones you can afford only in a selected local community, making sure you have the right permits though. For effectiveness, you need to be very strategic in erecting billboards. It is hugely impactful if you erect a billboard at the main entrance to your business premises particularly if you are into factory work or manufacturing.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing can be a very effective marketing strategy if done right. Getting the correct telephone numbers and knowing when to make that all important call is crucial if you don’t want to suffer excessive rejections. If not done right, telemarking can make you to waste time and money making annoying calls and even to unlikely buyers. If done right, it can be quite effective to turn many prospective buyers into customers.

SMS Marketing

SMS marketing can be quite effective to get new customers. Unlike telemarketing, SMS marketing does not rudely intrude into the privacy of prospective buyers. Recipients can always open their SMS messages at their own convenience. This is why SMS messages have open rates as high as 98%.

Radio and TV Ads

Radio and TV are still effective marketing channels for ads. For most marketers, the problem is not that of effectiveness but excessive costs to advertise on Radio and TV. Many homesteads do afford to have Radios and TVs and people habitually rely on them for their main sources of information. Depending on the products you are marketing and your target market, Radio and TV can easily and quickly get your message out if you can afford the cost. You can however cut down on costs and still get good results if you purchase ads on other audio platforms, such as podcasts or Spotify.

Newspaper Ads

Newspaper ads are an effective marketing strategy particularly in a society with high literacy rate. That is where you have the type of audience that regularly picks up a physical newspaper. Inside newspapers, an insert, digital ad, or classified ad are great ways to send out a marketing message that gets results. However, you must always endeavor to choose your outlets carefully, negotiate rates, and spend time creating engaging content if you want the best results. Settling for mediocre visual design or lackluster copy won’t get you impressive results in newspaper advertising.

Tested Content and Video Marketing Techniques for Small Business

In digital marketing parlance, content is king. Good content is indispensable to effective marketing in the digital world; the reason content is everywhere out there. Marketers need content in their websites, social media handles, for their email marketing campaigns, brand design and content marketing strategies. However, an effective content must not only have good quality, it must also have context. Before creating content therefore, you must keep your audience, the platform you are using, your brand, and the customer experience in mind. That is about the best way to create quality content that has context and gets the best marketing results.

Content Marketing Techniques

With the right content marketing techniques, you can plan on pleasing your audience consistently with high-quality content, by way of the following content marketing methods.

Blogging

Marketers usually create content and market it through their blogs. That is blogging which is about the most popular content marketing technique out there. Through your published blog content, you can start generating recurring traffic to your own site. That is the kind of content that serves multiple purposes for your business, particularly for:

Driving organic traffic
Troubleshooting for customers
Building your brand authority as a thought leader
Serving content for paid traffic, and
Providing helpful content for users

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is about the best way to expose your brand to new audiences by guest posting on other blogs. This you can do through a mutual blog-post exchange with other brands, pay to contribute, or even by just providing valuable free content to another website. What you choose to do depends on the relationship you establish with other businesses/brands/popular blogs. It is all about better exposure for your content. If your guest-blog host is hugely popular with a large following, that’s great.  It gives you a great platform to better spread awareness for your brand. The key to guest blogging is to provide plenty of value first then plug is your business later.

Podcasting

When compared to other forms of content marketing techniques, podcasting appears to be a relatively new content marketing strategy. As an effective marketing technique, it does not appear to be too saturated yet. You can package influencer interviews, specialized how-to expertise and suchlike great info for your audience in podcasting form. If you are packaging influencer interviews, getting your first big interview is usually the hardest part. If you manage to get a good one, the snowball effect can keep your momentum going for quite a while.

Gift Content

Depending on the product you are marketing, you can create some free content as giveaways on your website. Your website visitors can have these gifts in exchange for their email addresses which you need to build your email list. Such free content could be in form of an eBook, access to a guide, a checklist, or even some discount coupon. Just make sure to offer some valuable things to your audience in exchange for their email addresses. On your website, you can then create landing pages and signup forms to promote your content. Next move is to drive traffic to these pages. If the pages are well optimized, they will help your conversions to new leads and even sales.

Video Marketing Techniques

Smart marketers can always find affordable ways to incorporate video into their small business marketing strategy. This is because of the high effectiveness of video marketing. If your marketing videos are well shot, they could make all the difference between your customers choosing your product or your competitor’s. Most times, such videos might really be all a buyer needs to buy your products outright or sign up for a free trial.

Here are a few highly effective and budget-friendly ways you can use videos in your small business marketing program:

Product Videos

Marketers use product videos to explain more about the product/service they are marketing. Through these videos, marketers can clearly outline how the product works, why it’s helpful, use cases, and even its salient and useful features. These videos tend to act like premieres to exciting movies. If well shot, videos should be exciting enough to grab viewers’ attention and make them to click a link to learn more about the product/service, make a purchase, or sign-up for a full-fledged demo.

How-to Videos

Marketers create how-to videos to practically teach their customers how the product/service they are marketing works. Whatever the product is, most buyers always want to know how they can use it to do for them what the marketer says the product can do. A proper video demonstration of how a product works can actually entice buyers to buy the product. Marketers like to create such videos to show customers how to for instance assemble a piece of equipment they are selling. That practical demonstration is usually more helpful to buyers than any Manual of Operation no matter how beautifully written.

Reviews and Testimonials

Most online shoppers usually trust customer reviews. A very high percentage of online shoppers read online reviews before making their buy decisions. Reviews are more in text form while Testimonials if in video form tend to get better attention. With Testimonials, you get to control the narrative and use them on any platforms or channels you prefer. You may choose to collect just short one-liner testimonials for your website/blog. Long case-study testimonials are best suited for your YouTube and social media channels.

Video Advertising

You can market your business with video on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Some of these videos could be short in-stream skippable video ads, non-skippable bumper ads, overlay ads, or display ads. For best results, you can experiment with different ads formats to see which resonate most with your audience. You can then choose the ones that get you the best returns on your marketing investment then build your marketing strategy around them.