5 Common Mistakes to Avoid as an Affiliate Marketer

Yes, many digital marketers are getting involved in affiliate marketing to make money. Many are making very common mistakes as well that tend to hold them back from succeeding in the business. Granted, affiliate marketing can be a very profitable way to earn money online if things are done correctly but unfortunately many affiliate marketers keep making very common but avoidable mistakes. These mistakes are largely responsible for most of the difficulties many encounter in the business. Some marketers enthusiastically start affiliate marketing with high expectations only to be frustrated along the way by avoidable mistakes. Many even fail outright because of these mistakes. The good news though is that many of these mistakes are avoidable. Five of such mistakes are as discussed below. You can do well to avoid them in your own affiliate marketing business.

1. Failure to Build a Targeted Audience: A major factor in affiliate marketing success strategy is to be able to match a targeted audience with the right product/service. You are making a mistake as an affiliate marketer if you neglect or fail to do so. Many affiliate marketers merely go for numbers as audience without bothering to give due consideration as to whether these people are actually interested in the products they are promoting. They fail to understand that it is highly targeted numbers that convert better than broad untargeted numbers. If you are not converting well, you cannot make good sales and as an affiliate, your commission earnings will be very poor. So, it I best to always focus more on building a more engaged audience, even if smaller, that is interested in the specific products/services you are promoting. Doing so increases the likelihood of good conversions, higher sales and more commissions.
 
2. Endorsing Products you Don’t Know: From experience, it is pretty difficult for affiliates to promote products they don’t know too well or have not even tried themselves. If you promote such products as an affiliate, you risk promoting products that may not be a good fit for your audience. That can severely damage your credibility and cost you dearly in conversions and sales. For this reason, it is hugely important to only promote products that you have researched very well, you know well and have probably tried yourself. It is only such products you can confidently recommend to others and expect them to respond positively. Such products help you to quickly build trust with your audience. If your audience trusts and believes in you, it can lead to higher conversions and more sales.
 
3. Focusing Only on Products Promotion: Marketing is an all-encompassing business which hinges on doing everything to add value to showcase the positive features and attributes of the products/services you are promoting. So, you must always focus more on how a product/service can help users to solve their problems instead merely asking them through ubiquitous CTAs to buy the product. It is better to focus on generating quality content that complements the products/services you are promoting. Such content helps to generate organic engagement with your audience and drives sales. Therefore, you can well to concentrate more on creating impactful content, optimizing it for SEO, and integrating it with other marketing platforms as a credible way to attract good traffic to your product pages.

4. Failure to Gauge Progress: Without a reliable method of tracking your marketing, it is like marketing in the dark. You must therefore make sure that tracking and analytics are essential components of your affiliate marketing campaigns. Sadly, many affiliate marketers tend to overlook the importance of tracking their marketing campaigns. That is one huge marketing error that must be avoided at all cost. One way to avoid such error is to set up tracking and analytics tools on your website and marketing campaigns to gauge your progress. That way, you can easily detect how your audience responds to your campaigns and how and where your traffic is coming from. You’ll know what strategy is delivering the right results and which isn’t. Tracking provides some vital info about your marketing campaigns that you really need to decide what needs improving upon, re-tweaking or discarding to get better results from the campaigns.

5. Focusing Only on Quick Returns: If your main focus is on quick returns in your affiliate marketing activities, you are making a huge mistake which is fairly common among affiliate marketers though. It is always best to shift focus away from immediate results to long term results. The strategies you deploy in your affiliate marketing efforts must always take this into account. It is best for you if you focus more on building a sustainable business that can generate consistent revenue over time. You can do this by promoting high-quality products that have good audience fit. If you use this strategy, you can over time be able to build a loyal audience that trusts your recommendations and acts positively on them. That is the kind of audience that is more likely to make repeat purchases over time. So, if you take a long-term view of your affiliate marketing strategy, it can help you to build a business that is more sustainable and can generate revenues and commissions for you over a prolonged period.

How to Quickly Expand Customer Base for your Ecommerce Store

Every ecommerce business owner always wants opportunities to positively connect with consumers and increase sales. To achieve this, many of these business owners usually have a strategic approach to building and growing their customer base through viable online platforms particularly social media. If you are an ecommerce store owner and you want to quickly expand your customer base, here are proven and reliable ways you can strategically expand your customer base. 

Make Your Products Highly Visible Online

This is a given. The more visible your products are online, the more people get to find them and the more customers they generate. To make your products more visible, you must optimize your ecommerce website and deploy other effective marketing techniques to enhance their visibility. Finding your products organically online through search engines entails effective SEO on your website. What this means is that your product titles, descriptions, images, and keywords should be tailored to search engine algorithms particularly Google. Such SEO steps largely determine how high your products appear in SERPs of search engines. Higher ranking automatically means higher visibility and more organic traffic. You can help this process by making sure your product images are professionally photographed from multiple angles, have high resolution and include infographics if feasible. This helps customers and potential customers to get a better sense of what they are trying to buy. A better sense of and understanding of the products on display can enhance the likelihood that they will actually make a purchase. Additionally, you can directly sponsor ads online to increase the visibility of your products.

Offer Competitive Pricing

Price remains a key factor in the purchasing decisions of many customers. Online, these customers have unlimited opportunities to scout around for the right prices before making their purchase decisions. So, if your products are priced too high when compared to similar products elsewhere, many customers usually choose to purchase elsewhere. Your competition benefits from this simple decision. It is smart marketing therefore to ensure that your prices are competitive in comparison to your competition. Before fixing prices for your own products, make sure you research the prices of similar products in some other platforms then adjust your prices accordingly. To expand your customer base, you can in addition consider offering discounts and or promotions. Doing so can help you to attract more new customers thereby increasing sales proportionately.

Take Advantage of Customer Reviews

If you want to increase customer base in your ecommerce store, you cannot afford to ignore the feelings and opinions of your customers. You can gauge these feelings correctly from customer reviews. This is because customer reviews are a crucial element in trust building with your customers. To encourage customers to leave reviews, you can consider including a request for a review in your product packaging or as part of your follow-up emails. You can also consider offering incentives, such as a discount on their next purchase, in exchange for a review. Make sure you take good advantage of reviews whether positive or negative by reacting and or responding to them. That is how best to take advantage of reviews to grow your customer base. As a marketing strategy, positive reviews can help increase visibility for your products online. Such reviews can help improve search rankings for the products, and ultimately help to drive more sales for them.

Have a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy

You can have in place a data-driven marketing strategy to grow your customer base. That requires diligent research on many online platforms particularly social media. You can generate data on trend analysis, analytics and any other vital marketing data to help you make well-informed marketing decisions. You’ll get to know about how to optimize the content on your ecommerce store and your product listings. Vital information about effective advertising and pricing of your products can be gleaned from the data you generate. You can effectively grow your customer base if you generate the right data and take marketing decisions based on such data. You must however endeavor to have in place a very sound and effective marketing strategy to bring this about. It is only such marketing strategy that can help you to quickly grow your customer base and make more sales as a result.

How Niche Edits Can Help Your Content Strategy

Smart marketers tactically use niche edits to boost their content strategy. So can you if you know what you are doing. You can use niche edits to enhance old content that is already circulating. Doing so can help to improve your online authority and brand reputation in a cost-effective and time-sustainable way. Here is what happens when you use niche edits to enhance your content strategy.

 
 
Increased Exposure and Authority

Niche edits are some sort of backlinks and they work in similar ways. When deployed, they help to inject brand exposure into your content or products. This they do by way accessing old articles and inserting backlinks in them. It is a fairly technical thing to do on your content, so if you are unable to deploy niche edits yourself, you can hire the services of professionals to help you out. What you really need do is to source relevant, high-quality content, or if you like, you can audit your own content to find appropriate placements for affiliated links. If you do this correctly, that content will be given a much wider audience by way of the backlinks. That automatically helps to increase exposure for your products/services and grow your brand authority.
 
Inbound Traffic Boost

Niche edits are great for inbound traffic boost. When put into action, niche edits help to boost traffic to your designated landing page destination. A boost in traffic means more leads, more conversions and more sales in your business. This is because the traffic boost also means brand exposure and audience expansion. This traffic includes organic traffic which will come from search engines particularly Google. Niche edits help Google to rank your website more highly in its SERPs rankings. High website ranking means more legitimacy and visibility for your content. That translates to good organic traffic.
 
More Economic Use of Time

As every digital marketer very well knows, it is time saving to modify and utilize old content instead of creating new content. Recycling old content with niche edits helps to save time. This you do by adding in some new backlinks to the old content. That helps to save time by reducing or even eliminating the need for completely new content creation. Doing this is cheaper and more budget friendly as well.

 
Enhancing Pre-Existing Content

With niche edits, pre-existing content is ultimately enhanced. When content is enhanced, it helps its ranking with search engines and ultimately attracts more organic traffic. Enhanced content means more and better exposure to a wider audience. This can create the much needed boost for the content. Niche edits as backlinks on indexed pages means that the pages can gain a new wave of traffic. That helps their ranking as well in the SERPs of search engines. Higher ranking is great for your content strategy, as the content will benefit from more exposure and ultimately attract more traffic.

Improving Already Ranking Content

Even if your content already ranks high, you will still want it to rank higher. This is because the higher its ranking, the more traffic it receives from search engines. While ranking higher is always a goal to strive for in digital marketing, hitting content that already ranks high by improving it is also beneficial. Niche edits come in very handy in that quest. It is also possible to improve on your content by taking advantage of already established traffic sources too. Since niche edits can make your content more relevant, they help to engage a wider and more diverse audience. With niche edits, you can go back to old pieces of content with a view to making them more appealing even to modern customers. So, no matter how old your content is and how highly ranked, you can improve on it with niche edits. Therefore, no matter the status of your content even as an established and indexed piece, there is always room for improvement. This improvement can be easily achieved if you factor in niche edits in form of backlinks. This is what many expert marketers recommend. 

10 Powerful Email Marketing Tips to Boost Your Email Campaigns

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective digital marketing strategy. It remains one of the most effective ways to promote your online store, build mutually beneficial relationships with customers, nurture leads and generate sales. If you are currently working on a strategy to boost your email campaigns, following are some 10 vital email marketing components you really need in that strategy.

1. Design and Use Automatic Welcome Messages

Welcome emails are usually a good intro particularly for new subscribers. They are automatically sent to new subscribers when they sign up or purchase a product. You can also send welcome emails to existing customers who haven’t logged in for a while. In all these messages, the design and the messages they convey are very important. This must be taken into consideration when crafting the messages. Messages like “Welcome! We hope you like our product” or “Your account has been activated” or “Welcome back, it’s been quite a while” are some great messages your welcome emails can convey. Welcome emails can even be more effective when personalized and targeted. They directly prove you’re not sending out mass emails but only mails that are specifically tailored to specific customers. Welcome emails are a great way to build trust with your customers and making them to get used to receiving your emails.

2. Personalize Your Emails

Personalized emails are usually more effective emails. Sending personalized email messages to potential leads helps to boost response rates. Aside from giving your email subscribers a sense of connection with you, personalizing your emails makes them feel less like spam. They get better results as well. The key to successful email marketing is knowing exactly who you want to send emails and which messages resonate best with each group of recipients. Once you are able to identify what works and what doesn’t, you can better tailor your messages specifically to your audience for good results. You can customize each individual email message by adding links to products or pages on your site where interested email recipients can access your products or get to read more information on your website. Doing this helps to increase the opening rate, the click through rate and with fewer and fewer mails ending up in the spam folder.

3. Segment Your Subscribers

Subscriber segmentation is an effective marketing term which experienced marketers do take advantage of to make their emails more effective. As a marketing technique, it simply means arranging your subscribers into groups based on their interests and behavior so that you can send them more relevant content, offers, and other marketing messages. Marketers can effectively use this technique to create multiple versions of their emails, such as a welcome email, a thank you email, and a follow-up email for instance. Therefore, if you segment your subscribers well enough, it can help build trust and long-term interest for a business. This is as a result of your being able to present them with the right information or offers they actually want to receive and can help meet their needs. Segmentation is thus an important and integral part of an email marketing strategy which allows marketers to directly target their audience with personalized and highly effective emails.

4. Make Your Emails Mobile-Friendly

Google now reports that over 60% of online data is attributable to mobile devices particularly mobile phones. Now that’s some really huge chunk of data. This means that many more people are doing business online with the use of mobile phones and that includes sending and receiving emails. So, making your emails mobile-friendly has become really crucial in this age and time. If for instance you want to promote sales or discounts with your emails, optimizing the emails for mobile devices makes the content easily viewed on these devices. You can optimize your emails for mobile devices by resizing key elements on the emails such as keeping the images/photos/graphics small, using small sizes of fonts and margins and placing important links at the top of the page for easy visual access.

5. Time Your Emails Very Well

Determining the right time to send emails to customers usually depends on several factors. The most important of these factors is when last the customers visited your website, what action they took while on the site and whether or not they completed any transactions. This info you can easily glean from Google analytics data from your website. You can determine what days of the week bounce rate is higher, when email open rates are low or high, what time of the day, morning, afternoon or evening this happens and so on. Armed with such vital insights, you can correctly determine when and how best to send out your emails to customers for maximum effects and results.

6. Always A/B Test Your Email Content

Testing your emails before sending them out is to determine what works and what doesn’t. You can take advantage of A/B email testing software to test the effectiveness of your email content. Through A/B testing, you can split-test different versions of your email content to determine which one performs better. So, A/B testing of email content is about the best way to improve the open rates. The version that works best is usually the one that attracts customers more and consequently responsible for more sales.

7. Regularly Delete Your Non-Responsive Email Addresses

For most online marketers, their email subscriber list is usually a very valuable marketing asset. That makes it essential for them to manage the subscriber list well. The aim is to be sure the email list is responsive. You can easily determine this when your email sending reports indicate which mails were neither clicked nor opened.  When for instance you click “send” on your email newsletter, your list will contain all subscribers who did not open the email. It is always best to use the unsubscribe page to remove/delete all the people who are ignoring your emails from your email list. To do this professionally, you can use email management tools to help you eliminate the consistent non-opens. These tools are also handy to help you manage your subscribers and decrease the time spent on the repetitive task of managing your email subscribers list.

8. Always Include Your Own Responsive Email Address

Having your own responsive email is one great way to nurture a great relationship with your customers. If your customers can reliably and quickly reach you if and when they want, it can keep such customers coming back over and over again to do business with you. Once your email recipients can’t find a reliable channel to send any follow-up emails directly, your emails may all end up in their spam folders. To avoid such scenario, make sure to always put your reliable email address in the footer of your emails where customers expect to find it. Business is all about effective communication and if seamlessly done, it helps build trust with customers. If customers are aware that they are communicating with real people, it helps to put them at ease to do good business. That helps to build trust faster.

9. Utilize Your Email Analytics Well

Email marketing campaigns without analytics data is like marketing in the dark. You can therefore utilize your email analytics data to improve your campaigns. Through such data, you can get correct insights to check your email bounce rate, open rate, clicks, and the number of unsubscribes. It can also help you to determine how to send emails at different times throughout the week, testing subject lines, changing your CTA, and testing other creative variations. These are very vital info you can effectively use to rejig or to redirect your email campaigns at any point in your marketing campaign. Your email analytics helps you to accurately measure results from your email marketing campaigns. If you fail to measure your marketing results correctly, it is pretty difficult for you to have much reliable data on which to base your future decisions and to design your next email marketing campaign.

10. Utilize AI and Email Automation

Artificial Intelligence AI and automation help to eliminate repeat actions and increase efficiency in email marketing. Once you’ve taken the pains to craft good content, next is to automate their delivery. With the use of efficient automation tools like Campaign Monitor or MailChimp, you can program the timing of their sending and even to a segmented audience. That helps to increase your email effectiveness. These tools really help to make automation in email marketing easy and simple. The tools are smart enough to allow you create automated emails based on triggers. The common triggers are when someone opens your email, clicks on a link, or purchases something from you. The tools help to eliminate the drudgery of having to manually send out emails. Even if you are dealing with a multitude of different subscribers, these smart tools help you to save time without diminishing efficiency.

Final Thoughts

Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to promote your online store, build relationships with customers, and generate sales. What you really need is to come up with creative and effective ways to construct emails and send them out for maximum effects. The foregoing tips have been well tested and they can help you to achieve your email marketing goals. However, it is your creativity that is most important if your desire is to use email marketing to increase sales and create long-term customers.

How to Make Your Blog Content more Impactful

Blogging is the most common form of content marketing among online business owners. With presently over 600 million active blogs on the internet, the popularity of blogs as content marketing strategy is not in doubt. Amidst such a huge crowd of blogs, already in existence, the competition for attention is really quite high. Without a really outstanding content, produced consistently, it is quite difficult for any blog to make an appreciable impact on the Internet. So what to do? You must be ready to fix your content and improve its SEO, if you want to make your blog more impactful.

  

Following are a few things you can do if you are really keen on making your blog more impactful.
 
Fix Your Blogging SEO Errors

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a technique you can use on your content to make it more visible to Search Engines. SEO on your content could be fraught with many errors and even outdated if you do not take steps to check it out and fix any errors from time to time. Not regularly checking out your SEO is one common mistake many bloggers make from time to time. As a blogger, if any of your blogging mistakes impact the SEO on your blog, your blog traffic, particularly organic traffic will take a huge blow. This may linger on for quite a while if you don’t take steps to fix the SEO errors. The good news though is that SEO errors can generally be fixed if you know what you are doing.

Get Content Ideas from Social Media Comments

With over 4.6 billion active users worldwide, Social Media usually provides a wealth of content ideas for active bloggers. Millions of users regularly post content in form of blogs, videos, graphics, images and photos which generate comments and questions. These comments can help a blogger to generate blogging ideas and content to help make their blog more impactful on their blog audience.

Create Increasingly Better Content for Your Blog

As a blogger, the more and better content you create, the more your blog audience grows. Your main goal as a blogger should therefore not just to recreate content that’s already out there. You must strive to better what is already out there. That is the real challenge that helps to make your blog more impactful.
 
Find the Best New Blogging Tips

Blogging on the Internet is a hugely dynamic enterprise. Aside the huge competition, tastes and trends are changing rapidly and your blog must take these into account for it to be impactful. It is not enough though to simply make blog posts. These posts must be deliberately promoted and shared for your blog to be impactful. As you blog along, you’ll come across new ideas and tips. These must be brought to bear on the new content you create to make your blog current and impactful. As a blogger, you’ll always have a lot of promotion and improvement work to be done on your blog to enhance its impact on users.

Boost your Affiliate Marketing Earnings with Rich Content

Bloggers can monetize their content with Affiliate marketing links. The richer your blog content in terms of ideas, the more impactful it becomes and the more traffic it receives. Once these ideas support your affiliate links, the more clicks they receive and the more money your blog makes by way of affiliate commissions.
 
Hire only Quality Blog Writers if you must

Blogging is a skill. It is either you know how to blog well or you don’t. What makes your blog impactful is what really matters here. Good blogging is a foremost requirement for your blog to be impactful. If however, you are unable to blog well, hiring professional bloggers becomes a good idea. By hiring extra writers for your blog, they can help put out more content on the blog. If such writers manage to create content that keeps the quality of posts high, your blog becomes more impactful.

Hire a Local SEO Agency if you please

If you do not have the real technical knowledge to get a good SEO on your content, hiring a local agency to help you out is not a bad idea. Significantly, SEO is one convenient part of your blogging activities you can always outsource. Hiring a local SEO agency may actually be an efficient way to grow your blog and make it more impactful, all without wasting too much of your own time on it.

Know more About How Search Engines Work

If you want your blog to benefit from organic traffic, you must know how SEO and Search Engines work. If you do, you can always find ways to improve the SEO on your content to make your blog more impactful. It helps your blogging tremendously if you have a holistic understanding of search engines and how they work to generate organic traffic.
 
Improve Your Website Page Loading Speed

The loading speed of your website impacts its SEO. If your blog loads fast, your website visitors do not have to wait for much too long to access your content. Internet users are notoriously always in a hurry. For this reason, if your website loading speed is slow, many users can click off your blog page fairly quickly and probably move over to your competitors. That can mean loss of potential business. Additionally, page load speed is also important for search engines to rank your website content. It is hugely important therefore for you not to overlook your webpage loading speed when creating your website and when tinkering with it for SEO and content creation. The loading speed of your webpages makes your website more user-friendly and consequently makes your blog more impactful.

Don’t Ignore Off-Page SEO Strategies

In matters of SEO, most business owners always think of on-page SEO more than off-page SEO. That is not right. Never ignore off-page SEO if you want your blog to be really impactful. Most popular blogging SEO strategies involve some critical changes on your website proper. That is on-page SEO. If you combine on-page strategies with off-page strategies, it can help your blog to be more impactful.
 
Optimize Your Blog for Mobile

Google reports now indicate that over 60% of web data is attributable to mobile devices. That means many more people are accessing the Internet around the world via mobile devices, particularly smartphones. So, if you want your blog to be more impactful, it is smart to optimize it for mobile devices.

How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy for your Online Business

Digital marketing usually involves the use of digital online channels to promote products, services and even ideas. These days, businesses routinely deploy digital marketing for many and varied purposes online. For many online business owners, they rely on digital marketing mostly to generate traffic, leads and sales. Digital marketing is thus one great and effective way to build awareness and create a thought leadership position online. This is why digital marketing is essential part of the overall marketing strategy online business owners really depend on to effectively meet the needs of their numerous customers.

Here are some vital steps you can take to create an effective digital marketing strategy for your business.

Understand your Target Audience

This is one of the most essential steps to creating a digital marketing strategy. You must take deliberate steps to really understand your target audience before you can effectively market to them. If you don’t know your audience well enough, you cannot effectively market to them. Knowing your audience means you must know the needs of your audience, which marketing channels your potential customers prefer and exactly how to use these channels to reach them. Among online business owners, the most common channels of preference include social media, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and PPC advertising. To build an effective marketing strategy, you can focus on just one or a combination of two or more of these channels, depending on your objectives and the goals you’ve set for your business. The type of marketing content you produce will be directly influenced by the channels you choose to market with.

Define your Short and Long-Term Goals/Objectives
 
Just like any other business, it is hugely important in digital marketing to clearly define and set out your short and long-term goals/objectives right from the outset and make these goals/objectives an essential part of your business’s marketing strategy. When these goals/objectives are well established in your marketing strategy, they become a vital tool for reaching out to customers. They essentially help to build brand awareness and establishing a rapport with customers no matter how numerous they are. Bearing in mind that your main objective in setting goals is how to make your marketing efforts more effective, you must ensure that the goals are time-based and measurable. You can for instance have short term goals like doubling your traffic and leads in six months and long term goals like an increase in customer acquisition, higher conversion rate, increase in sales and revenue. It is best to set SMART goals, meaning the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Time-bound. If you set SMART goals as part of your strategy, you’re more likely to reach them within your set time frame. You can with such goals accurately measure or gauge how your business is doing as you progress along. That way, you can easily determine if you are making expected progress or if you are even succeeding at all based on your set objectives.
 
Identify your Ideal Buyer Persona

With research and careful analysis, you can clearly identify your ideal buyer persona. This is hugely important because your ideal buyer persona is a very essential party of your digital marketing strategy. A buyer persona helps you to better understand your audience and to relate to people you absolutely need to. An ideal buyer persona helps businesses to reach out to customers, build relationships, generate leads and increase sales. A buyer persona is some kind of abstract picture of what you think your ideal buyers are like. This is a picture you can build up using personal information and work details of who you expect your ideal buyer to be like. Details of such information include age, educational qualification, geographical location, job title and role outside of work, family, income level, gender and so on. These details clearly provide a context of your ideal buyer and therefore very important for your marketing strategy.

Create an Evergreen Content Strategy

All content that brings traffic to your website is great but evergreen content is best. This is because, evergreen content is content that remains relevant for a long period of time, and it brings good traffic for that period too. Evergreen content has the advantage of attracting new visitors while not becoming irrelevant or outdated over time. Search engines like evergreen content as well and they tend to rank it highly in their SERPs. That means good organic traffic in the mix. If you want to have evergreen content as part of your marketing strategy, make sure you consistently create content in form of tutorials, how-to guides, examples, checklists, and problem-solving articles which really attract traffic. These are the types of content that are likely to remain relevant and popular with readers over a prolonged period of time. If you are able to focus on content that has a long shelf life, it can directly benefit your marketing strategy. Such content helps to boost your keyword rankings, set up better SEO, and enjoy steady traffic growth. This is in addition to helping your brand to build online authority and credibility.

Use Earned Media

Your business benefits from earned media if your content is very good. If your content is good, it is shared more and via multichannel to boot. Earned media is simply content that is shared by others and links back to your website. It is usually in the form of written or video content. Earned media can also include organic search engine traffic. The more your content is shared, the more likely others will reference it. As a marketing strategy, earned media usually helps to get your content in front of fans, potential customers, and many others who share a common interest in the content. This process is really enhanced if your content is easy to find and share. Therefore, having a social media marketing strategy is a way to enhance earned media.

Use Pay-Per-Click, PPC Ads

Pay-per-click, PPC ads is the paid form of search engine marketing. PPC ads can therefore be a key component of your integrated marketing strategies. It is a bit technical in nature and you must have the resources to pay search engines particularly Google for the clicks it can arrange for you by way of PPC.  PPC ads are highly effective when used correctly. They enable marketers to reach a wide audience quickly since a vast majority of online experiences start on Google. Since your potential audience probably uses Google every day, Google PPC ads can reach virtually every person in your target audience pretty quickly. For effectiveness, PPC ads can be created in many different styles. You can have ads in form of simple text or images, and you can incorporate ad extensions too. If your ads have extensions, it can increase the click-through rate of the ads. Ad extensions tend to make your ads larger and more prominent on Google SERPs. That means more organic traffic. 

6 Most Common Digital Marketing Strategies You Should Know

Digital marketing covers a vast area of marketing particularly on the internet. Online marketers rely on digital marketing to get traffic, connect with their audience, capture leads, and make sales.  Marketers without an impressive digital presence are less likely to outperform those with active digital presence online. Smart marketers depend heavily on digital marketing to outperform their competition and gain a competitive edge on the internet. The field in quite vast and it encompasses diverse marketing strategies. These strategies directly leverage computer and internet technology to effectively promote products/services online. If you are interested in digital marketing, it is best to familiarize yourself with the most common strategies that successful marketers like to recommend. Following are six of such digital marketing strategies you too can effectively use to get results.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing strategy where affiliates help product merchants market their products and earn commissions for their efforts. It is some kind of mutually beneficial partnership between product merchants, affiliates and consumers. Affiliates directly help product merchants to boost their business and increase their engagement with consumers. Affiliates help make available to consumers, products/services that help solve problems for them. In this partnership, product merchants sell more products/services while consumers easily find products/services that meet their needs. Affiliates who facilitate this earn more commissions from the process.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a process of connecting with your audience through relevant information sharing. Content is hugely important for marketers to cater to the concerns of their target audience and help them seek solutions to their needs. It is one digital strategy that is very popular with marketers. If the content is qualitative and well packaged, it helps marketers to effectively reach out to their target audience and gain their trust. For digital marketing purposes, an effective content is usually packaged in the form of blogs, research data, videos, infographics, guides, podcasts, bulletins and more. These are the common techniques that help the marketer to build a following/audience over time. When the content you consistently produce builds trust with this audience, it impacts your traffic, leads and sales. It ultimately helps to boost your affiliate marketing business.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is another effective digital marketing strategy which enables marketers to easily interact with their audience by way of emails. It is essentially used by marketers for targeting new, retaining existing, and nurturing leads and customers. To have an effective email marketing campaign, you must first build a responsive email list. This you do by diligently collecting the email addresses of your target audience over time through op-in and sign-up marketing techniques. You can also grow your email list using lead magnets, pop-ups, exit-intent messages, and more. Marketers love to use emails to market because it is cost-effective and the ROI is usually quite impressive. Experienced marketers can segment their email list for more personalized marketing messages and campaigns.

4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

With more than 4.6 billion active users around the globe, social media has become hugely popular with digital marketers. Social media marketing SMM is a digital marketing strategy which allows marketers to promote content via social media platforms of choice. Marketers use social media platforms to market their brands organically or through paid advertising. SMM as a marketing strategy is a very effective way to connect with your target audience no matter where that audience is on the globe. It makes easy two-way interaction between marketers and their respective target audience. Aside its huge popularity, sharing messages on social media is quite easy and smooth. The reason social media easily facilitates engagement as your audience reacts at will and/or leaves comments on your posts. This user content helps marketers to assess the performance of their content. Many consumers use social media to research preferred solutions and make informed buying decisions. This makes social media platforms ideal for capturing quality leads and even to make sales.

Influencer marketing is ancillary to SMM. This is because most influencers ply their trade in social media as social media influencers. Influencer marketing as a viable SMM strategy is quite effective to reach out to a huge audience which can be in the millions. Influencers can even influence the buy decisions of this huge audience through endorsements and recommendations. Because a significant percentage of consumers really trust influencer recommendations, partnering with influencers can actually become a big business boost for marketers.
 
5. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a digital marketing strategy where marketers are required to pay for the ads they run on online platforms. If they have the right marketing budget, it is possible for marketers to run ads on different search engines and social media platforms. For search engine marketing, marketers generally prefer Google which is a lead search engine for running paid ad campaigns. You can also run paid ads on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes. Because ranking well on search engines can be a very slow process, most marketers prefer using a fair mix of organic and paid marketing strategies to reach out to their respective target audiences. Paid ads can give you much faster results if you have the right marketing budget. You can always use paid ads marketing strategy if you’re looking for a quick boost in traffic or sales.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In digital marketing, it is not enough to create content no matter how good the content is. You must explore all reliable avenues to make this content accessible to your audience. That is where SEO comes in as a reliable marketing strategy. SEO is a bit technical and tricky especially for marketers that are not too experienced. For such marketers who cannot use DIY approach, they can hire the services of professional webmasters to have SEO done on their websites. SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps to make your content visible to search engines. If the search engines rank the content high in their SERPs, it increases its visibility to searchers. That means more organic traffic to your website.

Online, a search engine is usually a go-to platform for most people to find suitable solutions. When people simple tap in their search queries on major search engines like Google, it shows recommendations that cater to the respective search queries in detail. If these search queries resonate with your niche, Google throws up your content thereby making it accessible to the searchers. The more search engines throw up your content in search results, the more organic traffic it receives. This is why SEO should be your go-to strategy for more organic traffic.

Wrapping Up

The foregoing are digital marketing strategies that are popular among marketers and they get results. The reason you should know them well and be prepared to deploy them in your marketing efforts. Marketers worldwide use a mix of these strategies to achieve their set marketing objectives. They rely on them for the success of their respective marketing campaigns. You too can try them out and see which ones work best for you.

How to Increase Sales Online with Affiliate Marketing

As a business model, affiliate marketing combines the talents and marketing efforts of many individuals to generate traffic, leads and sales for a business. It is a business arrangement involving three parties, namely, the product merchant/seller, the affiliate/advertiser, and the buyer/customer. The affiliate helps the product merchant to promote products to a buyer and earns a commission from the merchant for the products sold to the buyer which are directly attributable to his promotional activities. All the affiliate needs to do to earn more commissions is to make more efforts to promote products and generate more sales. For this reason, marketers who can integrate affiliate marketing strategies into their performance-based marketing mix can exponentially increase their business’s bottom line which is sales. These here affiliate marketing tips can be of help to you if you want to increase sales in your online business.

Optimize Your Website Landing Page

Your website is your business window to the world of the internet. Its landing page is of special importance because that is where prospective customers first make contact with your business. To optimize your landing page, make sure it is attractive and easy to navigate, it has convincing content with strong Call-to-Action CTA and very strong and compelling headlines. If well optimized, it offers your prospective customers the assurance they require before they do business with you. To make this possible, the landing page must contain in-depth product information that can aid prospects to make the all-important buy decisions. A well optimized landing page significantly helps to increase engagement, reveals to prospects what your products/services can do for them, and to convert visitors into paying customers/clients. It thus becomes very useful to boost conversion rates and make sales.
 
Choose the Right Affiliate to Work With

As a business owner, if you want your affiliate marketing campaign to succeed, make sure you find and work with the right affiliates. It is of significant marketing importance to invest your time and efforts to find individuals who have an audience likely to be interested in the products you are selling. Begin by looking at the affiliate’s subscriber count and, more importantly, their subscriber retention rate. If you find affiliates that are already established in the marketing industry and have sufficient credibility to suggest a mutually beneficial working partnership, such are the kind of affiliates that are best to work with. What you need is the traffic affiliates generate and affiliates without a sizeable following from an audience inclined to your business niche cannot be of much help in this regard. This is what must influence your choice of affiliates to work with.

Use Affiliate Links Contextually

It is not advisable to force content linking process with affiliate links, even though affiliate links are usually the backbone of any affiliate marketing campaign. For best results, affiliate links should however be used contextually and in strategic ways. That is what gives your content the natural look without it appearing to consumers as a sales pitch. It is when your content looks natural that consumers in your target demographic may be persuaded by it to make a purchase. What works best is when marketers use a ‘create first, link later’ strategy as a method of integrating links in their content. The best strategy is to first create a high quality and captivating content. Next is to decide where and how to add affiliate links on the content. You may even decide the appropriateness and whether or not to add an affiliate product link on the content. These strategies help to ensure that your advertising techniques do not compromise your content and render it unattractive for marketing purposes.

 
Occasionally Offer Special Deals/Discounts

Most shoppers are always on the lookout for a good price and bargain. The reason they painstakingly scout around shops and sellers before making a purchase. Before many shoppers make a purchase, they usually look for potential good deals, good prices and attractive discount coupons. Because of this, when marketers incorporate good deals and discounts into their affiliate marketing strategy, it helps to significantly increase sales. Smart marketers always know how to research the market, learn about the competition, and analyze their products, discounts, affiliates, and methods of cross-channel promotion. That is how they get to know what works and how best to improve or add value to what works to help increase sales.

Last Line

Product merchants will seek to sell more products/services now and even in the foreseeable future. These merchants will continue to need the services of more affiliate marketers to sell more products/services. This is why the affiliate marketing industry is predicted to see continued growth in the years ahead.

Likely Reasons Your Website Isn’t Appearing On Google Search Results

If you want your digital marketing strategy to be effective, first create a user-friendly website and have it hosted well. Next step is to optimize the website to improve its online visibility and search ranking particularly on Google SERPs. You need tactical use of Search Engine Optimization, SEO to get this done properly. If after a while you search for the website on Google search results and you cannot find the site, it proves there are issues with the website. There may be technical reasons the website isn’t appearing on Google search results. Following are the likely reasons why.

The Website has been Penalized

Your website can be penalized by Google if it discovers you are engaging in “unethical” or “black hat” SEO tactics. When Google penalizes your website for any unacceptable SEO tactics, it simple drops the website from appearing on its search results. That is close to blacking out your website on the internet. To prevent your website from Google penalties, make sure you do not purchase low-quality backlinks or stuff your website content with keywords. Both of these tactics are unethical in the eyes of Google and they usually attract penalties. To avoid these penalties, you can undertake a comprehensive SEO audit once in a while to be sure you are doing things correctly particularly in terms of your SEO tactics.

The Website has been Blocked

You can have your website blocked from searches if you are reckless with the use of meta tags on the site. It is meta tags that give instructions to Google what to do or not do on your website. So, when you use ‘noindex’ as a meta tag on your website, it tells Google bots not to index or display a webpage on Google search results. If you set ‘noindex’ to your entire website or certain webpages, it simply means the entire website or these pages will not appear in the search results. To prevent that from happening, make sure that webpages that you want to appear on Google search results don’t have ‘noindex’ in their meta tags.

Lack of Relevant Keywords on the Website Content

If you do not have related keywords in the content of your website, you are confusing search engines. This is because major search engines like Google use the keywords on your website to gain textual understanding of the products/services you are offering on the website. The right keywords help Google to display your website on its search results. So, when these relevant keywords are missing from your website, the website is not likely to appear on search results for related search queries on Google.

The Website is Rather New on the Web

If your website is new on the web, it takes quite a while say a few days or possibly a few weeks for Google to notice it and index it. It is only then the website stands a good chance of making it into Google search results. So, if you just launched your website, it is advisable to wait a bit for the website to be found and shown on Google search results. That is if the website is well optimized though.

The Website May Have Duplicate Content Issues

Google bots usually have a very sensitive nose for plagiarized or copied materials. Anytime they discover such materials on a website, there are bound to be consequences. They always know a duplicate content when they discover that same or similar web page is accessible at different URLs. When content appears as duplicate to Google, it refuses to index it. When faced with such scenario, Google usually chooses the content version that you set as the canonical. If however no version is set as canonical, Google usually decides in favor of quality. In such scenario, Google attempts to identify the best version of the page to index based on its judgement. If therefore your website content is copied from another website and really looks similar, Google may bypass it without indexing it. If that happens, chances are very high that your website will not appear on Google search results.

The Website Doesn’t Have Enough Quality Backlinks

In getting backlinks to your website, you must pay more attention to quality rather than numbers. The number of quality backlinks your website has tells Google the importance of the website. The more quality backlinks your website generates, the more the website appears important to Google and the more likely that Google will display the website on its SERPs. On the flip side, if your website is new and doesn’t have many quality backlinks, it may seem unimportant to Google. When that is the case, it may lead to the website not appearing on Google search results.

Why SMS is a Dependable Marketing Channel for E-Commerce Brands

Many e-commerce business owners usually prefer cross-channel marketing because it enables them to blend different communication channels to reach their customers and to create cohesive shopping experiences. Overall, and because of the overwhelming prevalence of smart devices particularly among young people, the use of SMS mobile messaging in cross-channel marketing has become hugely important in a holistic e-commerce strategy. If used correctly, SMS can be very effective to connect brands with consumers, nurture leads and get conversions. Following are compelling reasons why SMS mobile messaging is now a reliable and effective marketing channel for many e-commerce businesses.

SMS Helps to Strengthen Relationships

SMS just like email is easy to send and guaranteed to arrive destination hence it is extremely useful for e-commerce business owners to build and strengthen relationships with their customers. For most customers who already have a relationship with a brand, receiving text messages is something they’re open to. It is for this reason many brands can effortlessly use SMS to boost customer loyalty and retention. This they do by routinely using text messages to keep their customers constantly in the know of trends, latest updates, price changes, new products and even on-going promos. For exclusivity and better effectiveness, mobile messaging can be transformed into an exclusive channel with offers that are only available to customers enrolled in the SMS program. With its characteristic two-way conversational application, SMS can help brands to deepen relationships with customers through short surveys and collecting product feedback and customer reviews, very useful data for effective marketing purposes.

SMS Helps to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

SMS has the advantage of instant messaging. So, it can be a great tool for providing instant messaging to shoppers and thus helping to keep them in the customer journey. SMS is very good at this because when sending follow-ups, SMS open and response rates are way higher and thus perform better than emails. Many brands do take advantage of this by sending cart abandonment SMS reminders to their subscribed customers. SMS text alerts can help shoppers to pick up their carts and continue their shopping experience at any time and in any channel they presently are. All these greatly help to reduce shopping cart abandonment to the barest minimum.

SMS Helps to Deliver Personalized Customer Journeys

These days, consumers on the average check their mobile smart devices much more than any other gadget. That is why mobile messaging can be effective by being more personal, immediate and direct. Exactly why, brands can effectively use SMS to personalize customer journeys. Brands that are unable to or neglect to do so risk losing many customers as a result. Brands that really want to encourage and nudge their shoppers along the customer journey must be able to use SMS to give personalized info to the shoppers according to their individual preferences.
 
SMS Helps to Convert Shoppers On-the-Go

For marketing purposes, SMS has impressive click-through rates and conversion rates as high as 70% and 20% respectively. Because SMS is direct, straightforward and can be delivered to shoppers on the go, it helps to increase the chances of a shopper making a purchase. Brands can better convert shoppers on the go by increasing their text messages’ relevance with intent-based data that understands shoppers’ real-time intent.

SMS Helps to Easily Reach Younger Consumers

Google reports indicate that up to 60% online data is now attributable to mobile devices and a very large percentage of young people use these devices. Over 70% of these young people, 34 years and below prefer engaging brands in two-way communication and SMS is their favorite. To this huge demographic, SMS increases easy exclusivity and accessibility for them. For marketers who use SMS, it is quite easy and approachable to interact with this demographic. They are therefore more prone to open and read mobile messages which help to encourage their engagement levels as shoppers.

Last Line

Without a doubt, SMS has become one of the fastest-growing tools that e-commerce brands can use to boost customer interactions, loyalty and retention. SMS is not only personalized, accessible and engaging, but has also proven to be effective in increasing conversions. Because of SMS, business conversations are no longer limited to emails and social media platforms, even though they are still hugely popular among marketers. As a highly effective communication channel, SMS completes a comprehensive and result-oriented cross-channel marketing strategy. The reason it is now increasing in popularity among e-commerce business owners.

8 Major Benefits of Affiliate Marketing Model to Your Business

Affiliate marketing is a unique marketing model hugely popular with marketers because it is simple to implement and it is fair and highly rewarding. Marketers who understand its benefits as a business model can always succeed if they adopt the right tactics/techniques. These techniques can be fine-tuned for effectiveness if marketers research the business enough to know how it works and why it works. If they understand how it works, some of the major benefits derivable from the research and marketing efforts come from its relative ease and low-cost to set up and execute, increased competitive advantage, grossly reduced or non-existent risk, increased conversation rate, improved competitive advantage, and much more. More specifically:

1. Reduced Risk: The less you invest in affiliate marketing, the less the risk you are taking. When costs are relatively low, the risk is highly reduced in affiliate marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing as a business model may be prone to some slight chance of loss when payment is done only after actual conversions since it is best suited for businesses on a lower budget.

2. High Return on Investment (ROI): Keeping costs low and returns high is typical of affiliate marketing. If you use affiliate marketing in your online advertising methods, it can significantly lower your start-up costs and influence your overall revenue. That tells on the ROI of the business. ROI provides the right information as to whether the rewards the business gets justify the efforts put in to marketing the business. If you run a marketing campaign, you can through the ROI determine whether the amount of revenue generated during the affiliate marketing campaign rightly justifies the resources spent on the campaign. Marketers who do these calculations have determined over and over again that the affiliate market has a considerably higher ROI when compared to other online marketing strategies. The primary reason for this is because affiliates work for commissions and what they get is relative to what they bring out in terms of sales from their marketing efforts. Such affiliate activities help to keep costs low and returns high.

3. Low-Priced Start-Ups: Business success is directly hinged on keeping costs low and returns high. Affiliate marketing is typically known for low-priced start-up costs. Through diligent research, business owners always make sure they choose cost-effective measures particularly in products advertising while making sure not to get their brands involved in too pricey and non-profitable but mere fanciful marketing schemes. When business owners are extra careful while making purchases, they manage to keep the risk factors involved in the purchases as low as possible.

4. Less On-going Costs: Keeping overhead or on-going costs low always help the bottomline of a business. In affiliate marketing, most of the promotional activities are done by the affiliates themselves. That way, they share in the cost elements of the business. If the affiliates are many, that cost element shared becomes extremely low and even insignificant in some cases. When compared to the commission the affiliates earn that is performance-based, on-going costs pale into insignificance. On the other hand, business owners only have to pay affiliates commissions based on the sales they bring in. This way, affiliate market model only guarantees that business owners only part with their money only when a sale is made. That helps to keep costs low and justified.  

5. Targeted Traffic: Many affiliates are independent business owners in their own rights. They have their own online audience and favorite marketing channels. If you select affiliates in your business niche, chances are higher that their audiences will be interested in what you are selling. Your affiliates can therefore directly target this audience with your marketing messages. In affiliate marketing, targeted traffic is a more responsive traffic. When the traffic is targeted, the e-commerce store tends to receive higher traffic that is characteristically risk-free and with high ROI. Since the affiliates you deliberately select are in the same niche you are, it increases the chances that the targeted traffic they send to your store are individuals who will most likely be interested in the products you are selling.

6. Developing Brand Recognition: As a business owner, building brand recognition helps to build your business. In this quest, affiliate marketing directly helps to connect with social media influencers and bloggers who, in turn, could channel organic traffic towards the business owner’s website. Affiliates, even if in their thousands, are directly responsible for spreading unrestrained info about the positive side of any business. That helps in no small measure to build brand recognition. They act like some sort of brand ambassadors working round-the-clock to help push the brand and strengthen its recognition in the Internet market.

7. Reputation Boost: Affiliate marketing helps businesses to build reliable affiliate networks. These networks play very important and significant roles to help promote businesses even if indirectly. This can result in a rapid reputation boost for a business. If you work with reputable and reliable affiliates, it helps your own confirmation as a reliable and reputable business. Every successful business is built on trust. This is why businesses with strong reputations are trusted more and they always attract many more people to do business with.

8. Flexibility: Affiliate marketing business model is a simple and flexible business model. It is therefore easily scalable and can be transformed into bigger or smaller affiliate programs at minimal or no cost at all. This flexibility factor is one great attraction for more and more people who get involved in affiliate marketing. It is characterized by time flexibility, scale flexibility, location flexibility, products flexibility, promotional channels flexibility and so on. As an individual getting involved in affiliate marketing therefore, it is absolutely up to you to decide the type of business you want to promote and the time and effort you are prepared to put in which may generally range from a few hours per day to a few hours a week or even a few hours a month.

Tips to Step Up Your Social Media and Content Marketing Efforts

Digital marketing strategy is as unique to digital marketers just as it gets results for them in their own unique ways. Therefore, no digital marketing strategy can be wrong really for as long as it gets good results for the marketer. It is all a matter of results. To get these results, marketers do depend on many platforms and tools that are most relevant to their needs. To step up your social media and content marketing efforts, you can learn from your own mistakes and experiences as well as those of other small business owners. That helps you to get started and you build from there. These here are useful tips from the experiences of members of the online small business community.

Be a More Productive Content Marketer

To step up your content marketing efforts, you must painstakingly write good quality content in the form of blog posts and even social media content for the benefit of your readers. Doing this diligently and consistently takes quality time and efforts, even though it helps to enhance your productivity. You get more productive in your content marketing efforts if you hone your skills and create an intentional schedule to help you get more done within manageable time frame.
 
Blog to Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Blogging is the most popular form of content marketing. Good bloggers can indeed use blogs to profitably boost their affiliate marketing activities. The more good content you create as a blogger, the more traffic you attract and the better for your affiliate marketing business. If your blogging is good, you can leverage several marketing strategies to help you earn more affiliate income.

Promote Your Brand with Tweets

Getting your business on Twitter is good for your affiliate marketing. Once you grow an active twitter community, you can always find out which tweets have been most impactful in your marketing activities. You get to know this through some of your most liked tweets. That info provides you some insights into how to grow your brand and community on Twitter.

Leverage Your Social Media Skills

As the internet is deepening and technologies are advancing, social media continues to evolve. For your social media marketing to be effective for a long period of time, it is best to focus more on your social media skills instead of specific social media strategies. That is what gets the best results particularly if you are marketing content through blogging. It is more advisable then to leverage these skills adequately.

Increase Engagement with Social Media Polls

If you want good traffic, it is always better to explore all ways to increase your engagement. It a way to deliberately get people involved in what you are marketing. Social media polls are a way to go in that quest. Polls are a great way to get more people involved with your social media accounts. By doing so, they get to interact better with what you are marketing through the accounts.
 
Market with High Converting but Low Cost Ads

Most marketers are always operating very tight marketing budgets. Stretching what you have to get the most benefits is one great marketing skill on this issue. That is why you need to invest more in low cost but high converting ads. If you already have a mastery of the skills of organic content and social marketing, you can then go for paid ads. To get the best returns from your marketing investment, it is best to create high converting but low cost ads.

Get Expert Help

Expert help is always welcome in business decisions. In this case, if you want to better propagate your brand, it is best to consider working with a branding and communications agency. Agency help is useful because most small businesses don’t always have the resources to hire full time staff for their branding and marketing activities. By paying moderate agency fees, professional agencies can be hired to step up and fill that gap. You can work with some agencies to outsource some of your important branding and marketing tasks.

Leverage LinkedIn for Branding

Popular social media platform LinkedIn is quite suitable for serious business minded people to interact and network for business. Like minded business persons get to interact on the platform for mutual benefits. They do offer paid jobs, business partnerships and collaborations. Through these relationships, users can effectively leverage LinkedIn for small business branding and marketing.

Avoid SEO Mistakes

If you want organic traffic to your business, optimize your website for search engines. That is SEO which is an essential component of any blogging or content marketing strategy. It comes about by the deft use of keywords on your content. However, excessive use of these keywords is keywords stuffing which search engines do penalize. It is an SEO mistake to stuff your content with keywords. Such common mistakes can make your content marketing efforts less impactful. In extreme cases, search engines may even penalize your website by dropping it from their SERPs completely.

Take Advantage of Instagram Hashtags

Hashtags are unarguably very popular marketing tools for small businesses on social media, Instagram in particular. Through hashtags, businesses can directly popularize their brands on the internet. They help Instagram users to grow their following on the platform. If you want to grow your following on social media therefore, you can take advantage of Instagram hashtags to do so.

Proven Tips to Boost Your SEO Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers can create a structurally sound SEO affiliate marketing strategy by deliberate steps. It takes quite a while though and that requires diligence and patience. So, if you have made the efforts to put SEO affiliate marketing strategy in place and results are not forth coming, do not be discouraged. The process is a long-haul journey and results are not immediate. Knowing what to do to construct a successful SEO affiliate marketing strategy is one thing, but knowing how to do it right is something else. Part of knowing how to do it right is to think through what your niche should be, and what keywords can be relevant in your content. That helps you to keep your topic firmly in mind when crafting your content and making sure every word you write is relevant. That is hugely important because if you must have good readership and traffic, you cannot afford to mislead or even misinform your readers.

Following are a few things to keep in mind and do right which can help boost your success rate.

Don’t Bait Your Readers

Baiting your readers is a very cheap content marketing tactic which search engines easily discover. The whole essence of an SEO strategy is simply to increase traffic via keywords usage. You get the best organic traffic that way. However, it is not advisable to use keywords as a way to bait readers. If you do so by way of keywords stuffing, search engines detect it easily. It could lead to your website being penalized by dropping it in ranking or removing it from the SERPs outright. This is in addition to the fact that keywords stuffing could directly increase your bounce rate.

Factor in Mobile Users

These days, many more people are doing business on the go through mobile devices. Google reports indicate that about 60% of website traffic is generated through mobile devices. What that means is that most of the visitors to your website are using such devices to gain access. You cannot afford to ignore such huge chunk of traffic in your SEO strategy. Optimizing your website for mobile devices is one great way to get around it. If you do, your content format will work perfectly on such devices and that helps to boost your traffic. If mobile devices are able to navigate your website easily, your SEO efforts can more readily lure visitors to the website. Without it, most visitors may struggle to find their way around your website. That could discourage them from any worthwhile interaction with the site and many may even not hesitate to simply click away.

Avoid Keywords Stuffing

If you stuff your content with keywords, search engines easily find you out and penalize the content. Strategically using keywords on your content is what gets the best SEO results. If you overuse keywords, you risk reducing the quality of your work. That can negatively affect your rankings and ultimately a drop in your organic traffic. You can least afford such scenario in your affiliate marketing business.

Don’t Ignore Social Media

There are many brand-shaping strategies suited for social media platforms you can adopt for your business. That way, you can leverage the huge popularity of the platforms and ease of sharing info to boost your SEO strategy. Social media users are usually the first to know about breaking news, new hashtags, trending topics, and what is happening in the business world. So, it is beneficial for your business to get involved on social media. If you are always on top of trending news and stay up to date and you know what’s popular in the world, you can use such vital info in your SEO strategy. If you know exactly what people are searching for and what is trending on social media, you can always update your keywords accordingly to boost your SEO.

Offer Exclusivity

Exclusivity makes your content unique and sought after. If through this content you manage to capture the attention of potential customers, it’s crucial that you keep that attention by offering them something they can’t find anywhere else. That’s exclusivity. Even if you are in a very popular niche, you can purposefully take a new angle different from what no one else has thought about on a well-covered topic or you produce something entirely new and uniquely different to stand out. That requires a bit of creativity though if you want your content to spark the right conversation.

Don’t Get too Comfortable

SEO is always work in progress because it works with trends. Even when you have a good optimization in place, you cannot afford to get too comfortable by relaxing further efforts. Whatsoever you have in place needs to be reviewed regularly to ensure it is still relevant, fresh and up-to-date.  That helps you to keep a keen eye on your ranking, while striving continuously to improve it.