6 Viable Ways to Make Money on YouTube

Yes indeed? If you know what you are doing, you can make a lot of money on YouTube where nearly everyone else appears to be playing around with videos. If you get the hang of it, you can even make a full-time income by regularly posting quality videos on the platform. You must be sure to understand the community rules of YouTube platform and always watch out for any changes in these rules. Work in compliance with these rules and be consistent at posting quality content on the platform always. That’s about the best way to make money on the platform particularly when you do the following. 

1. Create a Quality Blog

Blogging is all about quality content. You can write out your YouTube videos and make them into articles. With the written words on YouTube videos, blogs usually have a better click through rate on CTAs and on affiliate links as well as display ads. You can also have guest posts or promotional content on videos to gain some traffic and extra money from your blog.

2. Join YouTube Partners Program

Most marketers generally agree that this is about the easiest way to earn money from YouTube. But first, to make money, you must have to join the partners program. By joining, it simply means you have become a partner and allowed YouTube to run ads on your videos. Your duty is to post quality videos and YouTube runs the ads and you earn commissions from ads sales. However, what qualifies you to join the program is that you must have at least 4000 hours of watch time on your videos, and not less than 1000 subscribers. You have the option of choosing what type of ads you want appear on your videos. That gives you quite a big control over what is shown on your content. Usually, the commission payment is split 55% and 45% between the content creator and YouTube. When the numbers add up, this can translate to a huge income for you the content creator.

3. Promote Sponsored Content

There are very many reputable brands that love to work with content creators and you can be one of such creators. You can make money working with sponsors when creating YouTube content. It either you actively reach out yourself to such brands or wait for the brands to reach out to you. Sponsored content thrives on many rules. The most common of these rules is that when creating sponsored videos, you will need to get the approval of the sponsoring brand before publishing. Once approved, you must arrange the fees for your services before you go ahead to publish the content.

4. Create Your Own Branded Merchandise

By creating your own unique branded merchandise, you can earn some extra money on YouTube. But first, you must partner with a print on demand partner who will print and ship out your orders as they are made. To get started, you need to make a cute design to put on your merchandise items. If you have the expertise, you can create this design yourself but if not, you can hire a reputable designer to help you out. Once the merchandise is created, you can make a stunning photo-shoot for ads purposes before adding the items to your e-commerce shop on platforms like Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly, etc. Your branded merchandise can be anything from trainer shoes, sweatshirts, t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags, key holders, table mats, napkins, ballpoint pens and sundry other items on great demand which YouTube viewers like to see. Yours is to get the order through your YouTube video content and your demand partner will print and ship out the order. You make money directly from the sales of your branded merchandise.

5. Affiliate Marketing

Helping product merchants market their products on YouTube in return for commissions is affiliate marketing. What you do is to make sure you have specific affiliate links to products/webpages in your blog posts or YouTube video descriptions. When people click on these links and make a purchase on the site, you earn a commission from the transaction. You can get affiliate links directly from product merchants in your niche or you get the links by joining a reputable affiliate program in the mold of Strong Future International, SFI, Amazon Associates Program, eBay Partner Network, ShareASale and others.

6. Sell Specialized Courses

To do this successfully and make money from it, you must be some kind of expert at something. That means specialized skills and knowledge. This knowledge may touch on fitness, body building, singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, and any other human activity on demand by others. You can teach the skill directly through webinars or package it in form of eBooks for wider sales and distribution. You can promote your skills through YouTube videos to get patronage. You don’t even have to be the best or the biggest expert in the field to make money. You only need to know a bit more about the topic/subject matter than some other people and you get patronage. Talk about your chosen topic/subject matter expansively in your YouTube videos by giving out insights and tips from your own experience. Many people will appreciate that and pay more attention to what you are saying. You get patronage from there.

Final Thoughts

The foregoing are some of the most viable options to earn money on YouTube if you are a YouTuber. If you really want to make money on YouTube, it is advisable to explore all the options to see which of them is easier for you to handle and which earns better income for you. That is irrespective of whether you are experienced in YouTube marketing or you are new in it. Give them a try, stay on it and see what pans out for you going forward. Good luck!!

5 Easy Steps to Make Money Online Working from Home

These days, most people like to work at home but not many get to make real money doing so. Affiliate programs are the real attractions for those who like to work at home. Many even give up their 9-5 jobs to become full time affiliates because of the convenience and ease of making money in affiliate marketing. Even though there are many affiliate programs on the internet, deciding on which to join requires due diligence and recommendations from successful affiliate marketers. The reputation of every affiliate program matters a lot because there are also many scam businesses online masquerading as affiliate programs. If you join any good one, such as Strong Future International, SFI, ClickBank, Amazon, eBay and the likes, they help you start off pretty quickly and you start making money almost immediately. However, it is good to know that affiliate programs are not get-rich-quick programs. Making money from affiliate programs requires careful consideration, due diligence and hard work. By taking the following steps to get involved in a good affiliate program, you can make money and turn a good profit with time if you work hard at it.

1. Design a Website: For most affiliate marketers, designing a website is usually the first step in affiliate marketing. A well designed website is a great business window on the internet. Marketing the website is where the real hard work begins and the internet is the market place. For effective marketing on the internet therefore, your well-designed website needs to be search engine optimized. That is what makes it to become highly visible to internet traffic. Habitually, internet users search for information through search engines. If your website is well optimized, it makes it easy for internet searchers to find it since optimization has made it visible to internet visitors. Online searchers who rely heavily on search engines to get what they are looking for constitute the organic traffic coming over to the website. That is the real traffic that benefits and enhances your affiliate marketing business.

2. Promote the Website: You promote a website to attract traffic to the website. As an affiliate, you need specialized knowledge about SEO to get it done. The overall aim is to ensure the site is ranked high in the SERPs of search engines. If the ranking is high, it gets more and better organic traffic which is good for your affiliate marketing business. Ranking high on SERPs requires varied marketing strategies to achieve. If you have the technical knowledge, you can undertake SEO on your website yourself through the deft use of special keywords on your content. If not, you can hire the services of professional webmasters to get it done. If properly done, it can help online searchers to locate your website and what you are selling much more easily. Any advertisement you place on the website should entice online visitors to click and reach the product page you are advertising. If the webpage has enough information about the product, it serves as a great incentive for the visitor to take positive action and even to return to the page later.

3. Join a Reputable Affiliate Program: Care and due diligence is required here because there are very many scam affiliate programs on the internet. The choice of a good affiliate program in the mold of Strong Future International, SFI, ClickBank, Amazon and eBay is the next very important consideration if you want to make money from your affiliate business. The advantage of joining popular and reputable affiliate programs is to hit the ground running real quick. These programs help you to start seamlessly, provide you a sound support system, good training and in-house marketing tools to promote your business. Some even provide you your own customized website to enhance your marketing efforts, all at no cost. Above all, they arrange to have all your commissions accurately calculated and paid to you as and when due.

4. Read and Understand the Affiliate Policy: To make it easy for you to start quickly, make marketing easier for you, some affiliate programs make customized websites available to their affiliates at no cost. These websites are ready-to-use websites that are plugged into a network to enable the affiliate commence marketing activities as soon as they join the program. This is as a result of some intricate business relationship and policy requirements. So, you must make sure you read and understand the affiliate policy of any affiliate program before joining. It is important you do so because most of these huge affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI for instance usually have duplicate standard websites for all their affiliates who may be in their hundreds of thousands. A good affiliate policy is what helps to keep these large numbers of affiliates in line and well provided for.

5. Check out the Commission Payment Policy: If you are in affiliate marketing to make money, you cannot afford to ignore the commission payment policy of any affiliate program. Commission payment is a very vital consideration for joining any affiliate program. Therefore, before becoming an affiliate, it is of paramount importance to know the payment policies of the affiliate program. You can easily find out if the commission they pay can give you a good income as an affiliate. Find out the pay-out intervals and at what percentages. Usually, most affiliate programs have a pay policy of weekly or monthly on a percentage of 5-50% of sales generated depending on the products. Make sure there is a sound tracking system in place to track sales accurately. If there is no sound tracking system in place, there is always the possibility that the affiliate may not get the deserved commission since there will be no sound accounting system for the accurate numbers of customers referred. The better the tracking and accounting system, the better the affiliate program is. Since you are in the business to make money, poor tracking and accounting can jeopardize that desire. 

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.

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.

Effective Small Business Social Media Marketing Techniques

These days, irrespective your brand or industry, you cannot afford not to have social media as part of your small business marketing strategy. That is unless you want your small business to stagnate. As a marketer, depending on your experience, your brand and even your temperament, you have the option of using many marketing techniques for your marketing campaigns, but social media marketing should always be a sure choice. You have the option of exploring several social media marketing strategies among which are:

Influencer Marketing

If you have a massive following in your social media handles, you can become an influencer for brands. First, you must grow your audience to a reasonable size for it to be effective for influencer marketing. If you do not have that sort of following yet particularly on the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes, you can partner with micro-influencers to get your brand in front of your niche audiences. Most Micro-influencers tend to have 10-100 thousand followers and often come off as more relatable and approachable for partnership arrangements than the big celebrity influencers.

Messenger Marketing

If you need quick one-on-one messaging, you can use social messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, AI-powered chatbots and Skype. Feedback in instant and reliable and you can market any product/service through these messaging apps. Aside customer support and resolving customer problems instantly, messenger marketing is very effective using these apps. Through the instant messages, you make product/service suggestions to customers to help solve their problems. Promos, discounts and new products arrivals can be better announced using these instant messaging apps.

Employee Advocacy Programs

Smart marketers can deliberately turn their employees into extensions of their social media programs. That way, you can easily start an employee advocacy program. There are online platforms like GaggleAMP and Dynamic Signal that encourage employees to share content on their social network in exchange for points, prizes, and internal recognition. If your employees take advantage of these platforms to share your content on the platforms, a combination of their collective following in addition to yours can help give a much wider exposure to your marketing content than if you relied on yours alone. There is always a very big difference in the reach of your business through employee advocacy programs.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Do you know you can actually do practically anything and even advertise on social media for free? Great if you do! But, in case you don’t, be informed that you can do organic social media marketing for free just as other free social media activities. Some of these free activities include, publishing marketing content, publishing posts, commenting on articles/content, inviting users to like/share your page, engaging with reviews, and actively interacting in social media groups. Most marketers know that it is hugely challenging to grow a large and engaging following particularly on pay-to-play networks without spending money, but you can still do a great deal of marketing on social media without expending a dime. That is done by way of organic marketing.

 

Social Media Advertising

Many social media marketers find social media advertising intimidating, but it is incredibly lucrative if you know what you are doing.  Once you learn the ropes and do what is expected, getting the right results is a given. Through social media advertising, you get access to tons of metrics. Through such metrics, it is possible to know if the strategy you are using is earning you profits or helping you to make losses. Whichever it turns out, you can always at any time adjust your strategy to get the best results. The most result-oriented social media advertising you should be using at any point includes techniques like Facebook ads, sponsored posts, YouTube ads, and LinkedIn InMail.

Live Streaming

Live streaming is a great way to showcase your products and engage with your customers in a more personal way. Live streaming because it is real time, manages to turn talk-at-you marketing into back-and-forth mutually beneficial conversations. It still promises to get more personal as internet technology tends to deepen marketing activities by the day. Such experiences can make the difference between a one-off purchase and a life-long customer. Smart marketers always explore viable ways to Host a webinar or go behind the scenes of a product launch to build trust and relationships with the audience particularly through live streaming.

Tangible Benefits of Small Business Marketing

You cannot have a small business and keep it under wraps. If you do, you may not be in business for much too long. Marketing and exposing your small business is what helps it to grow. Even though marketing a small business takes a bit of time and resources particularly money, you’ll discover that it is well worth it when the returns start coming in. If you don’t deliberately market your business, it means you’re practically waiting for customers to stumble into the business by themselves. Such waiting usually turns out to be a long and frustrating one. It is unprofitable too. Marketing gets your products/services in front of people who need or want them. Usually, good marketing helps to convince buyers that you have the right solution to their problems. Through it, you can sometimes manage to convince consumers that they have a problem that needs fixing and you have the right solution to the problem. All these make marketing hugely essential for the growth and stability of your small business.

If you market your small business well enough, you can get the following direct and tangible benefits from the business.

Business Awareness: You cannot sell if you are unable to market your products/services effectively. Creating awareness around your business is part of that process. For people to buy your products/services, they must first know such products/services exist and are available in the market. They must know the right market too. What marketing does is to directly expose your products/services to potential buyers. That helps buyers with the opportunity to sample them or even buy them.

Customer Loyalty: Even if you already have customers, customer loyalty guarantees repeat business. Good marketing helps your business to retain customers and to do repeat business with them. Out there in the business world, the competition is always very stiff. It is akin to a dog-eat-dog relationship. Even if people are willing to buy your products, a competitor may just come along and do everything to try to win them over. Marketing helps to keep your brand tops in the minds of customers. That somehow helps to ward off competition a bit but not for long if you take your eyes off the ball. Effective marketing helps to keep your eyes on the ball. 

 
Business Insights: Effective marketing helps the business owner to have vital insights and gather relevant data to grow the business. With insights, you get to learn more about your target audience, what they like, what they do, how they shop and so on. You get to know which marketing strategies resonate best with them. You get to learn about what communication methods particularly what type of emails resonate best with them. You learn of which level of discounts lead to more purchases and which images convert better for your marketing messages. With such vital insights, you can better handle your product development, pricing, and future marketing strategies.

Sales and Revenue: Every marketer who knows his trade must know that marketing directly drives sales. The more and better you market, the more sales you make. More sales directly translate to more revenue for your business. Good marketing guarantees that. No matter which promotional strategies you are using, whether email campaigns or a social media promotion, it is marketing that gets consumers to buy your products/services. These consumers translate to customers and the more customers you have, the more sales and revenue you make in your business.

Repeat Purchases: Every smart small business owner always wants to have repeat customers. The business reason for this is that it is by far cheaper to market to old customers than to new prospects. Yes, one-time purchases may be great, but repeat buying is better. Marketing helps to remind customers about your products/services to get them to come back for more. If you have already built trust with your customers, getting them to come back for repeat business is usually not too much of a hassle.

6 Proven Tips to Market Your Content for Effectiveness

Regular happenings in the digital and real worlds greatly affect trends in the content marketing space. This is why businesses must always explore all ways to adapt to these changes, without which they’ll usually have issues with their growth patterns. The immediate response should be through their content marketing strategy even though that at times may not even be enough. If marketers can implement the right content marketing strategy taking into account the happenings in the digital and real worlds in combination with artificial intelligence content creation, targeting their audience’s emotions and maintaining good quality content at all times, they can have a very effective content for marketing purposes.

 

Here are proven tips that can help your content marketing to be more effective and result-oriented.

Tip 1. Empathetic and Emotional Content Marketing

If you want the attention of your audience, try to write content with emotion and empathy. Audiences engage more with empathizing and emotional content. It is therefore hugely essential for you to know your audience well enough. You must relate with them not just as customers but as humans with distinct and unique emotions, perspectives, and lifestyles of their own. With this in mind, you can easily create a content strategy that ideally suits the needs and desires of your audience. If your audience feels you and realizes you care about them, it engenders more authentic and beneficial relationships. That is largely why empathetic and emotional content is a major key to any successful content marketing strategy.

Tip 2. Artificial intelligence, AI Marketing

These days, you cannot market content successfully of you ignore Artificial intelligence, AI. The reason AI is currently gaining a lot of attention in content marketing. Content marketers use AI content writing to help them build a much more effective and efficient content strategy, particularly when integrated with human efforts. AI helps to save time in content writing while at the same time maintaining high quality. This is why many content writing tools employ AI content creation to save time and resources and better the customer experience. Content writing software like Instoried for instance helps content writers to add empathy to their content, thereby making the content more engaging. In addition, Instoried software comes with an article plagiarism checker that helps content writers to write original content for their blogs.

Tip 3. More Interactive Content

Your content engages better if you write more interactive content. The more your audience engages and interacts with your content, the better content experience they have. The better content experience they have, the more the conversions and leads the content attracts. The best way to ensure you offer the type of content that is engaging and interactive is to use more infographics, quizzes, questionnaires, polls, and interactive eBooks in your content. It is a great and result-oriented marketing strategy to add them to the landing pages of your websites and your social media platforms.

Tip 4. More Video Marketing

Online marketers have since discovered that video marketing is a very effective marketing strategy. This has been confirmed by reliable survey reports. A recent survey conducted by Hubspot confirmed that 76% of marketers referred to ‘video’ as the most effective content format. Therefore, if you want your marketing to really stand out, go for video as your main marketing format. When you create videos, your marketing manages to form deeper connections with your audience. That way, you can easily capture their attention and market better to them. 

Tip 5. Prioritize Quality Content

In content marketing, content remains king. The better the content you are offering, the better its effects on your audience and most particularly your customers. Good content helps to better enhance your customer experience. This is why customer experience is one of the most essential criteria for digital marketing strategy. If therefore you are able to prioritize quality content, you can ensure a great customer experience. That takes a bit of work and diligence though. You can only provide quality content to your audience if your research is up to the mark and you are up to date with the latest happenings in your industry. In particular, it is critical for you to know what your target audience seems to be interested in at any time. That way, you can better market to them. This serves your marketing strategy better than merely churning out mediocre content every day. For effectiveness therefore, you must make sure your content is unique and of very high quality, even if it means not being able to share content too frequently. Never forget to check your content for plagiarism and grammatical errors. If you don’t, your readers and search engines will take note.

Tip 6. More Webinars and Live Videos

Webinars and live videos are now becoming increasingly popular in digital marketing. This is mostly due to the convenience and ease involved with their uses particularly amongst business professionals. Most B2B professionals watch at least one webinar every week. They find a great use for them because they add authenticity to content and help brands offer an interactive customer experience. Most brands succeed more with webinars and live videos in their marketing strategy because webinars and live videos provide a genuinely engaging experience even without directly promoting products/services.

Wrapping Up

What marketers really need in times like these is innovative content marketing strategy. Part of that strategy is by having more emphasis on empathetic, interactive, and quality content and using AI for various content marketing needs. Marketers need to also keep track of content marketing trends and incorporate them into their marketing strategy. Doing so enables them to stay a step ahead the competition. This competitive edge will endure only if they manage to innovatively market with webinars and live videos to drive high engagement.

5 Tips to Monetize Your Social Media Presence

With presently over 4.5 billion people active on social media, many habitually spend a lot of time out there merely whiling away their time. Most of these people are not aware that they can monetize their social media accounts and make money out of their social media presence. Even if people merely see their social presence as a hobby, that’s cool. It is easy to make money out of a favorite hobby anyway. Now that you know, here are some tips to monetize your social media accounts and make money out of your social media presence.

 

#1: Just Get Started

First step is to get started by having an account on some of the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. Next is to put in the work necessary to grow your accounts on social media. It may be tempting to try to monetize your accounts right away but it is always advisable to tarry awhile until you are able to boost the numbers of your followers significantly. Depending on the platform, the audience size you really need before monetization varies a great deal. Some micro-influencers do real good if they have 1,500 followers or even less and still make money all the same. What counts the most is your ability to consistently create highly engaging content and offerings on the platforms. Good quality content is what helps to grow your audience quickly. As your audience grows, you can then build genuine connections with your target market. That is where the money is.

#2: Launch Affiliate Marketing

Even if you have your own product/service to sell on social media, you can in addition market products for product merchants and earn commissions for your efforts. This you can do by way of affiliate relationship. If you work with an affiliate marketing partner, that relationship can help you to grow your income by referring potential customers to their businesses. When you partner with a brand as an affiliate marketer, your duty is to promote their products on your social media handles. By doing so, you can earn a commission each time someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchases the products you are promoting.

#3: Create Exclusive Content Course

Many social media users always want exclusive content. Such specialized how-to content that vividly teaches people how to get things done is hugely popular on social media. If you have special knowledge or skills that can benefit others, you can create a course that teaches your social media followers about the craft. Such courses can attract people who are willing to pay for what you have to offer. Even if the courses are free, you still benefit from the traffic you attract with the courses. Such traffic can help you to make money from a sponsored content. That’s how many social media influencers get to make money by offering short, free teaser courses to their followers.

 
#4: Generate Traffic to Your eCommerce Shop

If you have an eCommerce store where you sell goods/services online, you can use your social media accounts to direct potential buyers to your online shop to boost your sales. On social media, your store can greatly benefit from the huge market out there. The ease of sharing information and communication is also great for online marketing. Marketing your products directly out of your website may not give your marketing enough exposure. Doing so on social media adequately fills such marketing gap. You can thus take advantage of social media to showcase your products/services in action real time. That helps your potential customers to quickly and fully understand how you can solve their problems. You get more patronage as a result.

#5: Become a Paid Influencer

On social media, influencers use their popularity and large following to make money. If you have a large following on your social media accounts, you too can become a paid influencer. All you need do is to explore many ways to reach out to brands in your niche and offer to promote and share their products in exchange for commission payment or a grant of free products. Many brands will respond by first sizing up your social media accounts to see if they will be worth their while. If they discover that you regularly post high-quality content that shows a high follower engagement, it will increase your appeal to them that you are really some influencer. They may then be persuaded to take you up on your offer albeit tentatively at the beginning. It is at this point a smart influencer can negotiate higher levels of commission payment and even modes of payment. This is when the money will keep rolling in as your influencer capacity continues to grow by the day.

10 Strong Online Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Business

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

1.  Start a Blog

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

2. Market with Affiliate Programs

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

3. Take SEO Seriously

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

4. Deploy Email Marketing

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

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

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

7. Hold Regular Contests and Giveaways

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

8. Build a Credible Opt-In Email List

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

 
9. Engage a Consultant/Coach

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

10. Take Your Web Design Seriously

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

Resourceful Ways to Market a New Business

One of the most important things you will need to do when starting a new business is to market it well. How you carry out this marketing depends on the type of business you have chosen and the resources at your disposal. That plus a bit of research on what sort of marketing works best for the type of business can be really helpful. No solution is perfect though. What helps you to get the best results is always preferable. Find below some marketing options most marketing experts like recommend. 

 
 

Social Media Marketing

As social media is increasingly becoming more popular and the internet is deepening by the day, many more businesses are now using social media as one of their main forms of digital marketing. If you market on social media and your business is new, it is fairly easy for you to quickly build up recognition and brand identity for your brand by spreading awareness for the products/services you are marketing. Your marketing can become more impactful if you grow your audience well and segment it for marketing messages. You need to have accounts on the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. You not only need to have accounts on these social media platforms, you must also be sure to make regular posts, interact with your audience, address their concerns and queries through comments and direct messages. If you do, you’ll get better marketing results.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO is one of the key aspects of digital marketing. A good SEO on your website helps search engines to rank it well. If search engines rank your website high in their SERPs, it benefits from the organic traffic they send its way. A good SEO on your website helps to increase the amount of traffic visiting your website. A good traffic inflow in turn helps to boost the opportunity for leads, sales and even profits. Maintaining your search engine ranking is essential to direct potential customers away from competitor websites and towards your own business’s website. That translates to good business. However, it must be noted that SEO is a bit technical. It involves the careful deployment of specially selected keywords related to your business niche on your website content. If you know how, you can handle SEO yourself, but if not, hiring the services of professional webmasters to do it for you is advisable.
 
Radio and TV Advertising

Advertising on Radio and TV may be old school but they are still very effective traditional advertising methods. More so if your business is new. Radio and TV ads are still about the best ways to reach a much wider local audience and bring in increased sales. Both methods are great to reach offline audience which may be local in your business environment. When people hear your business ads regularly on the Radio and TV, your business name/brand can quickly become familiar to people who will be more likely to choose it over others who may be your competitors. Most people like to stick with what’s familiar to them. Advertising via the Radio and TV can help your business to quickly become like a household name. However, advertising on Radio and TV comes with huge costs. They should only be undertaken if you have the marketing budget to accommodate them. 

 
 

Staging Events

Business owners usually stage and host events to encourage many more people to learn more about their brands and to attract huge media attention. This media attention serves essentially as a free form of advertising for a brand as well as telling the public what the business is all about. By hosting a local derby for kids, charity events, garage sales, health walk, etc. etc., you not only have a great opportunity to raise funds for noble causes, you freely advertise your brand and showcase your business as well.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is quite handy to grow your business and promote your products widely online. It is usually a business arrangement between three parties, Product Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers. What the affiliate simply does is to help product merchants promote their products using unique affiliate links. Once a product is purchased via the affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale. By this arrangement, product merchants can partner with social media influences (affiliates) to advertise products and encourage sales from their huge audiences. This arrangement is an incredibly popular and lucrative way of reaching a wider target audience and selling more products/services. It works well and really profitable if the product merchant manages to reach out to very popular influencers who are interested in his business niche. If a business arrangement is fashioned out with such influencers, it helps to quickly grow a brand and boost sales.

Powerful Tips to Improve Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Digital marketers can easily grow their businesses with the right affiliate marketing strategies. If used right, affiliate marketing can readily become an excellent way to enhance your business through increased profits, more leads and to easily forge connections with other brands, and lots more. Affiliate marketing is all about mutually beneficial partnerships between product merchants, affiliates/publishers and consumers. When consumers access and purchase a product through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale as determined by the product merchant. Quite a simple relationship no doubt!

 

Here are some powerful tips that can help you get more value from the affiliate marketing strategy you have in place for your business.

Create High-Quality Content around Your Offers

This you can do by deliberate efforts. The content you create should not only be of high quality, it must bear some relationship with the products you are promoting. The aim of such content is to attract potential customers to your site, offering them valuable information or advice, then directing them through the right CTA to buy your products. With the right links, you can also direct them to your affiliate partners. In digital marketing, blogging is about the best way to create and distribute content to promote your affiliate offers. If you can get visitors to read content on your website, it becomes easier to generate an impressive commission from your affiliate partnerships. If your content presents as authoritative and valuable information in your business niche, and appears to offer powerful, actionable content, then readers are more likely to click the affiliate links within the content.

Connect with the Right Affiliates

To succeed with affiliate programs every product you offer should resonate with one or more of your buyer personas. That can only happen when you connect with the right affiliates who share a similar passion in the products you are promoting. Buyer personas are essentially what help business owners and marketers define the goals, needs, and interests of people who visit their websites. That way, they can effectively market to them and get good results. You get more clicks and sales from your affiliate links if each product you offer appeals to at least one segment of your audience. With your buyer personas in place, you can then look for patterns in pain points or aspirations, and use this information to connect with the right affiliates for your business.

Optimize Your Content for Relevant Keywords

This is important because you want to receive valuable organic traffic from search engines. That brings search engine optimization, SEO, into the mix. If your content is optimized with the right keywords, it helps its ranking in Google SERPs. When these keywords are centered on search intent, you get better results. Google’s free Keyword Planner is a very useful tool that can help you to select the best keywords for your business niche. These are the ideal keywords to insert in the content you create. The quality of this content is enhanced if you focus more on conversational posts that educate and entertain users. By strategically connecting your affiliate links to relevant keywords, there’s a good chance that most of your posts will rank higher in the Search Engine Result Pages, SERPs of search engines particularly Google.

Significantly Market on Social Media

It is smart to make your social media engagement a very important part of your marketing strategy. Aside its huge popularity, sharing marketing messages on social media is like a piece of cake. With over 4.5 billion people currently using social media regularly, it is one huge market marketers cannot afford to ignore. If you factor in that many of these people use many social media platforms for shopping inspiration, it becomes more obvious why affiliate marketing works so well on the platforms.  If you use social media as a marketing channel, you have access to very many ways to reach your audience. This is in addition to the many free in-house marketing tools they place at your disposal. Through social media, you can build an audience real quick, promote new products, and see more sales through your affiliate programs. You can therefore take advantage of very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, to easily connect with your target audience.

Segment Your Email List

If you already have a credible email list, it is more useful if you can segment it for marketing purposes. By segmenting your email recipients into separate email lists, it becomes easier and more effective to market to them. Segmenting gives you the all-important freedom and flexibility to create custom offers, both affiliate and otherwise, for your subscribers. Better still, you can also take deliberate steps to personalize the leads because personalizing and segmenting your leads can have a noticeable impact on your affiliate sales. That in combination with well-made buyer personas significantly makes it easy for you to create multiple campaigns geared towards customers with specific interests, goals, and problems. 

How to Speed Up Your Business Growth with Digital Marketing

Right now, advancement in technology and the internet have managed to give business owners a plethora of online business options particularly in digital marketing. With or without prior experience many more people can now start their own online business and effectively grow it with digital marketing. Even at that, people still need to have some fundamental understanding of how the internet works and how to deploy digital strategy in it to grow a business. With this understanding, everything other thing about digital marketing can be learned with practice over time. That means, even if you aren’t exceptionally gifted in internet technology, you can still achieve some measure of success in the growth of your business. Here is how you can rely on digital marketing to expand your business online.

Understand Your Audience

It is difficult to succeed as a digital entrepreneur if you cannot market directly to a well identified target audience. The more you understand your target audience, the better your ability to effectively market to them. For this reason, many online entrepreneurs and marketers always make very deliberate efforts to understand the behaviors and preferences of their audience. Basic info from this understanding helps business owners to target the right buyer persona. It allows them to know exactly who their internet business is aimed at. This is how marketers discover what their audience likes or dislikes or even prefers and to develop unique and effective tactics to market to them. Doing this correctly is good for business growth.

Concentrate on Content Marketing

In digital marketing, content is king. Through good content creation, your business can continuously grow in prominence. Online entrepreneurs require exceptionally good content marketing abilities to grow their businesses online. High-quality content together with effective digital marketing strategy is great for your business to gain online authority and improvement in its digital footprints. High-quality content even with minimal commitment tends to yield enormous returns on investment.

Increase Your Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the most effective digital strategies there are. With good videos deployed in your marketing efforts, you can successfully expand your internet business. Visual ads as in videos are quite attention-grabbing and thus more effective for marketing purposes. Customers respond by far faster to video ads than to any other type of marketing. In fact, video ads help businesses expand nearly 50% quicker than non-video ads. Video marketing is thus very efficient and effective digital marketing technique particularly when deployed through the right internet channels like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Build a Unique Brand

Your brand if sufficiently unique can serve as your business identity online. The more specialized this uniqueness is to a micro-niche, the better for your business. For your brand to be unique, it must have a clear mission, value proposition and with novel solutions to problems. If the brand is distinct and unique enough, it gives your business a great advantage in the market place. If this advantage manages to guarantee that there is sufficient demand in brand’s specialized market so much the better. The ability to distinguish itself in the internet market is also critical and the uniqueness of a brand helps out there. The uniqueness of your brand combined with a strong online presence helps your online business to thrive well.

Increase Collaborations

You can increase collaborations with other businesses to distribute content. By marketing that way businesses can basically ride on the success of one another to make use of their consumer base. This is a win-win situation that is mutually beneficial to all parties. Collaborations can also help businesses to increase their reach at minimal marketing efforts. Depending on your type of business and digital expertise, you can explore many forms of collaborations, such as collaborative content, co-marketing, joint webinars, and staging events. If you know what you are doing, collaborative options available to you are limitless. That depends on your creativity though. The more creative you are in your approach to distributing content marketing, the better it is for the growth of your business.

Make Your Business Scalable with Online Solutions

Online entrepreneurs can rely on online tools and solutions to make their content marketing scalable as a viable way to grow their business at lower costs. Advancement in technology and online tools help out with automation and Artificial Intelligence, AI. These tools and software can ease up things and still be helpful at no extra cost even if you are scaling up through other online business platforms. They readily provide low-cost options to get things done through automation. If you for instance operate a small business, you must know how to prepare an invoice. But through automation, you can use a free online invoice generator to help you get paid faster.

Use Paid Media to Increase Reach

If you want to significantly increase media presence for your business, you can complement free media with paid media ads. Paid media is a very effective marketing technique for expanding the web presence of your business. It is so effective that with even a little investment, you will notice a significant number of people learning about your business. Paid media, particularly on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and the likes can easily be used to target your ideal market and customer persona. For best results, the ads you run on social media platforms must be catchy, of high quality and informative enough to easily attract attention. So, if you must spend money on paid media marketing, there is the need for you to pay good attention to the sort of material you’re putting out. Such material must always be the type that significantly helps your business to increase its reach and enhance its growth.

How to Profitably Engage Affiliate Marketing for Your Business

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy many business owners rely on to sell their products/services. It is an effective and low-risk method of building audience for your business by partnering with like-minded individuals and brands. This partnership is hinged on mutual benefits for product merchants as well as affiliates. Affiliates work on commission-based formats which the products merchants put in place. All the affiliate does is to promote unique affiliate links to products through their content/blog. Any time a purchase is made through this unique link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale. This process is easily adaptable and beneficial for most types of business models. Here are some proven ways you can profitably engage affiliate marketing for your business and be glad you did.

Establish a Clear Brand Identity

Affiliate marketing is most effective when you already have a clear brand identity. Therefore, before launching a wide-scale affiliate program, it is advisable to first build a solid brand identity. Since most affiliates will promote your products across multiple online platforms, your brand identity ensures uniformity and continuity across these platforms. This is why you must clearly establish a viable brand manual that denotes clear brand colors, fonts, and voice. That makes it possible for all your affiliates to properly present your brand identity to avoid confusing and or inaccurate promotion messages.
 
Collaborate With Complimentary Brands

Affiliate marketing is a versatile concept that is suitable for promoting most brands. It works with collaboration with other brands as well. This collaboration is a type of partnership that allows for cross-recruiting and premised on a wider audience base. It is mutually beneficial for brands when one brand promotes for the benefit of another brand in some kind of cross-selling. By this arrangement, both brands can benefit from the promotional activities as well as earn commissions both ways from referrals and purchases.

Launch an Affiliate Email Campaign

Email campaigns are still very effective in online marketing activities. More so when such emails are specially designed for affiliates. If you launch an affiliate email campaign, it serves as a form of internal communication for your existing affiliate network. This method allows for clear and concise brand collaboration. You can thus set up an email campaign to update affiliates about upcoming promotions and sales as well as provide up-to-date marketing materials to make their marketing activities more result oriented.

Work to Improve Conversion Rates

Without good conversions, it is pretty difficult for marketers to make sales. You can therefore make optimizing conversion rates the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy. If you do the right things, affiliate marketing has a high chance of success when it comes to improving conversion rates on your website. For effectiveness, you can handpick and choose your affiliates to ensure brand compatibility. Take a step further by offering enticing promotions such as incentive bonuses, free products, and enticing commissions to keep potential partners interested. If the affiliate team you have selected is well trained and works in efficient collaboration, it can create the right synergy to improve your conversions rates.

Partner With Podcast Hosts

It is difficult for marketers to ignore Podcasts these days because they are widely consumed by the population. Aside from being easily absorbed, Podcasts are effortlessly entertaining modems and therefore great as effective affiliate marketing tools. Online, Podcast hosts typically come with a loyal and trusting audience. What that means is that Podcast followers take brand partnerships seriously. So, if you partner with podcast hosts to entice them to plug your brand into their episodes, the results are great. For this reason, you can grant Podcast hosts an exclusive discount code for their listeners, as well as a set percentage of profits. Your business benefits a great deal from such arrangements.

Target Slow Selling Products

It is smart marketing for marketers to deliberately use less popular products to motivate higher commissions. Some products may be slow selling but once a sale is made, the commission volume can be huge. If you deliberately target such products, affiliate marketing may just be a great way to get your slow selling and less popular inventory off the shelves. At times what such products really need to sell is a little extra promotional attention and incentive. That means deliberate and specially targeted marketing efforts for such products. So, any which way you can use to push your slower-moving products unto the spotlight through affiliate marketing can be really great for your business.

Run Influencer Campaigns

If product merchants can effectively partner with Influencers, the results can be astounding. Marketers can thus use influencer campaigns as very effective form of affiliate marketing. By running a well-coordinated seasonal or long-term influencer campaigns, such collaboration allows your brand to utilize affiliate links as the right incentives. You can therefore start a profitable and mutually beneficial affiliate marketing campaign by simply partnering with one or more influencers to promote your products/services.