7 Small Business Online Marketing Tips

Effective small business marketing can undoubtedly help your business to thrive online. Through small business marketing, you can seize the opportunity to tell others what you do and why they should patronize you or become your clients/customers. Since you do not expect people to simply show up and start spending their money on your business, you must actively market to hem. Doing so need not be unduly expensive if you know what you are doing. The essence is to create a huge online visibility for your brand at the lowest cost. For cost-effectiveness, most small businesses rely more on social media and email marketing to help promote their brands.

To increase online visibility for your small business, these small business-marketing tips can help you out.

1. Have a User-Friendly Website

It is very essential in small business marketing to have a functional and user-friendly website. A website serves as your business window in virtual space. It is where online visitors first get in contact with your business. That makes it about the most important part of small business marketing. Your website must be hosted well, and with up-to-date information about your business at all times. Make sure your website is optimized with the right keywords to make it visible to search engines. If your website is visible to search engines, they send organic traffic to the site thereby making it easy online for your potential customers to find your business.

2. Define and Promote Your Brand

Your brand must be well defined online to enable it compete effectively. You get better results if it is the brand story you consistently share with your audience. Small business marketing relies and thrives better on a well-defined brand that your audience easily understands and remembers. For this reason, how you tell the story of your brand is hugely important. If well done, it makes it easier for your consumers to connect easily and engage with your product/service.

3. Be Active in Your Local Community

Many expert marketers like to say, “Every business is local.” All small businesses are integral parts of the local community. Therefore, actively engaging with your local community is a crucial part of small business marketing. If you are active in your community, your small business will no doubt thrive well in that community. Google reports that a very large percentage of online searches are now local searches for avenues to do business. You must explore all viable avenues to put your business in the hearts and minds of people in your local community. You earn better patronage as a result.

4. Market with Video Content

Video content on your website is hugely attractive to customers who want to find out about you and your products in an easy way. How-to videos are a quick and effective way to help such customers. The reason they are attractive and are increasingly the preferred way people rely on to quickly find information about your small businesses online. If the video on your website is authentic and informative enough, it can easily get people to click on your content to know more about what you are offering. To enhance that, you can pack your ideas and expertise in a 30 seconds video to share to your customers. You get better results from video content that way.

5. Engage in Social Media Marketing

For most small businesses, their marketing budgets are always hugely limited. They tend to make up for that by spending more time marketing on social media because social media marketing is cost-effective and very cheap. That is what makes social media marketing very attractive. Social media allows you to be a part of your local community and your industry community sharing your brand info easily. Social media is a great way to easily share what you are doing and what your business is all about to a huge audience at the touch of a button. By posting fresh content on your social media sites regularly, and using relevant hashtags to make sure you find your audience, you can use social media to attract people to your website. If you choose the right social media platforms, it allows you to take your business to where your potential customers are on social media. You get better patronage as a result.

6. Be Open to Continuous Learning

Internet marketing is a continuously evolving business. You must know at all times what is working and what is trending. That requires continuous learning and education if you want to improve on your marketing efforts. It is not only imperative for you to stay on top of the changes and trends in your business sector but also on top of the new tricks and tips of marketing online. It helps to be open to continuous learning by following industry experts on social media, taking free online courses, signing up for marketing newsletters and industry bulletins, reading great articles about the latest changes and best practices in online marketing.

7. Measure Your Efforts with Analytics

You need the generous use of free online analytics tools to generate and analyze data to measure the progress you are making in your marketing activities. Without this analysis, it is difficult if not impossible for you to know how well you are using your time and resources in your marketing efforts. Put bluntly, you cannot easily determine your ROI without analytics. By using Google Analytics and or other services, you easily determine how well you are doing in your marketing efforts. Data generated from the open-rates and click-through rates on your emails and the engagement and ROI you are getting from your social media and email campaigns, can be carefully analyzed for decision-making. These decisions revolve around what to change, what to drop and what to improve upon. You can easily decide on how to adjust what you are doing even if it involves changing your marketing message a bit. That allows you to take advantage of new search terms as well as deciding where to spend more time and money on social media depending on which of the platforms is doing better in terms of engagement.

What is Digital Marketing?

 At times, business marketers interchange digital marketing with online marketing in their business nomenclatures. Digital marketing is simply a marketing model which covers a wide range of tools and tactics designed to create brand awareness and name recognition for brands. The introduction and widespread proliferation personal computers, and other digital devices like tablets and smart phones gave rise to the digital age phenomenon. Most of these devices are so popular and easy to use for online marketing business that nearly every marketer currently keys in to them as very handy tools for the business. The real reason nearly every marketer is now involved in digital marketing.
Popular digital marketing practices among marketers include:

1.    Personal/Business Websites
2.    Other Online Advertising
3.    Email Marketing
4.    Video Marketing
5.    Influencer Marketing
6.    Search Engine Optimization, SEO
7.    Search Engine Marketing
8.    Social Media Marketing
9.    Social Media Advertising
10.    Infographics Creation and Promotion
11.    Podcasting
12.    Webinars
13.    Blogging
14.    Guest Blogging
15.    Content Marketing

Many digital marketers are online daily doing any of or a combination of all the above to get their businesses going. What works well for one person may not necessarily work well for another person because of our individual differences as human beings. What matters is to determine what works best for you in your own chosen line of business. What works well for you is what you should very well do to get the desired results every marketer craves for. That is what expert digital marketers recommend.

 

Benefits of Sharing Content on Social Media

 It may not be out of place to assert that nearly everyone appears to be on social media these days. For online marketers, many have since discovered the awesome power of social media as it affects marketing online. That power derives mostly from the ease of use and ability to share content widely and quickly. Marketing experts appear to agree that the single most powerful feature of social media is the power of sharing. When users post quality content which is in alignment with the interests of their friends/followers, many of these friends/followers may resolve to share that content with their own connections as well. That scenario helps to give the content a “viral effect” which directly benefits the business of marketers. Such benefits come mostly by way of attracting the much needed traffic to where such businesses are located online.

As a marketer, sharing your content helps to accomplish a number of goals in your business, the most obvious being the ability of your content to reach and be seen by a large number of readers. Effective sharing of content manages to do so much more. It is potentially exponential and the multiplier effect is enormous. Depending on the number of friends/followers at each level who in turn take on the sharing, a viral process is triggered as a result. The more quality content you post, the higher the chances that it will in turn be shared by others at each level.


 
The ability to share good content somehow reinforces your connection with the friends/followers who share the post. When a fellow marketer agrees to and actually shares your content, it simply means he/she is vouching for the quality of the content. Such friends/followers are actually chesting out directly affirming that your content is a good one by sharing it. If their own friends/followers like and appreciate the content as well, they also share it. What that means is that you have contributed value that has helped others to bond with their friends/followers. This relationship when appreciated with gratitude somehow helps to reinforce your connection with others.

Many marketers have found out that sharing somehow helps to create more links to your content. Here is how it works. For example, if you have a link on any content of your blog posts, each subsequent sharing creates another link to your blog. If that post is also shared on social media it also creates a link to your social media profile. Each share creates more backlinks to you or your blog. More sharing increases and enhances more ways you and your business can be found. That translates to exposure. So, the more ways other people can find their way to your content, the more popular that content becomes. In online parlance, popularity simply means more traffic to your business.

If you make a good post and it gets shared more and is “liked” by many more people, the search engines usually give it a higher rating since they see a clear proof that it is good content. Therefore, the more your posts get shared, the more exposure you get on the search engines. The more exposure you get from search engines, the more traffic they send to your site. Social media sites do love real activity on their platforms as well. That is why sharing on their platforms also increases the rank of your social media profile on the sites.  That no doubt is good for any online business.

 

Ease of sharing within and with other social media sites is another great benefit. As people are different so also are social media sites. Everyone, depending on their preferences and the nature of their businesses always has a preferred social media site. That you are not on the same platform with me does not mean I can’t help share your content. If for example I am your friend on Facebook and you share your blog post, I can easily have your good content therein shared to my own friends/followers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many others. Other persons in those other platforms can also share the content within their own platforms. Here is the benefit. Even if you the original content “owner” may not be active on all the social media sites, further sharing by your friends/followers on these other sites helps to spread your content farther and more widely. That is much better than what you can do on your own within the one site you are active on. More and wider sharing of your content greatly expands your reach exponentially. Your business gets to benefit directly from that.  

Best Affiliate Networks Online

Every newbie affiliate marketer always wants to know where they can be to get good results. We are immensely pleased to make some recommendations. At the moment, some affiliate networks offer hundreds of affiliate marketing programs all in one place. Instead of chasing numerous individual programs, you are best advised to simply register with an affiliate network to enable you gain access to numerous affiliate marketing programs they have on board. In my view, the very best options currently available are:

VigiLinks

Skimlinks

CJ Affiliate

ShareAsale

Rakuten LinkShare

Avangate

LinkConnector

FlexOffers

Affiliate Window


 

Best Affiliate Marketing Programs Online

 Many affiliate marketing programs online offer different variants and commission paying structures. You can check them all out, research them and sign up to work for any of them you fancy. Here are some of the best and most popular affiliate marketing programs you can get on the web presently.

Aweber

SFI

Amazon

AliExpress

EBay

HostGator

Warrior Plus

Gearbest

ClickBank

Shopify

SEMRush

 

How to Use Websites and Blogs for Affiliate Marketing

 The business of affiliate marketing simply revolves around products promotions and sales. You can promote products and services on an existing website or blog or you can identify a product and build a website around it. If you already have a website with a sizable audience, you can start by partnering with affiliate programs that are relevant in your niche. Doing so could help you to get started real quick and to get a handle on affiliate marketing much faster. If however you do not have a website, all you’ll have to do is to build one especially if you intend being in affiliate marketing for the long run. You do not necessarily need a website or blog, but having one gives you more control and a real advantage over your marketing campaigns.

Online marketing experts believe that a website is the only ethical way to build your email list, which is the input of your sales funnel that will bring in highly relevant leads. Even if you do not start with a website, you can have it in your plans to have at least one website or blog. Experienced marketers routinely have multiple websites with each targeted to a niche and used to sell products and services relevant to the niche. It takes real practical experience and expertise to get that done for good results.

Expert marketers believe that a niche website works best with affiliate marketing. Because such a site is usually focused to a niche, it attracts mostly people interested in that niche. They are the only ones who will most likely visit the site. What that means is that such people will more positively respond to promotions if they are relevant to the niche they are interested in. Niches like trends, fashion, wines, foods, flowers, furniture, technology, jewelry, travels, resorts etc, etc, are very popular niches anyone can build a website around depending on your tastes, experience, likes and expertise.

Welcome to Affiliate Marketing as a Business

 Well, these days everyone wants to make money online/offline whichever they prefer. Many get involved in promoting products/services and earning a commission from sales. You have probably heard about making money with Affiliate Marketing and wondering what it is all about and how you can tap into the opportunity. I guess your mind is working in the direction many marketers are now earning a decent living.

Now, what exactly is Affiliate Marketing? It means many things to many people depending on how involved they are in the business. It is nothing new or completely novel. Affiliate marketing in its simplest terms means referring people to buy a product or service in return for a commission from the product seller or service provider. 


 

“Affiliate Marketing is the process of promoting products or services online or offline in return for a certain percentage as commission for each successful sale from the merchant.”


That is rather simple and straightforward. It can be used for any business. That is exactly why many and varied businesses like Financial services companies such as insurance companies, banks, and asset managers have been using a variant of it for decades to build their businesses. Even though some of these businesses like to call their affiliate marketers such fanciful names as independent marketers, and call the commissions they pay out, performance bonuses, but the bottomline is, it is still affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing may have been around for decades, but its popularity ballooned when the internet happened. With the internet and proliferation of web technologies, affiliate marketing became simpler, attracting more interest from diverse people.

With the internet, Affiliate marketers no longer had to go knocking door to door to make a sale. They can simply unleash the power of web technologies to promote the products or services of their clients. That is one real advantage over traditional door-to-door salesman marketing methods. The internet also ensures that you are no longer restricted to your region to make a sale. That makes it possible to expanding your reach widely and increasing your potential sales volume as a consequence. If you have access to the internet, you can simply sit in your own little corner of the world and successfully sell products to people all over the world.  Same way, you also get paid and receive your commissions as well through same web technologies. All these combine to make Affiliate Marketing a really very exciting type of business.

How to Organize and Track Advertising in SFI Business

The best way to start is to add key codes to your personal SFI and TC Gateways or any other Gateways you may choose to promote. Gratefully, SFI provides you the tools to use on this link:

https://www.sfimg.com/PowerTools/KeyCodeTracking?referrer=search

The key codes will assist you to track the volume of traffic to your ads and the conversion rates. Armed with the information, you can easily decide which promotions are doing poorly and do require some improvements and which are doing very well. You may choose to use some unique key codes for each ads site to make comparisons easier.

It is also advisable (if you know how) to find ways to set up many data fields to compare different types of advertising whether Offline or Online and to make informed decisions based on the data you collect.

These are the only ways I can think of right now by which you can set up a system to organize and track your advertising. Best wishes.

 

Best Ways to Promote W3

Many thanks to SFI, W3 has its own special gateway which every affiliate can promote widely to get results. You can promote the gateway both online and offline in your own traditional avenues for promoting your SFI business. Use SFI free marketing tools as in banners, flyers, car stickers and test ads. Be sure however that whatever ad you are promoting about W3 has some or all the following specific facts about it.

1. FREE membership.
2. FREE monthly music.
3. FREE monthly membership listing.
4. FREE member reward points.
5. Special discounts and prizes and lots more.

This is the best way to promote W3 to get results. Best wishes.