Top 6 Direct Benefits of Starting a Business Online

Anyone can start a business online for many and varied reasons. Such people usually measure the benefits they get from their online business depending on the reasons they had for starting the business in the first instance. Generally however, there are various benefits that make starting an online business an attractive option particularly for entrepreneurs of all shades, backgrounds and ambitions that are desirous to make money online. These here 6 direct benefits are tops on the list.

1. Niche Specialization: Online businesses easily get some traction on the internet if tied to a niche. With niche specialization, Internet entrepreneurs can easily target niche markets. Doing so enables them to cater to particular customer requirements. This is why niche specialization often results in a dedicated customer base and increased loyalty. One huge benefit for any online business.
 
2. Targeted Marketing: Targeted marketing is usually a very effective marketing online because of the effectiveness of online digital marketing tools. These tools enable online businesses to focus directly on specific demographics. This helps to increase the efficiency of marketing efforts thereby minimizing wasted resources. Targeted marketing can thus help a business to save up on valuable time and money.

3. Business Freedom and Flexibility: Technically, one of the most appealing aspects of running an online business is freedom and flexibility. As an online entrepreneur, you can do your own thing at your own time 24/7. Online, entrepreneurs can set their own schedules, work from anywhere with an internet connection, and tailor their businesses to their lifestyles. That’s real business freedom and flexibility which many entrepreneurs are quite comfortable with.

4. Low Costs: Typical of online businesses, they usually require lower initial investments compared to brick-and-mortar physical businesses working out of a store/office. This is why online businesses are characterized by reduced overhead costs particularly on rent and utilities. This reduced cost enables online business owners to better allocate resources to areas of need where they matter most.

5. Diverse Revenue Streams: Because of the versatility of the Internet, online businesses can tap into various revenue streams to earn revenues. A typical online business can earn income from selling physical and digital products as well as various services. Streams of income can be earned from affiliate marketing, advertising, and even subscriptions.

6. Wide Global Reach: Yes, the versatility of the Internet also enables online businesses to reach customers anywhere in the world where there is Internet services. Online businesses typically have the potential and the huge advantage to reach a global audience fairly easily. This helps to overcome the limitations of location and expanding market possibilities.

Last Line

From the foregoing benefits of starting an online business, you can easily discern that they are real business advantages that can help business profitability. They no doubt help to make starting and operating an online business a really attractive and worthwhile venture for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Top 5 Tips You Need to Consider When Starting a Business Blog

Blogging is the commonest form of content marketing among online marketers. You can blog about anything under the sun provided you have good information that others will like to know about. You can blog for business, for entertainment and even for fun. Anyone can start a blog if they so decide. Following are some valuable tips you should consider if you want to start your own blog and be successful at it.

1. Choose the Right Hosting Platform

Your host platform matters a great deal if you want to manage a profitable blog. You can choose to blog on an independent website and pay for hosting it or you choose popular free website hosts like Blogger, Wix or WordPress. If you are just launching a blog, you must make hosting your top concern because aside the hosting fees you’ll have to pay if you are not using a free blogging platform, the blogging tools each host website makes available for your blogging activities are of immense importance for the success of your blog. They provide web security as well. This is hugely important because using insecure web host can seriously harm your blog. It is best therefore to use a web host that places a high priority on security particularly with servers that have security precautions like firewalls and routine website backups.

2. Set up Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs act like the “eyes” of search engines. They basically tell search engine algorithms which of your content pieces are most important and exactly what your post is about. Since you are likely to be blogging on the same niche, chances that you’ll be writing comparable content is very high. Because such content will be aiming for the same tagline, it is best to have a canonical URL for each piece. Therefore, setting up various URL types from scratch can be very useful for your blog. If however you are using a free-blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress, their in-house blogging tools will take care of most of your blogging requirements.

3. Use Visuals with Great Care

The use of visuals in a blog can be advantageous as well as disadvantageous. If you’re new to blogging, you need to take adequate care when using visuals in your content. It is not advisable to use just any images you come across online. If you do, you run the risk of infringing on copyrighted images. What is best to do is to strive to find websites that offer free photos and visuals. There, you’ll have unfettered access to high-quality images that you can use for free. Shutterstock or Pixabay are great places you can get free high-quality images you can safely use on your blog content. However, if you have the expertise and the right equipment, it is safer still to create your own images.

 

4. Closely Monitor the Performance of your Website

No matter how good your blog content is, if your blog website is not performing to par, your blog is not likely to get any traction. This is why you must monitor the performance of your website routinely. By thoroughly understanding how and where people access and use your website, it is easier for you to figure out whatever needs to be done on the site to enhance its performance. You’ll also be able to know what elements you need to add to the website for it to perform better. Try to avoid any guess work when taking vital decisions on your website. By using some great analytics tools like Google Analytics, you can find out exactly which are your most popular content and where your website visitors are coming from and much more. This tool also helps you to monitor visitor activity across your website, track customers and leads. The data generated by this tool enables you to determine what works well on your website and what needs fixing. Overall, you can always be in a better position to improve the general performance of your website if you monitor its performance well enough and with the right tools.

5. Invest in a Good Plagiarism Checker Tool

Plagiarism checker is one fine tool no serious blogger can afford to do without. With it, you can easily ascertain the originality of your content before posting it. This is hugely important because you can get penalized by search engines for posting duplicate content. Your blog content must be unique and original if you want to achieve great results with your blog. Most versions of plagiarism checkers operate quickly. That is one great advantage bloggers have if they use these checkers to quickly search the entire internet before posting content. If the checker Okays your content, you don’t have to worry about whether you plagiarized it or not even if per chance. All you need do as a blogger is, when you finish crafting your content, just upload the work to the software, and it will immediately run a complete plagiarism check on the material. This way, instead of re-reading your work and manually checking for plagiarism, you can save your precious time and effort by using plagiarism checker tool like Copyscape to help you out in a matter of seconds.
 
Wrapping Up

If you are new to blogging, use the foregoing tips faithfully. As you blog along, you’ll be able learn some more tactics/techniques along the way. Even if the niche you are blogging on is a bit saturated, you can get along fine and hold your own if you allow these tips to guide you. Make sure you post great content regularly and consistently when you get off your launch pad. With patience and determination, you too can become a blogging success with time.

4 Tested Tips to Earn Money Online with Affiliate Marketing

Many online marketers regard affiliate marketing as one of the best online money making opportunities out there. This is true to the extent that only marketers who really know how to get to earn real money with affiliate marketing. The trend is that people do not really know how to work affiliate marketing to earn money quickly abandon the business claiming the business is not it. Some others also abandon the business thinking it is more of a scam than a legitimate business. Fact is, affiliate marketing is a legitimate online business and not a scam. People who know how to work the business get to make money, real money that is. Following are tested tips that can help any committed affiliate marketer to earn money online.

1. Create a Business Website: Even though affiliate marketing is one of the best online money making opportunities, everyone really needs to work hard on the business before they can get to earn money. To go about it, you need a business website of your own. Your website will serve as your business window in the very deep world of the internet. Without a functional business website, it will be difficult for you to make money. To show the importance of a website in affiliate marketing, some reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI, always allocate an in-house website to all its affiliates. That is where they all independently do their promotional and marketing business out of. To succeed as an affiliate marketer therefore, you must seize the opportunity of your own business website to vigorously promote products in your business niche, attract traffic and make sales to earn commissions.

2. Optimize your Website: If you want search engines to rank your website and send organic traffic to it, you must use SEO techniques to optimize it. To do this effectively, you must consistently write and post high quality and informative content on the website. Specially selected keywords related to your business niche must be carefully used on this content to make it attractive to search engines. In addition, you will also need to build a lot of quality backlinks to the website. These links together with good ranking by search engines help the website to receive highly valuable organic traffic. Good organic traffic to your website helps your business to make good sales.

3. Drive Traffic to your Website: Aside the good SEO ranking and good quality backlinks to your website, you still need to explore every other mostly free method to drive traffic to the website. Finding ways to deliberately promote the website is one very viable option. You can use popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others to promote your website. You can also write highly valuable and informative articles and submit them to article directories to attract traffic to your website. For best results, be sure the articles you write are unique, qualitative and niche-specific in content before you submit the articles to various article directories.

4. Diligently Measure Marketing Results: Google Analytics tool is usually very handy to collect, collate and analyze marketing data. This helps to make it easy for marketing campaigns to be compared with one another to see what works best for different products and different marketing channels. For better comparative analysis, marketers need to always compare different products of the same niche. Doing so allows your website visitors to discover which product is the most suitable for them. That way, your website ultimately becomes helpful for potential buyers to make their all-important buy decisions.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate marketing is a success if it can help get traffic to a product website. That traffic helps the website to get leads and conversions. If in the process sales are made, the business makes money as a result. The foregoing tips usually help that process a great deal.

10 Reasons Your Business Needs a Website

You cannot do business successfully online without a strong online presence. These days, more and more people are shopping online, one of the reasons more people are taking their businesses online. Before buying any product/service online, a lot of web users prefer looking up online reviews about the product/service. The info they are looking for is usually found on the websites of the product/service merchants. This makes it imperative for every online business owner to have a website even if it is just an e-commerce store. Consumers spend considerable time online searching for suitable products/services and on online research. This considerable time is spent moving from one website to another. For this reason, no matter the size of your online business, it is hugely important to have a website. Discussed below are 10 reasons why having a website is extremely important for the growth and success of your online business.

1. Professional Look: Online, your website is your business window in the internet. That is where customers and potential customers first make contact with your online business. If the website you are running your business out of is well-designed and attractive to customers, it helps to give your business a more professional look. It also shows a sign of seriousness, authenticity, reliability and approachability.

2. Saves Customers’ Time: A website is usually helpful in providing all the relevant info about the products/services on sale. By doing so, it helps to save time considerably for customers since no customer prefers to move out of a store to make all kinds of purchases if such purchases can be made in one store. Many websites have features that sort and departmentalize products. This also helps customers to save time searching for the products they want on the website.  

3. Improves Credibility: No one does business in a vacuum particularly on the internet. So, if you have a website, it helps to improve the credibility of your business. Your website provides all the relevant info about your business, including easy contact information. With that, even as deep as the internet is and filled with many niche businesses, with many similar to yours, your website helps your business to have a marked and recognizable presence on the internet. It is not enough therefore to simply have a website. What is most important is to build a website that greatly enhances the credibility of your business online. Once your website is good, it creates a good impression in the minds of customers. That can be great for the credibility of your business.

4. Provides Social Proof: As more and more people shop online, most of these shoppers usually prefer to make their purchase decisions in consideration of the behavior of other customers. So, by having your own website and other official pages on different social media platforms, it helps to provide social proof to potential customers. Also, if your business can be successfully searched online with relevant keywords, that helps its social proof tremendously particularly if customer testimonials also come up in these searches.

5. Helps to Generate Leads: If you have a website, it helps to increase the potentials of the business to get leads. Web users may visit your website without making a purchase but could leave a contact for follow up. Customers who make purchases may leave positive reviews and feedback. Down the road, such reviews can help other customers to make a purchase from the website. A good website can help a business this way to generate leads and sales in unlimited manner.

6. Enhances Competition: Without a website, no business stands any chance to compete favorably on the internet. Your website helps to increase your chances of competing with other brands. It provides a fair platform to compete well with other brands. You can only benefit from organic traffic from search engines if they rank your website high enough. A high ranking website (well optimized though) means more organic traffic, more leads and more sales which can indeed trump your competition. Without a website, your business loses its ability to compete fairly and that means loss of business to its competition.

7. Showcases Brand Value: There is no better place online than a website for business owners to showcase their products/services. On a website, online business owners really represent what their brands stand for. Most customers expect a business to have a website and it is through the website a business can have its brand stand out to be counted. Whatever features business owners have on their websites like mission statements, logos, colors, graphics/photos that are unique to the website help its brand value.

8. Listing of Offers: There is no better place for an e-commerce store to list its products offers than its website. This is so because a website is the first interaction between a business and its customers. No smart marketer can therefore afford to neglect their business website. Many e-commerce stores habitually list different offers on their websites thereby helping to make shopping easy for customers. By providing offers on a website, it completely eliminates the need of using a third-party website to sell any product/service. It helps to make one-stop shopping available to shoppers.

9. Increases ROI: Marketers are always in business to make money. Keeping costs low and sales high is what helps to enhance the Return-On-Investment, ROI of a business. Building a responsive website costs very little including hosting. If you factor in the ROI, having a website proves to be extremely beneficial. Most of your marketing is done out of your website. It is the website that helps to bring both organic and inorganic traffic to your business and it generates leads and sales. That is how the business gets to earn income and when matched with the cost of setting up and running the website, the ROI is greatly enhanced.

10. Provides Help to Customers: Online shoppers are always in great hurry searching for solutions to their problems. That means interactions with websites and business owners which on their own create problems too. A well set out website always comes very handy to help customers/shoppers solve their problems. Business owners can deploy AI in form of chatbots on their websites to relate with and help customers round the clock. If customers don’t get satisfaction from chatbots, they can always leave their inquiries and or concerns on the website for the business owner to handle whenever they come online. The website remains available for these customers to return to later for answers to their inquiries.  

How to Use AI to Acquire and Retain Customers

Online marketers are increasingly relying on Artificial Intelligence, AI for problem-solving in their marketing activities. They do this by using AI powered aps some of which are voice-activated virtual assistants, auto responders, CTAs, customer service and retail and e-commerce automation. Online business owners now depend more and more on the power of AI and machine learning to significantly increase brand awareness, enhance customer engagement, improve user experience, meet customer expectations and to find solutions to even more complex business problems. 

 
Direct Marketing Benefits of AI

You can achieve many milestones in your online business which allow you to acquire new customers and retain existing ones if you do the following.

Use AI-powered social media tools to help you monitor and gain valuable insights about your brand.
Use AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. That way, you can manage to create content that’s relevant to your target audience.
Integrate AI into your e-commerce site to reduce shopping cart abandonment.
Use AI to significantly improve your website user experience by making it intuitive, accessible, and easy to navigate.
Use AI to help you generate high-quality leads that are likely to buy your products and become customers.
Use AI to personalize and tailor-fit your product recommendations based on your customers’ preferences thereby increasing repeat purchases.

No matter the nature of your online business, it is possible for you to acquire and retain customers more efficiently than what it normally takes to get same things done manually. Here is what you need do.

Improve Your Website User Experience

As an online business owner, your business window into the internet world is your website. That is where visitors can interact with your brand, respond to your call-to-action, and to purchase products. To make these interactions smooth, it is important that visitors to the site have a great experience while navigating through the site. With AI, you can improve your website user experience several fold by way of personalized recommendations, search relevance and seamless customer service through AI chatbots. In particular, the presence of AI chatbots on your e-commerce website contributes to a great user experience on the site because they provide 24/7 assistance and support in the absence of human customer service.  They help users to get accurate answers to their inquiries more quickly and efficiently when compared to manually scrolling through text-based FAQs.

Evaluate the Performance of your Content

This you can do by using AI to identify gaps in your content marketing strategy. If you’ve been creating content for a while, by deploying AI, you can easily identify the gaps, find fixes, and evaluate the performance of your content marketing campaign. Even if you’re into retail or e-commerce business, you can use AI to identify the gaps in your content marketing. Your content may be directly focused on your products and their features, but through AI, you can better determine the relevant content that addresses your audience’s needs and pain points faster and more accurately.

Pre-Qualify Prospects and Leads

When your new leads are not converting into sales well enough, you can rectify the situation with the help of AI. If you have a bit of experience in online marketing, you’ll know when you’re not getting good sales despite the high traffic your website is receiving. If you are experiencing this, it could mean you are not taking some marketing actions correctly. It could mean your CTAs are ineffective, your content marketing strategy is poor, you are targeting the wrong audience, you are promoting your products through the wrong social media channels or you are using the wrong type of Sign-up form. With the help of AI tools, you can extract relevant data to help you learn more about your target audience. These tools also provide predictive analytics on your customers’ behavior. By using them efficiently, you can improve your lead generation strategy because they’ll help you to identify which leads to pursue, where to find them, and how to effectively engage them.

Cut Down on Cart Abandonment Rate

If you run an e-commerce business and you experience a high cart abandonment rate, it could mean certain things are just not right with some operations in your website. Many online shoppers may abandon their shopping carts because they’re not ready to buy yet, high extra costs, privacy concerns, complicated/cumbersome checkout process, privacy concerns and most commonly, not enough customer-friendly payment methods. AI-powered chatbots can come in handy to address these issues by diligently guiding customers through their shopping journey. AI chatbots can with smooth conversational approach give customers a nudge to prompt them to complete their purchase. They also act as a virtual shopping assistant or concierge that can let a customer know about an on-the-spot discount, a time-sensitive deal, a free shipping coupon, or any other incentives that will encourage them to complete the checkout. Even lost orders due to cart abandonment can be recovered with the help of AI. If AI does these for an e-commerce website, it can lead to an increase in conversion rate for the business.

Social Listening

Marketers can deploy AI for social listening for potential customers. This is simply a process in which AI can be used to analyze the conversations, trends, and buzz surrounding your brand across different social media platforms. Social listening effectively analyzes what’s usually behind the metrics and the numbers. It determines the social media sentiment about your brand and everything else relating to how people feel and relate to your brand. Such AI generated data/information you get through social listening can be used as a guide in your strategy to gain new customers. Without a doubt, getting this type of intricate data can constitute an enormous and very daunting task for human beings. AI helps out very nicely.

Increase Repurchases

Marketers can increase repurchases with predictive analytics made possible with the use of AI. Predictive analytics is the process of making predictions based on historical data using data mining, statistical modelling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other techniques. Through it, marketers can generate insights, forecast trends, and predict behaviors based on past and current data. Its practical use is when marketers rely on it to predict customers’ propensity to repurchase products as well as its frequency. When used to optimize marketing campaigns, AI-powered predictive analytics can generate customer response, increase repurchase, and promote cross-selling of relevant products. Predictive analytics helps marketers to focus their marketing resources on customer retention while targeting a highly motivated segment of their markets that may be happy to return and repurchase more products. This helps to save on ads costs for marketers. AI makes it possible.

Provide Personal Recommendations

Most online shoppers really value personalized marketing experiences. The reason brands are able to boost their sales when they tailor their recommendations based on consumer data. Recommendation systems’ algorithms typically rely on data on browsing history, pages visited, and previous purchases. Thus, smart AI can accurately analyze customers’ interactions with website content and find relevant products that will interest the individual customer. This is how AI makes it easier to target potential customers and effectively put the best products in front of the site visitors. With AI, recommendation engines are able to filter and customize product recommendations based on each customer’s preferences and correctly match the customers’ preferences with the right products. Because of this element of personalization, marketers can effectively acquire and retain customers with the help of AI.

Tips to Grow Your Online Business with a Blog

Most online business owners now rely on blogs to grow their businesses and blogs are really proving very useful in growing many of these businesses. Intermediate parties may not be able to promote your products as much as you would prefer, so blogs come in very handy to fill that gap. No matter how competitive the internet appears to be for business owners, a good blog can help make a real difference. Blogs can help to effectively popularize your products on the internet even in today’s highly competitive market. This is why business owners rely on blogs as superb resources for branding and for creating general awareness for their products on the internet. Blogs are a great resource for letting people online know how excellent the products you’re offering are that they would love to use. Below are some great tips on how to use your blog to grow your online business.

 
 
Post Only High Quality Content

In online marketing, content is king. A good blog is all about crafting and posting quality blogs regularly to attract readers. Therefore, to attract more visitors to your blog, you need to post quality and compelling content regularly that people find interesting, engaging, and relevant to their needs. The reason they’ll keep coming back to your website for more blog information. If your blog content is well optimized with relevant keywords, it can help you with the digital marketing processes necessary to promote your blog and get it on top of Google SERPs. This is why the better the content you post, the higher your chances of attracting leads/buyers that could transmute to customers if well nurtured.

Build Email List

A credible email list is an excellent digital marketing asset for marketers. It however takes quality time and efforts to build one. Here is what expert marketers recommend to build a good email list. Make sure your blog has a contact form you use to capture the names, location, and email IDs of persons that comment on your blog through this contact form or comments section. To get your website visitors to part with such vital personal information about themselves, you must try to offer something of value to them in exchange for the information. You can for instance offer free newsletter, research information, eBooks, prize winning quizzes as well as promos. Offering such values is quite effective even though many visitors will freely part with their personal information if your content is attractive, has quality, useful, and relevant to their needs. Over time, the list will grow and become a very valuable asset for your email marketing activities. You can segment your email list for effective marketing and also use it to nurture leads to become customers.

Share Your Blog on Social Media

If you have accounts on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and others, you can easily share information about your new blog posts to your followers. Your followers could in turn share this information to their own followers if they find the information useful. That way, your blog post can easily go viral thereby attracting many more people to share your posts if they find them interesting enough. On social media, you can seize the excellent opportunities the platforms provide to easily interact with potential buyers or others who may be interested in products. From these interactions, you can acquire some leads, prospective customers and even customers provided you are able to handle their queries and suggestions or comments correctly. If you do, your chances of converting some of them to buyers of your products are greatly enhanced.

Optimize for Digital Marketing

Every marketer wants his business to be visible online. Getting your business well ranked on search engines like Google is a great way to go about it. That calls for SEO, Search Engine Optimization techniques on your blog content and even your website. If you know how to, you can deftly use keywords relevant to your products on your content to make it visible to search engines. Because SEO is hugely technical, you may choose to hire the services of a good digital marketer to do various digital marketing processes on your blog. If well done, SEO can help your blog to rank in the topmost searches of Google SERPs. That is how your blog can get to attract more attention online and benefit from quality organic traffic.

Blog About Your Industry

Blogging about your industry or business niche is one great way to show expertise which in turn attracts readers. You can through your blog provide news, breakthroughs, research findings, trending issues and views about the latest happenings about your industry. That somehow helps to keep readers and other stakeholders in the industry interested in your blog. This is also one great way to increase your business blog following. Such readers will relate to you as a dependable authority in your industry and that could enhance their loyalty to your brand.
 
Provide Affiliate Links

Many buyers trust blogs more than online ads when buying products online that matters to them. Bloggers always latch on to that opportunity by providing affiliate links to the products they are selling in the content of their blogs. A click on these links takes buyers directly to where they can find the products. A great blog about your industry with the right affiliate links to your products is always a great idea. Providing affiliate links to your products is like an invitation to your website users to take a look and possibly buy from you. If links provide the real opportunities for you to make sales online, they help your business to grow.

Wrapping Up

A blog is a vital resource marketers rely on to make sales online and to grow their businesses. If your blog is of high quality, informative and educational enough, it serves this purpose very well. If you run a business online and you are not blogging for business yet, the time to start is now. The foregoing tips are very handy. When it comes to marketing online, you will never regret doing so with a good blog.

3 Smart Ways Online Marketers Can Boost Their Personal Productivity

Most online marketers usually face huge challenges in their daily activities and it affects their productivity a great deal. These challenges range from SEO, website optimization, internet access device optimization, managing traffic and rankings, PPC campaigns, social media marketing, Search Engine marketing, Email marketing, online reputation management and so on. By taking on these many marketing activities, (even if necessary for your overall marketing success), productivity at times takes a dip. That is more so if you have no viable and workable plan in place to take on the numerous marketing tasks. Then what to do? Simple! Just put a little planning in place to help curb the challenges. That helps your online productivity a great deal. If you take my tips, follow the simple measures below and even make them routine practices, they can help boost your online marketing productivity a great deal.

  

1. Break Up Your Marketing Tasks Into Smaller Bits

Breaking your marketing tasks into smaller bits/milestones creates simplicity and easy achievability. That helps your online productivity. Just spare quality time to create, daily, weekly and monthly tasks you need to take on for your marketing. Follow this plan diligently by accomplishing one task before moving on to the next. That helps to provide direction and the impetus to accomplish more tasks. When tasks are in smaller bits, they become more realistic and easily achievable. By the time you chalk off one task after another on completion, it makes you feel good. That provides the right motivation to keep things going smoothly till you achieve your targets.  Once you achieve your targets as planned, your productivity goes up naturally.

2. Avoid Distractions with Good Planning

Online marketers can do well to always avoid distractions. With distractions, marketers tend to dissipate energy and resources unnecessarily. Inevitably, online marketers have to daily browse other websites and visit many social media platforms. That is where many of the distractions are unless you are strictly guided by what takes you to each site and to exit the site as soon as you are through with it. That requires prior planning. Good planning helps online marketers to manage their to-do lists effectively and efficiently. With it, they can check procrastination and missing out on tasks, spending too long a time a one site and getting attracted to other issues on these sites outside what they planned for. Good planning allows online marketers to focus on real work and steering clear of accessing websites that have nothing to do with the work at hand. If as a marketer you are unable to make conscious efforts to avoid these distractions, you can engage a time-tracking tool to help manage your time well online. Doing so can be great for productivity.

 

3. Always Optimize Your Internet Access Device

Clutter naturally slows down internet access devices particularly computers. Since online marketers usually have a resource-intensive job that requires that they access countless sites and toggle between multiple sites simultaneously on regular basis, picking up a lot of clutter is a given. Without removing this clutter regularly, you inadvertently slow down the performance and efficiency of such devices. Therefore, you must routinely take deliberate steps to optimize the device you are using to access the internet with a view to maintaining its high performance and on memory fronts. Fortunately, there are very handy remedies to turn to if you want to boost your productivity with a super fast computer. You can easily use the right software among the many available online to clean up your computer systems and get rid of the redundant files and apps slowing it down. It is that simple. 

The Fundamentals of Small Business SEO Strategy

If you market online, even if it is a small business, you need SEO strategy, very basic SEO strategies at the very least. These very fundamental and basic strategies will enable your business to gain some marketing traction online even amidst the huge and at times suffocating competition. Essentially there are four marketing fundamentals your small business needs to focus on to have a successful SEO strategy. Many expert marketers generally agree on the following.

1.    Content Marketing
2.    Link Building
3.    Technical SEO
4.    Local SEO

 

1. Content Marketing

If you market online, the success of your marketing efforts depends largely on good content.  This content must be authoritative, informative, educational and even entertaining. That is what helps it to attract a good following. In the SEO world, content is king. No matter how user-friendly your business website is, without good content, it can hardly attract good traffic. For this reason, it is fundamental for your business website to house web pages and blog articles that contain high quality and valuable content. When this content is optimized with the right keywords for search engines, it attracts organic traffic from search engines.

2. Link Building

Link building is a digital marketing technique of driving links to your website, through a variety of methods. Your business website gets backlinks when another website or online platform links to your website. If such linking websites are reputable and authoritative online, they help boost your own site’s authority. This is why marketers deliberately use online techniques to earn more of high-quality links, as against massive volumes of low quality links. Better still if your website earns these links organically through search engines. Major search engines like Google tend to rank websites with high-quality backlinks higher. That way, Google’s algorithms strive to show more of high-authority sites to web surfers. This translates to good organic traffic back to your business website.

3. Technical SEO

Technical Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is yet another fundamental requirement for a small business SEO strategy. It allows the business website to be technically sound for online search operations. For your business website to be technically sound, it must:

•    Have a fast load time, say about 5 seconds or less.
•    Be optimized for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
•    Be easily found and indexable by search engines.
•    Be easily navigable.
•    Be secure, by always having an up-to-date SSL certificate.
•    Avoid broken links and 404 pages.

Form the foregoing, it clearly shows that Technical SEO involves the technical optimization of your entire website. It affects the site structure, navigation, load speed, and link structure. Without a fast, functional, and user-friendly website, no amount of content or backlinks will be enough to maximize your rankings. Meaning, without it, no other activities will be sufficient to attract the required traffic back to your website. Technical SEO requires real knowledge and skills of website management and development to put in place. If as a marketer you do not have this requisite knowhow, it is advisable to hire the services of a technical SEO expert and or webmaster to handle the technical optimization of your website for you.

4. Local SEO

Most major search engines like Google now recognize that most small businesses are essentially local. Hence, the need to make local searches a priority in their search results. Welcome to local SEO. Local SEO is a type of SEO that is unique to local businesses. This is because many local businesses serve specific geographical areas. Moreover, their potential customers are often using geo-specific terms to find these businesses in their local area. When searchers type a search term on Google with “near me” phrase, Google usually sends search results nearest to the location of that searcher. That makes is easy to find local businesses online if they are optimized for local SEO searches.

How to Use Automation to Boost Your Online Marketing Business

Experienced online marketers make money by embarking on such marketing activities that help to keep costs low and revenues high. Marketing automation tools are extremely essential in the task of achieving such marketing objectives. To hone their marketing strategies and increase efficiencies, online business owners are increasingly leveraging automation and reducing human intervention to manage routine daily tasks. Marketers now rely on automation to restructure the digital marketing activities that help them to nurture leads, sales and business communication messages. Automation also helps to reduce the tendency of task repetition and delayed timelines. These technologies help marketers to achieve high ROI by simply integrating data and processes that automate marketing tasks. That comes about through high operational efficiency that allows businesses to manage effectively and efficiently, multiple marketing channels with automated tasks.

Find below, some of the benefits digital marketers derive from automation that help boost their businesses in a great way.
 
Effectiveness in Spending

Every responsible businessperson always keeps a keen eye on costs. Personnel maintenance cost is always a major cost element for most businesses. When automation replaces human tasks, the spending on human resources is relatively less. That helps to free up resources for other business activities that help the overall increase in the ROI for the business.
 
Generating and Nurturing Leads

Generating leads and sales are crucial to the survival of any marketing business. Automation helps marketers to better focus on strategies for nurturing leads and customer acquisition. By using effective marketing automation tools, marketers can get great insights into customer behavior and their purchase journey. That vital information is essential for marketers to redesign or tweak their marketing strategies for better results. With these insights, they can customize follow-ups with customers in a more personalized and engaging manner.

Refining Marketing Strategies

Automation gives marketers ample time and information to enable them analyze better, customer behavior and their purchase journey. With that, they can evolve more strategies that better help and enhance customer experience. They can in addition create more personalized content to reach out better to potential customers, process and nurture the leads.

Integrating Marketing Strategies

Automation helps marketers to integrate and execute marketing campaigns better. Marketers rely on automation to handle mundane and repetitive tasks by eliminating repetition through template-based workflows and integration of marketing channels onto a centralized platform. In doing so, marketers save valuable time and resources while still getting very good results from their marketing activities.  When marketers integrate their marketing activities into dedicated platforms for social media marketing, email marketing, and data analytics, the results are great.

Improving Time Efficiency

Time as a vital resource is very crucial to the success of many businesses. For that reason, by leveraging automation tools, marketers can indeed handle better, activities that help to expedite time-consuming tasks. Doing so helps marketers to free up valuable time for other vital business tasks that require direct human intervention. With more time available to them, marketers can be more innovative, focus better on important tasks and be more result-oriented in managing their businesses.

Strategic Insights to Grow Your Online Marketing Business

Online marketers generally benefit more from the experiences of others who have been there before them and are still there doing their thing. Small business owners who are doing great are always willing to share some insights as distilled from their experiences. Discerning online marketers who benefit from these insights can use what they learn from the “experts” to grow their own online marketing businesses. Now, consider these insights.

Invest in a Practical Website

Your marketing window in the online virtual world is your website. Having a well-designed and practical website is thus imperative. Online, your website is where your business is at and that is where customers can effectively do business with you. Investing in a practical website is therefore good for your online business. If you hire the services of a reputable web developer, they can help you to build a website that works cohesively with any E-commerce platform of your choice. They can build a website for you complete with professional product images and some great content, which they can upload onto your website in such a way as to make it aesthetic and user-friendly. That is the kind of practical website your business needs.

Make Sure Your Website is Secure

In today’s business world, particularly online business, everyone is concerned about security. Doing business with an insecure website is not advisable. If you want to do business online, one of the most important considerations for your website is security. In the course of your online business, you will no doubt be using common online payment methods like credit cards that allow shoppers to do business from your website in a simple and efficient manner. Of course, you know credit cards always carry very private financial information of shoppers. Without a secure website, such information can easily be hacked by fraudsters thereby helping in no small measure to endanger the financial well-being of your customers. Make sure your website has first-rate security in place as one practical way to protect customer data and your own business data as well.

Market with the Right E-commerce Platform

To market seamlessly with an E-commerce platform, you must spend quality time researching the platforms to enable you decide on any that best suits what you and your business really need. The best E-commerce platforms to do business with are those that give you all the features you need to start off your online business and to scale and manage it well. This is hugely important because practically, E-commerce platforms act as dependable backbones of any online retail enterprise. They are usually well-positioned to allow the front-end and back-end of an online shop to work seamlessly together effectively and efficiently.

Have an Effective SEO Strategy

You cannot afford to overlook an effective SEO strategy for your website if you want it to useful online. Good SEO allows search engines to find and rank your site well enough to send organic traffic to it. A good SEO strategy allows consumers to search and organically discover online retail shops and products right from the comfort of their homes and offices. All that shoppers need do is simply to query search engines with the right keywords relevant to your website/business and the search engines send these shoppers straight to your website, if your SEO strategy is helpful.

Be Digital/Online Savvy

You cannot do business online without the basic knowledge of how to do business online. You must know practically everything you need to know which you greatly need to run a successful business online. You need to own and operate a practical website to allow you post fresh content regularly and to write a blog to promote your products. Running free accounts in very popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a host of others can greatly help your online marketing business. From your website, you must know how to run ads, write blogs, post marketing videos and share links to your product in other online marketplaces. You cannot do without these practical online skills, if you want to market successfully online.

Simplify Your Business

In online business, simple is beautiful and simple is practical. The simpler it is to do business with your website, the better the business the site does. You can also do what other marketers are already doing and you can simplify yours for better business. You can link up with popular E-commerce sites like Amazon and sell your products in partnership with them. Purchases, payments and check out procedures must be simple enough to make your website attractive to do business.

Take Advantage of Your USP

Every business has a Unique Selling Point, USP. It takes some efforts to discover what it is. If you want to succeed as online marketer, you must find your unique selling point. Study and analyze what your competitors do in their online marketing business then discover what you do better than they do. That is your USP. It is your USP you can rely on to do exact same things your competitors do but you do them better. The more and better you do the things that tend to set your business distinctly apart from others, the better for the business.

Don’t Distract Customers

Customers are the main reason you are in business. Doing anything in your business no matter how mundane to distract them is a no-no. For this reason, you must ensure your website is user-friendly and attractive enough to sustain customers’ attention instead of distracting them. Always remember that customers come to your website primarily to shop and not to be entertained. Enticing them to do things in your website that detract from this mission is a distraction that you must avoid as much as practicable. If customers come to your online business and they do not buy from you, you are not in business.

10 Tips to Nurture your Business’s Digital Marketing Authority

The virtual internet world is a very wide world where digital marketers do their thing. It is very difficult to succeed out there unless you can maintain your digital marketing authority. To enhance that, it is crucial to understand how to nurture and optimize your digital marketing authority. These here, 10 marketing tips can be of help in that quest.  

1. Regularly Update Your Website

Updating your website regularly is to keep up with the changes that may inevitable occur in the course of running a business. Because consumers are always looking for authentic information on how to do business with you, be sure your website is current and up-to-date at all times. Changes in hours of business, products on offer, ongoing promos, sales promos, and new discounts and coupons on offer, must always be fully updated to reflect what is current on your website. Doing so makes it easy for your customers to get any relevant information they are looking for.

2. Measure Your Progress with Google Analytics Tools

Without analytics, it is difficult to gauge how well your business is doing in the digital space. If you have a credible and reliable way of finding out how you are doing, it helps you to better utilize and optimize the time you spend on your digital marketing efforts. Google Analytics free online tools are very good to use for these measurements. If your business is on social media (i don’t see why it shouldn’t be there), you also have access to their free tools as well. You can access such free tools on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others that give easy Insights about the progress of your business.  These tools help you to accurately measure the digital marketing progress of your business on social media and they are free to use. 

3. Work Your Marketing Plan

In digital marketing, it helps to have a marketing plan and to work this plan. Make sure your marketing plan is always up-to-date and workable as well. Your marketing plan is a good plan if it reflects your target market, the mission and vision of your business. If your online and offline marketing efforts fit well into your plan, you can better connect with your current and new customers by endeavoring to work the plan diligently. A good marketing plan helps provide a reliable guide to ensure you use your valuable time wisely and profitably.

4. Focus on Your Customers

Customers are the main reason you are in business. Your business focus must always be on them and for them. If you have some good insights into what their needs are and what they are searching for online, you can better channel your marketing efforts to those areas. If you want to have a better understanding of your audience, and what their needs are, you can use free online analytics and data tools. The most popular of these free tools are Google Analytics, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Insights. For the success of your digital marketing efforts, the more and better you understand your customers, the more the likelihood of your success in marketing to them. Information from your key customers’ feedback if well utilized can also help your digital marketing efforts.

5. Market with Engaging Content 

In digital marketing, content is king. It must be informative, educating and even entertaining to be useful. For this reason, you must take adequate care and time to create visual content that easily captures your consumers’ attention. Good content must adequately highlight a combination of the vision and mission of your business with the products/services you are promoting, promos, business updates, CTAs and such like business building/promoting activities. A healthy mix of good aesthetics, graphics, photos and video content help make an appealing and engaging content.

6. Optimize Your Website

Your website is your online business window. It serves that purpose better if it is visible to search engines. It is only visible to search engines if it is optimized for that purpose. Search Engine Optimization, SEO helps your customers to find your business easily online. Website optimization is an extremely vital element in determining the relevance and authority of your website on the web. If you claim and regularly update your “Google My Business” business profile, it helps your online presence and authority. By optimizing each page on your website with unique meta-tag descriptions and keywords, it is easy for your customers and even potential customers to find your business. Your business online authority is also better enhanced if you can link the site to other websites, social media pages, blogs, etc. Alt titles and descriptions to each image/video on your website further reinforce the authority of the site.

7. Take Advantage of Your Social Media Presence 

Your social media presence is a very credible way to connect easily with customers. You must take full advantage of that. Your social media efforts should reflect your goals as part of your marketing plan. Taking your business on social media is an effective way of marketing to your customers where they are. By optimizing your presence on social media and properly tailoring your messages to suit each platform and effectively using good content with graphics and videos, you can easily catch customers’ attention. A direct consequence of that is more business exposure and customer engagement. Ultimately, your online presence and authority is better enhanced and in no small measure.

8. Stay Connected with Reviews/Feedback

It is smart business to always ask your customers for feedback. That helps you to stay connected with them. The feedback and testimonials from your customers most times is the easiest and most effective way to gauge how valuable your products/services are to them. Responding professionally and encouraging them to keep sending feedback helps in no small measure to nurture your online authority and to grow your business.   

9. Engage Customers with Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing methods to stay in touch with your customers and to nurture your online authority. If you choose to use the services of MailChimp or Constant Contact to assist you, you can automatically send frequent emails to your customers as a very effective way of keeping them fully informed on what your business is up to at any point in time. Your online authority is better enhanced as a result.  

10. Use Paid Advertising as Needed

Most small businesses are always on shoestring budget for advertising. The reason they depend more on free online advertising. If however you want to market to many more people and free advertising is not helpful enough, you can decide to supplement that with some paid advertising as needed within the limits of your ads budget. In paid advertising, the higher your budget, the higher your reach. If however your ads budget is severely restrictive, you can in addition use social media advertising. Characteristically, social media advertising offers a fairly inexpensive way to reach more potential customers and customers. Social media makes it possible for you to target easily, different locations, audiences, interests and behavior patterns around the globe 24/7.