6 Global Best Practices to Combat Inevitable Cyber Threats on Your Online Apps

The need for web Apps is increasing in tandem with increasing digitization of businesses around the globe. There is hardly any online business today that is not using web Apps. This also increases the necessity of having these Apps secure enough to do business with. If you are taking your business online, even if you fulfill the need for an App, making sure the App is secure is quite essential. Online marketing experts generally agree that developing a secure web App is one of the most vital steps any business needs to ensure business security and growth. This is more so when you factor in the current trend of increased cyber crimes and the daring nature of cyber criminals. If you want to directly combat cyber crimes and threats to your online Apps, these here global best practices come in very handy.

1. Back Up all your Data

Online, there is always a threat of compromised or stolen data by cyber criminals. This is more worrisome because no matter how secure your App is, there is always a slight chance that your data can be compromised or stolen. Exactly why you must take all steps necessary to back up your data! Backing up all your data therefore becomes an important move to put your business on a safer side. This is one very important precaution you can take to checkmate any hacker who manages to get access to your online App data. You can arrange this back up by storing all your online App information in another location and replicate the archives in multiple places. If any hacker manages to get access to your data in the primary location and compromising it, you can protect your business from serious data losses by falling back on the back up location to retrieve your important data.
 
2. Use a Virtual Private Network, VPN

A very dependable way to protect against cyber crimes is the use of a Virtual Private Network, VPN. But using a VPN does not mean cyber criminals cannot get to you. They can but the VPN adds an additional protective layer. That gives you additional security because a VPN protects against cyber-attacks in many ways through traffic encryption. VPN also has some real advantage of being very cheap to use. This adds to its attraction for business owners.

3. Use SSL Certificates

With the use of Secure Socket Layers, SSL certificates, you can secure your online Apps by simply encoding all the data that is shared on it. Presently, it is one of the best practices to combat cyber threats. This it does using SSL protocols to secure the information available on the App from cyber criminals. It is hugely important for your business therefore to activate SSL Certificates for your online Apps. Once it is in place, it becomes doubly difficult for hackers and cyber criminals to easily access the information you share on the Apps. It is actually the cryptographic keys the SSL Certificate uses that really make it pretty difficult for hackers to read your data. If they can’t read the data, they can’t steal it.

4. Provide Adequate Training

Employees that are well trained and proactive can be vital assets to combat cyber crimes and cyber threats. So, if you train your workers well enough, they’ll have the requisite knowledge about cyber criminals and cyber crimes. That equips them to know what to expect from hackers and exactly what to do to prevent attacks. You can take advantage of well-packaged cyber security training for all your employees using reputable experts and experienced web App security masters. Through these experts, your employees can learn about the online Apps and the surrounding potential threats. Well-trained employees can always put the vital checks in place to checkmate any ambitious cyber criminal at any point in time when they dare to launch an attack on your Apps.

5. Update Your App Regularly

An updated App is always a safer App to use. One of the very best practices in the business is to ensure security against threats by releasing regular App updates for your users. This is hugely important because it is outdated Apps that are more susceptible to cyber-attacks. They are more vulnerable to these attacks as well because most of the time, an outdated software may lead to weak security features which may enable hackers to easily manipulate the data on the App. An App can have its online App’s components updated on and off based on its infrastructure. This prevents hackers from easily accessing the information on the App, thus making the App effectively protected from cyber threats and attacks.

6. Manage User Permissions

One smart step towards having a secure web App is to skillfully manage user permissions. Even if you have many employees in your business, you can limit vital full internet access to a few well-trained employees. The fewer the number of such privileged workers the easier it is to keep your online Apps secure. Doing this greatly reduces the volume of data that hackers can attack. But, if you are careless enough to allow everyone in your employ unfettered access, it will take one, just one successful cyber-attack to compromise all your data. Managing your user permissions skillfully is about the best way to prevent that.

Summary

Poor App security and other vital loopholes are increasingly making online Apps vulnerable to hackers and cyber criminals. Incidentally, as Apps are upgrading, cyber criminals are learning new ways to attack them. This is exactly where the real challenge is for business owners. For now however, making an App difficult to hack is about the most practical option available to business owners. The foregoing best practices come in very handy in that quest. Ignoring them can quickly spell doom for your much-cherished online business. It is smart therefore to take all necessary precautions now before you have cause to regret.

Top Marketing Strategies Online Marketers Cannot Afford to Ignore

As an online business owner, you cannot succeed without having some working knowledge of marketing. That requires getting to know various digital marketing strategies, the most successful of which trump traditional marketing strategies most times. This is because digital marketing strategies allow you to reach more people at less cost than you would spend on traditional forms of marketing, such as, newspaper ads, billboards, and Radio and TV commercials. Even at that, things don’t come easy too even in digital marketing except you use the right strategies combined with a strong online presence for your business. What this means is that you must have a user-friendly business website as a foremost requirement. Next is to get the business on as many social media platforms as convenient. Your strong online presence starts to build up from these arrangements. If your online presence becomes stronger, you can start to deploy the following marketing strategies to get traffic, leads and customers.

 
Affiliate and Referral Marketing

These are forms of digital marketing strategies which allow third parties to help product merchants promote products/services in exchange for commissions.  Even though Affiliate and Referral Marketing are two terms that are often used interchangeably, they mean basically the same thing. They both involve affiliates promoting products/services for merchants using personalized links/codes for attribution purposes and commissions payment. In a more organized business form, affiliates operate by joining reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI to promote products and earn commissions. Since the business model is performance based, the more affiliates promote products/services, the more commissions they earn.

Recruitment Marketing

In this type of marketing, the strategy is not to target consumers but job seekers instead. Just as affiliate marketers market towards consumers to create brand awareness and drive sales, recruitment marketers use recruitment marketing to market towards job seekers with a view to recruiting the most qualified and skilled individuals who apply to work. Recruitment marketing similarly uses digital marketing strategies, such as PPC and social media marketing to recruit job seekers. With the right digital marketing strategies, recruitment marketers can reach the biggest and most skilled job seeking audience.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that uses on-website techniques and the right keywords to get your business website to rank higher on search engines. Even though this form of marketing is limited to search engines, it is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. SEO relies technically on the use of special keywords on a business website to get it to rank higher in the SERPs of major search engines like Google.
 
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

This is another digital marketing strategy that derives its effectiveness from the correct use of keywords on a business website. PPC marketing allows marketers to have their ads posted on a publisher’s website for traffic purposes. Anytime such ads are clicked by a visitor, the marketer pays the publisher/website owner. Google Ads are the most common types of PPC. Marketers pay Google to have the top slots on the search engine. In addition to Google ads, marketers can also run PPC ads on very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

Content Marketing

In a content marketing strategy, content is king. Good and high quality content that is! With content marketing, marketers use quality content to create brand awareness and drive traffic to their websites. This Content can be in the form of graphics, photos, videos, blog posts, and any other type of content that you can send through emails and post on social media platforms.

Social Media Marketing

Because of the huge popularity of social media for digital marketing purposes, most of the content by marketers is usually on their social media business pages. This is social media marketing. That process is helped mostly by the fact that most social media platforms allow marketers to create business pages for marketing purposes. The platforms also help marketers with in-house marketing tools and tips to help make their marketing more effective. Because of their popularity and marketing effectiveness, most marketers prefer the following social media platforms.
•    Facebook
•    Twitter
•    LinkedIn
•    Instagram
•    Snapchat
•    Pinterest

Email Marketing

Email marketing allows marketers to communicate with a huge audience by merely pressing a computer button. That audience could be in hundreds of thousands and once the computer message reads “sent”, they all receive it in a matter of seconds. With emails, marketers can easily send marketing messages to their customers, no matter the number and where they are in the world. Marketing content emails usually includes information about upcoming products, promotions, price adjustment, new trends, sales offers, discount coupons, and any other informative news that can help consumers make their decisions or solve their problems.

Wrapping Up

If you run a business online, it will be difficult for you to grow the business and make good sales if you do not at least have a working knowledge of the foregoing marketing strategies. The better you know and are able to use these strategies, the better you can market your business online. If however your knowledge is severely limited in these fields, you can consider hiring the services of a digital marketing agency or some experts in the various fields to help you out. The success of your online marketing is what is most important, not how you choose to bring it about. Good luck!

Blogging as an Effective Online Marketing Tool

Blogging is for everyone who has something useful to say that others will like to read. Blogging for business is now hugely popular amongst online marketers because they’ve found blogging as an effective online marketing tool. You can get these benefits too if you blog the right way. Here is what you can do.

Create a Blog: You have a choice either to create a free blog from Blogger, WordPress or some other free blogging platforms online or you invest in your own unique blog domain. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but what really matters is how to post your blogs regularly and unhindered in their visibility online and it allows you to effectively promote your products and or services as you want.

Have a Blogging Plan: A planned blog is a more effective blog. You can therefore plan out your blog topics ahead of time with clear writing and posting schedules. Your audience is always expectant and in order not to disappoint and lose their following, you must give them what they expect from you on schedule. That is where planning your blog is very essential. You must dedicate specific times to blogging and stick with the schedule. That is the best way to avoid time crush that can force you to deliver poor quality blogs and even out of schedule.

Source Topics/Ideas from Your Customers: Let’s face it, the real reason you blog is to satisfy an audience. That audience is made up of mostly customers and potential customers. Your blog is effective if you post what they want to read. The best way to know what they want to read is through FAQs from your customers. Some of these FAQs can become potential blog posts. It is such blog content that can be really informative and helpful to your readers. If you blog about issues you know your customers really care about, your blog becomes much easier and less time-consuming to write even without compromising quality.

Build an Audience for your Blog: From this audience, you can have your own contact and email list. These are very useful tools for online marketing. You can segment and market more effectively to an audience you’ve build up over time yourself. Once your blogs posts are relevant, qualitative, educational and informative enough, your audience of loyal followers will grow naturally.

Promote your Blog Content: You can take advantage of online communities to promote your blog. When a blog is not deliberately promoted, it is less effective. You can take full advantage of social media to promote your blog and grow its following. Social media posts can be the perfect vehicles to drive readers to your blog content. If you join social media groups that have an affinity to your business objectives, they can feed your blog interaction.

Outsource Blogging Responsibilities: For some people, blogging can be a very tedious exercise. If you are in this category, you can outsource your blogging responsibilities to professional/freelance bloggers at mutually agreed terms which may include but not limited to paying some fees. That takes the burden of tedious blog writing off your back and it makes it much easier to keep your blog updated with smart content and on schedule too.

Make Only Easy-To Read Posts: The big secret about blog effectiveness is that people don’t necessarily want to read.  They simply want useful information. Not many readers have the time and patience to read long and complicated articles. For this reason, a blogger must always strive to make easy to read blogs. Expert bloggers recommend the use of short paragraphs, breaking up long sentences and the use of appropriate formatting for blogs to make for easy reading and comprehension. After writing a blog post, you may choose to read it out loud yourself. That way, you can easily identify if the content doesn’t flow as expected.

Encourage Feedback from your Readers: Encouraging feedback from your readers is a great way to keep them engaged and to collect useful information for your blogging efforts. Have close relatives and friends read your blog and give useful advice how it can be improved upon particularly in terms of content and style. If you want to do exceptional work in your blog, you need to get sincere inputs from some other persons who believe in you.

Consider Guest-Blogging: For more inbound traffic, you can reach out to other marketers and reach a deal as a guest blogger. Guest blogging can help you to feed your own blog readership because when blog readers see your posts on associated websites, they follow the links to your blogs. Guest blogging helps to build your online reputation. That translates to more inbound traffic to your own blog.

Pay attention to your Industry: Paying attention to your industry is how your blog can be more useful and better noticed. Take note of what is trending in the industry and what others are saying. That way, you can craft great blogs that will make your brand to stay relevant in your marketplace. If your blog speaks with authority as some kind of expert in your industry, it gets better attention. This you can do by using your blog to react to current events in your industry, provide solutions and recommendations, and contribute to trending discussions on important industry topics. By doing so, you’ll not only be creating more content, this content will help your website to rank higher in Google SERPs. That inadvertently helps to establish your brand as a voice of authority and expertise in your industry.

Create Amazing Headlines: Yes indeed! Amazing headlines easily grab readers’ attention many of who never really get to read the full blog anyway. Marketing experts reveal that many more people habitually read headlines than read the real content. That’s why they advise that bloggers should always make the headline the most crucial piece in their content.

Share Customer Stories: Yeah, every customer always has a unique story to tell. These stories can be a treasure trove of information for more blog posts. If these stories are success stories, so much the better! Through such stories, you can seize the opportunity to celebrate these customers. This in turn will help to highlight the contribution of your business to their success stories. As an added blogging advantage, customer stories usually take less time to write since you do not have to create content out of nowhere. It is as simple as calling up your customers and asking them to share their success stories. That helps you to create happier customers in addition to getting valuable information for your blog content.

5 Cost-Effective Ways to Harness the Power of Social Media

No question about it, social media has made tremendous impact on digital marketing. Aside the huge popularity of social media, sharing marketing messages on the platforms is relatively very easy and effective. Even though the competition in digital marketing is tough and hugely challenging, social media helps to ease things up a bit for many marketers. With over 4 billion active users on social media at the moment with most logging into at least one of the platforms daily, digital marketers cannot ask for a more fertile marketing environment. The icing on the cake is that marketing therein is hugely cost-effective. If you visualize social media as some kind of Public Square where everyone interacts freely, you don’t really need to spend any money for this interaction since it is an open space for everyone. However, standing out and getting noticed in such free space for everyone has its own challenges. Marketers can always weave their ways around these challenges if they have the right marketing strategies and are consistent enough to make a real difference out there. That too is not at a great expense.

 

Here are 5 cost-effective ways to market on social media without stressing yourself financially.

1. Go Live on Videos: Marketing videos are very easy to make and easy to deploy on social media. You make more impact as a marketer when your audience hears directly from the “horse’s mouth.” This impact is more when you endeavor to go live on the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Marketing with live videos on these platforms is a great way for your audience to meet you live. That is hugely impacting and it is a free social media feature to boot.

2. Pay Genuine Attention to Your Audience: Make a habit of talking to and listening to your audience. By doing so, they feel cared for and do reciprocate as well. There is no question about it. Everyone likes attention particularly when that attention looks genuine. If and when your social media followers feel like you are giving them genuine attention, they will key into your content and support you. You can practically demonstrate this attention by devoting quality time to read comments/inquiries on your posts and respond to them all. By doing so, you are showing real concern and attention to what bugs your audience. They reciprocate and respond to your marketing messages as if it is person to person real time. That can be hugely impactful.

3. Be Consistent: There is no better way to show consistency than to show up every day. If you do, your audience will like and appreciate you better. Consistency helps you to build a connection with your target audience and imprint your brand in their minds. It makes you easily recognizable as a brand allowing others to find and notice you online with relative ease. Aside making regular and qualitative social media posts, you can ensure consistency in your social media profiles if you set them up using the same avatars, logos, descriptions and tone to make for easy recognition.

4. Make your Posts Creative and Interactive: Out there on social media, everyone is making a post every minute of the day. That is really a very huge trove of posts. For your posts to stand out from the crowd, you must endeavor to be creative in crafting your posts and making them interactive. No question about it, lots of people love the creativity offered by social media stories and marketing pitches. Always have that at the back of your mind when designing your posts particularly when such posts involve product launches, discounts, price adjustments, promos, and special announcements. If you are so inclined, you can post special snippets of your day-to-day life at work to give your audience some behind-the-scenes ideas about what you do and how you do it in your business. You can create quizzes, a poll, host a Q&A session and even make jokes to attract and engage the attention of your audience. These are all free but very effective marketing tools on social media.

5. Incorporate Hashtags Generously: Marketers use hashtags as little communities of content online. They do so by pairing their content with the right and appropriate hashtags. When they do this, the content automatically becomes part of these specific communities. That helps the content with very cheap online visibility. When your content is appropriately tagged, hashtags have the power and authority to help multiply your engagement provided they are correctly used. Many online searchers rely on hashtags to locate posts online that are relevant to their interests. That makes the use of hashtags some fantastic, cost-effective and incredible way to get your business noticed online. As a marketer, you can either create your own unique hashtags, or you latch on to any hashtags relevant to your business and content. Whichever you use, be sure it makes sense and relevant enough to help online searchers locate your business and your content.

Wrapping Up

Social media is now very deep and still developing. The reason digital marketers cannot afford to overlook social media in their marketing activities. If you are a creative marketer wanting to cut back on marketing costs, there is a lot you can do to leverage social media. The foregoing tips are very handy in that quest. Even if these tips will help you to save on some marketing money, to get good results, you must invest some more of your time and efforts. In the long term, it is worth the while for you to put some more efforts into finding the right tools, resources, and platforms that will help you build a sustainable online marketing strategy at minimal financial costs.

10 Success Tips for Online Marketing

The intriguing thing about online marketing is that many are making millions with it while millions of others are failing miserably. There is tendency to ask, what exactly these other millions are not doing right that is responsible for their failures. The answer lies in style, tactics and techniques. What then do they need to do or do better to succeed in online marketing? You’ll find the answer in these here tips.

1. Register Your Website on Many Search Engines: The Internet happens to have many search engines that do about the same things for internet searchers. They are responsible for directing and sending internet searchers to different websites depending on the information they are searching for. The major ones are Google.com, Yahoo.com, Excite.com, Bing.com, Yandex.com, Altavista.com, Lycos.com, and the likes. You can register your website in as many search engines as you want since registration is free of costs. Alternatively, you can use FreeWebSubmission.com to submit your website free to thousands of search engines. The more search engines your website is registered or indexed on, the better it is for your organic traffic.

 
 
2. Have a Clear Marketing Goal: You must design and build a unique website with your marketing goal in mind. This goal must be clear, concise and achievable. Websites can serve multi-purposes so take extra care to make sure aside from your main marketing goal, your website is flexible enough to serve other digital purposes. If however out of your website you can sell products/services, nurture leads, advertise your business, and build your customer base, market content and lots more, your website is great.

3. Have a Promotion Plan: The internet is a hugely competitive space for digital marketers. Millions of business websites are out there competing for surfers’ attention. To be able to compete effectively in a scenario like that, you must have a workable promotional plan in place and make it an integral part of your marketing strategy. As expert marketers like to advise, if you want to sell real good, be ready to promote vigorously. A good promotional plan helps that process.

4. Experiment Marketing Techniques: Yeah, without experimentation, it is difficult to know for sure what works and what doesn’t in your marketing. This is why you must experiment with marketing techniques to know what works best for your type of business. Most experienced marketers mastered the ropes through this type of experimentation with marketing techniques. You too can do same.

5. Keep a Keen Eye on Your Competition: Some expert marketers even advise outright spying on your competition. The reason is simple. If you follow your competition closely on social media and monitor their websites, it is possible to know what they do in their marketing activities and even why they do it. That is one great way to glean a few tricks/techniques from their activities to help improve on your own techniques. If you monitor your competitors' websites frequently, it will help you not only to generate new ideas, but to always think about doing something better and offering more and better tools to help your customers online. That way, you can become more competitive and even to beat your competitors in their game if you are smart enough.

6. Save on Marketing Costs: This is hugely imperative for the survival of your business. The more you save on your marketing costs, the better for your bottom line, revenues and profits. Consider a toll-free number to take orders and get feedback from your customers to save costs. Email marketing automation is also cost saving. WhatsApp calls, chat bots and Artificial Intelligence AI are all cost-saving for your marketing efforts.
 
7. Be Flexible in Your Marketing: Marketing flexibility combines effectively with marketing experimentation. You never know for sure what really works, when it really works and through what channels. Flexibility allows you to make changes as needed even in your marketing strategy as the need arises. Make your website interactive in nature. That is what helps you to get the right feedback you need to make changes from time to time. No matter how much you earlier planned your website, make it flexible enough to accommodate changes based on what you learn during your marketing operations.

8. Promote Your Website Widely: Aggressive marketing involves aggressive promotion. Any and every opportunity you have, never fail to promote your website widely. You can always up your promotion game by including your email address and website URL on all your corporate stationery and product packaging. Business cards and complimentary gifts/correspondence must be used effectively to promote your website. If you have any mass advertising you decide to carry out, be sure to have concise addresses/contacts where you can be easily reached. Expert marketers recommend the use of active ads, in which with a click, the navigator will arrive directly at your site.

9. Position Your Website for Referrals: Referrals are always a great traffic source for marketers. Your website must therefore be positioned for referrals. If for instance you have an extensive line of products for sale, by way of referrals, you can ask your website visitors for information about their needs so that you can program the site to recommend a certain product/service to meet these needs. What this means is that if you are offering these options, you are simply offering your customers just what they are looking for. That translates to a very valuable service for your customers.

10. Don’t Ignore Feedback: Every marketer needs feedback to help improve on what they are doing. If you are not getting enough feedback in your marketing efforts, you can pointedly ask for feedback from your potential customers and customers. You can for instance ask your website visitors if they want to be notified about price slashes or new products/services or about an offer you plan to launch into the market. If you have built a credible email list over time, sending these notifications by email becomes very easy and effective.

Tips to Boost the ROI of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns are readily one of the most affordable and cost-effective online marketing strategies for most marketers. Marketers resort to email marketing to save costs, widely each out to customers and potential customers, drive sales/revenues, nurture leads, and gain more customers. Marketers rely hugely on emails to maintain a strong relationship with customers and to build their brands. You can easily measure the effectiveness of your emails. That makes emails ready marketing tools to drive Returns-On-Investment, ROI for your business. Emails allow you to optimize and fine-tune your marketing campaigns to drive ROI that outperforms many other marketing channels. For this reason, smart marketers are always in search of better ways to use emails in their marketing campaigns to make the campaigns more effective and profitable. One of such ways is to use emails effectively well to boost ROI. These here tips can be of help to you in your own email marketing campaigns.

 
 
Include Call-To-Action, CTA in Your Emails

If you’ve ever opened a marketing email and you find it difficult to understand what the marketer is really up to, you’ll realize the importance of CTAs in emails. A huge percentage of emails without CTAs usually end up in trash bins. I doubt if you can afford such huge waste in your own marketing efforts. Emails without CTAs don’t convert. If your marketing efforts are not converting, you are simply wasting your precious time and resources. For your emails to convert at a higher rate, you must include a conspicuous CTA to tell your recipients what action you want them to take. That action if taken helps your conversions. Simple CTAs marketers like to use are: “Click here for more info”, “Click here for Discount Coupon”, “Pre-Order Now” and suchlike messages.

Diligently Track Your Email Deliverability

Diligently tracking emails helps to measure their effectiveness and there are useful online tools to get it done in a fairly accurate manner. Metrics like emails opening rates, click-through rates, deliverability rates and revenue generated are all important metrics marketers need to measure to help drive ROI. When your emails are not reaching their targets, they are not even opened and they don’t help generate revenue for your marketing efforts, they’re as good as useless. Therefore, you must always make sure your emails are optimized and well-crafted with simple marketing language and with a dash of good aesthetics to make them attractive to recipients. That is the best way to get them to escape sperm filters and to reach their targets. These days, with more advanced sperm filters now in use, they can easily detect and filter out what they consider “junk” based on some spam-trigger words included in the subject line and body of email messages. It gets that technical so adequate care must be taken to always draft emails that are deliverable and can be tracked for effectiveness. Only such emails manage to help ROI better.

Segment Your Email List

If you want your email campaigns to help boost ROI for your business, you must divide and break down your email list into as many different segments as possible. Doing so makes marketing segmentation easy and effective. Find out what works best for your marketing campaigns and do your segmentation based on it. It is a marketing reality that not all your email recipients want the same things or are influenced by the same messages. Segmentation allows you to send different types of emails to different groups depending on what each group needs. The most effective emails are the mails specially created to cater to these needs. These are the emails that greatly help to boost ROI.

Humor Your Email Recipients to Action

For email effectiveness, you can tactically deploy humor and shock value in your subject lines. What you want is for your subject email line to easily command attention and trigger the recipient to click on it. You can achieve that if your emails manage to stand out from the dozens of other emails competing for attention in your recipients’ inboxes. Humor and shock value can at times help pull the tricks to earn your emails desirable attention even amidst strong competition from several other emails dropping in your recipients’ inboxes. For your offer to be noticed, your emails must first be opened. If not opened, you are simply marketing in vain. If humor helps to get your mails opened and not quickly trashed, so much the better for your email marketing campaigns. Trashed emails stand no chance at all of generating any kind of returns and therefore cannot be of any help to ROI.

Optimize Your Emails for Mobile

With increasing use of mobile devices worldwide, it is safe to assume that a high percentage of your marketing emails will be read on mobile devices. That has very significant marketing implications. Mobile emailing is growing so rapidly that it has become imperative for marketers to optimize their emails for mobile devices. You can do this by having a custom responsive email template design or by using a branded template which is essentially a very low-cost way to make your emails stand out in attractiveness and in aesthetics. What this means is that for your emails to be effective, your subject lines must easily grab the attention of recipients, your messages must be direct and to the point, and your design must be eye-catching and must flow seamlessly on small screens typical of most mobile devices. Optimizing your emails for mobile devices takes care of all suchlike marketing essentials that somehow help to boost ROI.

6 Essential Tips to Boost your Small Business Marketing

To give your small business a boost, you’ve to explore ways to increase your marketing activities. With increased marketing, the business is better placed to generate leads, customers and sales. Even amidst stiff competition as expected with any online business, you can increase sales and make profits if your marketing is right. In that quest, if you want to have more customers than your competitors, these here six essential tips can help you out.

1. Get a Standard Website Design

As most marketers very well know, website design plays a huge part when it comes to attracting online customers. If you have the knowhow, you can design your website yourself. If not, you can use the services of professional webmasters to design a standard business website for you. What really matters in the design is that the website must be attractive, loads quickly and optimized for search engines and mobile devices. Such is the website that allows you to brand your business correctly. That is the type of website that quickly reflects your business values and is attractive and interesting enough to attract the attention of potential customers.

2. Intensify Content Marketing

Content marketing is one great way to attract traffic to your website. If you regularly put out highly informative and educational content from your website, you attract readers. That is traffic. By getting people curious to read your information, you arrest their attention. If that curiosity gets them back to your website often enough, you can use other marketing techniques to sell to them. Dishing out more free and informative content to cater to the needs of your readers, potential customers and customers through helpful blog posts and how-to videos helps to grab their attention better. That translates to traffic to your website. The more traffic you attract to your website through good content, the better your chances of getting conversions, customers and sales.

3. Market with Paid Ads

If your marketing budget can accommodate it, it is advisable to boost your small business sales with paid ads. Online, the best paid ads option is pay-per-click, PPC advertising model. Through this model, you only have to pay for the ads when someone clicks on them. That makes PPC cost-effective and it allows you to grab the user’s attention in a matter of seconds. The ads are laser-targeted, the reason they get very impressive results. Here is how they work. Online, anytime someone searches for something that you are targeting to show above your competitors, your ads show up on top of the most-optimized websites. What this means is that even though you do have to spend some bit money, it is always worthwhile since PPC ads enable you to instantly claim a high position on SERPs without having to go down the long, tedious and highly technical route of SEO. Ranking highly on SERPs translates to good organic traffic.

4. Market on Social Media

These days, if you are a small business owner and you are not marketing on social media, you are missing a lot. In this age of internet, there is hardly anyone not on social media doing one thing or another nowadays. What is really interesting about social media when it comes to online marketing is that it allows you to target the right people, in the right places and at the right times. The friends/followers you build over time on social media are people you already have many things in common with. This is the audience you can easily segment and market to, to get the best results. Your content can be shared easily on social media making it go viral in quick time if it is interesting and captivating enough.

 

5. Don’t Ignore Search Engine Optimization, SEO

If you market online, you cannot afford to ignore SEO if you want to boost sales for your small business online. A good SEO makes your website attractive and visible to search engines. Through it, search engines rank well your website in their SERPs. Search engines are programed to follow a set of rules for ranking websites. If your SEO is good, you can certainly attract more customers from online channels, courtesy of search engines. That usually emanates from good organic traffic back to your website. SEO involves all the practices supervised and enforced by search engines’ algorithms to provide the best results to internet users.

6. Add Affiliate Marketing

You can boost sales on your small business website by adding affiliate marketing to make more money. What an affiliate marketer simply does is to link a product merchant to a buyer and commission is earned from the effort. How is this done? Through your business website, you can display affiliate links and promote a merchant’s products through these links. Once a click is made through these links and a purchase is made, you earn a commission. It is as simple as that. Affiliate marketing is really feasible out of a standard business website because you leverage the internet tools therein to allow you skip all the tedious marketing tasks and still be able to make direct sales. Commissions payable are pre-negotiated and agreed upon and pay-outs become due and paid as soon as a sale is concluded.

8 Online Marketing Tips to Boost Sales

Online marketing is hugely competitive. You must know the products you are selling and stay on top of your online marketing activities if you want to boost sales. There are many things you can do ranging from optimizing your website, choosing marketing channels, rebooting your marketing strategies, writing a better blog, getting more industry info and staying on top of the trends and so on if you want to boost sales online. You can also pay more attention to social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and any other marketing techniques commonly used to effectively market products/services online. Expert marketers advise that you can experiment with different marketing methods/techniques until you come up with the best mix. And, never be afraid to try something new provided it gives you the results you want.

Here are eight things marketers can do to help them boost online sales significantly.
 
1. Make your Website User-Friendly

Your website is your business window on the internet. That is where potential customers first make contact with your business and that is where customers return to for repeat business. It is the first place every prospective buyer gets to before making their buy decisions. To enable your website serve this useful purpose efficiently, it must be well-designed and hosted on the internet. The images, photos, graphics and videos on the site must be such that enables it to be visually engaging, load quickly and interactive enough for the convenience of customers. It must be optimized for search engines and mobile devices.
 
2. Write an Informative Blog

To write an informative blog, you must first figure out your area of expertise in your business niche. That is where you can develop great blog ideas and topics that will be informative enough to showcase your expertise and attract readers. For most marketers, writing a good blog remains one of the best tools to convey value to prospective customers and establish themselves as experts in their business niche. To make your blog content more engaging and shareable, you must optimize it for SEO and incorporate multimedia channels in it. You can in addition promote the blog via your email newsletters.

3. Create Buyer Personas

You need an ideal buyer persona to help you craft your marketing messages. This is because you cannot effectively market to your target audience if you don’t know who they are and where they are. You must take quality time to come up with detailed buyer personas for the people you think would get the most benefits out of your product/service. Exactly who are the people most likely to use your product/service and how you can package the product/service to appeal to them are issues your buyer persona must clearly address. From there, you can deliberately create content specifically tailored to each persona you have created.

4. Jack-up Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the best and most cost-effective digital lines of communication with customers and potential customers. Once you have a credible email list in place, you can efficiently use it to market new products, announce promos/discounts, nurture and qualify leads, close sales, collect valuable data and so on. The icing on the cake is that you can automate your emails through some email marketing platforms to make your marketing easier and cheaper for you. Through these email automation platforms, you can host your welcome emails, follow-up emails, and appointment reminders to save you valuable time and money. When you automate your emails, it makes it easy for you to time them appropriately, send a series of emails and maintain regular communication with customers and prospective customers.

5. Brand Yourself Better
 
Your online presence must be consistent to help your branding. For this reason, the branding you use must be cohesive across all platforms and channels. Your business logo, colors, font, aesthetic layout, and other design elements should match across your website, social media channels, and email correspondence. That helps to unify your brand voice making it the same across every platform you are operating from. In addition, your brand must be easily memorable enough to be in the minds of your customers and potential customers. A combination of all these elements will help you to create a brand that is reliable and that people feel they can trust enough to do business with. The real reason you must brand yourself and your business well online.

6. Make your Listings Complete and Active

It is not only recommended you get your business listed, you must make efforts to make the listings active. Keeping your business listing active is critical to ensuring you show up in search results. This is one great way to get more reviews and to engage with more reviewers. If you have not already done so, just get your business listed on GMB, Google-My-Business, Yellow Pages and Bing. Be sure your listing is complete, cohesive and detailed across all sites. Make sure your business hours, contact information like Skype, telephones, office location, business hours, photos, site links, and other relevant business information are detailed on your listings. All these help your business to generate feedback and reviews to enable you engage with customers positively. A good engagement helps your business to build trust, generate more leads and sales.

7. Be Conversant with Industry Terms

Every business has its own language of engagement. You must be conversant with the language of your own industry even if it is industry jargon. If you are conversant with your industry terms and how to use them, it can help you to look more professional in your chosen business. That way, you can build trust with your prospective customers better and faster. However, you must always be sure you really understand a term and its proper context before using it to avoid offending or annoying anyone. The reason you must use these terms sparingly to make sense the way industry experts do.

8. Stay on Top of your Industry Trends
 
A good grasp of industry trends helps business owners to be on top of their marketing game on the internet. For this reason, it is smart to keep close tabs on industry leaders and take note of how they’re marketing themselves. That way, you’ll get to know what they are doing that you can incorporate into your own marketing strategy and what they are not doing that you can drop from yours. Follow/friend your industry leaders on their social media-handles to see what content they regularly share. Identify the major influencers in your business niche and pay attention to what they’re sharing. Regularly curate and share quality content on your social media pages, watch out for what gets the most engagement, then model your new content off of that. Stay on top of the latest industry data to avoid quoting and relying on outdated statistics in your marketing material or social posts. You can do this by checking industry publications and sites regularly for the latest information, statistics and data. Always double-check the source of any statistics/data for credibility and take note of any relevant information that can be of help to your business.

Top Digital Marketing Strategies for Creative Online Marketing

It is extremely important to have a digital marketing strategy for your online business. If the digital marketing strategy is creative enough, it will help your online business to grow faster. Since we now live in a digital era, it is easier to get your business noticed if you have a credible digital marketing strategy in place to effectively market the business online. All you really need is a bit of creativity in your marketing efforts and you’ll get good results. 

Here are some digital marketing strategies that can help you out.

Deepen Your Blogs: If you blog for business, try to deepen your blogs with more information, data and statistics to attract more readership. Bloggers have since discovered that longer and deeper blog posts generate many times more success rate and help gain new customers when compared to short blogs. Expert bloggers recommend blog posts not shorter than 750 words but depending on your type of business, shorter blog posts as low as 250-350 words do really nice particularly on social media. However, search engines tend to have a preference for longer blog posts. For example on Google, the average word count for the top-ranking posts is 1100-1300 words. Make this info a very important guide when crafting your blog posts.
 
Research Your Competitors: It is not enough to just research your competitors, you can devise creative ways to even spy on their activities. It is of great help to your marketing strategy if you have a clear idea what your competitors are doing in the market and why they are doing what they are doing. To know what is going on in the minds of your competitors is a key intelligence digital marketing info you can use to distinctly differentiate your business online. If you know about your competitors’ strategies, you can use them to design your differentiators. In digital marketing, being different will make you stand out and apart from everyone else. Being unique and different can be of great help to help your business generate more traffic, leads and customers on your website. A quick Google search of the products/services you are marketing can help you to find out helpful info about your competitors’ digital marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile: Google now reports that about 65% of its search data is attributable to mobile devices. What this means is that your business website must be optimized for mobile devices to take advantage of this huge search data. Most people prefer doing business with websites they can easily interact with online. This is why user-friendly and mobile-friendly websites tend to get more and better traffic than others.

Personalize Your Marketing: Every human being likes to feel important and appreciated. The reason personalized marketing messages are very important in digital marketing. Even if you are suggesting similar products, using the customer’s name, or sending the deals that match their location, being personal will attract such customers more. You can use conversational tones whenever possible and be sure the message specifically addresses the needs of the recipient. Encourage customers to make suggestions and even specific demands you can meet to satisfy their needs.

Market with Email: Email marketing is cost-effective and delivers good returns on investment. You can segment emails, personalize marketing messages and optimize the mails for good results. Emails can also be well timed for delivery at appropriate times anywhere around the globe. This is why email is hugely popular with marketers and it now appears to be one of the best ways to promote most businesses online. By using AI, you can automate emails to help save time, efforts and other resources. The reason email is a great strategy of online marketing for most small businesses.

Online Marketing Tips for Small Business Startups

You have a great business idea? That’s cool. If it is an online marketing business idea, and it is unique and promising, you could be on to something great as an entrepreneur. You are on your way to being your own boss. That gives you some measure of independence and power as a business owner. If you launch the business successfully on the internet, that’s great. That is the right way to go. You’ll be saving yourself from the initial huge capital outlay needed to rent office spaces and all, if the business were to have a physical space.

 
 
Here is a step-by-step way to go if your small business is a startup.

Plan and Prepare

Plan and prepare for vigorous marketing online. That entails a lot. Design a website with a good structure in place. This structure includes searcheable URLs, website titles, internal links, etc and should meet the requirements of successful SEO optimization. The website should be flexible, user-friendly and well optimized for mobile devices. It should be able to prominently display good ads banners, contact information and calls-to-action features.
 
Launch the Business

When launched, it the ideal time to grow your online presence and build your brand. That requires skillful online marketing efforts. As soon as the website is live, online marketing measures should be used to build the brand. That aims to make the brand known and to deliberately guide users to the website. You can now promote good content out of it, do affiliate marketing out of it and enter into any other sales/partnership deals out of it.

Attract Leads and Sales

Next is to attract leads, customers and sales. That calls for more marketing efforts. To reach as many users as possible and as quickly as possible, branding campaigns with banners should be deployed on high-reach pages of the website. This is the time to take all marketing steps that help to attract interested parties to your products and your brand. These efforts help to bring increased traffic to the website, leads, customers and sales. You can in addition use social media campaigns including how-to videos in order to increase engagement and attract more traffic to the website. To benefit from free organic traffic, the website must be optimized with good SEO and backlinks to make it visible and attractive to search engines.

Maximize Sales/Profit

This is the ultimate. Everyone is in business to make sales and profits. How you are able to maximize your sales and profits determines how successful your business is. To enhance this, you must continuously track your traffic, analyze metrics and take all measures to keep boosting your traffic with an effort to maximize sales and profits. That means more advertising, more optimizing and more monitoring of your traffic results. This you can do by using traffic analysis to find out where the most valuable traffic is coming from. That helps you to determine where best to concentrate your marketing activities/resources and through which channels. With continuous monitoring of your traffic in combination with quickly implemented optimization measures, you can ensure that the marketing measures you are using contribute to constant profit maximization.

Concluding Thoughts

All start-ups no matter the scale are by no means easy. That is why you need a well-thought-out business plan, financial potential and professional online marketing skills to see you through. If your mind is open to continuous learning, you can quickly acquire the right marketing skills to help your business succeed online. What you really need is to deploy marketing skills on your website to increase sales by skillfully converting your website visitors into paying customers. That is the good news. Every business you see doing great out there today was at some point a startup just like your own. 

Get your hands on it right away. Good luck!

8 Creative Ways to Increase Visibility for your Small Business Online

Your small business needs online visibility to do well online. This you can do in many ways aside from such common ways as your website, social media profiles, online listings, and ads. If you are already used to the common ways, you can now try these here eight creative ways to increase visibility for your small business online.

1. Make your Content Accessible to Everyone

This includes people with disability particularly sight impairments. You can attract more traffic to your website if you explore ways to make your website pages and emails accessible to people with disabilities. With about 25% of adults having one form of disability or another, using internet technology to market to this formidable group can help to dramatically increase your online visibility. If more people with disabilities have more and better access to your online content, it presents you a very valuable opportunity to expand your online visibility.

2. Be Sensitive to Diversity

This is diversity in race, gender, disability and peculiarities. Now more than ever before, incorporating diversity into your workplace and marketing material is more important than ever. This is the sign of the times to really embrace full diversity in your marketing activities. If you represent the diverse range of people within your audience in your online assets, you can get noticed by more people while also demonstrating social responsibility at the same time.

3. Seek Guest Posting

By exploring many ways to use guest posting to reach more potential customers, you increase your online visibility as a result. What you do is to deliberately search for any complementary businesses or local media outlets that have a strong online presence. Reach out to them to see if they’ll accept your guest posts on their website. If they do, you do not only get your business in front of their audience, but a link to your site from theirs can help to improve your SEO. You give out similar favors by accepting guest posts on your own blog. Both gestures help the online visibility of benefiting websites.

4. Leverage the Power of Videos

Your small business can tactically leverage the power of video for more shares and memorability and that is great for your online visibility. How-to videos are very easy to create and share too. Viewers usually retain over 90% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to about 10% when reading it in text. That is why videos are very effective marketing tools online. The shareability of videos is also very high particularly on popular social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and the likes.

5. Content Sharing by Employees

If a small business owner encourages his employees to share his business content with their own social networks, the visibility therefrom is great. Content shared by employees usually receives more engagements than content shared by brand channels. Small business owners can always take advantage of this by sharing content particularly blog posts with their employees and encourage them to share it on their social media networks in particular. That helps to generate more feedback and user content which search engines notice. Such content can greatly help your ranking and visibility.

6. Build Beneficial Relationships

To seek online visibility, having a good relationship with many different people is hugely beneficial. Going about it alone as a business owner might be daunting at times but factoring in other people with whom you have a strong relationship can help you in a number of ways. Many of such people who have their own audiences and relationships they routinely deal with can be of great help. People in this category who easily come to mind are content writers, loyal customers, fellow business owners, reporters, vendors, influencers, celebrities, sport personalities and so on. A connection with these connections can introduce you to their own connections. The ultimate goal is to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships from which organic opportunities can arise. A hugely beneficial network grows from there and that is great for your online visibility. 

 

7. Use Mobile-Specific Marketing Strategies

Good news for small business owners! Google is now using mobile-first indexing for all sites on the web. By this development, if you have a mobile optimized website, it helps your online visibility. In addition, with more than half of internet searches now being performed on mobile devices, your website can greatly benefit from such huge search data. If your website is mobile optimized, it helps to make sure your website pages and emails render properly on tablets and smartphones. It also seamlessly leverages mobile-specific strategies like, podcast ads, SMS marketing, voice search, mobile search ads, local SEO and so on.

8. Intensify Email Marketing

The biggest advantage of email marketing is that email recipients have already opted in to receive your emails. Unlike social media followers who merely opted to follow you, email inboxes don’t compete for info from hugely crowded news feeds. Marketing by email can be specifically targeted in both messaging and timing and the marketing responses can be very great for your visibility. They help your business with lots of opportunities to get quality exposure. Once you take quality time to build an email list over time, segment the list, create quality and highly informative content for your emails, and optimize the emails well enough, they help your business exposure/visibility tremendously.

5 Simple Ways to Improve your Small Business Online Presence with Advertising

A strong online presence means a strong small business online. Advertising helps small businesses to improve their online presence in many respects. Through advertising whether free ads or paid ads, businesses manage to show up prominently on search engines, social media feeds, and websites that your ideal customers frequent. If you rely on SEO for free ads, you can only target your audience with just keywords. But with paid-per-click, PPC ads, you can segment your audience and market directly to them with special ads. The effects these types of ads have on your online presence are varied but they all work all the same.

Here are some select 5 of many different ad options you can use to increase your online presence.

1. Display ads

Display ads may not have high engagement rates like search ads but they still earn your business a lot of impressions and exposure. This they effectively do by putting your business in front of custom audiences based on their interests, behaviors, types of websites and apps they frequent, and even places they’ve visited. Just like social media ads, display ads allow you to have more options for branding, color, and creativity.

2. Search Ads

Search ads depend on the creative use of keywords for effectiveness. When they are paid ads, they can even be more effective. Paid search ads do not only help your business to land at the top of the SERPs of search engines, they also manage to reach your target customers when they have the highest intent. That increases their effectiveness to grow your online presence. It is a win, win, situation for your business if the business benefits from search ads and paid ads. These ads serve to get your site to rank in both organic and paid results for a keyword. By doing so, the chances of getting a click on one or the other are higher and your business benefits immensely from the exposure.

3. Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads work to appear in front of users who have previously expressed interest in your business. Such interest derives from interacting with any of your previous ads or an earlier visit to your website. This is a great and hugely effective way to maintain a presence with prospects as they engage elsewhere on the web. You can repackage ads/info based on their previous interests and use it to get them back to your business.

4. Google Local Service Ads

Most small businesses are local and Google capitalizes on this fact to target ads. Google Local Service Ads are very effective ads. This is because they manage to show up at the top of Google SERPs in card form. If Google rates your business highly, it can label the business “Google Guaranteed.” You will notice this when you go through the application process. Your ads will appear with a green “Google Guaranteed” badge under your name. That kind of helps your business to make for a stronger presence in that section of the results.

5. Social Media Ads

No question about it social media ads are great ads you can use to improve your online presence. This is because social media ads have higher reach and engagement rates than organic posts. They can be better targeted too. While social media users have less intent than on search engines, social ads come with stronger targeting capabilities and more creative freedom. In addition, you can easily leverage the power of video ads on social media particularly if you are marketing out of the very popular social media platforms, like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, Instagram and the likes.

How to Improve your Small Business Online Presence with Listings

You can improve online presence for your small business by listing it on popular directories. Even though there are thousands of online directories out there on the internet, if you create listings for your business on the most popular directories, it helps the business to show up in many more places online. In addition, links to your website from popular directories do serve as valuable citations for your business. Google takes these links into consideration when ranking your site and that helps your online presence a great deal.

Here is what you can do if you want to use listings to improve online presence for your small business.

Get Your Business on the Heavy Hitters

It is always advisable for small business owners to target the most popular directories right from the outset. These are the “heavy hitters.” They tend to dominate the top 10 on the SERPs of most search engines. For this reason, many of the smaller directories out there usually aggregate information from these big directories. The big directories get tens of millions of visits per month and your business can benefit from this huge traffic to improve its online presence. Just try out big hitters like, Google-My-Business, GMB (the star-boy of the lot), Facebook, Yelp and Bing. You may also consider Foursquare if you want to take advantage of being included in thousands of local apps and services.
 
Maintain and Monitor your Listings

Thousands of directories across the web do pull information from one another. That can lead to inconsistencies or inaccuracies over time on your listings. You must take deliberate steps to check this because it spells a very bad omen for your online presence. You know why? Most consumers easily lose trust in local businesses if they find out incorrect or inconsistent information in their listings. And you know why? Every business thrives on trust. As much as practicable, you must make out valuable time to maintain and monitor all your listings from time to me. Alternatively, you can use the services of a listing service provider to help you out.

Populate Every Listing Field with Accurate Information

You must be very meticulous about this for obvious reasons. Just like social media feeds and search engine results pages, listing results are determined by algorithms. This means that the quality and consistency of your listing matters a great deal for you to get noticed. All vital information about your business must be listed accurately in the correct boxes or spaces provided. Vital information like your website, business niche/category, hours of business, business address, and contact info and so on are hugely important in your listings. As much as possible, make sure the information you provide is identical across all the listing sites you are using.
 
Make your Review Strategy Proactive

Strategically, reviews have perhaps the most powerful influence over how high you show up in directory results. That is in addition to the fact that they are one of the top ranking factors for Google local search. These are hugely important factors for your online presence. For this reason, there is a need for you to have a proactive strategy in place to keep a steady stream of reviews coming in. The more reviews you get, the higher your business is ranked by search engines and the stronger your online presence becomes. Constantly monitoring your reviews is very crucial because of how important the reviews are for your online presence.