Best and Most Effective Marketing Channels for eCommerce Business

Online, eCommerce businesses always have many effective channels they can take advantage of to reach and engage with their target audience. The real challenge however is how to choose the right mix of marketing channels to meet your needs. This is more so when you factor in that these channels are really crucial to the survival of your eCommerce business. You really need them to help you drive traffic, increase conversions and boost your online store’s revenue. In this quest, let’s discuss hereunder some of the best and most effective marketing channels for eCommerce businesses out there on the internet.

Content Marketing

Content marketing entails creating valuable, informative and engaging content that resonates with your target audience. For best results, this content must be packaged in form of blog posts, videos, infographics, and suchlike formats to make it easily shareable. Choose a niche and consistently create content on it that can help promote the products you are marketing. Once your content is educational, informative and attractive, it can help attract organic traffic to your eCommerce store.

Affiliate Marketing

You can set up an affiliate marketing program on reputable affiliate platforms like Strong Future International, SFI. On this platform, affiliates help to promote your products and earn a commission on each sale they generate. It is a performance-based marketing strategy that can widely expand your reach. All you need do is to collaborate with content marketers in your niche to promote your products. Content marketers that help to promote your products through their unique affiliate links earn a commission on any sales generated through the link.

Social Media Marketing

The power of social media lies in its huge popularity. With billions of users on some of the platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram and Pinterest, social media marketing can be quite essential to the success of eCommerce businesses. All you need do is to have accounts on the most popular platforms, consistently create engaging content, run targeted ads, and utilize shoppable posts to showcase your products to a vast and diverse audience. If you have the link to your eCommerce store on the content you post on social media, it helps direct traffic to your eCommerce store.

Email Marketing

Email marketing may be “old school” but it remains one of the most effective channels for nurturing leads and converting them into customers. It can be a very essential marketing channel for your eCommerce store. By using email, an eCommerce store can send personalized messages to a large number of customers in a matter of seconds. Email is particularly very effective to get customers who may have abandoned their shopping carts to return to the carts by offering a discount to encourage them to complete their purchase. Emails are also very handy to send personalized product recommendations, exclusive offers, and cart abandonment reminders to keep your audience engaged by way of direct communication.

Online Marketplaces

The biggest advantage of selling online is that you can leverage the existing infrastructure of reputable platforms to promote your products. You can thus consider selling your products on popular online marketplaces like TripleClicks, Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Etsy and the likes. A major advantage of these platforms is that they already have very large built-in audiences. So, just listing your products on the platforms can effectively boost your sales. Adequate care must be taken before listing your products though because most of the platforms have specialized niches they market in.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Technically, SEO is the foundation of any successful eCommerce marketing strategy. Optimizing your website for search engines with relevant keywords ensures that your products are discoverable when potential customers search with these keywords. Effective SEO includes keyword research, on-page optimization, high-quality content creation, and link-building efforts.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

PPC Ads, particularly through Google Ads, allow you to bid on keywords and display ads at the top of search results. It is a highly effective way to drive targeted traffic to your eCommerce store if you can afford the cost even though you are required to pay only when a user clicks on your ad.

Influencer Marketing

Effectively leveraging the very wide reach of influencers in your niche can be a very powerful way to reach new audiences and potential customers. You can thus partner with influencers who align with your brand and products to create authentic, product-focused content. Influencers can help you to share your content to their large audiences. Some influencers can even help to review and recommend your products to their audiences. Some influencers that are product merchants themselves can help expose your products directly to their consumer base.

Conclusion

From the foregoing, it is easy to deduce that the best marketing channels for your eCommerce business depend on your target audience, products, and your marketing goals. Expert marketers like to advice that the best strategy is always to combine multiple marketing channels to maximize reach and impact. In this wise, ensure you regularly analyze your marketing efforts, measure results, and adapt your strategy to be sure you are effectively reaching and engaging your audience well enough in the hugely competitive eCommerce marketing landscape.

10 Feasible Channels of Affiliate Marketing for Beginners

 

With the deepening of the internet and digital marketing techniques, there are now practically no limits to the channels of affiliate marketing out there in the internet. Affiliate marketing beginners can always choose the channels that best suit them and are capable of helping them to get good revenues. Some affiliate marketing channels are characterized by short-term revenue capabilities like sharing affiliate links on social media for instance. While there are others such as building destination websites that are suitable for earning sustainable revenue for the long term. 

Experienced professionals however advise that beginners should not unduly limit themselves though. They can do well even if they choose to mix and match affiliate channels to create a stream of revenue with seasonal highs and lows.

Following are some 10 viable channels beginners can take advantage of and become good affiliate marketers:

1. Websites and Blogs: No matter how you design your website/blog, you can use affiliate links as tools, solutions, and complementary banners in the sidebar of the site. Most websites/blogs by design are topically niche sites, reviews sites, or how-to guides. All are suitable for affiliate links as tools to attract clicks to the products/services you are marketing.

2. EBooks and Courses: If you have the knowledge and expertise, you can write eBooks and use affiliate links on them. You can also design and sell a course that mentions a product, software, or service and use affiliate links on it too.
 
3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads: You can carefully search and locate affiliate programs that allow for running PPC ads. This is very important because not all affiliate programs do. To be on the safe side, if it is not clearly stated on the TOS rules of the program, make sure you obtain permission first from them to run PPC ads. Ask the program managers if direct linking or landing pages are required to do so. Without this permit, you risk getting removed from the program and the commissions you’ve earned reversed.

4. Social Media Advertising: You can leverage the wide reach of social media to gain huge coverage for your products/services. If you market on social media by running ads and posting affiliate links, it can profitably help to increase your reach. Your own following in combination with the followers of those following you help to make this process workable if they diligently share your posts to their own followers. If your following is large and engaged, boosting your own posts through the ad platform is some form of paid social media marketing that works well.
 
5. YouTube: YouTube remains the powerhouse of video content marketing. It is one of the top ways affiliates earn income. Many users usually come to YouTube to learn how to do something through videos. These how-to, well-crafted and high quality videos can become great marketing tools if they carry affiliate links in their description. Some of the videos are also used for product comparisons and reviews. You can thus make money with the affiliate links in the description and vanity codes in the videos.

6. Subscriptions: If you like to sell sports bet predictions or horoscopes, do paid marketing or professional newsletters, or even manage a subscription box; you can incorporate affiliate links to your products/services into them and earn income from subscriptions.

7. Newsletters and Email: Email marketing may be “old school” but it is still a very effective online marketing tool. What you really need is to carefully build a responsive email list and you are good to go. With this list, you can easily share relevant and timely communications/newsletters with your recipients. You can easily give your recipients discounts info, promos info and even deals on products they would need at the moment. Your email list is thus quite a valuable marketing asset you can depend on to earn money online by way of affiliate marketing.
 
8. Partnerships and Co-Branded Campaigns: You can explore the strategy of partnering with brands to promote each other with direct links or affiliate links. This you can do through blog posts, email blasts, co-sponsoring a giveaway on a third-party influencer/blogger site. By this arrangement, you can easily reach other wider audiences, track your results diligently and generate income through affiliate links. By the time you have impressive marketing stats; you can leverage these results to build larger partnerships. You get more and better marketing results doing so.

9. Product Reviews: If you have the skills, knowledge and expertise, you can be reviewing products in written content, on videos, and on social media. If you have your affiliate links on the content, it can become a great way to earn income.
 
10. SMS, Short Message Service: SMS through your smartphone and other smart devices can also be great for affiliate marketing. Just like email list, if your SMS list is responsive, you can get an audience that clicks and shops and you earn commissions. Bear in mind that most smartphone users tend to be younger. You can therefore craft and tailor your SMS messages to match your audience with the right products/services factoring in the right timing and season.

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is quite a simple business really. Anyone can get involved in affiliate marketing and make some good money in earned commissions. At its core, affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing model that rewards affiliates for generating traffic or sales through their own marketing efforts. All the affiliate does is simply to help product merchants promote products in return for a commission on the sales they help generate. The business may appear daunting at the outset but when you get really involved, you’ll discover that you too can make it in the business if you exercise some patience to follow the rules.

Here are some tested tips to help you get a foothold in the business:

Do Diligent Research & Choose a Niche: The first thing you do is to identify a niche or topic you’re passionate about or a topic you have considerable knowledge in. This will make it relatively easier for you to promote products/services you like; you are passionate about and genuinely believe in. Next is to consider the market demand, competition, and potential profitability to help you narrow down the niche you want to market in.

Consistently Create Quality Content: Content is vital in ensuring visibility for your business. If this content is of high quality, it can become the backbone of your affiliate marketing efforts. You can package this content in form of blog posts, videos, or podcasts. Whichever way you package it, always ensure it is relevant, valuable, impactful and genuine. This is the type of content that will ensure your audience trusts your recommendations. This trust is built on the quality and honesty of your content.

Carefully Choose a Platform: Online, the platform you’ll market out of is of vital importance. Many affiliate marketers leverage their blogs or websites because of their popularity. But in addition, you can also utilize social media platforms, YouTube, podcasts, or even email marketing. What is of utmost importance however is to ensure your chosen platform aligns with your target audience.

Join a Reputable Affiliate Program: There are numerous affiliate programs out there online, but when it comes to issues of affiliate programs, reputation matters a lot. This is where Strong Future International, SFI, comes highly recommended. You can also join huge networks like eBay, Amazon Associates and other niche-specific networks. You must make sure to diligently research which programs align best with your content and audience before you join.

Stay Compliant with Regulations: Every business is guided and regulated by laws, rules and guidelines. Affiliate marketing is no exception. If you want to avoid business-crippling sanctions, always make sure you comply with the laws, rules and regulations of affiliate marketing. Never fail to disclose your affiliate relationships to your audience. It’s not only ethical but often a legal requirement to do so.

Educate Yourself and Learn the Basics: You can hardly make meaningful progress in affiliate marketing if you don’t understand the basics. This is why you must familiarize yourself thoroughly with the terminology, concepts and terms. It is important to know what terms like CPA (Cost-Per-Action), PPC (Pay-Per-Click), CPC (Cost-Per-Click), and conversion rates are and why they are useful to your affiliate marketing business. To thoroughly educate yourself on the basics of affiliate marketing business, you can take advantage of the numerous online resources, courses, and webinars available out there on the internet to guide you.

Carefully Integrate Affiliate Links: If you join an affiliate program, you are issued a unique link/code to use in your promotional activities. This unique/code to products helps for easy attribution and identification of your promotional results. You can tactically integrate the links into your content organically making sure to avoid overloading your content with links. If you do, you may earn severe penalties from search engines. What is most important however is to always remember that the main aim of content creation is to overtly provide value to your audience and not just to promote sales.

Track, Analyze & Adapt: To do this effectively, you need smart analytics tools like Google Analytics. You can use these tools to track which strategies are working and which aren’t. The information and data from your tracking results will help you refine your approach, optimize your content, and increase your earnings.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate marketing as a business is vast and still evolving. If you are new in the business, the foregoing steps can help you to quickly get a handle on the business. These initial steps will help you to lay a strong foundation. Eventual success however depends on how serious and determined you are but you must be patient, persistent, and adaptable. If you stick with it, stay committed, keep learning, and let your passion guide your promotional activities, success awaits you down the road.

Top 10 Tested and Effective Marketing Strategies for New Businesses

In the wider world of digital marketing, marketing strategies cover a wide range of techniques. Technically, a marketing strategy is a long-term approach designed to achieve a specific goal or set of goals. But first you must understand your audience before you can effectively reach them with your marketing messages. These messages are usually aimed at increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or engaging a particular target audience. A good marketing strategy involves a detailed plan outlining how you intend to reach your marketing goals, the channels you plan to use, and how you’ll progressively measure your success.

 
Following are some top 10 tested and effective marketing strategies you can really depend on to grow your new business:
 
1. Affiliate Marketing: If you want to make good sales online, think affiliate marketing. It is a marketing strategy requiring affiliates to partner with product merchants to market their products/services in exchange for commissions. Affiliates earn a commission on each sale they help generate.

2. Content Marketing: This is a very popular marketing strategy among digital marketers. It simply involves consistently creating and sharing valuable content to attract and engage your target audience. For easy sharing, the content can be packaged in form of blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, etc.
 
3. Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing strategy leverages the huge popularity of social media platforms to market products/services. You can simply create accounts in the very popular social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and others to widely promote your products/services. Through these platforms, you can easily reach out to a wide audience, build and nurture relationships, and promote your products/services widely.
 
4. Email Marketing: This is one of the easiest and most cost-effective marketing strategies out there on the internet you can depend on to promote products /services. It simply involves sending emails directly to your audience to promote your products/services. With emails, you can widely share marketing newsletters, valuable and impactful content, or to communicate important business/marketing updates with your email recipients.

5. Event Marketing: Event marketing is a marketing strategy that involves hosting or participating in chosen events to promote your business. Such events are designed to engage your audience, showcase your products/services, and build relationships. Events like seminars, webinars, charity walks and local sporting derbies are great events you can use for marketing purposes.

6. Influencer Marketing: Influencers are mostly social media personalities with a large following. Influencer marketing as a strategy entails collaborating with influencers in your niche/industry to promote your products/services to their followers. Depending on the level of partnership, influencers can even endorse or recommend your products/services to their large following. They can help share your impactful content as well by this arrangement.

7. Search Engine Optimization, SEO: Technically, SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps your website rank higher in the SERPs of search engines. This is made possible by the tactical use of carefully selected keywords on your content that help search engines to find the content. When search engines rank your content high in their SERPs, it translates to good organic traffic back to your website.
 
8. Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising: PPC ads are highly targeted and affective ads even though they cost money. They involve running paid ads on platforms like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to reach a larger audience. With PPC, you are only required to pay for each click delivered to your website. PPC ads can be very effective to drive targeted traffic to your site.

9. Video Marketing: Video marketing strategy is gradually increasing in popularity among digital marketers because of its relative effectiveness to drive traffic. Video marketing involves carefully creating and sharing high-quality videos to engage your audience and promote your products/services. Some of the most effective videos suitable for this purpose are ho-to videos, product demos, tutorials, customer testimonials, etc.
 
10. Referral Marketing: This is yet another cost-effective marketing strategy. It thrives on customer loyalty. Referral marketing simply involves encouraging your customers to refer your business to their friends, colleagues, acquaintances or family in exchange for rewards. These rewards can be in form of discounts, free products, token gifts like eBooks or free branded products. 

7 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for New Businesses

Digital marketers see marketing strategy as a long-term business approach aimed to achieve a specific goal or set of goals. These strategic goals are many and varied but in digital marketing the goals are mainly aimed at increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or engaging a particular target audience. They involve detailed plans outlining how you intend to reach your goals, which channels you will use, and how you will measure your success. Digital marketing strategies usually cover a wide range of techniques that include Email marketing, PPC ads, affiliate marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media and influencer marketing. However, the best and most effective strategies depend on your business goals, target audience, budget, and the industry of your business.

 
In today’s business world, digital marketing strategy is a must particularly if your business is new and you want it to survive the fierce competition online. Out there on the internet, it is about the most cost-effective way to reach a large audience, engage them, and convert them into customers. Understanding your audience and their needs is really the key to a successful digital marketing strategy. That entails providing real value for them not by merely pushing products/services to them. Doing so not only helps to improve customer satisfaction but also fosters customer loyalty and drives long-term business success.
 
Following are some 7 tested and tried digital marketing strategies that can greatly benefit your new business:

1. Content Marketing: Content marketing is readily the most popular marketing strategy among digital marketers. It simply involves creating and sharing valuable content to attract, engage, and convert your audience. Your content can only successfully do that if it is of high quality, informative, impactful and even entertaining.
 
2. Social Media Marketing: These days, social media is where most people are at 24/7. It has become one huge market out there where millions of people can be reached with marketing messages. This is more so on the very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter (or X as is presently known), LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes. These social media platforms offer a great way to reach your audience, engage them, and promote your products/services to hundreds of millions of people.
 
3. Email Marketing: Email marketing may be “old school” but it remains a very effective marketing strategy. It is cheap to use, convenient and cost-effective as well. Email marketing allows you to directly communicate with your audience. With email marketing, you can easily send in a matter of seconds, marketing messages to hundreds of thousands of your subscribers by just pressing a computer button. Through email, you can easily provide your subscribers with valuable content and promotional messages of your products/services.

 
4. Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing leverages heavily on the huge popularity of social media. Most influencers are high profile social media personalities. Influencer marketing involves collaborating with influencers in your niche/industry to reach their very large followers to promote your products/services. Some influencers can directly endorse your products/services and even recommend them to their large followers.

5. Search Engine Optimization, SEO.  SEO is a digital marketing technique that helps to make your content visible to search engines. With the tactical use/insertion of carefully selected keywords on your content, search engines can rank the content high in their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic to your website. If well utilized, SEO can help your website to rank higher in search results. This helps to drive good organic traffic to your site.
 
6. Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy that involves partnering with affiliates to promote your products/services in exchange for a commission on each sale generated. Affiliates are independent business persons who decide to help product merchants promote their products/services in exchange for commissions on each sale they help generate. They do this by promoting unique affiliate links/codes on their content for easy attribution and payment of commissions on the sales generated through the links/codes.

7. PPC Advertising: PPC ads are very effective ads because they are laser-targeted. These ads allow you to reach a larger audience and drive traffic directly to your site. These ads are best run on paid ads platforms like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads. You only get to pay for each click when delivered to your website. PPC ads may cost good money but they are very effective ads and therefore highly suitable for new businesses.

8 Basic Tips to Choose the Right Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs now appear to be one of the most popular methods of making money online. The reasons are not farfetched. But, carefully selecting the right affiliate program is critical if you want to make money in affiliate marketing. Because there are countless platforms and products out there on the internet (and many are scams), it is of paramount importance to diligently research programs before committing yourself to any one particular program. This blog post will discuss some basic tips that can help you to make this all-important choice.

1. Understand the Different Types of Affiliate Programs

To make the right choice, you must first make sure you fully understand the different types of programs out there. This is because each type of program has its own advantages and downsides. It is hugely important therefore to research and compare different options before making a decision. Among digital marketers, the commonest programs are: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program which pays you a commission for every visitor who clicks on an ad or link on your site. There is also Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) which pays you a commission for every sale you generate. You have Cost-Per-Lead (CPL) which pays you for every lead you generate and Pay-For-Performance (PFP) programs as well. You can settle for what you prefer based on your marketing inclinations and capabilities.
 
2. Analyze Integration with Your Website/Blog

Since you will be marketing out of your own website/blog, it is important to analyze before making a choice how easy and convenient it will be to connect the affiliate program to your website/blog. This makes it imperative for you to look for programs that offer an easy-to-use platform. Reputable affiliate platforms like Strong Future International, SFI can help you to quickly and easily add links and track marketing results real time. Do not ignore user experience on the site particularly how easy it is for someone to click through from your website to the affiliate program website in a matter of seconds.

3. Check out Affiliates’ Reviews

Yes, the experience of existing affiliates on the program is an important consideration too. You can get this through affiliate reviews or feedback. Be sure to check out reviews from existing affiliates before deciding which affiliate program to opt for. With the feedback, you can access valuable insight into the program that can help you to make an informed decision. These reviews can shed light on the customer service, commission rates and frequency of payment, marketing methods and tools, product selection and other features of the program.

4. Research and Compare Potential Programs

It is important to research and compare potential programs before making a choice. The most important factors to consider are: product selection, commission rate, customer support and payout options. It advisable to analyze each program carefully, to see if it aligns with what you want. This is because some programs may offer higher commissions but have fewer products or lower commissions and many products. In some cases, there could be more diverse selections but lower payouts. If you manage to settle for the right balance, it can be key to helping you to make good money online with the right affiliate program. Strong Future International, SFI is a reputable affiliate program that offers many favorable conditions and comes highly recommended here.

5. Look for Credible and Reputable Programs

Strong Future International, SFI is one affiliate program that is credible and reputable to work with. It has a very good track record and valuable experience in the business. Even in terms of payment of good commissions, SFI comes highly recommended. Aiming for programs with a generous commission structure like SFI is a viable way to maximize your earnings potential in affiliate marketing. Its methods of determining commission payment, frequency of payment, methods and channels of payment are foolproof and of international standards. What people say about SFI are testimonies to these facts.

6. Look Out for Other Benefits

Yes, aside commissions payment, there are other equally important benefits derivable from affiliate programs. These should be considered as well before making a choice. Some of these considerations include marketing methods and tools, in-house 24/7 support services for troubleshooting or assistance, discounts and bonuses available. If you know about these extra incentives well in advance, it can help you to make a more informed decision about any program you settle for.

7. Consider the Needs of Your Audience

Before settling for an affiliate program, it is important to consider the needs of your audience. Make sure you fully understand their interest and the products/services you are promoting will be relevant to them. Even the content you produce must resonate with them if you want it to drive the desired results.

8. Regularly Track & Monitor Your Results

Tracking is of immense importance because that is about the only way to know if you are doing well. So, before selecting an affiliate program, make sure it has the right in-house tools to track and monitor your results regularly. This way, you will have the right info and data to optimize your campaigns for optimum benefits from the program. From the analytics info, you will be able to identify any issues or areas that require improvement. If you do, you can then take quick action, make the right adjustments as needed to put things right.

Summing Up

If you are really keen to make money online by way of affiliate marketing, choosing the right affiliate program is of paramount importance. The foregoing tips can be of immense help to you in that quest. It is advisable to take all eight of them into account before making a choice on the right affiliate program to work with. With time, you will eventually discover you did right.

5 Effective Ways to Attract New Customers to Your Online Business

If you want your e-commerce store to grow quickly, you must device effective ways to attract customers to the store. Explore all credible ways to spread the word very widely online about your business and your products/services. Without a steady flow of customers to your store, it can be pretty difficult for you to make sales or even see any profits. This is because you can’t expect consumers to buy what they pretty much know nothing about. Getting your products/services to where consumers can easily find them online becomes the real challenge. This is where this blog article is really relevant. If you want to attract customers to your online business, the following 5 ways among the many options available to you are quite effective.

 
1. Online Advertising

This is done mainly through Google PPC ads. Online adverting is a web-based way to promote your products/services through digital channels. Advertisers who are interested in using this service can link up with a major search engine marketing service provider like Google Ads. PPC ads are highly targeted ads by Google. That makes them highly effective too. Advertisers are only expected to pay for the number of clicks delivered to their products through their digital ads hosted by Google in its domain.

2. Affiliate Marketing

These days, affiliate marketing is increasingly becoming a very popular strategy for advertising. In this business model, affiliates help product merchants to promote products/services in exchange for commissions. These affiliates widely promote these products/services to their own audiences to attract sales. So, products merchants can thus effectively partner with online influencers like bloggers, YouTubers, content creators, and social media personalities to promote their products to very wide audiences by incorporating their advertising into their content. These influencers get paid a percentage of the sales they generate as affiliates. Product merchants can even sponsor blog posts or online videos in exchange for the creator including a brief segment spreading the word about their products/services in their content. This is one very effective way to reach the huge masses who are already consuming content from these creators/influencers.

3. Social Media Marketing

There are many social media influencers presently earning good commissions from helping product merchants spread the word about their products/services. With over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, social media has become one huge market out there on the internet. You can take advantage of its huge popularity to get more customers for your business by having accounts on the very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can take good advantage of the popularity of these platforms not only to widely promote your products/services but also to spread the word far and wide about special deals, promos and new arrivals. Social media is also great for building and strengthening your brand’s image. Attracting new customers to your business depends largely on your brand’s image.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Strategies

SEO strategies are highly effective to attract organic traffic to your website. They involve the tactical use of chosen keywords in your content to get search engines to rank the content high in their SERPs. So, if you incorporate the right SEO strategies into your brand’s online marketing campaign, your website is likely to show up on the SERPs, (search engine results pages) higher up than your competitors. That means more and better organic traffic than your competition. Any online business that ignores SEO strategy is not likely to survive the huge competition in online marketing. Many online businesses today like to attribute their marketing success largely to the SEO strategies they adopted in their marketing campaigns.

5. Pop-Up Events

Pop-up events are local activities really. They are a great way to put a human face on your brand. They can effectively help you to connect with your local community in an intimate way. Pop-up events such as local business fairs and farmers’ markets are great opportunities to put your business on the map for locals. They bring your business right to their door steps. You can easily attract more local customers if you promote products that are very popular with local people. This is why pop-up events are more effectively used and very popular with businesses in the food, personal care, health and wellness industries.

Last Line

From the foregoing, I guess you now know some of the best ways to attract customers to your online business. You can now design and deploy your own strategies to promote your brand and attract new customers. For best results, it is advisable to choose a combination of these methods rather than relying on just one. Once you launch an effective marketing campaign using these methods, you’ll no doubt notice a remarkable change in the flow of customers to your business. That’s worth giving it a try, will you?

Most Effective Combinations of Digital Marketing Methods

Most Digital Marketers prefer a combination of digital marketing methods as an effective strategy to promote their businesses. If however you are more comfortable using digital marketing strategies separately in your own business, all well and good. Most experts however recommend a combination of methods for best results. Let’s take a look at how various digital marketing methods pair well together and why.

Content Marketing and Most Other Digital Marketing Methods

Among experienced digital marketers, content marketing is readily one of the most popular digital marketing methods. These days, content creation is almost becoming synonymous with digital marketing. As a traffic-attracting technique, consistently creating high-value, impactful and branded content that resonates with your ideal target audience is imperative. This is the content that invariably adds value to the lives of your audience. So, the higher the value you add to your audience’s lives, the more likely they are going to trust you and thus ultimately convert into loyal paying customers. That scenario can be really great for the business of marketers. How then does content marketing combine with other digital marketing methods?

•    Your blogs and articles can be condensed into Tweets, Facebook and Instagram reels.
•    High-value content provides influencers and affiliates with more valuable and useful information to share, leverage and link to.
•    Good content can be optimized for SEM, PPC and SEO to attract targeted traffic.
•    Good content creation gives you an endless repository of information that you can repurpose into your email marketing campaigns.

SEM, PPC, and SEO

A combination of SEM, PPC and SEO is another digital marketing strategy that works well.
•    If you have a good SEO on your content, you can start attracting valuable organic traffic to your website. If you then use a combination of SEM and PPC alongside, it can increase your potential catchment area significantly.
•    SEM and PPC combine to deliver highly targeted and quick results almost instantaneously.
•    For monetization purposes, you can thus combine SEM and PPC to earn money through your website in the short term, while building up your organic traffic as well via SEO.
•    SEO may take some time to get right but once it is in place, it allows you to effectively own your organic traffic and maintain a constant stream of revenue generation via your website over a prolonged period. It is therefore really great for passive income opportunity.

Social Media and Video Marketing

Social media and video marketing are a great combination as a marketing strategy. Social media lends its huge popularity to the combination while video brings its strong visual power on board. This is why the two strategies can pair beautifully together. It is even more effective with popular social media platforms that attract an audience who prefers consuming visual content. For instance:

•    You can create entertaining and educational how-to videos to build trust and teach people about your products/services and how the products/services can best be of help to them.
•    You can occasionally throw in a highly targeted video ad.
•    You can effectively market on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok that specialize in video content.
•    To a lesser degree, you can also market in all major social media platforms that support multiple video formats.
•    You can take full advantage of the easy way to share content on all major social media platforms to get as much reach as possible on your video content. If any of your videos manages to go viral, so much the better for your marketing efforts.
 
Audio Marketing and Affiliate Marketing

Since podcasting and online radio are increasingly becoming popular with digital marketers, a combination of both with affiliate marketing can yield significantly valuable results. Here’s is how:

•    These two marketing strategies used together can help to quickly spread your marketing messages far and wide to as many new prospective customers as possible.
•    Affiliate celebrity products endorsement is a very powerful way to get new customers.
•    Influencers, who have a popular podcast, can help to grow your brand awareness significantly because many are “industry experts” with tremendous following.

SEO and Email Marketing

SEO and Email marketing as a combined strategy can work wonderfully well together if well executed. If you can effectively combine SEO and email marketing, you are essentially creating three new and more effective ways of attracting new customers. First, organically, via SEO, second, through a compelling sales copy, and third through further nurturing in your mailing list. Here is how:

•    Since it is very important for you to have a responsive email list in place, with SEO, you can build it organically. An organically built email list has the best possible chances of converting well.
•    You can use powerful lead magnets like eBooks to get users to join your email list.
•    Your website visitors, who don’t follow the CTA at the end of your eBook, can be further nurtured by way of follow-up emails.
•    If your eBook is valuable and free, it will be powerful enough to grow your email list. Visitors who want to claim your free eBook will be required to share their emails and opt into your mailing list in exchange for the eBook.
•    Your email newsletters can be well optimized with SEO to attract relevant organic traffic that can enhance your conversions.

Wrapping Up

From the foregoing, you can see that the ingenuity of marketers when combining marketing strategies is hugely important. Therefore, it is advisable to always go for what works best for you in whatever combinations. Since it is good marketing results you want, whatever combination of strategies that gives you the results is what is best for your business. It is advisable therefore that you should not limit yourself to just one form of digital marketing. Be open to all the available digital marketing strategies and their combinations and your business will be remarkably better for it.

7 Digital Marketing Techniques that Deliver Quick Results

Digital marketing is a vast and rapidly evolving marketing field with many strategies and tactics. If you are a digital marketer, the results you get can never be really good if you are unable to to utilize effective digital channels like search engines, social media, email, and websites to promote your products/services. Doing this successfully involves various techniques and strategies which you really need to reach and engage with a target audience cost-effectively and measurably. Digital marketing can include various tactics, the most effective of which are discussed below. 

Effective digital marketing allows businesses to easily reach a global audience, increase brand awareness and generate leads and sales. You can effectively track your results with Google analytics to know if and when you are doing well. As technology advances and more and more people are going online to do business, digital marketing has become hugely essential to any successful marketing strategy. Here are some of the most popular types of digital marketing that can help you deliver quick results.

1. Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing entails partnering with other business owners or individuals to promote products/services. In this marketing arrangement, affiliates help product merchants to promote products in exchange for commissions from each sale or conversion they help to generate.

2. Social Media Marketing: This involves leveraging popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to build brand awareness, engage with customers, and drive website traffic as well as conversions and sales.

3. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): This is a very effective online advertising technique where you have to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. The most common and popular form of PPC is search engine advertising. By this arrangement, marketers have to bid on keywords related to their businesses. That enables Google to display their ads at the top of its SERPs. This translates to good organic traffic for the marketer.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO entails optimizing your website and content to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That way, it manages to help drive more organic traffic to your website/blog.

5. Content Marketing: Content marketing involves consistently creating and sharing valuable and impactful content multichannel online. Such content can be packaged in form of blog posts, infographics, videos and e-books to sensitize, attract and retain a clearly defined audience. This is with a view to stimulating or inducing a favorable customer action.

6. Email Marketing: Email marketing entails sending targeted promotional messages or newsletters to a list of subscribers with a view to driving traffic, sales, or any other desired actions. Email messages can reach hundreds of thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds with just the press of a computer button.

7. Influencer Marketing: This involves partnering with influential people who have a large following on social media. These people may be popular bloggers, celebrities, sports personalities, famous people and entertainers. The partnership is with a view to promoting your products/services to their large audiences.

Affiliate Marketing Random Quips

Among digital marketers, affiliate marketing now appears to be one of the most popular and lucrative online passive income streams in the world. Now that’s quite some weighty information for anyone looking to make money online. Anyone, just about anyone can get involved in affiliate marketing and make money. The business model is simple really. Help promote products for product merchants and earn commissions on the sales you generate. Simple! Technically, an affiliate is therefore a person/business that advertises products to prospective customers in exchange for a commission on each purchase made through their unique affiliate link. 

 
Affiliate Marketing Variants

There are three prominent variants an affiliate can choose from.
 
1. Pay-Per-Lead: With this variant, an affiliate gets paid for each piece of information their unique affiliate link produces. Technically, a lead can be any action the merchant values, such as a sign-up, a download, or any other activity that may lead to a sale.

2. Pay-Per-Click: With this variant, irrespective of whether a sale is made or not, the affiliate is paid a commission for each click made through their unique affiliate link.

3. Pay-Per-Sale: Pay per sale is about the most popular affiliate marketing variant among digital marketers. In this variant, a commission is earned only when a sale is made. Affiliates earn a percentage of every sale completed through their unique affiliate link.

Now you know how affiliate marketing can earn you money, right? Come with me let’s find out how the business can be set up and operated.

How Affiliate Marketing Operates Step-By-Step

Step 1: Sign up free on a unique affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI and get assigned a unique affiliate marketing link.

Step 2.This link has a unique code that keeps track of all the sales you generate.

Step 3: Next is to promote products very widely on the internet. For products promotion, you can use various marketing methods. Most popular of these methods are, your website/blog, your accounts on popular social media platforms, email campaigns, and or paid advertising.

Step 4: The affiliate program accurately tracks and credits your unique code when a prospective customer clicks on your affiliate link anywhere online. When this click leads to a purchase, the sale is logged for you.

Step 5: At periodic intervals, which in the case of SFI is monthly, all the commissions due to you as an affiliate are computed and paid out to you. Simple and straight forward isn’t it?
 
Random Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
-    Product merchants have their products promoted widely.
-    These products gain wider exposures to broader audiences.
-    Merchants get more leads and conversions as a result.
-    They make more sales.
-    Affiliates earn good commissions for work done.
-    Marketing costs drastically reduce for product merchants.
-    Content creators earn good money as affiliates.
-    Influencers earn money as well from affiliate marketing.
-    Affiliates can monetize their content and generate passive income.

Summary

Affiliate marketing can become a lucrative online income source for anyone willing to try their hands on it. All you need do is to sign up with a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI, promote any products of your choice and start earning commissions right away. The program provides free training, lends you free marketing tools including your unique affiliate link, handles customer care for you, computes and pays your commissions monthly. Simple isn’t it?

Top 7 Effective Ecommerce Marketing Techniques to Boost Revenues

Ecommerce marketing simply means all the marketing techniques online marketers adopt to drive awareness and action to their online businesses. Online marketers drive these techniques through the use of social media, SEO, SMS, digital content, search engines, email campaigns and more. The ultimate aim is to use these techniques through the right online channels to attract visitors who may purchase products/services. These techniques if properly deployed can help your ecommerce business to retain customers, facilitate conversions, enhance post-purchase experience and generate repeat sales. They can directly help to make it easy for a wide range of people to discover your products/services online. Top 7 on the list of these techniques are:

1. Social Media Marketing

With presently about 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media is now the new haven for ecommerce marketing. This is more so in the hugely popular platforms like Facebook Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes. Social media has thus become a great market for ecommerce business owners because on the platforms, you can easily share marketing messages widely and you have many ways of creating channels for engagement. Social media users can easily share posts and videos within each platform and across multi-platforms. That allows many other users to interact with your content and share it too. This way, marketers can reach many more people that would originally be out of their immediate reach. That is great for effective marketing. Additionally, since interaction is quite easy on social media platforms, marketers can leverage user data and share user-generated content (UGC) widely. Doing so helps marketers to build trust and to optimize their marketing campaigns.

2. Content/SEO Marketing

The primary aim of SEO marketing is to naturally cultivate organic traffic to your ecommerce website. This you can by tweaking your target keywords to make your content visible to search engines. If properly done, search engines particularly Google will rank your content high in their SERPs. That means organic traffic to the website. You can in addition to the careful use of keywords in your content arrange to build backlinks from reputable websites to your website, make the website user-friendly and optimize it for mobile devices. All these will help to increase the visibility of the website and lower the bounce rate of the pages. That translates to improved engagement and consequently more organic traffic to the website.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has become a hugely popular marketing technique helping product merchants to widely promote their products and make sales. It is some form of partnership between Product Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers. Affiliates help product merchants to make their products available to consumers and they earn commissions from merchants on the sales they help generate. All the affiliates really do is to widely promote affiliate links on their content. When a user clicks on any of these links and makes a purchase, the affiliate earns a commission. So, when affiliates continue to create impactful and helpful content online, it helps to attract the attention of potential customers. If this content manages to reach a wider audience that is incentivized to buy, the affiliate earns commissions from the sales. It is thus a performance-based business arrangement. If affiliates don’t generate sales, they are not entitled to commissions. This makes affiliate marketing a great marketing technique highly suitable for ecommerce business marketing.

4. Email Marketing

To use email marketing technique successfully, make sure you have a responsive email list. That is the kind of list you can rely on to make your audience aware of new products, discounts, and other items relating to your ecommerce business. Email is not only cheap and easy to deploy, it is highly cost-effective to use. If used correctly, it can help your ecommerce business with lead generation, sales and brand awareness. Regular emails help to keep your customers engaged with your business by keeping them fully informed of trends, promos and new arrivals. They are great for data collection and unlimited sales generation through potent CTAs.

 
5. SMS Marketing

SMS is a form of opt-in marketing. It requires recipients to agree to subscribe to SMS correspondence before it can be effectively deployed. SMS marketing is cost-effective and gets messages into the inboxes of recipients intact and quickly. SMS marketing is therefore particularly great for personalized promotions, new offers and discounts, promos, surveys, and re-engagement of existing customers. SMS communication must however be short and concise to be effective. Make sure to include an option to opt-out for recipients who may choose to change their minds along the line.

6. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is increasingly taking root through social media. Many influencers and celebrities usually have a very large audience/following on social media. This audience at times relies hugely on their say so or even product endorsements to make their buy decisions. Influencers can even directly help to advertise products/services in exchange for commissions or some free supplies of the products they are helping to promote. Through influencer marketing, marketers can build trust with a large incentivized audience to make good sales. This is because influencers can give their audience useful and vital information about your products to enable them to make their buy decisions. Some influencers have a near cult-following online and whatever marketing information they give to their audience usually helps to get good marketing returns. This is why smart marketers can through influencer marketing directly target young potential customers who fanatically follow influencers on social media.

7. PPC/Paid Search

Pay-Per-Click, PPC marketing is a marketing technique where marketers pay search engines particularly Google for each click on their links. When you pay search engines, they place your ads higher on their relevant SERPs. The higher your ads are on these pages, the more organic traffic/clicks they attract thereby making it easier to drive incentivized traffic to your website. With PPC advertising, marketers are only required to pay only if people click on their ads. This helps marketers to manage their ads budgets very tightly and with measurable results for each ads dollar spent. If you directly target the right keywords with your ads, your target audience easily relates with the products you are marketing. That encourages clicks on your links thereby making it a relatively affordable and effective way to drive good traffic to your website. Good traffic means good leads, conversions, sales and more revenues.

Top 8 Tips to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Website

Affiliate marketing thrives on website traffic. The reason affiliate marketers tend to do everything practicable to drive traffic to their affiliate websites. In whatever affiliate program you are involved in, if you properly integrate affiliate links into your website content, blog articles or marketing content, you can create an effective way of getting potential customers to view your content, click on the links and ultimately make purchases from the site. Following are 8 top tips that can help you drive traffic to your affiliate website.

 

1. Include Clear and Visible Links in Your Content: Without clear and visible affiliate links on your content, it is practically impossible to direct potential customers to the products/services you are promoting. If users don’t find your products/services and make purchases, you earn no commissions as an affiliate marketer. Since affiliate marketing thrives on commissions, clear and visible links increase the chances that the links will be clicked and purchases made. It is through these purchases that the affiliate earns commissions. So, when promoting products/services on your website, users must have a clear and visible link directing them to the product page of your affiliate website.

2. Place the Links in a Prominent Spot: This is where website visitors can easily notice the links and possibly click on them. Try to place links in a prominent spot within your blog article so readers don’t miss them when they visit the webpage. If visitors notice these links easily, chances are high that they will click on them and possibly make a purchase.
 
3. Take Full Advantage of Social Media: With over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, social media is now where nearly everyone hangs out. Affiliates must deliberately take their promotions to people where they habitually hang out. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes are great places to promote affiliate products/services. On these platforms, you can easily share your affiliate links in short blogs. Doing this can increase your click-through rates significantly. That means traffic.

4. Integrate Your Links in Your Content: High quality and impactful content is quite handy for affiliate marketing purposes. Therefore, you must ensure your links are integrated into your content in such a way as to be sufficiently visible to content readers. These links must make sense in the context of what you’re writing and what you expect the readers to see before inserting them.

5. Always Use Catchy Anchor Text: Anchor texts easily attract readers’ attention when they are prominent and catchy. When properly used, anchor text is the text that people do see when they hover over your link. For these texts to be effective, they must be attention-grabbing and relevant to what you’re linking to.

6. Use Persuasive Language in Your Links: Just like CTAs, using catchy words and phrases in your links helps to increase their effectiveness. For this reason, instead of simply saying, “Click here,” you can arouse curiosity further by using suchlike phrases as “check out new arrivals here” or “check out these great deals” or “get started FREE here.”

7. Use PPC Ads: For more traffic to your affiliate website, you can use any other traffic-inducing strategies like paid ads. PPC ads readily come to mind here. If you have the means, you can actually pay for Google ads to be directed to your affiliate website. PPC ads are highly targeted and very effective ads but they cost money.
 
8. Use Email Marketing: If you have a responsive Email list in place, it becomes very easy to send marketing messages together with affiliate links to hundreds of thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds by simply pressing a computer button. This way, you can easily drive highly incentivized traffic to your affiliate website through the affiliate links.

Summing Up

Affiliate marketing is a simple performance-based business model. This is powered by driving traffic to the affiliate website. The foregoing tips will help you to drive this traffic. When the traffic is high, chances of click-throughs and purchases are greatly enhanced. The affiliate’s commissions earning potential increases as well.

7 Top Spot Internet Marketing Strategies Every Ambitious Marketer Needs

Presently, internet marketing has become a hugely popular method of brand building and products/services promotions among digital marketers. Marketers easily settle for internet marketing because they can depend on it for increased efficiency and effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. If you already own a business or you are considering starting one, your primary concern should be how best to promote your products/services to get the best results. Internet marketing readily comes to mind to get these results. Marketing successfully on the internet requires effective strategies.

Following are some top spot and effective internet marketing strategies every ambitious marketer needs to aggressively grow their business.

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant content with a view to attracting and retaining customers. Content marketers technically use content to persuade their audience of a brand’s authenticity. Relevant content makes marketers feel understood and can naturally lead to a sales pitch. Such content is usually packaged in form of blogs, articles, videos, infographics, case studies, eBooks, and User-Generated Content, UGC. Content marketing as a strategy is really effective if the content is of high quality, impactful, informative and even entertaining. If content is created with a specific target audience in mind and published through the right channels, it tends to be more effective as well.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple performance-based business model where affiliates help promote a merchant’s products/services to consumers and earn commissions for their efforts. Affiliates usually promote these products/services on social media, web blogs, video content and podcasts. Affiliate marketing as a marketing strategy can work for anyone who understands how it works and uses it correctly. Through this strategy, marketers can directly increase leads, sales and even their customer base. For best results in affiliate marketing, it is advisable to join reputable affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI. This way, you can have the advantage of choosing and working with the right affiliates, optimize your marketing platforms and explore all ways to collaborate with influencers to enable you take a marketing advantage of their large following/audience.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing may be “old school” and has been around for quite a while but it is still a very effective marketing strategy. To get the best results from email marketing, you must diligent build a responsive email list. This list is hugely important for your email marketing to be effective. If you have this list in place, with just the pressing of a computer button, you can send marketing messages to hundreds of thousands of recipients in a matter of seconds. Email marketing is thus a very effective marketing strategy for getting leads, increasing sales and your customer base.

4. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a technique you can use on your website content to enable it rank high in the SERPs of search engines. The technique involves the effective use of keywords, mata tags and backlinks to attract the attention of search engines. It involves both on-page and off-page factors to comply with the requirements of search engine bots.  SEO is an important technique of reaching out to your target audience and increasing traffic to your website. This traffic is organic traffic which search engines send to your website in response to searches related to the keywords you have optimized your content with. SEO technique requires you to from time to time tinker with specific elements of your website in order to comply with search engine’s particularly Google’s requirements and provide the best user experience possible. Technically, SEO is simply deliberate website activities of getting your website/blog to rank at the top of the SERPs of search engines. If properly done, it helps your website to receive better organic traffic, more leads, good conversions and sales.

5. Influencer Marketing

Influencers are usually prominent people who have a large number of followers particularly on social media. Marketers can collaborate with influencers to promote their products/services. They can effectively take advantage of the huge audiences of influencers to reach a large number of people with marketing messages. Influencers can even help by endorsing products/services to their huge flowing in return for commissions. Working with influencers to promote your brand’s messages, products/services is known as influencer marketing. It is a hugely effective marketing strategy to increase sales.

6. Conversion Rate Optimization, CRO

Technically, CRO is the practice of maximizing the number of conversions on your website or app. This is calculated by the percentage of site visitors that successfully complete a targeted activity. Any user that goes through this process successfully is referred to as a conversion. The more conversions you have on your website, the more sales you make and the more your business grows. User-conversion is a way of extracting more value from the traffic of users on your website. So, conversion rate optimization is quite handy to help marketers reduce their customer acquisition expenditures. A real cost-effective way to acquire more customers no doubt! Ultimately, if you manage to increase your conversion rate, you can attract more customers, boost your sales and expand your business.

7. Pay-Per-Click, PPC

PPC is an effective internet marketing technique to widely expose your business and product/services to customers. It is a very important component of an inbound marketing plan. So how does PPC work? As an effective marketing technique, it enables advertisers to place bids on specific keywords on the internet. When users enter these keywords into search engines, the search engines will present to them the ads connected to such keywords. A click on these ads takes the searcher to visit the advertiser’s website. The advertiser consequently pays for each click delivered to his website through that process. PPC ads are always well targeted to segmented recipients and thus very effective as marketing techniques.

Summing Up

On the internet, there are some foolproof strategies every ambitious marketer should use to market their products/services, increase brand awareness and grow their business. The foregoing strategies are top spots among these strategies. If you diligently implement them, no doubt they will help increase brand awareness for your business. Consequently, your business will get more leads, acquire more customers, make more sales and boost your revenue.