How to Track your Brand’s Ad Results on Google

Advertising on Google tends to get quicker marketing results for marketers. The reason smart marketers really take advantage of Google ads to reach new customers and grow their brands. You can never know how well your Google ads are doing if you cannot effectively track the ads. Without good tracking, you could be wasting a lot of resources, time and money on ads and end up with very poor results.  If you decide to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign for instance, it is essential to diligently track your ads performance data. If you do, it is easy for you to see how well your ads are doing. You must therefore understand how PPC performance works before you can effectively track the success of your Google ads campaigns. That is about the best way to know how well you are doing and if you are getting the most out of your advertising budget.

Following are recommended steps you can take to effectively track your Google ads results.

Use Google Analytics to Track Ads

Google Analytics is a free Google online tool. With this tool, you can effectively track how much traffic your website gets from all sources, inclusive of PPC ads. The tool will help you to understand how visitors interact with your website and the ads displayed on it. The information you gather with it can help you to make the right adjustments on your advertising. Well-adjusted ads can help to improve your conversion rate and ultimately good ROI.

Keep an Eye on Your Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is a direct way to gauge the performance of Google ads. You must keep a keen eye on it during your ads campaigns. Technically, conversion rate is the percentage of people who click on your ads and take desired action. Such actions include but not limited to making a purchase. You can find this information in the “Conversions” tab of your Google AdWords account. Here is how to interpret the data. High conversion rate means high performing ads while low conversion rate indicates poorly performing ads. If your ads are performance well it means they are reaching the right audience but if low, it means they are not reaching the right audience. This could mean your ad copy is ineffective or you are targeting the wrong audience. This is why if you track your conversion rate well enough, you can identify issues that may require adjustments to enable your ads perform optimally.
 
Use Google AdWords to Check your Ads Positioning

Ad positioning is a crucial metric that tells a marketer the average position of where his ad appears on Google SERPs. What this means is that the higher the ad is ranked on the SERPs, the higher the chances that more users are likely to see and click on it. To make this possible, your ad must be optimized with the right keywords that users are targeting. Next is to review the positions for your brand’s keywords and compare them to the positions of your competitors. If you notice that your brand is appearing in a lower position than your competitors it is an indication for you to quickly make some performance adjustments on your ads campaign. You can find keywords information in your Google AdWords account’s “Keywords” tab.
 
Test Your Ads with A/B Testing
 
Regularly testing your ad copy is a way of determining how well the ad is doing. Most marketers rely on A/B testing to track their ad performance and optimize results. When they create two or more ad versions, they can use A/B testing to track and compare which one performs better. Before launching your Google ad campaign, you can run an A/B test on the versions of ad copy you are planning to use. This is about the best way to ensure that your Google ad campaign is performing as optimally as you want. You can check out the right information you need to do this in the “Experiments” tab of your Google AdWords account. If you want to get the best results from PPC ads, you can A/B test different ad copy, landing pages, and other website elements. By doing this, you’ll get to know which ad combination leads to the most conversions and consequently, a higher ROI. 

Review the Impressions and Clicks on your Google Ads

Impressions are another great way to measure the performance of Google ads. They represent the number of times an ad has been shown. This is as against clicks which represent the number of times people have clicked on the ad. A diligent review of these two metrics gives the marketer a clear idea how effective his Google ads are at reaching the target audience. You can access this data in the “Ads” tab of your Google AdWords account. Here is how to interpret the data. When your Google ads have a high number of impressions but the click-through rates are low, it means your ad copy needs some adjustments. When the ads have high click-through rates, it means they are actually reaching the right audience and driving them to take desired action. To actually determine if your ads are doing great therefore, you must diligently review these PPC metrics regularly.
 
Wrapping Up

Tracking your Google ad performance is a desirable step to know if your marketing campaign is doing great. The metrics data you collect from your tracking efforts is helpful for you to better understand what’s working well and what’s not working well in your marketing campaign. These metrics provide the data you can rely on to make needed adjustments to help you get the most out of your PPC and Ad campaigns budget. If you want to get such vital marketing benefits, start now to track your Google ads campaign results.

How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy for your Online Business

Digital marketing usually involves the use of digital online channels to promote products, services and even ideas. These days, businesses routinely deploy digital marketing for many and varied purposes online. For many online business owners, they rely on digital marketing mostly to generate traffic, leads and sales. Digital marketing is thus one great and effective way to build awareness and create a thought leadership position online. This is why digital marketing is essential part of the overall marketing strategy online business owners really depend on to effectively meet the needs of their numerous customers.

Here are some vital steps you can take to create an effective digital marketing strategy for your business.

Understand your Target Audience

This is one of the most essential steps to creating a digital marketing strategy. You must take deliberate steps to really understand your target audience before you can effectively market to them. If you don’t know your audience well enough, you cannot effectively market to them. Knowing your audience means you must know the needs of your audience, which marketing channels your potential customers prefer and exactly how to use these channels to reach them. Among online business owners, the most common channels of preference include social media, search engine marketing, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and PPC advertising. To build an effective marketing strategy, you can focus on just one or a combination of two or more of these channels, depending on your objectives and the goals you’ve set for your business. The type of marketing content you produce will be directly influenced by the channels you choose to market with.

Define your Short and Long-Term Goals/Objectives
 
Just like any other business, it is hugely important in digital marketing to clearly define and set out your short and long-term goals/objectives right from the outset and make these goals/objectives an essential part of your business’s marketing strategy. When these goals/objectives are well established in your marketing strategy, they become a vital tool for reaching out to customers. They essentially help to build brand awareness and establishing a rapport with customers no matter how numerous they are. Bearing in mind that your main objective in setting goals is how to make your marketing efforts more effective, you must ensure that the goals are time-based and measurable. You can for instance have short term goals like doubling your traffic and leads in six months and long term goals like an increase in customer acquisition, higher conversion rate, increase in sales and revenue. It is best to set SMART goals, meaning the goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, and Time-bound. If you set SMART goals as part of your strategy, you’re more likely to reach them within your set time frame. You can with such goals accurately measure or gauge how your business is doing as you progress along. That way, you can easily determine if you are making expected progress or if you are even succeeding at all based on your set objectives.
 
Identify your Ideal Buyer Persona

With research and careful analysis, you can clearly identify your ideal buyer persona. This is hugely important because your ideal buyer persona is a very essential party of your digital marketing strategy. A buyer persona helps you to better understand your audience and to relate to people you absolutely need to. An ideal buyer persona helps businesses to reach out to customers, build relationships, generate leads and increase sales. A buyer persona is some kind of abstract picture of what you think your ideal buyers are like. This is a picture you can build up using personal information and work details of who you expect your ideal buyer to be like. Details of such information include age, educational qualification, geographical location, job title and role outside of work, family, income level, gender and so on. These details clearly provide a context of your ideal buyer and therefore very important for your marketing strategy.

Create an Evergreen Content Strategy

All content that brings traffic to your website is great but evergreen content is best. This is because, evergreen content is content that remains relevant for a long period of time, and it brings good traffic for that period too. Evergreen content has the advantage of attracting new visitors while not becoming irrelevant or outdated over time. Search engines like evergreen content as well and they tend to rank it highly in their SERPs. That means good organic traffic in the mix. If you want to have evergreen content as part of your marketing strategy, make sure you consistently create content in form of tutorials, how-to guides, examples, checklists, and problem-solving articles which really attract traffic. These are the types of content that are likely to remain relevant and popular with readers over a prolonged period of time. If you are able to focus on content that has a long shelf life, it can directly benefit your marketing strategy. Such content helps to boost your keyword rankings, set up better SEO, and enjoy steady traffic growth. This is in addition to helping your brand to build online authority and credibility.

Use Earned Media

Your business benefits from earned media if your content is very good. If your content is good, it is shared more and via multichannel to boot. Earned media is simply content that is shared by others and links back to your website. It is usually in the form of written or video content. Earned media can also include organic search engine traffic. The more your content is shared, the more likely others will reference it. As a marketing strategy, earned media usually helps to get your content in front of fans, potential customers, and many others who share a common interest in the content. This process is really enhanced if your content is easy to find and share. Therefore, having a social media marketing strategy is a way to enhance earned media.

Use Pay-Per-Click, PPC Ads

Pay-per-click, PPC ads is the paid form of search engine marketing. PPC ads can therefore be a key component of your integrated marketing strategies. It is a bit technical in nature and you must have the resources to pay search engines particularly Google for the clicks it can arrange for you by way of PPC.  PPC ads are highly effective when used correctly. They enable marketers to reach a wide audience quickly since a vast majority of online experiences start on Google. Since your potential audience probably uses Google every day, Google PPC ads can reach virtually every person in your target audience pretty quickly. For effectiveness, PPC ads can be created in many different styles. You can have ads in form of simple text or images, and you can incorporate ad extensions too. If your ads have extensions, it can increase the click-through rate of the ads. Ad extensions tend to make your ads larger and more prominent on Google SERPs. That means more organic traffic. 

9 Online Business Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

Doing business online is increasingly becoming the in-thing worldwide. Affiliate marketing is foremost among online businesses really attractive to people. It is a type of performance-based business model involving product merchants, affiliates and consumers. In the business, an affiliate promotes products for a business merchant by referring customers to the merchant via links on the internet. If these efforts lead to a sale, the affiliate will receive a commission from the merchant for each successful referral. Affiliates are at liberty to promote products multi-channel online. The most common of these channels are email marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing, Google PPC, text message marketing, content marketing, blogging and so on. What matters most to affiliates in this business model is how best to communicate marketing messages to their audience for quick results by way of traffic, particularly organic traffic. 

 
There are many advantages of affiliate marketing over traditional marketing methods of selling products such as Radio and TV ads, Newspaper ads, Billboards, Flyers, and Handbills and so on. Below are some of such advantages. Technically, affiliate marketing is:

1. Very Easy to Set Up: You can set up affiliate marketing business in a matter of minutes because it is quite easy to set up. The only equipment you need is a computer or smartphone and an Internet connection. Even if you can’t afford your own website, you can sign up FREE on a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI and within minutes you are in business.
 
2. Low Risk: In affiliate marketing, you don’t have to spend any of your own money as initial investment. All you need do is to simply join up and in most cases for FREE, and you can start making money from day one. As a performance-based business model, there are no upfront costs or risks involved in the business. This makes affiliate marketing a characteristically low-risk way of making money online.

3. Cost-Effective: Quite unlike traditional marketing methods, you do not need to spend a fortune on advertising. All the ads you need do are online, essentially low-cost and highly effective. You don’t have any need to spend top dollar on erecting Billboards, Radio and TV ads, printing flyers, hiring staff or office space. Even if you spend some money to buy online ads or pay for traffic, it is peanuts when compared to what you need to spend on traditional advertising and the results you get from both. Besides, affiliate marketing is designed and best suited for digital advertising. With a little investment on a computer or smartphone and Internet access, you are in business as an affiliate marketer.

4. Highly Flexible: Yes indeed! You can do affiliate marketing at anytime and anywhere of your choosing. You don’t need to bother your head about inventory, staffing, office space and all that. All you really need do is to promote the products you want to sell as vigorously as feasible and you are in business.

5. No Special Skills Needed: You don’t need any special skills or even prior experience to get started in affiliate marketing. No special qualifications needed either. Once you have a working knowledge of the computer and the Internet and you can operate a smartphone, you are in business. 

6. Website/Blog Optional: Unless you decide to, you don’t even need your own website/blog to get started in affiliate marketing. You can simple join FREE a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI and boom, you are in business. For effective marketing, even without your own website/blog, you can take to social media. If you open accounts on popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, you can do effective marketing promoting products on social media as an affiliate marketer.
 
7. Work from Anywhere: This is the icing on the cake. You can work affiliate marketing anywhere around the globe provided there is Internet access. You work anytime of your choosing 24/7 depending on your convenience. You can work in the comfort of your home or office, on the go, or anywhere else you choose as long as you have access to the Internet.

8. Scalable: If you are already doing business online, you can easily adapt it to do affiliate marketing. If you do business online, chances are high that you are working out of your own website/blog. If so, you can easily turn the website/blog into an affiliate site.

9. Good Return on Investment, ROI: Yes indeed! Every good business owner always has an eye on ROI as bottom line. In affiliate marketing, the average ROI is around 100%. Not many businesses have such high ROI. What this means is that, whatever amount you invest in affiliate marketing, within a few months, you can recoup it 100%. 

Digital Marketing Techniques that Benefit Your Online Business

The internet is deep and gets deeper with continuous technological innovations. That is what digital marketing leverages on to become so popular with online marketers. Through it, marketers simply make use of the internet, electronic devices, or any form of digital communication to do business online. They take advantage of digital channels like search engines and websites to reach out to their target audience, which includes existing and potential customers. They depend on choice digital marketing techniques to get desired results.

Marketers’ Choice Digital Marketing Techniques

Online marketers see digital marketing techniques as unique marketing methods that make use of digital channels to reach out to an audience. Marketers usually factor in their individual marketing needs and goals before they decide which marketing technique will best serve their purpose. That is what helps them to make their choices of which techniques to deploy in their marketing campaigns. Below are various choice techniques popular with online marketers.

Affiliate Marketing

Through affiliate marketing, product merchants can take advantage of a wider field using affiliates to promote products/services online. The marketers who serve as affiliates earn a commission for each sale or completed transaction their promotional activities help to bring about. Ambitious marketers who are interested in trying out affiliate marketing for their business can join FREE reputable affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI. This program can help them to build and manage their affiliate partnerships for good results.

Email Marketing

Email marketing may be “old school” but it is still a very effective digital marketing technique and very popular with marketers too. Marketers use email as an effective way to easily communicate with their audience. Experienced marketers have a way of crafting personalized emails that usually contain more information about their products/services, news about promotions or updates, and even share discounts. Some emails can be crafted to include newsletters, welcome messages for new customers/clients, or informational emails that contain tips or guides to nurture an existing customer base. Also, many businesses use customized emails to specially target an audience for conversions and sales promotions. Emails are easy and cost-effective to use and can be sent to millions of people in a matter of seconds with just the touch of a computer button.  

Content Marketing

Digital marketers place a very high premium on content as a marketing technique. This is because they depend on content to attract traffic to their websites. If this content is valuable, has high quality and informative enough, it helps to attract leads and increase conversions, drive website traffic, nurture existing customers, and promote brand awareness. This is more so when the content is packaged in common and popular channels used in content marketing, such as newsletters, eBooks, bulletins, blog posts, and infographics.

Pay-per-click Marketing (PPC)

Marketers use PPC for paid ads on Google. In PPC marketing, marketers create campaigns for paid ads. These ads are run on PPC platforms like Google Ads. You only pay for each click on such ads. The ads are highly targeted, so each click is paid for when someone clicks on the ads.
 
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO technique is all about search engine rankings for organic traffic purposes. SEO optimizes your website to make it rank higher in the SERPs of search engines particularly Google. If your website ranks higher on these pages, it could result in higher organic traffic to the website. However, SEO is a bit technical in nature requiring the deft use of carefully selected keywords and backlinks on your website. To effectively optimize your webpage for search engines therefore, you need to factor in key elements such as your content quality, backlinks, and page loading speed etc. etc. to have a good SEO the webpage.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing technique leverages on the huge popularity of social media for online marketing activities. With presently over 4.6 billion active-users worldwide social media has become a very huge market for digital marketers. They use SMM technique on different social media networks to reach millions of people in their audience. So, online marketers are thus able to use their social networks to build and deploy campaigns for brand awareness, bolstering their business credibility either as a subject-matter expert, or even as a sales channel.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing also leverages on the huge popularity of social media platforms. It simply entails teaming up with influencers, or individuals who have a significant or dedicated following on social media to widely market products/services. The right influencers are those with a large following on social media and they’re some sort of experts in some subject matter of interest. Influencers can be well known celebrities too who help product merchants endorse products or even recommend products to their large audience. Influencers are effective because they are perceived as subject-matter experts within their particular niche who have gained the trust of their followers.
 
More Direct Benefits of these Digital Marketing Techniques

Digital marketers don’t just use these online techniques for fun. They use them to boost their businesses and to make more sales. Following are some more direct ways businesses benefit from digital marketing techniques.

Low Barrier to Entry

Significantly, digital marketing methods are easily accessible to businesses, regardless of their size and industry. There are no high-cost initial capital investments to start a business online. That makes digital methods highly suitable for small business start-ups. With a very small capital outlay, small businesses can build their own websites, host it and commence business even without prior coding knowledge or having to pay expensive fees. Such businesses can easily leverage many online tools, software and services that offer free plans, free trials, or affordable pricing tiers for social media management, email marketing, and SEO. The ROI is always very encouraging because of the very low investment costs.

Measurable Results

Many free tools abound online to measure your marketing results as you go along. You have access to data and analytics, which you can use to assess your performance, determine the effectiveness of your campaigns, and make data-driven decisions. Such data helps you to know which technique works well and which doesn’t. So, at any point in time during your marketing campaigns, you’ll know what to improve on and what to discard to get better results.

Enhance Deeper Connection with your Audience

Digital marketing offers greater flexibility for brands when reaching out to their audience. Digital marketing channels allow marketers to directly communicate with their audience in real time and from practically anywhere. Customers and potential customers can also take advantage of same channels to directly communicate with brands. This helps to build stronger bonds, deeper connection and trust between marketers and their audience. Many of these digital channels like social media and emails are really very handy to initiate and carry on beneficial marketing conversations, do promos, pass trending info and announce discounts and sales to customers.

Facilitate Conversions

Digital marketing channels help to make it easier for visitors to take or complete a desired action online. Such actions include but not limited to signing up for a newsletter, eBook or blog content or making a purchase. All through the customer journey, digital channels are helpful and handy since they make conversations easy and more convenient. They help to facilitate conversions for the business and ultimately more sales.

Lifeline for Small Businesses

Digital marketing techniques help small businesses who otherwise would have been struggling to compete favorably. These are businesses that otherwise would have been unable to compete with large enterprises or global brands. Thanks to digital marketing techniques, small businesses can effectively leverage the power of the internet and social media to do business steadily online. These techniques help small businesses to maximize their available resources to gain higher ROI. Digital marketing techniques also help small businesses to optimize how they use online channels to effectively interact with their customers anytime, anywhere. They thus help small businesses to build trust and better customer relations in the short and long term.

Good Reasons to Choose Affiliate Marketing as a Business

Among digital marketers and people looking to make money from a side hustle, affiliate marketing is readily a business of choice. Presently, many marketers see it as about the best online business out there. The reasons for this notion are many and varied. Aside the relative ease of joining the business and relative cost of starting and running the business, you can operate it from anywhere you choose, even in the comfort of your home. Besides all these, you become your own boss when you are in affiliate marketing. That alone is quite exciting for modern day business owners. These and what follows next and very good reasons for anyone to choose affiliate marketing as a business.

You do not need any prior experience to get involved in affiliate marketing. Just reach out to products/service merchants, choose any product/service to promote and when the product sells, you earn a commission. Simple! You do not even need to have a product/service of your own to sell before starting up an affiliate marketing business. Just begin and when you become an affiliate, you can learn the right marketing strategies as you go along.
 
If you become an affiliate, you can manage your time as you deem fit. You work when you choose and from where you choose. You don’t even need to spend too much of your time in the business. You are OK if you can keep your website active and updated with fresh content consistently and the ads you run on it, active always. However, Internet marketing is quite similar to any other business. The more time and effort you invest in your affiliate marketing business, the more sales you generate and the more commissions you earn.

In affiliate marketing, you are your own boss and the working timing is also yours to manage and use as you deem fit. When your website/blog subscriber list becomes significant and with good internet traffic, you can become an affiliate magnet. Businesses who largely depend on affiliate marketing for promoting traffic to their website will then be offering you a bonus for signing up with them as an affiliate. A win-win situation really! You need their bonus, and they need the traffic you are bringing in.

Affiliate marketing is very simple to start. Just create a website/blog then commence posting quality content to attract readers and grow your audience. When this audience grows significantly, you can begin to post affiliate links to a product merchant’s website on your content. Once these links are used to purchase a product/service from the merchant, you earn a commission from the merchant.
 
On the internet, the competition for business attention is always very fierce. Many merchants sell similar products and they all want patronage from same market. With that kind of scenario, all advertisement and promotional activities are very much to increase traffic and to boost sales. This is where affiliates become useful to assist in the promotional activities and attract good traffic.  As an affiliate, you can sign up with product merchants to help out directly or join reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI by signing up FREE to help promote products/services in exchange for commissions.
 
In many traditional businesses, there exists a possibility to run out of customers/clients. But, if you get involved in affiliate marketing as a business, that possibility is very remote. Affiliate marketers never really run out of customers/clients because the business is leveraged on the internet. The internet enables affiliates to easily reach millions of people worldwide with just a single click on a computer button. Now that’s really awesome for a business. On the internet, the amount of business opportunities is quite immense. This is even more so when the number of online businesses increases daily making affiliate marketers to be in very high demand. This makes it easy for many people particularly stay-at-home Moms to work the business from home and make good money too.

 
Affiliate marketing business is a business anyone can get involved in and make money. It is a great business opportunity for all kinds of people irrespective of whether they are a student, young Moms, the elderly, people with regular 9-5 jobs, or any person looking for a side hustle or an extra source of income. No special training is needed to get started and once you start, you begin to earn almost immediately. All anyone needs to start an affiliate marketing business on the internet is a website and a good access to the internet. You do not need a brick-and-mortar store or even personnel to get started. With just a little investment to create and host a website and some basic knowledge to generate traffic to the website, as well some bit of efforts to promote products/services, you are in business. In some affiliate marketing models, it is even possible to generate traffic and sales without owning a website of your own.

Once you get started in your own affiliate marketing business, you will be able to earn commissions for every sales generated out of the referrals directed by the affiliate links/codes you are promoting. This commission payment has many variants. Some businesses pay per sale, some offer pay-per-click, PPC and some pay per view. The bottom line is, when a desired marketing action is attributable to your affiliate link/code, you earn a commission.

Last Line

There are very many benefits derivable from affiliate marketing many of which are actually the reasons people choose affiliate marketing as a business. The foregoing are just some of the reasons that are easy to comprehend and try out by anyone irrespective of their backgrounds. If you have been thinking of starting a business online, why not consider affiliate marketing? You’ll be glad you did.

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!

5 Techniques to Make Money with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketers are independent business persons who work to earn commissions. They help product merchants market their products and earn commissions from their efforts. They are not directly responsible for product manufacturing, warehousing/storage, product delivery or customer service. These are the responsibilities of product merchants.  The job of affiliate marketers is to simply direct traffic from their websites, blogs, newsletters, and online posts to the brands they are promoting. Affiliates earn money in form of commissions in exchange for driving traffic and/or purchases to the referring brand.

Here are some tested techniques affiliates use to earn money in affiliate marketing.

1. Coupon Sites

When product merchants want to introduce a novel or underappreciated product/service into the market, coupon sites come in very handy. For a limited period of time, you can promote a reduction on first-time purchases in an affiliate arrangement with a coupon website. These coupons can entice buyers to visit your website and sign up to become supporters of your brand. Commissions are paid for connections made in this process.

2. Bloggers/Influencers

If you connect with popular and established writers or social media Influencers in your business niche, they can directly help you through their separate audiences to expand your own reach. That makes your reach exponentially wider. If these writers and influencers help to propagate your marketing messages or write articles to promote or endorse your products, it directly enhances your sales. What they write or endorse, because of the trust they have built with their separate audiences over time, can directly attract people from their audience to look up the website of the product merchant. When these visitors make purchases, the writers or influencers are then entitled to be paid commissions relative to the sales made.

3. Review Sites

Products merchants take to review websites when they have high-priced products to sell. It is customary for buyers and customers to desire more information about any product before making their buy decisions. That is where review websites become handy to provide this additional information by way of product reviews. When businesses and authors on review websites willingly give a referral link to your product and rate it highly, it usually increases the likelihood that potential buyers will click through and buy from you. The referring parties earn commissions from their referral efforts.

4. Search Affiliates

Search affiliates are mostly independent business owners who spend money on ads to have their products shown in search engine results. There are affiliates who earn commissions through PPC on their ads. The ads can also be placed on popular social media networks, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook or other online advertising networks. The more searchers click on these ads, the more commissions the affiliates earn.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may have been around for quite a while but it is still a very efficient affiliate marketing technique. It remains one of the most efficient methods to get individuals to sign up for a brand, a survey, a contest or a webinar. Affiliate marketers can send out a huge mass of emails with the contents having affiliate links to the product they are promoting. Once these links are used to sign up or make purchases from the product merchant, the affiliate earns a commission. Quite an effective affiliate marketing technique no doubt!

Wrapping Up

Earning money with affiliate marketing is a simple business model that is performance based. The more you intensify your promotional activities, the more commissions you earn. It is however unrealistic to expect to earn tonnes of money overnight. If you have the diligence and patience to set up the right techniques, money will gradually start to come in with time. Affiliate marketing is really a very simple legitimate business that requires perseverance, ingenuity, focus, and devotion over time. That is when appreciable income is expected to start to accruing to the affiliate marketer.

6 Best and Most Effective eCommerce Marketing Strategies, Experts’ Tips

To grow your eCommerce business, you need effective advertising. That’s about the only way your business can get to reach more customers. It takes many marketing strategies and tactics to effectively advertise online. Some of these strategies can be deployed either singly or in combination depending on the type of products you are marketing and the marketing channels you choose to use.

Based on expert recommendations, below are 6 best and most effective eCommerce marketing strategies to help you reach more customers and achieve your marketing goals.

1. Optimizing Your Website

If you run eCommerce business, your website is the first impression a shopper gets to have about your business. Well, that shopper had better be impressed or else you may lose his business. You cannot expect to directly impress a shopper on your website if your website design and aesthetics are poor and unimpressive. What helps to keep shoppers a bit longer on your website is optimization. If your website is optimized, shoppers stay a bit longer on the website to notice the wonderful products you are selling. If they notice these products, chances are higher that they may get to purchase some of the products. You can therefore optimize your website through a simple site structure that is easy to navigate. The right shopping information should be easily noticeable and CTAs very obvious to get shoppers to take desirable actions. If the website is optimized for mobile devices, better still because Google now attributes a very high percentage of search data to mobile devices.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple business model that thrives on synergy. Since the eCommerce business owner cannot afford to reach all prospects all by himself, he needs to combine the efforts of affiliates to do so. Business owners can therefore partner with publishers/affiliates that can help promote products for them on their blog posts, emails, social media, and videos. In the bargain, these publishers/affiliates earn a percentage of the sales made through their promotional efforts as commissions. That is affiliate marketing. Some product merchants can decide to work directly with reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI who can directly assist them with training, customer care, marketing tools, analytics and easy attribution and payment of commissions.

3. eCommerce SEO

It is expected that many customers research products well online before they even decide to buy. For this reason, if you want to give your eCommerce business the best chance of converting prospects, you must connect with them during the research stage. That is where eCommerce SEO becomes very handy. This is the process of optimizing your web pages to rank high for essential business keywords related to the products you are selling. To improve your eCommerce SEO, you must take deliberate steps to improve your Content Marketing, technical SEO, On-Page and Off-Page SEO. These improvements will help you to engage better in your eCommerce SEO campaigns. Doing so is one great way to acquire more leads and customers from the organic traffic coming from search engines.

4. Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising

With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, eCommerce business owners can reach their audience with targeted ads on Google. What makes PPC ads particularly effective is that eCommerce business owners can take specific steps and actions to improve the chances of the ads reaching their targets. Such steps/actions include conducting diligent keywords research, adjusting ads bids in line with set goals, building relevant landing pages, using Google shopping ads and using retargeting ads. After taking all necessary steps and executing these techniques, you can improve performance through A/B testing. Since you can’t expect a single ad to effectively work for every business, experts recommend that business owners must carefully test various ad campaign elements if they want to improve performance.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective marketing technique popular with eCommerce business owners. It is highly cost-effective too. Marketing with email has very many advantages for eCommerce business owners when compared to other marketing channels. Aside the cost-effectiveness, business owners can personalize email messages, segment the messages and even use email automation software to automate email messages to reach a wider audience reliably. All these help business owners to save time, money, and other resources and still be able to get impressive results from email campaigns. When business owners send relevant emails to their numerous subscribers, it helps to increase the open and click-through rates of the emails. In addition, because the emails are directing the recipients to a relevant web page, there’s a higher chance of converting such visitors. Therefore, if you want your eCommerce business to grow, email marketing is a must rather than a convenient option.

6. Social Media Marketing

Most people worldwide use social media platforms for fun and to connect with friends but many users also follow businesses and check out information and product offers on some of the platforms. eCommerce business owners usually provide value to their audience on social media through the type of content that can solve their problems. That is why many eCommerce businesses tend to focus on social media platforms credible locations where they can reach their ideal customers. In many business niches, there are experts and celebrities who have gained a big following on social media as a result of their excellent performance and prominence in their vocations or industries. As a result, these experts and influencers tend to have loyal audiences who trust their product recommendations. eCommerce businesses do take advantage of this relationship to promote their products. This is influencer marketing which directly compliments social media marketing. Presently, some social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram because of their unique in-house marketing tools allow business owners to sell products directly on their platforms. On social media therefore, there are many excellent opportunities for eCommerce business owners to promote and sell their products to a very wide and diverse audience.

Wrapping Up

Effective marketing is one of the best ways to give your eCommerce business the right exposure online. Having an excellent product is just not enough to do good business out there. Nobody will buy your product if they’ve never heard of it and they don’t know anything about it. By deploying the right marketing strategies as discussed above, it is possible to attract more shoppers to your eCommerce store and sell more products to them. If you need to boost your marketing results therefore, your best bet is to deploy these here strategies in the right way.

Simple Ways to Monetize Your Business Website

If you do business online, it is a given that you want to make money. Aside selling products off your website, you can really make money from it if you choose to. You can simply monetize your website to make money from it, but you must know how to do it right to get good results. Monetizing a website takes quite a bit of work and the right tools! For the website to make good money, you must first grow your following to a huge audience. That requires skills. You need skills to regularly create good quality content for the website, share the content widely on social media and other online channels, attract traffic, build a functional email list and consistently grow your following. 

Find below what expert marketers recommend you do if you seriously want to monetize your business website.

Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is when you promote products/services for a product/service merchant and you earn commissions for your efforts. It is performance based. The more products/services you promote through your website that result in sales, the more commissions you earn. Affiliate marketing is highly profitable because it is low-cost and low-risk to operate. To make money from affiliate marketing, just be sure the products/services you promote are high-quality, relevant to your website and in high demand. To promote products and start making money almost immediately, you can sign up with popular and reputable e-commerce websites like Strong Future International SFI, Amazon, ClickBank, eBay and any other reputable e-commerce websites that run affiliate programs.

Display Ads: Display advertising is one of the most important ways to earn income out of your business website. You can earn advertising revenue simply by selling ad space on your website. Popular display ads most marketers prefer are text, image, or video ads that prompt a visitor to a website click to take a desired action. With display ads, advertising revenue is usually calculated based on the number of clicks or impressions for each ad on display on your website. Depending on the online channels you choose to use, display ads can take the form of banner-format ads, interstitial ads, rich media ads with interactive elements, and video ads. These ads can be effectively used on web pages and popular social media channels like Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook among other social networks. You earn ads revenue as users click on these ads.
 
E-commerce Store: You can sell your own goods and make money out of your online store. If your website is designed to fully support e-commerce, it is one of the commonest ways to monetize your business website. People can subscribe to your store to buy more of your products on a regular basis. You can also link your store to popular e-commerce websites like Strong Future International SFI, ClickBank and Amazon to sell your products out of their websites.
 
Website Flipping: You can make money out of creating websites, grow them to good rankings then sell them off. This is website flipping which can earn good money for you if you know what you are doing. To attract a potential buyer to your website at a good prize, you must have good income from the monetization sources on the website, huge following and high traffic on the website.

Sponsored Posts: Sponsored posts are a form of content marketing where advertisers pay for content created by third parties. These posts must be relevant to the businesses of the advertisers. Sponsored posts come in form of reviews, newsletters, and case studies as the case may be. Through sponsored posts, you can get quality content on your website and increase your brand credibility. To do this, the sponsored posts you accept on your website must be from credible and reputable sources but certainly not from your known competitors. Such posts must help to enhance the SEO of your website by complying with Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Consulting Services: You can earn money through consulting services on your website if you have specialized knowledge to sell. If you are an expert in any dedicated and specialized field of human endeavor and you have immense knowledge and skills about the subject matter, you can sell your knowledge and skills by mentoring people who are willing to pay you to acquire the knowledge and skills themselves.

Online Courses: You can teach any special course or skill online and even make the course into eBooks for sale to willing buyers. You can promote this knowledge/skill on social media to get buyers. In matters of packaging, you can package online courses, case studies, and webinars beautifully to earn revenue online. What you earn depends on the value of the knowledge/skill and the amount of patronage.

Pay-Per-Click, PPC Ads: PPC is an advertising model marketers skillfully use to drive traffic to their websites. It is a popular and highly effective way to monetize a website. PPC allows advertisers to place ads on a host website, and each time any of these ads is clicked, a fee is paid. PPC is a very lucrative website monetization technique. It is lucrative only if your website traffic is regular and high. For good and targeted traffic, PPC ads use the right keywords for SEO to target users who are most likely to click on the ads. In PPC, the host website gets paid when it helps advertisers get traffic.

Responsive Email Lists: Email lists are very valuable digital marketing assets. It takes some quality time and diligence to build a responsive email list over time. Marketers use email lists to inform customers and potential customers about new products, product launches, promos, price adjustments and important events. You make money with email lists when you effectively use them to promote and sell products/services. Additionally, renting mailing lists to other brands/companies can also be a good source of income. Email marketing should however be used with utmost care because spamming with emails can actually lead to loss of customers and business patronage.

Pay-To-Access Content: As the name implies, you can actually have very valuable content locked in your website which people must pay to access. In some cases, such websites can have subscribed membership to generate revenue. Other models include paywalls, online memberships, and subscriptions. Such membership program provides access to highly valuable premium content to users who pay a known subscription fee. Subscriptions are a more reliable and sustainable monetization method on a website. They promise engaged readers willing to pay for unique premium content ready access for as long as they pay their subscriptions. Now, that’s one reliable, sustainable and continuous stream of income for any website.

Expert Tips to Earn Money with Online Affiliate Programs

These days, many more people are trying to earn some extra money working from home on affiliate programs. With the increasing desire to earn some extra income online, coupled with the present harsh economic trends, more people are daily looking for ways to earn some extra cash by way of some online business opportunities. Affiliate marketing programs easily fits this bill since people can easily work affiliate programs part time and still be able to work on full time jobs. If such people manage to get a handle on affiliate business, it can even become a full time job at some point. Affiliate marketing is an excellent and one of the most popular ways to make money online. If you are keen yourself and you are up to it, here are some expert tips that can help you to make money online as an affiliate marketer.

Set Up Your Website: You need your own website to really make some money with online affiliate programs. That is not to say you can’t make money even without a website but, having a website of your own can make the business more lucrative for you. If you have the skills, you can design your own website as you please but if not, the services of professional webmasters can help you out. They can arrange the hosting for you as well. A professionally designed website gives you more and better features depending on your type of business. What matters most however is to always settle for the option that serves your purpose best.

Make your Website User-Friendly: If your website is not user-friendly, it cannot be traffic-friendly. For this reason, once you have your website in place, it is imperative for you to work on the website to position it to draw good traffic. Without good traffic, it is virtually impossible to make good money with online affiliate programs. For your website to be user-friendly, it must be attractive, fast loading and easy to navigate. That is what helps to keep visitors longer on the site to do business with you. To enhance this, you must deliberately create quality content on a regular and consistent basis, build up credibility and diligently work on attracting traffic to the website. With quality content and if you position your affiliate links well on the site and with the right niche, visitors will be returning to the site again and again. If they do so, it helps to increase your chances of making good sales from the site.
 
Choose a Good Affiliate Program: What determines a good affiliate program is a good niche, good platform, good products and commissions. With this in mind, you’ll find that there are many online affiliate programs out there to choose from. Irrespective of whether you are operating out of your own website or not, the opportunities to make money in affiliate marketing are infinite. However, you must make sure to work with a legitimate and reputable affiliate program. If not, you may end up wasting your time, money and efforts on a program that is not legitimate. That can be quite frustrating and even discouraging. Before signing up therefore, make sure to check well into the commission that the program offers. Most affiliate programs pay between 5%-50% commissions. You must therefore ensure you get a reasonable commission that is paid out regularly before getting involved with any affiliate program.

 
Promote Your Website: It is for the sake of traffic you must promote your website as best you can. Promoting your website becomes hugely imperative as soon as the site is properly set up. Online, you have many options you can choose to use to promote your website. Among these options are pay-per-click PPC marketing, link building, article marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and more. Once you start building traffic to your site, you will notice that your sales will begin to climb. This is a clear proof that the affiliate marketing program you have chosen is working.

How to Boost Your Affiliate Commissions

Increasing digitization of business has opened many ways of earning income online. Presently, affiliate marketing appears somewhat prominent as one of the ways to earn income online. Through affiliate marketing, you can earn a good amount of income whenever you promote any product/service for product/service merchants. It is one great technique to generate unlimited income online. If you are creative enough in your affiliate marketing activities, and you are able to significantly boost traffic to your website, you can directly boost your affiliate marketing commissions as well. Some of these here tips and tricks can be of help to you in the quest to boost your affiliate commissions. 

Create a Loyal Community

Trust is quite essential in business particularly online business. If you manage to create a community that trusts you and your business, it will be loyal to you and your business. As an affiliate marketer, if consumers trust the brand you are marketing, you will sell more of it with significant increase in the commissions you earn. Because it always cheaper to market to a returning customer than a new one, you can deliberately set the machinery in motion to market more to returning customers. If as a consequence your website gets a boost in the numbers of returning customers, you sell more and earn more commissions. Only a loyal audience/community can guarantee that.

Establish Organic Traffic

Experienced marketers like to explore many ways to establish traffic to affiliate links. With organic traffic in mind, these marketers rely mostly on content marketing particularly blogging on their business websites and on social media. If your blog content is of high quality, you can better attract a good audience. Affiliate links embedded in such content that is optimized with SEO directly benefits from organic traffic. In addition, if you do PPC campaigns on very popular social media platforms, you can also take advantage of good organic traffic. Your commission earnings get a boost from these efforts.

Be Active On Social Media

Being active on social media particularly the mini-blogging platforms can help your affiliate marketing efforts. On these platforms, you can directly market to a segmented audience the products they are likely to have interest in. This is one of the easiest ways to attract an audience and earn good commissions by promoting products directly to them since the chances of the audience clicking on your affiliate links are greatly enhanced. You can better promote products on social media because on the platforms, making a post is easy as well as sharing, commenting and reacting to posts. That significantly eases up interactions and communications thereby paving the way for a better business relationship. For affiliate marketers, a better business relationship helps to boost commissions.

Keep a Keen Eye on Your Analytics

Most affiliate marketers like to market multi-channel. That necessitates having measurable performance metrics across these channels. If you have a complete overview of all the performances of the different channels, then it becomes easier to know how you are faring at any point in time. To do this well enough, you can deploy various analytical tools such as Google Analytics. These tools will help you to keep a keen eye on link statistics, traffic analytics and behavior analytics. This info can help you to take better informed marketing decisions which can significantly boost the commissions you earn in your affiliate marketing activities.

Regularly Check Your Links

As a vital part of your affiliate marketing strategy, regularly check your affiliate links to make sure they are working as expected. Any link not working, rejig it to keep it working. You need the data from your link statistics to be able to do this effectively. Link statistics allow you to know how the links you have provided multi-channel are performing. Through the data, you’ll know which is working correctly or not and what the stats are. You can create a workable strategy and a data base to help with close monitoring of your links performance. Fix what needs to be fixed as quickly as possible to avoid losing out on your commissions’ pay-outs due to lower conversion rates.

How Affiliate Marketing Business Really Works

For years entrepreneurs have earned some sort of compensations for referring customers to other businesses even without implicitly referring to the business model as affiliate marketing. That has changed with the advent and popularity of eCommerce. E-commerce thrives on a reciprocal business model of earning and paying commissions out of sales made. That is affiliate marketing in its simplest form. The affiliate earns a commission from the sales generated with his affiliate link while the product merchant pays the commission as per agreed terms and conditions. This business model of incentivizing referrals somehow creates a mutually beneficial arrangement where both parties are motivated to help each another.

 

Becoming an affiliate is simple. Just choose a company whose products you’ll like to promote then sign up. After signing up, you can then commence promoting the products’ links of the company in numerous places and online channels. The affiliate relationship may entail many diverse actions but the commonest is generating sales and earning commissions on your efforts. As long as the clicks come from your unique affiliate links, in-house cookies will track the customer all the way to the final action. That is when the affiliate is entitled to a commission that could range from 5-10% of the sale depending on the program. Because of the cost-effectiveness and easy accessibility of affiliate marketing, the business model has managed to become a global phenomenon. According to credible online statistics, here is why:

•    Affiliate marketing is credited with up to 16% of all online purchases. Really huge.
•    About 80% of affiliate marketers expect their revenue to keep growing.
•    About 80% of brands now have affiliate marketing programs.
•    Presently, the global industry is valued at around $12 billion. Awesome no doubt.

These staggering statistics make affiliate marketing worth the while as a business model and a veritable avenue for making money online. Anyone can make money with affiliate marketing if they choose to. But you must first understand how it works, how to do it and how to apply yourself adequately to the pursuit. If you do, your earning potential is limitless.

The question then is, will you? Then here is what it takes.

You must be able to market vigorously and target your ads sharply. Targeting is hugely essential for affiliate marketing to work well. Irrespective of whatsoever role you are playing in an affiliate marketing strategy, your marketing must always be well targeted for it to work. That is rather obvious. If your marketing is not well targeted, reactions to it will be poor. If people don’t click on your affiliate links and take the desired action, you can’t earn a commission. That is simple enough I suppose. You get the best results by promoting your affiliate links where your target audience will be looking. Expert affiliate marketers recommend the following locations amongst others.

•    Training sessions
•    Blog articles
•    Email campaigns
•    Newsletters
•    Webinars
•    PPC (pay-per-click) ads
•    Social media posts
•    Video content
•    Google My Business platform

Depending on the products you are marketing, you can use all or some of these avenues to promote your affiliate links. You must however explore all ways to be deliberate and precise in your marketing efforts. As even a rookie marketer very well knows, promoting affiliate links to the wrong audience is all a wasted effort you can least afford.