Potent Ways to Promote and Grow your Blog

Promoting your blog to give it online authority and a good following is a long term process. It is not even a one-time event or action. It takes processes, strategies and deliberate actions to get your blog noticed among the over 600 million active blogs online. If you want to grow your blog, be prepared to promote it as much as you can. To promote your blog, one of the most effective strategies expert bloggers recommend is to work to create as much valuable content as possible and syndicate the content in as many places/channels as possible. That way, the content stands a very good chance of reaching more people. The more people read your content, the more traffic you will get back to your blog. That appears to be the main objective of promoting and growing a blog. Here are some of the promotion techniques.

Use SEO to Promote Your Blog

If you want to get good organic traffic to your blog, you must think Search Engine Optimization, SEO to promote it. SEO is one very effective way to promote your blog on search engines. The higher the blog ranks on the SERPs of search engines, the more people see it. The more people see it, the more traffic the blog receives. Most content marketers rely on blogs to reach new customers and keep existing ones coming back for more. If you research your niche keywords well enough and take advantage of a keyword planner, you can carefully use these keywords on your content to optimize it. With a good SEO on your blog content, the chances of its ranking higher on major search engines particularly Google increases. By deploying the right SEO techniques as listed below, you can promote your blog with SEO to get amazing results.

Some Potent SEO techniques to Promote Your Blog
•    Create Valuable Content People Want to Read
•    Make Your Content Better Than the Competition’s
•    Optimize for Mobile Devices
•    Guest Post on Other Blogs
•    Create a Backlink Strategy
•    Optimize for Voice Search
•    Use more Long-Tail Keywords

Use Social Media to Promote your Blog

With presently over 4.5 billion active users on social media, it is one great place to promote your blog. The platforms are hugely popular and some of them have in-house tools bloggers can take advantage of to promote their blogs. Aside the huge popularity of social media platforms, the ease of sharing content/info on the platforms and the ease of interaction and communication is great for bloggers. Among the very popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, you can easily share your content with a huge number of people because the platforms allow people interested in what you have to say to follow along and keep pace with your posts. That way, the platforms can be highly effective to drive traffic back to your blog.

Last Line

Blogging is essentially a painstaking effort to write quality content regularly and build a strong community around your blog. Giving your blog a strong online presence to grow it for traffic purposes is what follows next. That is where promoting it multichannel becomes hugely important. The foregoing techniques are quite handy to do so effectively.

Effective Tips on How to Promote Your Blog

For most bloggers, blogging is essentially a business. You cannot hope to make it in any business if you don’t promote it. So it is with blogging. If you are a blogger and you want to excel in the fiercely competitive internet market-space, your promotion strategies, your products, and your brand’s reputation must excel. You must be able to deploy your knowledge and skills to promote your blog on the internet to do better than your competitors. Characteristically on the internet, the blogging environment is extremely competitive. For this reason, the more you deploy and commit your knowledge and skills to promote your blog, the better chances you’ll have to make it succeed. As the digital environment is constantly growing and technology advancements keep showing up almost every day, you must be able to take advantage of these changes to promote your blog to success.  Blogging success is dependent on many factors, and there’s a high degree of complexity when figuring out what works best for your blog. It requires your full attention, a lot of your time, energy, discipline and commitment and a great deal of patience. If you can muster and guarantee these things, you are well on your way to blogging success.

These here effective blog promotion tips if well deployed can help even an average blogger to gain some competitive advantage in his blogging niche.

Provide Relevant High Quality Content

If you want to please and satisfy your blog readers and future customers on a consistent basis, you must provide them relevant content that has high value that can earn their trust. Blogging is basically dependent on content. The more valuable content you post, the faster your blog will grow in awareness, reputation, and customer trust. Blog right consistently and people will begin to trust you. If people trust you, it becomes easy for them to do business with you and be happy to try your products/services because the barriers to purchase will be considerably lowered.

Optimize Your Blog

All blog content is expected to be targeted at an audience. Optimizing your content with the relevant keywords in your niche and targeted at that audience makes the content more effective. Welcome to Search Engine Optimization, SEO. With the right SEO on your content, Search Engines tend to rank it high on their SERPs. Of course, the best blogs usually occupy the first positions in the SERPs and they get more organic traffic. However because SEO is highly technical and can be very challenging for bloggers, hiring professional help to get it done is always a very viable option. If you want to do it yourself, you can only get it right through diligent practice and with trial-and-error approach. It takes good content, great connections, time, patience, consistency and a lot of commitment to have a good SEO on your blog.

Study and Understand Your Audience

You can better target an audience you know and understand. You can only market successfully to an audience you know and understand. It is this understanding you can leverage to sell them products/services. Put simply, it is difficult to make money as a marketer if you don’t know how to approach your future customers. That requires a good understanding of where they come from, how they act, what they want, and what motivates them to act. Through this understanding, you can have an idea of your ideal customer whom you can have in front of you as a target persona to market to. You get better results that way because your marketing and sales strategy will prove to be much more efficient and result oriented.

Leverage the Most Popular Social Media Networks

These days, nearly everyone is on social media around the world 24/7. If you are a blogger/marketer, you must figure out where your target customers love to spend their time on social media. That is where you must focus on to promote your blog. The very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram are great places to promote from but success on each platform depends on the products you are marketing and the demographics you are targeting. You must therefore decide on which social media platforms work best for you and leverage them effectively.

Leverage Relevant Niche Influencers

A niche influencer is a person that is already well known and respected by your target audience. As a blogger, you have a duty to identify influencers who do not represent a threat to your business. What this means is that even if such persons directly endorse or even promote your products, there is no chance that they’ll convert your customers to themselves or direct them elsewhere. These are the kind of influencers you should make direct contact with and request collaboration. Most influencers have their own large followers/audience and you can leverage this audience to widely promote your content through their direct endorsements or content sharing. Be willing to offer influencers commissions if they help promote your products to make sales.

Build Strong Relationships

Most businesses thrive on good relationships. So is blogging. This is why networking is a very crucial part of your blogging experience. You can build strong relationships through a good network of customers, business owners, bloggers and influencers. Through this network, you can get good business advice, good ideas, encouragement and support. Your blog can benefit from quality backlinks, if others in your network, share, retweet, or link your blog posts in their own marketing activities. A strong relationship with your “close customers” is even more valuable. These are customers you can depend on to help you with different tasks such as surveys, word-of-mouth-marketing, and any other type of support you may need from time to time.

How to Promote Your Service Business Online

If you are a service provider, just like every business owner, your business must have been adversely affected by the general restrictions occasioned by the covid-19 pandemic. What you should worry about now is how to promote your service business to create a better online presence or boost your existing online presence with a view to attracting more customers back to your business. However, the unique nature of service businesses warrants unique business promotion activities and somewhat different marketing strategy simply because services involve intangible products.

If you want to effectively promote your service business online, here are some tips for getting found online.

Create a Blog

Because of the intangible nature of services, every service business thrives on reviews, recommendations or word of mouth. Technically, the trial of a service is often impractical because it is an intangible product. This is why it relies hugely on recommendations to generate trust in its ability to meet the needs of customers. If you create a blog on your website and encourage user-generated content in the form of reviews and articles, it is one effective way to ensure visitors to your website trust and believe in the service you offer. By writing good content on your blog about customers’ experiences with your services, it somehow helps to build the much needed credibility for your business. Continuously writing in-depth, factual, and relevant articles in your blog posts is one great way to sustain customers’ interest in your service business. A good blog does that seamlessly.  

Invest in Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find your service business online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. If you are offering a service online, because it is intangible, you really need a very good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. As such, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links. Your website benefits from good organic traffic by these efforts. SEO is hugely technical in nature because of its complexity. Because of this, you can only implement a good SEO strategy yourself if you have the knowledge, technical skills, education, experience, and the right SEO software. Alternatively, just like many business owners do, you can hire the services of professional agencies or individual SEO experts to handle SEO for your business website. In terms of costs, doing it yourself is most cost-effective if you know how to.

Use Emails to Market

Email marketing is extremely effective to promote a service business. It is not only cost-effective, it is also very effective to get new customers. By using emails to market newsletters, marketers get better results for their service businesses than marketing on very popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The reason for this effectiveness is simple. Emails are direct, reduce noise, and are guaranteed to reach the intended audience in the form intended. It is however very important to know how to get your potential customers’ email addresses before you can optimize email results. By deliberate efforts, you can build a reliable email list of your customers and potential customers over time. Without this list, the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool is greatly reduced. Marketers can build this list from a combination of existing customer lists, lists obtained by offering webinars and physical meetings, and email lists of potential customers obtained by offering an incentive to them in exchange for their email addresses.

Collaborate with Other Businesses

Many service businesses need some form of synergy to grow. That calls for business collaboration with other businesses. Through faithful friendship and cooperation, a service business can collaborate with another for a mutually beneficial fruitful relationship. The symbiotic nature of this arrangement ensures that both businesses benefit from each other’s audiences without any encroachments. For instance, a logistics business can collaborate with a courier business and they both benefit handsomely from the arrangement. Same way businesses can collaborate and mutually benefit from business networks common to both.

Teach Online Courses

Service business owners can promote their businesses by teaching online courses/ tutorials related their business niche. If you offer such technical online courses/tutorials to your website visitors, and what you offer has high quality, it can help generate a lot of traffic for your business. This traffic comes in two ways for two reasons. The first is that people are always eager to learn, especially if it is free, qualitative and beneficial. Secondly, free courses and tutorials help to build some form of rapport with customers even before you offer your services to them. From these efforts, you can arouse the curiosity of your consumers. Next is to make your sales pitches and make your sales. Businesses operating professional services online can do so effectively by offering free apps, free software, or other types of training as a way to demonstrate their proficiency and to garner new customers. Free apps offers and the training to use the apps effectively can often lead users to purchase the apps. That is good business.

5 Ways to Monetize Your Business Website

Due to the prevailing pandemic, millions of people now appear to have lost their businesses and means of livelihoods. Many people now face grossly reduced incomes or no incomes at all. It is simply natural to expect such people to look for alternative ways of survival. Many now think rightly of website monetization and making money online. As a result, the internet seems increasingly very attractive at the moment. It is now common to find people searching the internet for ways they can make money online during these challenging times. Taking your small business online and exploring all avenues to have the site monetized has become a very attractive prospect. If you are thinking that way as well here is what works. If you are able to create a good website, offer for sale an excellent product or service from the site, you too can make money online. Next step is how to promote your website successfully online to attract good traffic. This website traffic is what you really need to earn money by way of monetization. The following are very popular ways to monetize your website for that purpose.

1. Selling a Product/Service

Having a great product or service to sell online is one very positive way to earn money online. If you are selling your own product or service, all the sales revenue accrue to you. At minimal investment of cash, the ROI is usually very attractive if you are selling your own product or service online. Just think out of the box, create a product or service that easily solves problems for many people and wham, you are in business. Draw inspiration from your passion and talent to create a solution by way of a product or a service, and make things simple, you’ll get customers in no time.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model of linking merchants to consumers and you get paid commissions for your efforts. If you promote affiliate links from your website and purchases are made via those links, you get paid. That simply means earning commissions from promoting and selling merchants’ products to your website visitors. This becomes simpler and better paying if you sign up for the programs of large e-commerce affiliate sites like SFI, Amazon and Alibaba. When you sign-up for their programs, you will then have access to products’ links to promote on your website. Include these links in the content you write to recommend various e-commerce products you feel like promoting on your website. When people click on these links and purchase any products, you earn a percentage commission from the sales. It is as simple as that.

3. Membership Fees

Charging membership fees is one sure way to earn from your website. To qualify for such fees, the info you put out from your website must be highly informative, authoritative, exclusive and in very high demand. Good content suitable for membership on websites include market research findings, webinars, or podcasts. If you create such content, you can then ask your website visitors who desperately need the info to pay a fee before having access to the content. That way, you make money steadily for as long as your content is in demand. 

4. Sponsored Posts

After you launch your website, you must promote it vigorously to grow traffic and audience. When the audience is big enough, you can reach out to bigger marketing businesses that operate in the same niche you are to find out if they are interested in your website traffic. If they show interest, you can offer to publish an authoritative blog or video about their product or service and link to them. You can offer to include them in your regular newsletter, or place their ads on your site. If they realize that they are getting traffic from your efforts, you can then cut a sponsorship deal with them. That simply means steady money and income.

5. Website Traffic Reselling

As a successful marketer, you can actually resell your website traffic if it is huge and steady. If your website traffic gets to such high level, say in the thousands, you can then decide to join platforms like Google Ads or Ezoic by applying to them to place advertisements on your website. Google Adsense is particularly very popular at this and the code they give you to insert on your website is very efficient in calculating the “views” and “hits” on the ads they run on your website. That is what determines what they pay you as a publisher of these ads. It is only when your website traffic sees or clicks on the ads that you are entitled to be paid. Alternatively, you can reach out to marketers, merchants and other advertisers directly. By displaying their banners and links on your website, you are helping them to advertise their products or services. You earn money from these efforts through the clicks that emanate from your website.

How Best to Test Your Website for Usability

As most digital marketers very well know, your website is your front office online. It is the best place to showcase and promote your goods/services to attract customers. To be able to perform that function effectively and efficiently, your website must be easily usable. So, it helps your business a great deal if you can routinely and regularly carry out usability testing on your website to be sure it does for your business what you expect it to do. Most importantly, it is extremely vital to go through various types of usability testing for your website even before you launch it. If its various functional aspects like speed and flow are unable to enhance user experience, your business suffers the consequence.


 
Here is what to test

Customer Experience

Every business is online to get customers. You can hardly get a good customer experience without easy usability of your website. If you have an in depth understanding of the needs of your customers, you can position your website to meet these needs. A good customer experience usually translates to good customers and good business.

Easy Accessibility

Web users are notoriously impatient. Getting hits on your website is directly related to how easily accessible it is. When users encounter a bit of difficulty in accessing your website, they quickly move on and your business suffers the consequence. Easy web accessibility allows people with a wide range of abilities to navigate and interact with your website without stress and that is good for your business.

Brand Positioning

Your brand is your business. If your website cannot position and promote your brand effectively, it does not help your business. Poor quality of usability of your website cannot help you to gain the trust of your customers easily. That is the trust which helps the growth and popularity of your brand and your business. Doing a few right and proper things on your website helps to ensure a highly optimized user experience which can promote the overall perception of your brand.

Customer Conversions

It is just not enough to get a lot of hits and visits to your website. What matters most is how many of such visitors end up becoming customers. The higher the conversion rate, the better for your business! Customer experience plays a great role in increased customer conversion rates the reason it is a credible test for your website usability.

Productive Systems

Very easy to deploy and use systems greatly enhance customers experience. What your website needs are systems which are very easy to use and can be updated using simple but effective methods. Such systems if in place are extremely valuable assets for your business because they greatly enhance the productivity of your website. 

How to Understand the Purpose of Social Media

 Yes, social media remains a place of unfettered interaction online. It is a very useful tool for people who know what to do with it. But, you must know how to play in it if you don’t want to make a fool of yourself out there. It takes some thoughtful planning and organization to get things right on social media. All you need is to pay attention because if you don’t use it right, you may perpetually struggle fruitlessly out there.

Here are some salient issues you must understand about the purpose of social media if you want to derive immense benefits from social media’s uses:

#1. Social media delivers your message to the right audience online

Like minds always associate on social media and more likely to do business with one another. You must be an active participant yourself to derive maximum benefits from this relationship. The main thing social media helps you do is to put your message right out there in front of customers and potential new customers. Fact is, you’re unlikely to attract customers to places they don’t already go to. The real reason you must always take the time to figure out where your audience is before trying to reach them. Targeting popular social media platforms like facebook, twitter, instagram and the likes is usually of immense benefits in that regard.

#2. Social media is not a know-all, be-all platform

It sure has its limitations. Some users erroneously expect social media to work miraculously to promote their business. Experience has shown that things don’t usually work out that easily. You must first work hard on your own account before it gets noticed online. If you do manage to get good traction, it is usually as a result of the lot of hard work you’ve put in earlier. Social media does not solve all your marketing problems but it sure takes care of a lot.

#3. Social media doesn’t help in all issues

It doesn’t always help in all things because of its own short comings. Sometimes, having a social media profile doesn’t make much of a difference for your business. It may not even help at all depending on the type of business you are into. You must get fully involved too if you want to be taken seriously as a participant. If you don’t participate actively, you don’t get good results. Participation is what brings results not by just being a dormant player. If your social media profiles are not updated often enough, they may actually be hurting your online presence without your knowing it. 


 

4 Creative Marketing Campaign Ideas to Promote Your Business

Periodically, good marketers create marketing plans for their businesses. These plans they incorporate into their overall marketing strategies. Many do roll over and fine tune the strategies they’ve discovered over time really work for them. Even though marketers may all be doing the same things, those who get the best results tend to do many of these things differently. That is the trick. In the ever-changing digital world, it’s more important than ever to update your marketing strategy at least yearly, failing which your competitors can easily take advantage of your laxity. It is that serious. 


 
Here are some very potent marketing tactics many experts recommend to promote your business.

#1. Be Active on Social Media

Social media now appears to be the most popular marketing platform on the web. It is here with us all and has come to stay. If you want to put your business out there in front of millions of potential customers, just get it on social media. Be sure it is active on some of the most popular platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Being active on social media makes the business more transparent and accessible to people who are most likely to do business with you. People generally like a business that is easily accessible and easy to interact with. Social media guarantees these as well as being a very good platform for advertising the business.

#2. Create Attention Grabbing Business Marketing Tools

Irrespective of whether you are advertising online/offline, it is still very important to use physical marketing tools, such as flyers and brochures designed in such a way as to easily grab attention. Flyers, business cards and brochures can be professionally produced and handed out conveniently in large numbers at gatherings of potential customers. When used online, these materials are best deployed at locations on the sites where they catch attention easily.

#3. Write Quality Blog Content

Do you write a blog? Trite question! There is hardly any marketer who doesn’t write a blog these days. If you do, be sure to write quality content and regularly too! In the blogging world, content remains king. If you aren’t writing blog content for your website yet, I have a bit of bad news for you. You’re way behind your competition. No good marketer likes that. Blog content is what improves your site’s SEO and drives people to your website. That means traffic which translates to sales as bottom line.

#4. Deploy Video Marketing

Video marketing is a way of visual content marketing which is about the most effective traffic-attracting idea currently online. It is becoming increasingly popular and essential for many small businesses online. Many marketers are now choosing video over text more and more because of its effectiveness at capturing people’s attention fairly easily. For best results from visual content marketing, you can put together a webinar for your cyber-audience. In addition, you can create how-to videos for your products/services or you can even choose to open a YouTube channel for your videos.

10 Simple Ways to Earn Cool Money Online

The Internet has become some form of goldmine within which anyone willing to do honest work can earn a comfortable living. When I started out in year 2012, I was just playing around until I soon discovered how to turn play time into income-earning time. It took me quite some time to master the ropes a bit though.  From my experience, anyone can make money online even if they know next to nothing about online marketing, social media, or even SEO. You can quickly learn the ropes like I did if you are smart enough. I can now comfortably recommend at least 10 ways I have used and others are using to make legitimate cool money online. Here they are but not necessarily listed in any particular order of importance.

#1: Affiliate Marketing

This is readily the most popular and most common way to earn money legitimately online.  Most websites selling products and services rely heavily on affiliates to help push their products/services on the web. When a product/service gets sold on account of the marketing efforts of an affiliate, the affiliate gets a pre-agreed percentage of the sale as commission. The more products you are able to help sell, the more money you make. Presently, SFI prides itself as the #1 Affiliate Marketing Business online. That is for good reasons because they practically lead every affiliate by the hand to make money. With SFI, you can earn anything from #5,000 to $100,000 per year at full blast on a deep downline you must have built over some time.

#2: Google Adsense

This is one great way to earn money from your website or blog. By the time you get a good blog going, the next thing is to monetize it. This you do by applying to Google for a Google Adsense code. This is the code Google gives out to marketers at its own very strict discretion. Once you insert the code on your website/blog, you are good to go. Google kicks in at this stage and does the rest under its own very strict rules and regulations. You get paid any time someone clicks on the ads Google displays via that code on your site and/or makes a purchase. That way, you can earn a monthly paycheck of $100-$5000 depending on how popular your blog is as judged by the traffic it gets on daily basis.


 
#3: Selling Stuff Online
 
This is fairly simple and straight forward i suppose. From my experience, most people do sell stuff easily online. The more stuff you sell, the more money you make. Ever heard of garage sales? This is one way to sell off old stuff you have been accumulating in your garage over the years. It will amaze you the good number of people looking for old stuff to buy online. If you run a physical shop, you can advertise to your followers on social media particularly YouTube, facebook, twitter and Instagram and you get orders as a result. You may choose to advertise on free sites like craigslist.org to get buyers. One very dependable way to make money online is to sell stuff in a great way using the internet to earn cool money! You can make up to $1500 per month selling stuff, any stuff online.

#4: Digital Products
 
You’ve got to be good at creating digital products to earn money here. There are all kinds of digital products out there online created by others even if you are unable to create them yourself. All you need do is to get a resale permit or resell license from the original owners of the digital products and you are in business. Many people are online daily looking for information. If you have well-packaged eBooks or how-to videos on any popular topics or business niches in high demand, you can sell them online to make money. Making up to $1000 per month selling digital products is common amongst marketers.

#5: Brand Sponsorships

Most brands who really want to sell well and get a good market share are often willing to pay for some sort of sponsorship package that includes written content, videos, social shares, and more. Many brands do pay for saying something good about their brands online.  If you are very popular on social media, particularly on facebook, twitter, pinterest and others, and if you have a very huge followership and audience, you can make cool money from brand sponsorship. Brand owners are ever willing to pay for the sponsorship of their brands, if your social media background is hugely impressive. Some $500-$5000 can be made monthly if you get to know the ropes about brand sponsorship.

#6: Display Ads

With display ads on your website/blog, you get to make money when the ads are viewed online. Somehow, display ads are an extension of Google Adsense where the reader doesn’t just have to click on the ad for you to make money. You get paid in two ways. These are Pay Per View, PPV and Pay Per Click, PPC, both recognized and valued by Google Adsense code. Display ads play the same role on your website/blog just as billboard ads on roadsides or highways. With display ads, you get paid based on the number of times your displayed ads are viewed no matter what. For that reason, these ads work better and earn good money for you if your website/blog traffic is really high. Popular blogs earn as much as $5000 monthly from display ads alone.

#7: Sponsored Posts

Many companies pay people to write about and promote their products/services in form of sponsored posts. It is sort of similar to sponsored brands, the only difference being that the posts are not directly about brands but about specific products/services. With a sponsored post, a company pays you to talk about their product or service on their website if you have the clout and authority to command belief. If you are a known and respected authority in any field related to the product or service, you can make $2000-$5000 per month from sponsored posts alone.


 
#8: YouTube Ads

YouTube currently enjoys a special niche online as a video exchange site. It is extremely popular for that. You can easily set up your own onsite account and start posting your own videos. Good money is made from ads in onsite accounts which have a large followership and popularity. The more the ads are viewed, the more money you make. Google Adsense code helps out also in this process. YouTube ads are fairly easy to set up because all you have to do is turn on ads every time you publish a video. Most marketers earn more money with this strategy as they build and enlarge their viewership. Some earn up to $5000 per month from just turning on YouTube ads embedded with Google Adsense codes.

#9: Freelance Writing

This requires some proven and tested expertise and there is no running away from it. Without knowing what to write and how to write it to impress others, you can’t be a good freelance writer. Many freelance writers earn some $100-$1000 per article depending on the niche and the writer’s authority. Freelance writing enables you to gain exposure and authority as you write along. That helps to increase the demand for your services and ultimately improved and enhanced earnings as a result.

#10: Consultancy/Coaching

Consultancy/Coaching is the niche of authoritative experts online. You can package and sell full courses inclusive of certification online. Through webinars, you can directly offer real time lectures worldwide and earn good money for your efforts. You can coach online for business strategies, health and wellness, hunting, hiking, swimming, body building and any topic of your choice where you have undisputed know-how and expertise. How much you earn depends on the type of niche you are involved in. Some high flying Executive Coaches/Consultants make around $200-$350 per hour coaching or consulting for sundry businesses.

Last Line!

Not everyone may find all these methods suitable for them to earn money online because our individual competences and backgrounds vary very diversely. That’s OK! Just find and settle for any you believe you can make money with and not necessarily all of them. If you do that, you are good to go and you too will start making clean and legitimate money online with your own efforts. Get started right now if you are not already on. A delay means loss of money which you can least afford. 

 

How to Promote Your Website like a Pro

If you have a website, and you greatly need to have one if you are a serious marketer, you must devise ways to promote it with a view to attracting traffic to it. You need very clear strategies to do so if you want your efforts to yield good results. What requires the most attention is how to use these strategies not just to increase the visibility of your site but most importantly to increase the quality and standing of the site. To promote your site like a Pro, you must do what the Pros like to do. Here are some of the strategies real Pros recommend particularly about design, layout, aesthetics, presentation, hosting and actual operation of any website meant for online business marketing purposes.

Make it simple to use and navigate

Depending on your type of business, simple sites always give better results than complex and complicated sites. The Pros always advise that such sites must be clean, simple, sleek, and very fast in loading time. If can avoid excessively large images and too many fancy features on the site, that can help a great deal on its navigation since large images and fanciful features tend to slow down navigation on any site. The easier you make it for someone to browse through your site, the better their chances of staying longer on the site or even winding up subscribing or making a purchase.


 
Have on it many channels of feedback and Interaction

In any business, a 2-way communication is very vital. The more and easier ways visitors can interact with your site, the better chances of your site becoming more and better known. The more you allow users to interact on your site, the more they will do so. The more they interact with your site, the more likely they are to become interested in it. How do you better enhance this interaction? Install on the site, email contact button, allow users to comment and even engage in conversations with some token moderation. Allow users to rank the site and vote on comments with likes and dislikes. Even sharing and live chat features on the site are helpful as well.

Foster an onsite community

Community is where group interaction and communication really takes place and works well. As you design and build your site, you must factor in and think of the type of community that you want to foster. By allowing interaction, responding quickly, and moderating the discussions onsite, you are, in essence, creating a community. It is not good for business to always push your product/service on everyone you come across. Pros advise that it is best to always create awareness first before you make your product/service available. Fostering and working in an onsite community of like-minded fellows enables you to do that fairly easily.

Be very liberal with visitors’ participation
 
If you want to sell and sell well, you must be ready to deal with people at all times taking into account the complex nature of every human being. In our complex world of today, most people not only want to be seen, they want to be heard as well. Everyone thus always has an opinion to express about any and every issue. You must therefore device ways on your site to allow visitors to interact freely with your site and with others. People always like to bring their knowledge and wisdom into any conversion. By allowing them to freely do so, a bit of moderation directly by you is of essence. Set and maintain boundaries by monitoring and moderating your site yourself. This type of check should not in any way be seen or construed as akin to command and control. Real freedom particularly of expression and choices is very good for business. So, you must allow liberal freedom to visitors to your website.

Respond to feedback very quickly

Quick response to inquiries is very good for business. Your site must be known by others as a quick response site. That notion helps to promote it a great deal. No matter the type of inquiry, even if it is mere commenting, filling out a form or sending an email, online visitors always want a quick response from a responsive site. The real reason you must make your website responsive and quickly too. Timely responses always manage to help move relationships forward while the interest therein is still keen and fresh.

Personally monitor and moderate your website 

Freedom of choice and decisions is very good for business. Allowing real time interaction onsite is crucial to a successful website operation. But, too much uncontrolled freedom is a danger to it as well. As the site owner, you must set boundaries for all your visitors to stay within. Adequate allowances must be made so as not to allow these boundaries to be unduly restrictive. If they are too restrictive, you may end up scaring away visitors you are keen on retaining. People tend to abuse excessive liberty online by spamming and being abusive. Both must be checked directly by the site owner who may need to invest a bit of time and energy to delete or moderate spammy and offensive comments. That is what the Pros do.


 
Integrate your site into larger online communities
 
To integrate your site into larger online communities, you inevitably must turn to social media. Because of their huge popularity and ease of sharing messages by millions and millions of users, social media is the best place to integrate your site and latch into the activities of a huge and very active online community. Social media sites are best used not only to draw traffic to your site, but to demonstrate how your site and eventually the community you desire to create on your site manages to fit into larger communities which online platforms represent. A very fitting and productive goal is to design your site with the social media features that allow for easy integration with these larger communities. That is what the Pros do and they highly recommend.

Last Line!

Aside from having interesting and entertaining content on your website, deploying the foregoing strategies will make it more attractive to others. Websites give better results if you use a format that works well on different types of media. For flexibility and versatility, your website should be readable and attractive to read on different devices like smart phones, tablets, TVs and desktops, irrespective of whatever operating system or browser used to view them. That is how the Pros get it done and they highly recommend too.

How to Use Freebies to Promote Your Website

 These days nearly everyone wants something of value and wherever possible, get it for free. As a marketer, even if the content of your Website is very interesting, highly informative, and entertaining, you still need more promotional strategies to make it successful. So, what do smart marketers do in the circumstance? They go for a bit of perks on the side to lure and keep visitors focused on their websites. They carefully choose a distinct promotion strategy to isolate and focus on one particular thing of value and place it on their websites. The main selling point of such thing of value is usually that it is offered for free. That offer acts as a very good bait to keep visitors coming and staying on the site. Most people really love freebies no doubt.

Every marketer always has a very wide range of freebies they can choose to offer. Everything depends on the marketer, his/her expertise on digital items of value and the nature of the businesses they are offering. If you need help, you can access many examples of promotional freebies many others are using on the Web. Everything depends on what you are offering. Some theme designers offer some themes free. Some photographers usually offer some of their images for your use royalty free. If you are a Graphic artist, you can offer free clip-arts. If you are a musician or a music distributor, you can offer free downloads of certain types of songs. Many Programmers do offer certain programs as freeware to attract buyers. E-books and “how to” wares are very popular freebies on the web and they are fairly easy to write and distribute.

Every experienced marketer knows that the attention span of most Internet surfers is always very fleet and notoriously limited. A freebie offer always manages to “arrest” the attention of some of these surfers. That helps to attract and keep good traffic on your website. That no doubt is very good for your online business. Millions of people are on the Internet offering one thing or the other. Many of these huge numbers compete rigorously daily for the limited attention of Internet surfers. They all want to attract people to their websites and for them to keep coming back. Many smart marketers know too well that it is virtually impracticable and I dare say impossible for any one person to look at every site to which they are invited. In such a bleak scenario, what to do to make a real difference is to offer something of value free. By actively offering something which people really need, something for which they may be actively seeking, for free, chances are, you could grab their attention better. Offering freebies is thus one great way to get visitors to actually come and even stay a bit longer on your Website. That directly translates to more and better traffic to your website and a potent booster for your business.
 
 

How to Promote Your Website by Creating and Posting Videos

Traffic, traffic and more traffic, that’s what smart marketers always want. Their businesses depend heavily on good quality web traffic. The real reason most marketers always go for any online activity which helps them to get traffic. Creating and posting videos is one of such activities. As most of these marketers very well know, creating videos is one great way to drive traffic to your Website. Granted, everyone needs a certain amount of skill to capture good quality videos from the environment, but even when you have good videos, where to post them to give your website the much needed traffic is also of paramount importance. For now, YouTube appears to be the main choice location for marketers posting videos. Because of the ease of sharing and commenting on videos on the platform, YouTube no doubt is a very fantastic way to promote your Website. Marketers who routinely embed videos on their Websites or post them on social media inevitably create very potent opportunities for others to find and link to their sites. That encourages web traffic to such sites. Very good for any online business if you ask me!

To get in the game, your first step is to create a YouTube channel that links back to your Website. Next is to make sure the videos you have created can display your URL within the content of the videos and in the video descriptions found below the videos. The essence of that is to make it easy for your potential customers to easily find the videos through either normal Google search or directly on YouTube. An easier way to spread the content and to better expose your website is to embed the videos on your Websites and posts on your social media platforms. Warning! Some social media platforms are a bit finicky about the content they allow on their platforms, so, you must factor that in when propagating your URL through videos on their sites. The popularity of social media sites particularly Facebook and Twitter is no longer in doubt. The ease and speed of sharing content on these platforms go a long way to quickly help in creating backlinks to your website if the URL to such sites is correctly and properly embedded in the videos being so propagated. Clicks on such videos always direct visitors to your website. That translates to traffic, quality web traffic that is.


 

How Smart Bloggers Make Dumb Choices

 Do you know the pluses and minuses of affiliate marketing? Great if you do. Even if you don’t, it just takes a bit of digging behind-the-scenes to look. You’ll discover many dumb things even expert bloggers do. Here’s a sampler.

Some merchants may be above-board, but may not be a good fit for your own type of audience. Sticking with such merchants is a dumb thing to do. 


 
Regularly, some bloggers get fooled by unscrupulous merchants all in the name of business. For all you care, all the noise about a particular product may just be mere hyping and some bloggers easily get carried away by that. More often than not, these bloggers forget the cliché, “If an opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is.” Not heeding that is exactly why many bloggers sometimes get seduced by the tactics of less ethical and unscrupulous merchants.

It is easy to find numerous tips and tricks in affiliate marketing forums that might help you make a quick buck.  Such tricks could quickly lead to a break in trust with your audience. That is not the best way to go. In any business, trust counts for much and once it is lost, a lot is lost.

Anyone, no matter how experienced and expert they are can get fooled once in a while. Here are some quick tips to help you stay safe:

Don’t promote any product until you have all the vital information you need to promote it. To get this information, be sure you’ve subscribed to your affiliate partners’ email list and know exactly what your readers can expect in terms of follow-up marketing. That leaves you on very sure and safe grounds to promote the product as expected.

Do not pay a fee to become an affiliate. That is inclusive of membership or setup fees. Most credible affiliate program are FREE to join and many even entice people with sign-up bonuses. When you see product merchants asking for fees, it is likely they are running scams. Beware!

Don’t get involved in using tricks and unethical methods to promote any product.  Some marketers habitually use aggressive SEO tactics that focus exclusively on tricking search engines to market their products. That is a very dumb thing to do even if you may record a few successes here and there. If humans don’t wise up to your tricks soon enough, search engines will and they could have you banned from search engine listings. A real disaster if that happens.

 

What Makes an Affiliate Program Good To Promote?

 In affiliate marketing program, promotion is really key. Just because you’ve found a high paying affiliate program, doesn’t mean you should promote it right away. If you find an affiliate product which meets these here 4 criteria, you are best advised to consider taking the time to promote it.

Therefore, before promoting an affiliate program, always be sure it meets following key criteria.

01. Have I used it myself? Use a product first and be sure it works as promised before you undertake to promote it. This is rather obvious though but surprisingly, many marketers don’t consider it as very important. By using a product yourself, you will discover both the pros and cons of the product you are using. That information helps you to write more credible reviews or case studies on the product. This is important because the more trustworthy you are, the more likely your readers will click on your affiliate links.

02. Does it work for me? You can only answer this question if you have used the product. Consumers are aware that there are so many products and services out there that don’t do what they promise. Even if they do, they just don’t do it as well from the promotional promises. If you don’t want to lose trust and credibility fast enough, promote only products/services which you have used yourself and they work well for you.

03. Is it a trusted Brand? In affiliate marketing trust is earned over time. Trust readily attracts customers to the brand. That is the real reason many marketers prefer promoting affiliate products of a company or persons they already know and trust. When you know their products are solid and they treat their customers well, you get involved. Such brands readily make the best affiliate programs to promote because people are more likely to search for and buy from only the trusted brands they know.

04. Are the products evergreen? Some marketers prefer to make quick money hence they readily latch on to products that may launch for only a week or two and then close. To others, that is not a good strategy because there is too much work involved in such promotional efforts. It is best to focus more on evergreen programs that you can always promote on the long term thereby earning residual commissions for many months or even years down the road.

How to Promote Affiliate Products

 Products promotion simply means to drive traffic to the products and get people to see and buy them. Depending on the niche of your blog, you can apply directly to companies and become an affiliate. Thereafter, by means of your website or blog, you commence promoting the products you have selected. Your promotions work best and are most effective if you have your own website or blog. When you drive traffic to your website or blog you are not just promoting the affiliate product, you are promoting yourself too. Promoting yourself effectively helps a great deal to increasing your channels of making money online.
Some effective channels and tools you can use to promote affiliate products include but not limited to:

Hand bills
Placing banners in your website or blog
Inserting affiliate links in your website or blog
Paid traffic
Writing product reviews
Email marketing
Social media marketing
Search engine traffic, SEO
Flyers
Car stickers, etc.
If your promotions are efficient, you start earning commissions almost immediately. When you start earning commissions, getting paid should not be a problem. For now, the most popular and reliable payment methods are through PayPal Accounts, Direct bank deposits, Cheques and Payoneer Master Card. You must endeavor to find out what is accepted and smooth to use in your Country of operation before you settle for any of these methods.

 

3-Steps to Start an Affiliate Marketing Business

Everyone must go through this process if they seriously want to be affiliate marketers. You too can start affiliate marketing even as a beginner in just 3 steps.



01. Pick a niche

The first thing you must to do before you venture into affiliate marketing is to pick a niche. A niche is simply a topic or an area of interest which you like and are really knowledgeable about. Settling for a niche you like enables you to speak to a particular target audience instead of trying to talk to everybody thereby dissipating energy needlessly. Some examples of very popular niches are:

Food
Drinks
Business
Family
Entertainment
Automobiles
Finance
Health
Travels, etc
For full effects, each of these broad niches can be further broken down into sub-niches. If you are a beginner, you are best advised to settle for a narrower sub-niche instead of focusing on a broad niche where your knowledge and expertise may not be fully convincing. Another advantage of having a narrow niche is because it allows you to focus on a much targeted customer base. Instead of focusing on Health for example as a broad niche, you can decide to target dieting, weight loss, skin care, health supplements, etc, etc which are narrower but still on health matters all the same.

02. Build a website or a blog around that niche
 
After settling for a niche of your choice, the next thing you must do is to build a website or a blog around that niche. The website or blog now serves as your online promotional base for the business. If you want long-term success in the business, having a website or a blog gives you an indispensable advantage. With them, you derive the freedom to connect with your readers with a view to giving them helpful and fresh information on a regular basis. That way, you can build a subscriber base and follow-up with them until they trust you enough to follow your recommendations as they come from you. If you have your own website or blog, instead of sending visitors directly to an affiliate offer, you can direct those visitors to your own website or blog where you can convert them to loyal followers through your email list. A reliable email list allows you to promote many other affiliate offers through your email list thereby expanding your business exponentially.

03. Join Affiliate Programs

There are many credible and reliable affiliate programs online. Search and locate them, making sure you understand and agree with their rules of engagement before signing up. If you have your own website or blog, the next step is to sign up for affiliate programs and start making some money as you promote products out of your website or blog. Be sure you select only good, proven and effective products to promote. Doing so will enable you to hit commissions real quick. That is what most affiliate marketers really want, making real money from commissions.

 

How to Promote Affiliate Marketing on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media. Many already have a formidable audience built up over time on social media. For that reason, social media has become another effective way of promoting with relative ease affiliate products and services. If you are a celebrity, with the help of social media, you can easily play an influencer role to promote products and services. As a celebrity influencer, your fans will respond to your recommendations simply because they like or trust you. Many of such fans routinely follow your lead so when you endorse a product or service, you easily get them to try the product or service based solely on your endorsement. That is the power of social media. Here is how it works in some of the most popular social media platforms around.


 
Affiliate Marketing on Facebook

With about 2.2 billion active monthly users, Facebook appears to be the most popular social networking platform at the moment. On Facebook, if you are having a Facebook page or group that is focused to a niche, it is likely to be more effective to promote any affiliate marketing product/service. It is therefore readily one of the best platforms to do affiliate marketing. It is most advisable to use Facebook Groups more to promote affiliate links because organic engagement is still positive in Facebook Groups inspite of platform restrictions elsewhere.

Affiliate Marketing on Instagram

This is a photo-friendly social media platform. But, one big drawback on Instagram about affiliate marketing is that it does not allow you add links to your posts. The only effective way around this drawback is for affiliate marketers to routinely put the affiliate links (shortened by way of URL shortening service on Google anyway) in their profiles for the duration their ads campaigns will be running. That is the only way your site visitors can get to have an opportunity to click on the link displayed in your profile.

Affiliate Marketing on YouTube

This no doubt is the most popular search engine and the largest social media platform for videos. This dual nature makes YouTube a very effective source of traffic for affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketer, you can use YouTube effectively if you can create a video guide, tip, how to, or review of the product or service you want to sell. In this description, you can add links to the product using your affiliate link. When your viewers get to know through the information you provide that you have included a link to the product or service for their convenience, you get them really curious and that earns higher click-through rates as a result.

Affiliate Marketing with Email Marketing
 
Many marketers sometimes argue that Email marketing is a thing of the past but to others, it is another effective way to promote your affiliate partnerships. Most experienced Email marketers still believe in it and use it efficiently. For good results using Email marketing, first you must build a list of email addresses of leads and customers using the opt-in form in the entry point of your sales funnel. That done, you can then offer your visitors something of value like an e-book for free then ask them to enter their email addresses in the form so that you can send them the free offer. After building up the list, you can segment the audience for effective affiliate marketing campaigns. That done, it becomes fairly easy to target the appropriate deals, and offers to the right audience. Ultimately, such efforts lead to more responses and better sales which is what thrills many affiliate marketers. 

 

Effective Channels to Promote Affiliate Marketing Programs

 According to many online marketing experts, the business of affiliate marketing simply revolves around products promotions and sales. You can promote products and services of your affiliate marketing program using a number of affiliate marketing channels like your website or blog. Social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are also very handy and easy to use. Their popularity, ease of use and speed of spreading messages are always a big boost for all marketing efforts.

Part of your ads campaign may also include email marketing with a sales funnel. In addition, you may choose to buy traffic from sources like Google, Facebook and YouTube. What works for you and gives you the best results is what you use. Of very popular use are the following different channels which you are at liberty to choose from. They can all be effectively and efficiently used to promote products and services of your affiliate marketing program. The most popular of these channels are:

Email Marketing
Social Media (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp)
A Website or Blog
Search Engine Ads (Google, YouTube, Bing)
Social Media Ads (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram)