Tips to Earn Money Online From a Side-Hustle

A side-hustle isn’t a hobby or something you’ll only do when you have free time. It is some sort of job that makes you feel motivated and you are passionate about to engage in. It must in addition make you productive enough as to earn income from it. However, the best side-hustle is the type that will give you a meaningful amount of time to dedicate to it even when holding down a regular paying job. Starting a side-hustle is one great way to generate some extra income online that can greatly compliment your regular paycheck. It is important to choose only the type of side-hustles you are knowledgeable and skillful about which align with your interests. This is because, aside from generating extra income for you, side-hustles do offer various other benefits for people seeking some form of work-life balance in their lives. The following online gigs which you can easily get involved in tend to fit that bill perfectly.

Build a Business Website

It is pretty difficult to do business successfully online without a website. Even if you want to embark on a side-hustle, it is hugely important to have a functional website. If you don’t have the skills to build one, professional webmasters can help you out for a fee. Having a business website can be a great way to market your side-hustle and make some extra money. Once your website is up and running, you can keep updating it with fresh content to attract traffic. Good content on your website if well optimized helps to attract the attention of search engines. That translates to good organic traffic which helps to make your website more relevant. Creating a blog is one of the best website ideas for a lucrative side-hustle. This is because blogging allows you to widely share your thoughts on various topics. If you monetize the blog, you can earn revenues from paid ads, sponsored content, endorsements, affiliate links, or through a paid subscription system.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to earn money online as a side-hustle. It is a performance-based business model that rewards marketers with percentage-based commissions for every sale they drive from their audience. The key to successful affiliate marketing as a side-hustle is to make sure to promote only products in your niche that you like and have probably used before or you are presently using. That’s about the best way you can be more relevant to your audience and increase your chances of converting sales better. You can do well by promoting your favorite products on your website or out of social media accounts. In addition, you may choose to join a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI and you leverage their experience, marketing tools and organization to freely market your choice products/services.
 
Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media presently has about 4.6 billion active users worldwide. Now that’s one huge market out there! Because of this huge popularity, social media marketing (SMM) now has a unique capacity to influence consumer behavior. It is usually very effective to drive engagement, interact with a wide range of audiences and extract relevant customer data that help marketers to track and gauge their marketing campaigns. For a side hustle, SMM is an excellent way to leverage your existing skills and knowledge to make money online. You can use your knowledge and expertise to help business owners increase their online presence and grow their sales and you get paid for your efforts. As a social media marketer, your main job is to craft ads that help to increase brand exposure. You can then promote these ads on the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and the likes to attract customers.

Designing

If you have art and designing skills, you can turn them into a side-hustle online. You can create many art works and sell them out of popular e-commerce platforms like Fiverr or Upwork. The skills you bring into this kind of creative venture are unique to you. So, you can quickly gain online reputation for such creative art works. That translates to good money from your side-hustle. Once the job makes you feel motivated, passionate, and highly productive, you can make more money from it.

Blogging/Content Writing

If you have writing skills and the flair for writing, you have many options for making money online. The idea is to write something great that people will like to read and even pay to read. That means even if you are writing a blog or marketing content, what you write must be of high quality and impactful. That is what gets your writing to be quickly noticed and reckoned with. So, if you want to get paid to write, you can do this via various online services that pay you to create content such as reviews and social media posts. However, even though you may have the skills, good writing may be a little time-consuming because you need to do a lot of research to get your facts right. Aside from being paid outright for writing, you can monetize your blog content to earn more money. If you monetize your blog, you can earn revenues from paid ads, sponsored content, endorsements, affiliate links, or through a paid subscription system.

Online Surveys

Online surveys are a great way to earn side income while holding down a full-time job. Technically, surveys are simple and easy to start and completed on schedule. Business owners use online survey websites to conduct market research and pay consumers for their feedback. They offer material rewards such as product discounts, free airline/bus/train tickets, discounted lodgings or gift cards. To make money from surveys, you must make sure to work with reputable surveys websites. Do not fail to do your due diligence/research and check out as many surveys websites you can find to clarify on their reliability before you decide on which to work with. 

5 Digital Techniques to Drive Good Traffic to Your E-Commerce Store

Every online business owner needs good traffic to their websites to enable them make sales. You may choose to get this traffic organically or you spend good money on ads to increase traffic to your website or e-commerce store. Because of the cost element involved in using paid ads, many e-commerce stores owners usually prefer to use organic ways to increase traffic to their stores. Organic ways may not require high capital investments to accomplish, but they do require hard work, good strategy, patience and consistency. By the time your e-commerce starts to get good organic traffic, it helps to increase its credibility and reputation in its niche industry. When the credibility of your store increases, it means more customers will trust the business enough to become repeat customers. That helps to boost traffic to the store.

 
Here are some proven ways you can organically drive more traffic to your e-commerce store and generate more sales.
   
1. Content Marketing

Blogging remains the most popular and preferred form of content marketing among online marketers. The reason many of them believe content is king in digital marketing. They know that about 70% of consumers learn about a business through online articles and most of these articles come in form of blogs. Because of these articles, major search engines like Google prefer websites with high-quality and regularly updated content. Many marketers take advantage of this by adding a blog section on their e-commerce websites. If you regularly post useful and high value content on your blog, it helps to drive traffic better than merely posting dozens of promotional materials. Blogs that drive good traffic are usually very entertaining, engaging, and offer unique value to the readers. This value comes from good photos/images/infographics, answering questions from your blog audience, publishing trends, new insights about products, a bit of humor here and there, product reviews and how-to guides and suchlike info that really attract the interest of readers. If you craft your blog content well and according to your target audience's preferences, and the content is SEO optimized, it will help your e-commerce store to get more traffic. Good traffic translates to leads, conversions and even sales if you can effectively use compelling words and CTAs to make it happen.

2. Engaging Digital Marketing Professionals

Besides DIY techniques, you can outsource driving traffic to your e-commerce store if you so wish. There are some reputable agencies who have skilled and experienced digital marketing teams that can help you out if you hire them for the job. These agencies can help take off most of the DIY hassles from you. They know how to keep your audience engaged and convert your leads into sales. Depending on what you prefer, some agencies offer SEO services, website optimization, quality content writing services, blog management, and much more, all aimed at increasing organic traffic to your e-commerce store.

3. Social Media Marketing, SMM

Right now, social media has about 4.5 billion active users around the world. Now, that’s one huge market out there any smart online business owner can attract good traffic from. Chances are, most of your potential and existing customers are already active on social media. So, you can effectively leverage social media platforms particularly the most popular ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes to drive traffic to your e-commerce store. You can do this by creating an effective social media strategy then consistently post great content according to your target audience's preferences. The aim is to grab the attention of your social media audience and lure them to your e-commerce store. You can do this effectively if your content is attention-grabbing, unique, informative, in sync with trends and entertaining. 

 
4. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO plays a very significant role in increasing organic traffic to an e-commerce website. It is a technique that helps to communicate and guide search engines to rank your website. If the SEO on your website is good, it helps search engines to rank the website high in their SERPs. A higher ranked website receives more organic traffic from search engines because searchers tend to find the website more easily. If you have the know-how, by DIY, you can set up a good SEO on your website. If not, hiring the services of professional webmasters to do it for you is a good idea. If you are using the DIY option, never forget to include your specially selected and relevant keywords to your niche business in your web content, blog headlines, meta descriptions, product descriptions and so on. You must in addition optimize the URL structure of your website to make it easy to navigate. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly by optimizing it for mobile devices. Because page speed is also significant for search engine ranking, make sure to compress and optimize the media content on your site for faster loading times.

5. Guest Blogging

If you have good blogging skills, you can guest-blog on other reputable and popular blog websites to attract traffic to your own website. Through guest blogging, you can post your blogs and articles on other high-traffic websites in your niche. If you post your blogs on such popular websites and your blog is informative and educating enough, many blog readers on these sites will like to follow through on your link to get to your own blog site to read more blogs. That translates to good traffic to your blog. Because most popular blogs already have an established audience and higher ranking on search engines, your own blog benefits from these sites since you will be linking them to your site. As a guest blogger, these websites help you to showcase your expertise and offer your blog visitors a great first impression about you and your business. This is a huge benefit in addition to helping you to get known and to quickly build authority in your niche industry.

6 Most Common Digital Marketing Strategies You Should Know

Digital marketing covers a vast area of marketing particularly on the internet. Online marketers rely on digital marketing to get traffic, connect with their audience, capture leads, and make sales.  Marketers without an impressive digital presence are less likely to outperform those with active digital presence online. Smart marketers depend heavily on digital marketing to outperform their competition and gain a competitive edge on the internet. The field in quite vast and it encompasses diverse marketing strategies. These strategies directly leverage computer and internet technology to effectively promote products/services online. If you are interested in digital marketing, it is best to familiarize yourself with the most common strategies that successful marketers like to recommend. Following are six of such digital marketing strategies you too can effectively use to get results.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing strategy where affiliates help product merchants market their products and earn commissions for their efforts. It is some kind of mutually beneficial partnership between product merchants, affiliates and consumers. Affiliates directly help product merchants to boost their business and increase their engagement with consumers. Affiliates help make available to consumers, products/services that help solve problems for them. In this partnership, product merchants sell more products/services while consumers easily find products/services that meet their needs. Affiliates who facilitate this earn more commissions from the process.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a process of connecting with your audience through relevant information sharing. Content is hugely important for marketers to cater to the concerns of their target audience and help them seek solutions to their needs. It is one digital strategy that is very popular with marketers. If the content is qualitative and well packaged, it helps marketers to effectively reach out to their target audience and gain their trust. For digital marketing purposes, an effective content is usually packaged in the form of blogs, research data, videos, infographics, guides, podcasts, bulletins and more. These are the common techniques that help the marketer to build a following/audience over time. When the content you consistently produce builds trust with this audience, it impacts your traffic, leads and sales. It ultimately helps to boost your affiliate marketing business.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is another effective digital marketing strategy which enables marketers to easily interact with their audience by way of emails. It is essentially used by marketers for targeting new, retaining existing, and nurturing leads and customers. To have an effective email marketing campaign, you must first build a responsive email list. This you do by diligently collecting the email addresses of your target audience over time through op-in and sign-up marketing techniques. You can also grow your email list using lead magnets, pop-ups, exit-intent messages, and more. Marketers love to use emails to market because it is cost-effective and the ROI is usually quite impressive. Experienced marketers can segment their email list for more personalized marketing messages and campaigns.

4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

With more than 4.6 billion active users around the globe, social media has become hugely popular with digital marketers. Social media marketing SMM is a digital marketing strategy which allows marketers to promote content via social media platforms of choice. Marketers use social media platforms to market their brands organically or through paid advertising. SMM as a marketing strategy is a very effective way to connect with your target audience no matter where that audience is on the globe. It makes easy two-way interaction between marketers and their respective target audience. Aside its huge popularity, sharing messages on social media is quite easy and smooth. The reason social media easily facilitates engagement as your audience reacts at will and/or leaves comments on your posts. This user content helps marketers to assess the performance of their content. Many consumers use social media to research preferred solutions and make informed buying decisions. This makes social media platforms ideal for capturing quality leads and even to make sales.

Influencer marketing is ancillary to SMM. This is because most influencers ply their trade in social media as social media influencers. Influencer marketing as a viable SMM strategy is quite effective to reach out to a huge audience which can be in the millions. Influencers can even influence the buy decisions of this huge audience through endorsements and recommendations. Because a significant percentage of consumers really trust influencer recommendations, partnering with influencers can actually become a big business boost for marketers.
 
5. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a digital marketing strategy where marketers are required to pay for the ads they run on online platforms. If they have the right marketing budget, it is possible for marketers to run ads on different search engines and social media platforms. For search engine marketing, marketers generally prefer Google which is a lead search engine for running paid ad campaigns. You can also run paid ads on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes. Because ranking well on search engines can be a very slow process, most marketers prefer using a fair mix of organic and paid marketing strategies to reach out to their respective target audiences. Paid ads can give you much faster results if you have the right marketing budget. You can always use paid ads marketing strategy if you’re looking for a quick boost in traffic or sales.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In digital marketing, it is not enough to create content no matter how good the content is. You must explore all reliable avenues to make this content accessible to your audience. That is where SEO comes in as a reliable marketing strategy. SEO is a bit technical and tricky especially for marketers that are not too experienced. For such marketers who cannot use DIY approach, they can hire the services of professional webmasters to have SEO done on their websites. SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps to make your content visible to search engines. If the search engines rank the content high in their SERPs, it increases its visibility to searchers. That means more organic traffic to your website.

Online, a search engine is usually a go-to platform for most people to find suitable solutions. When people simple tap in their search queries on major search engines like Google, it shows recommendations that cater to the respective search queries in detail. If these search queries resonate with your niche, Google throws up your content thereby making it accessible to the searchers. The more search engines throw up your content in search results, the more organic traffic it receives. This is why SEO should be your go-to strategy for more organic traffic.

Wrapping Up

The foregoing are digital marketing strategies that are popular among marketers and they get results. The reason you should know them well and be prepared to deploy them in your marketing efforts. Marketers worldwide use a mix of these strategies to achieve their set marketing objectives. They rely on them for the success of their respective marketing campaigns. You too can try them out and see which ones work best for you.

Most Effective Online Marketing Strategies

For most online marketers, an online marketing strategy is simply a plan that outlines how their businesses can achieve set marketing goals. It is some sort of strategic plan showing how they plan to market, by what means and through which online channels. A good strategic plan vividly outlines what online channels and online marketing tactics will be deployed and even at what cost in terms of investment. If and whenever these strategic plans are effective, your marketing success will be on course.

However, online marketers are usually confronted with so many options that at times, it becomes difficult to decide which online marketing strategy to prioritize. What can help the decision about the most effective online marketing strategy to use is to factor in the brand you are promoting, the product and the demographics of your target audience. It is only by doing so you can decide better on an online marketing plan that will be most effective to achieve your marketing goals. Here are the most effective online marketing strategies which most experienced online marketers do not hesitate to recommend.

Content Marketing

As most experienced online marketers like to say, in online marketing, content is king. Marketers effectively use good content to disseminate informative, educational and even entertaining information to gain consumer trust and increase brand awareness. Content marketing is quite popular among digital marketers because it is typically less expensive than most other forms of marketing and it gets better results too particularly in terms of good traffic and more leads. To get these results, your content must be of high quality and valuable to users.

Search Engine Marketing, SEM

Search engine marketing, SEM is a type of online marketing where you increase your search ranking in the SERPs of search engines. Marketers do this by using paid advertising techniques. If you know the techniques and have the experience in Google Ads and display/search ads, you can do it yourself. But, if not, it is best to hire the services of digital marketing experts to do it for you by tinkering with how your business uses text-based search ads, YouTube video ads, display ads and mobile ads. What you expect is for Google to rank your business high in its SERPs. If it does, you’ll receive more and better organic traffic to your online business.
 
Video Marketing

Video marketing is especially very effective in online marketing largely because of the visual captivation of videos as marketing tools. This is more so when used on YouTube which is the most effective online video distribution platform most marketers like to use. YouTube is not only a social media platform; it is a search engine too. Marketing with videos on YouTube is one great way to harness its search influence and vast audience to promote your products. On YouTube therefore, you can effectively use engaging infomercials and instructional how-to videos to market your products and with impressive results. You can in addition host a Google Hangout with your customers/consumers as an entertainment option and with good results also.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model that requires the engagement of affiliates to help promote products for a product merchant and the affiliates receive compensation by way of commissions from the sales they generate. You can recruit affiliates directly to help promote your brand, or you link your e-commerce store to a reputable affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI which has millions of affiliates on roll ready and willing to help promote your products in exchange for commissions on the sales they generate. If however, you choose to recruit affiliates yourself, it is best to use affiliate recruiting software which can help to automate the process somewhat to save your precious time and resources.
 
Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for quite a while and it is still very popular with digital marketers. This is largely as a result of its continued effectiveness as a reliable marketing strategy with very impressive Return On Investment (ROI) for marketers. The ROI from email marketing is about 4x higher than many other marketing channels like paid search, direct mail and social media marketing which digital marketers also like to use.
    
Search Engine Optimization, SEO

If you have a good SEO on your e-commerce website, you get free organic traffic from search engines. That simply equates to free advertising. There is therefore no better way to get free advertising online than through SEO. A good SEO on your website helps to increase the ranking of the website in the SERPs of major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo because of the relevant keywords and search terms you have used on the site. The moment you have this digital marketing technique in place on your website, the organic traffic to it will increase significantly. What that means is better online business going forward and you will see a huge increase in the sales your e-commerce store will start to generate. SEO technique simply entails optimizing your website and getting relevant links and citations on it. The more relevant and plentiful these links and citations are, the better its chances of ranking high in search engines. And, a high ranking means more and better organic traffic to the site. That ultimately means more leads and sales on the website.

Pay-Per-Click, PPC

Unlike SEO which requires a lot of technical work on your website before it ranks high, PPC allows you to start ranking on the first page with almost no downtime and less requirements from Google. However, it comes with costs. Your business will have to pay for the clicks generated on your website. PPC technique is quite effective because only the clicks matching your keywords and search terms are directed to your website. PPC directly compliments SEO because SEO may not solve all of your keyword ranking challenges. PPC helps to save up on time as well since SEO even though an effective strategy in its own right is time wasting and highly technical to get in place. With SEO, getting high rankings for each search term takes a lot of time and effort, including strong content writing, keyword research, link building, and a strong website. PPC does not require all that to get you the traffic you pay for.

YouTube Video Marketing

Aside the huge effectiveness of marketing with videos, YouTube is also a very large search engine where people quickly go to look for solutions to their problems. Searchers go to YouTube to find solutions to their problems and the captivating videos on the platform if optimized well enough help to increase views and clicks. That means good traffic, more leads and sales. When you create good how-to/demonstration videos on topics related to your products and recommend the products, if the videos are optimized well enough on YouTube, they help to attract leads/buyers in significant numbers.

Social Media Marketing, SMM

These days nearly everyone is on social media 24/7 around the world. With about 4.65 billion active users worldwide, now that’s one huge market out there. Marketing on social media is therefore a very smart thing to do. Social media marketing is simply the strategy of promoting products/services using social media networks or platforms. But first you must have accounts on the most popular social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. Depending on the products you are marketing, you can use these platforms to make good promotions most times for free. Some of the platforms like Facebook and Instagram for instance have in-house tools specifically designed to aid marketers to achieve their desired branding and marketing goals. However, that is possible only if you can consistently develop content designed specifically for each social media platform by way of good content in form of articles, photos, videos, or any other type of content that your audience is interested in. If however you have the means, you can pay for ads to run on social media. As your social media marketing grows, you can take advantage of automation by using social media management tools to post and schedule content across multiple social media channels. The results can be very encouraging in terms of leads and sales generated therefrom.

Paid Search Advertising

Paid search advertising is typically pay-per-clicks where a marketer is required to pay for each view or click their ad receives. You can however not get the most out of this hugely effective advertising and marketing technique if you are unable to craft compelling ad texts. This involves the use of powerful headlines and intriguing snippets that are short and concise. You also need to use the right search engines or websites that are relevant to the ad market. Paid search advertising even though it comes at a considerable cost, has the potential to boost your business significantly. If as a marketer you are unable to study and master it perfectly, it is advisable to hire the services of an expert to handle it for you. That comes with a bit of costs too.

Influencer Marketing

People who have a sizeable, responsive and active audience on their websites or on social media and they have the ability to influence their audience to act in a certain way are usually known as influencers. On that premise, Influencer marketing can be rightly described as the marketing practice of working with influencers to promote a brand’s messages, products and or services. Through influencer marketing, marketers can easily get their marketing messages to a wide variety of audiences and at times together with the endorsement or recommendation of the Influencer. This is why it is one great and effective way marketers can take advantage of many digital channels to reach their target audience. It enables businesses to work in close association with Influencers while leveraging the huge popularity of celebrities and experts in their field who share similar values. Businesses can thus easily reach the large followers of Influencers with their branded offers and content. This in addition to Influencer recommendations and endorsements that usually help businesses to get more leads and make more brisk sales.

Local Search Marketing

Most online marketers know that every business is first and foremost local. This is why many e-commerce stores usually latch on to Google for their local search marketing through Google-My-Business, GMB. If your e-commerce store is optimized for local searches on GMB, Google usually throws up your business in search results using the searcher’s keywords particularly with a “near me” clause. Optimizing your business on GMB helps to increase the visibility of your business on Google Maps. So, when anyone is searching for a local business nearby, your business benefits from Google local search results. That can be great for local organic traffic, more local leads and more local sales. You can boost your local search results with inbound marketing from your conversations and sharing relevant material on your social media handles. By doing this, instead of panning out wider to find customers, inbound marketing strategies bring them to your website steadily.

Effective Marketing Tips, Tricks, and Techniques that Yield Good Results

Marketing is the technique brands use to promote their products and/or services. It involves deliberate actions to make others aware of the products/services you are selling. Marketing activities could be general or deliberately targeted. What is common to both is that they are designed to attract leads and customers. Online, digital marketing has proven to be the most effective form of marketing. Traditional marketing, mostly offline compliments it effectively for marketers. Below are some of the most preferred techniques by marketers.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a marketing technique of partnering with product merchants to help sell their products while the affiliate earns commissions from the sales. Typically, affiliates promote these products or services on their blog, website, and/or social media channels. Affiliate marketing is one great way product merchants can leverage on the reach and promotional abilities of affiliates to market their products/services with minimal efforts. By this arrangement, every time a product is purchased through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission as per agreed percentages.

Social Media Marketing, SMM

Since nearly everyone is on social media 24/7 worldwide, marketing through social media is now hugely important for digital marketers. With billions of social media users worldwide, getting out marketing messages through social media has become a great opportunity for brands to effectively market and attract leads, customers and even sales. Marketing is very easy on social media platforms because of their huge popularity and ease of sharing information. So, getting a free account for your brand on any or all the popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest and marketing through them can be highly beneficial for your brand.
 
Digital Marketing Strategies

Digital marketing is a very effective online marketing strategy if you know what you are doing. The reason is simple. Because of the peculiarities of the Internet, the enabling environment for digital marketing is enhanced. Through the Internet, marketing messages manage to reach the widest audience possible by simply pressing a computer button. With it come good technological advances such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) that allows marketing to become more specifically targeted, automated and effective.

Traditional Marketing

If your target market consists of those who prefer to stay offline and read newspapers, traditional marketing is effective too if your marketing budget can accommodate the cost. Because there are still people out there who appreciate reading newspapers, watching local television channels, and listening to local radio stations, advertising your business through Newspaper articles, TV and radio commercials, and fliers are still very effective forms of marketing. In fact, traditional forms of marketing are at times your best bet if your target market is your local community. 

    
Brand Marketing

You must know how to market your brand well no matter the size of your business. This is because for marketing purposes, your brand is what helps people to easily identify your business. For this reason, you must pay keen attention to some rather seemingly intangible business things like your business name, business colors, logo, motto/mission statement, and why you are in business. These are the things that remain in the subconscious minds of your customers and potential customers that are helpful for your brand identity and recognition.  They help people to think about your business in a certain way directly related to your brand identity. Take your business logo for instance. One of the best ways to market your brand is through your business logo. The reason your brand logo must be unique and easy to identify and relate with to be useful. It is very effective marketing if you display your logo in promotional items like Face caps, T-shirts, blankets, handkerchiefs, napkins, table mats, coffee mugs, key chains or some other simple items people like to use or carry around.
 
Email Marketing, EMM

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective form of digital marketing. Building a credible email list may be challenging but once in place it becomes a hugely valuable marketing asset. The larger this list, the more effective for marketing. If the list is segmented, so much the better! Once you settle for a marketing message, decide the recipients and press send. The message instantly goes to the inboxes of your recipients. Simple!

Search Engine Marketing

For search engine marketing to be effective, your business website needs Search Engine Optimization, SEO. That helps search engines to discover and rank your business/brand/products online. If your brand ranks high in their SERPs, it benefits from organic traffic which search engines send to it. For your business to benefit, you must use the right SEO techniques on your website/blog. SEO techniques involve the deft use of keywords on your website/blog to help your business rank higher in search results particularly on Google, the largest of them all.

Best Online Business Strategies for E-commerce Beginners

Yes, covid-19 restrictions are still somehow in place but people must do business all the same. If you are new to e-commerce, you must first recognize that some business strategies have high potential, and some don't. That is the way it is in the world of e-commerce business. For this reason, it is imperative to first thoroughly analyze the market space to discover which e-commerce business has great potential before you make your decisions, pandemic restrictions notwithstanding. Below are some tested e-commerce business strategies that can help entrepreneurs to earn money online.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a fairly easy business to start online even without prior experience. All it entails is to simply promote products online by sharing their referral links. These are affiliate links you can actively share on your blog, social media, email, or other online platforms. Any time someone clicks on your referral link or makes an order through the link, you earn a commission for your efforts. It is as simple as that. Online, there are a vast number of businesses looking for affiliate marketers to help them generate customers through effective links promotion or even word-of-mouth marketing. Large and very popular e-commerce websites like SFI TripleClicks, Alibaba and Amazon do offer affiliate programs that new e-commerce entrepreneurs can easily take advantage of.

Virtual Online Teaching

Teaching all kinds of skills online is a very lucrative business. Experience during the early stages of severe restrictions during the pandemic proved that businesses didn’t have to grind to a halt simply because of the pandemic. Online teaching and learning stepped up to help out. Many people were forced to study online. As a consequence, even offline-based institutions moved online. Many people with valuable and important skill sets in specific areas translated their knowledge into online courses and training and they started earning good money. More and more online learning platforms sprang up as well and the business continued to expand despite the pandemic. As a new entrepreneur interested in online teaching, there are many ways you can sell your online courses. Most common among them are by organizing online training sessions, self-publishing eBooks and making tutorial videos. You earn good money for your efforts.

App Developer/Web Designer

With improvement in technology, app and software development have become a great niche to start a business online. App developers now find good opportunities to create mobile apps and websites. If you are creative enough and have real interest in coding, HTML, CSS, and other aspects of web design, you can become a freelance webmaster/web designer. This is yet another great online business idea. Even if you don’t have the requisite experience in this field, you can leverage valuable web design resources, courses, and tutorials available for beginners and you’ll be in business pronto.

Social Media Management

SMM or Social Media Marketing is becoming increasingly popular with new online entrepreneurs. These are people who effectively use social media marketing to promote products/services online. They deploy social media efficiently as an integral part of their overall online marketing strategy. However, because of the diversity of many social media platforms, it could be hugely challenging to effectively manage them all for best results. One business opportunity this creates is that other businesses can outsource SMM to social media enthusiasts and experts who understand social media marketing and are able to manage social media platforms/pages well enough. Such experts get paid handsomely for their services.

Niche Market Retailer

Online, there are always buyers for almost everything. Even if you don’t have the requisite skills in social media management, affiliate marketing, or other online business ideas, you can create an e-commerce store to sell specific products like hand crafts, home made goods and even retail merchandise. If you promote the store well enough, you get good traffic, leads and sales. Comparatively, setting up an e-commerce store is relatively easy nowadays. Even if you are new in e-commerce business, you can create your hosting service with integrated e-commerce software or list your products on an e-commerce marketplace and you are in business.

Freelance Graphic Designer/Writer

Freelancing business online enjoys a lot of flexibility. Freelancers can freely choose what they do, how they do it and even who they do it for. If new in freelancing business, they can even decide to work with popular and credible freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, freelancers who can help you to decide what to work on and who to work with. Most businesses require the services of good designers to create infographics, logos, posters, and other visual designs. If you have a flair for writing and you have the requisite writing skills, you can use your talent to get job offers to write blog posts, eBooks, and sales copy from people across the globe. There are limitless opportunities for web designers and good writers online.

Handmade Craft Seller

If you have the skill sets for handcrafts, you can create an e-commerce store to showcase and sell handmade crafts/art. Even if you can’t make them yourself, you can get these products from a supplier and sell them online to make money. Other highly creative endeavors like photography, carvings, sculpture and painting and other beautiful works of art can help with good income online via an e-commerce store.

 

Dropshipping Business

Dropshipping business requires you to sell online by simply taking customers’ orders and partner with a third-party wholesaler/retailer who handles the inventory and order fulfillment side of the business. It is one of the best ways to make money online without the need to invest or buy products in advance by way of huge investments. To make your own money, you just need to sell the products with a bit of a mark-up over and above the wholesaler’s price. For e-commerce beginners, it is really lucrative since they don’t have to worry about cost of storage and inventory handling/management to run the business successfully.
 
SEO, Search Engine Optimization Consulting

If you have the technical know-how and a good knowledge of SEO, starting a consulting business for website owners is a good business idea. With more and more people taking their businesses online, the competition for search engine rankings is really becoming tougher. If search engines don’t rank your websites in their SERPs high enough, it doesn’t benefit from highly valuable organic traffic. For this reason, many companies/brands that are obsessed with staying ahead their competition through ranking high on SERPs and turning their searchers into customers need good SEO techniques on their websites. Because SEO is really technical, it requires some good expertise to be able to render the service by way of consultancy. Those who know how can render the service and make good money from it. Good SEO consultants help business owners to analyse how their brand’s websites are doing online. From the results, they can best prescribe effective SEO strategies that help to increase traffic and customers to such websites.

Becoming an Influencer

Most influencers earn money mainly through brand sponsorships. They work by helping brands promote their products/services on their page. This is a very effective marketing method because most influencers usually have a large following on social media, and people see them as some sort of experts in a particular business niche. You can thus become an influencer in food and hospitality brands, sports brands, logistics and travels brands, hotels and accommodation brands, fashion brands and so on. There are several social media platforms influencers can take advantage of to build a large following. The larger an influencer’s following is, the more he earns. To become an influencer, you can start a podcast, become a TikToker, or create a YouTube channel, Pinterest or an Instagram account through which you can be creating valuable content regularly for your followers who rely on your opinion as an expert. That way, you get to build a real online presence, have a lot of following, and you earn money through commissions by promoting/endorsing products for products merchants.

How Small Businesses Can Use Social Media for Business Growth

With an estimated user population of over 4 billion, small business owners who genuinely want to grow their businesses can no longer afford to ignore social media. This is more so for the hugely popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram. These platforms now account for billions of active users around the world 24/7. Now that’s one huge market out there which smart small business owners now take good advantage of to grow their businesses. They latch on to the vast opportunities social media provides to connect with customers, allowing them to do more business and to maximize their earnings therefrom. As an aside, small business owners can also use social media platforms to make some money even without having to sell anything.

The hugely popular social media platforms are really great at helping small businesses build brand awareness, increase customer base, increase sales, get more leads and connect with current and potential customers. This is largely because of the ease of interaction and information sharing on the platforms. With a good SMM strategy in place, small businesses can take good advantage of social media to interact easily with customers and grow their businesses. Specifically, here is how social media directly helps small businesses with business growth.

Create real connections with your brand: Small business owners can effectively create real human connections with their brands through social media. Through social media platforms, you can introduce your customers to your brand story as well as showcasing the benefits of your products/services with ease.

Expand your business reach: Yeah social media with billions of active users represents one very huge market out there. Small business owners can take advantage of this market to expand their business reach exponentially. They can take advantage of in-house marketing tools on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest to showcase products or even directly advertise products and services.

Do more business: Available marketing data indicate that more and more people are buying on social media. Small businesses can take advantage of this by adding CTA ‘buy now’ buttons on their social platforms to generate more sales. This allows social media users to buy directly without ever having to leave the social media platform they are on.

Generate more leads: With the help of social media platforms, you can increase lead generation by increasing interest among potential customers in your audience. The more leads you generate, the more conversions you get and consequently more sales.

Drive traffic to your website/online eCommerce store: If you habitually create and post high quality content on social media, it helps to grow your audience and traffic generation. Through social media posts and ads, you can drive traffic to your website or your online eCommerce store. If you continuously share great content from your website to your social channels, it encourages more click-throughs to your website. That is good traffic.

Effective Techniques to Measure Your Digital Marketing ROI

Digital Marketing is readily one of the most commonly used techniques of online marketing. Many businesses hugely rely on digital marketing to improve their brand recognition, create new consumer awareness and to drive more sales, all with a view to boosting their Return On Investment, ROI. It is through the use of some marketing techniques involving online and offline marketing that business owners can get to measure ROI to gauge how well their businesses are doing. Characteristically, most digital marketing techniques are cost-effective and therefore great for ROI. The most commonly used techniques derive from:

Internet Marketing: Internet marketing or digital marketing is a form of marketing that directly involves online promotion of services and products by way of search engine marketing, SEM. SEM includes paid search engine optimization, display advertising, social media advertising, video advertising and paid inclusion. These are the digital techniques readily available for business owners to incorporate in their digital marketing strategies. The primary aim is to effectively adapt them in marketing campaigns to help increase website traffic. The techniques can be deployed by way of digital ads, affiliate marketing programs, viral marketing campaigns, blogs, news releases and email marketing campaigns. It also includes banner ads, PPC, pay-per-click ads, text and picture ads, and video ads.

Web Marketing: Web marketing now appears to be the most common digital marketing strategy marketers like use. It is some form of digital marketing which depends on web and internet based digital technology for marketing effectiveness. Technologies like laptop computers, desktop computers, smartphones and other portable media and platforms that can be deployed for marketing products/services online. These technologies come in very handy for PPC ads, Blogging, Content Marketing, Online Promos and Social Media Marketing SMM.

Sales/Service Marketing: This involves some predictive and even offline marketing tactics. The services include sales forecasts, market analysis, demand forecasting, market trend analysis, and competition analysis. These are, very important insights business owners really need to understand their existing customer base, target customers, market mix, competition, and market opportunities. The strategies also come in very handy for business owners to use for their inbound marketing techniques and brand name recognition. They entail effective use of the web, email, and social media platforms for inbound marketing, customer relationship management, lead generation, and even telemarketing services. They also involve some offline marketing activities such as brochure printing, direct mail, Yellow Pages advertising, radio and TV ads and other printed media activities. 

Social Media Marketing, SMM: Social media is now hugely popular with marketers. It is a form of digital marketing involving popular social media platforms. Preferred social media platforms by marketers include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc. Marketers rely on the huge popularity of these social media channels to build, nurture and maintain business relationships. Through active audience engagements on these platforms, marketers can boost their online authority and increase website traffic as a result. They do this through the effective use of RSS feeds, video marketing, podcasting, and video conferencing amongst others. Marketing on social media has gained some increased prominence among marketers because of the widespread use of mobile devices worldwide. For this reason, a good social media strategy involving mobile devices can greatly help marketers to increase brand visibility and generate more revenues from in-platform ads.

Hot Tips to Build Your Brand Through Social Media Networks

Small business owners can no longer afford to ignore social media networks in their marketing activities. This is not just because of the huge popularity of many social networks but also because of the relative ease of marketing on the networks. Many small business owners have a preference for hugely popular micro-blogging sites such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. For this reason, social media is fast becoming the dominant advertising platform online. It is greatly cost-effective when compared to traditional formats of advertising such as TV, newspapers, magazines and radio among others. As preferred ads media, social networks enable small businesses to easily reach their target audiences more effectively through a variety of channels. This is why small business owners can depend on them to build their brands fairly quickly online.

Here are some hot tips/techniques to get the best marketing results from social media networks.

Social Media Management, SMM: SMM requires an integrated approach that takes into account various aspects of strategic internet marketing. This includes planning, measurement, and strategy implementation. If you accurately measure your marketing results quantitatively, you have a great opportunity to understand exactly where you are in your efforts to reach your target audience. This measurement data must include everything from the number of people who have visited your blog, to the number who are now your friends/followers on your social media handles. You can also measure and obtain metrics data on the time spent on each social media platform by your target audience. Next is to measure the actual engagement on the platforms. From the engagement data, you get to know the number of people who actually click on your ads, respond to your promotional messages, and share your content. This information is very valuable for marketing purposes as most marketers very well know. Smart small business owners rely on this data to formulate marketing plans, develop marketing strategies and launch marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO Strategy: For effective marketing purposes, SEO is not expected to be a one-time process. It is usually a continuous and an ongoing effort with the sole aim of achieving higher rankings on major search engines. Higher ranking on SERPs of search engines translates to higher organic traffic, leads, customers and sales. A good SEO strategy involves using the right keywords in your content, creating backlinks to your website, and generating high amount of traffic to the site. When your SEO is good enough, it helps your business to maintain a positive brand image while greatly increasing its brand awareness on the internet.

Strategic Internet Marketing: This focuses on SEO, paid Search Engine Optimization, PPC, pay-per-click, networking, viral, and other creative strategies. You can strategically integrate them all to get good results. A good SEO helps your business with organic exposure and you can easily incorporate it into your social network marketing plan/strategy. That way, you can easily use social networks to build your brand by directly engaging your target audience.

Combine SMM and Traditional Advertising Methods: Many small businesses successfully combine traditional media marketing with SMM in their efforts to quickly build their brands and grow their businesses. Both are complimentary to each other. It is not smart to rest one for the other if your marketing budget can accommodate both. If the budget cannot, it is advisable to put more of your scarce resources on SMM that is hugely cost-effective. This is a good survival strategy in the hugely suffocating ads marketing space.

Get Reliable Metrics/Analytics Data: To do this effectively it is recommended you use Google Analytics to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. There are free easy-to-use Google Analytics tools available online and paid ones as well if you are desirous to have a more comprehensive report. Business owners rely on analytics data to have insights into how users are interacting with the content on their websites, search and user behaviors, and demographics. This helps them to have a clear understanding of their audience and the activities they engage in and general audience behavior. Armed with such vital information, they can plan better and create more effective social media marketing campaigns for their businesses.

User tip: For best results from Google Analytics, just import the data, use the filters and options available, and generate a custom dashboard with detailed reports. That way, you can easily return to it and get updated info from it as often as you want.

12 Digital marketing Strategies for Ambitious Marketing

Digital marketers are always in search of what works best for them to market their products/services. They adopt any and every strategy that helps to get the results they want. For ambitious digital marketing efforts, here is what expert marketers recommend.

1. Search Engine Marketing, SEM

Search Engine marketing, SEM helps marketers to drive their website traffic through major search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. SEM is a marketing strategy popular among digital marketers because they find it handy to target potential customers who are already searching online for a product/service like the ones they are promoting. Anytime an internet user searches for a topic through a search engine, two sets of results usually come up. First set are the organic search results while the second set are results from paid ads because both sets of results come from the use of specific keywords which search engines use to locate them. SEM also includes such activities as Display Advertising, Search Retargeting, Site Remarketing, Mobile Marketing and Paid Social Advertising.

2. Google My Business, GMB

Google now provides a free tool to business owners called Google My Business. Ambitious digital marketers use this tool to improve their online search presence. Once marketers create a GMB listing, it generates a Google Maps location that synchronizes with Google Search to enhance location-based searchability. What marketers simply do on opening GMB listing is to add important business information such as their location, contact information, photos/graphics, and the products/services they are promoting. GMB listing allows customers to leave reviews and even their own photos. Marketers must therefore provide as much information as possible to help their rankings on Google for relevant search queries. The more info available to Google, the easier it is for Google to show it to the right people. A well-completed business profile with the right info helps with SEO for the business. You get better results if you compliment that with paid Google ads on the account.

3. Business Website

To market successfully online, a business website is a necessary requirement. A business website serves as online business window and the centerpiece of the digital marketing strategy for the business. It is from the site marketers can deploy all the digital marketing tools and techniques to promote their businesses. Marketers in all their marketer efforts aim at driving traffic to their websites where they usually convert prospects and leads into customers. For this reason, a business website must be attractive, eye-catching and memorable. It must be fast loading, easy to use, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly enough to attract traffic.

4. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO is essentially a technical way of tweaking a website with keywords to make it easier for it to come up naturally or organically in search results of major search engines. SEO helps the higher listing in their SERPs. SEO does this for your business free by optimizing content on your website, including blog articles, videos, photos and infographics. What SEO simply requires is an investment of time and effort (if you have the knowhow) as against direct advertising spend.

5. Social Media Marketing, SMM

The primary goal of SMM is to widely increase brand awareness and establish trust with the target audience using the huge popularity of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and the likes. Most social media platforms allow marketers to run ads on their sites to build the much-needed awareness even when such marketers only have a small audience and reach of their own. The platforms help marketers to direct traffic to their business websites and generate customer leads and sales.

6. Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating and promoting any marketing content online. It aims primarily to generate brand awareness, increase social media following, increase website traffic, and ultimately generate customer leads and sales for the business. For any content to meet this great expectation, it must be informative, engaging, educational and even entertaining. That is what the content needs to capture the attention of the target audience. Content is often published on a business website, but for good results, it can also be shared through social media, email marketing, SEO, and paid ads. The type of content ambitious marketers like to use include eBooks, case studies, how-to guides, glossaries, industry news, videos, images and banners, podcasts, webinars, blogs, online courses, and infographics.

7. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is now catching on among digital marketers because of the sole aim of saving time and money while still maintaining efficiency. Marketers depend on online software to get going most of the time. You can have access to marketing automation software in websites such as HubSpot. Such software allows marketers to streamline their processes by helping them to connect social media channels in one place to schedule and automate content across platforms. These software platforms also automate your basic marketing operations and repetitive tasks such as Email newsletters, CRM, Social media post scheduling and campaign tracking and reporting. However, because each social media network has a unique community and has preferences for content types, adequate care must be taken to create only content that works best across multi-platforms.

8. Marketing and Sales Funnels

For many digital marketers, marketing and sales funnels have become a very vital tool for their digital marketing strategies. Marketers now use lead capture pages to build and grow their email lists. They use token gifts like eBooks and Discount Coupons to get prospects to sign up to get value that the eBooks and Discount Coupons represent. Once users sign up to get these values, marketers capture their email addresses into their email lists. That is part of the not-too-obvious bargain for them to get the eBooks and or Coupons. As the email list grows, your audience, leads and sales grow along by way of a marketing or sales funnel pattern. 

9. Online PR

Digital marketers use online Public Relations, PR to secure earned coverage for their brands. It works much like traditional PR even though it poses much more challenges to measure the success of online PR than other online marketing methods. However, marketers need not underestimate the lack of analytics for measuring a positive news article’s impact. That it gets traffic, and it sure does, is all that really matters on the long run. Some common examples of online PR activities include, press releases on your website or social media, sharing content about causes that connect people, engaging with comments on social media content or your blog, emailing outreach to reporters and media organizations with pitches for news content/articles. This is in addition to such other activities that help establish your online reputation and attract traffic to your website.

10. Pay-Per-Click, PPC

PPC is the ads system used in search engine marketing such as on Google. What it does is to charge a marketer for every click on a paid ad run on the search engine. It usually gets direct prequalified traffic and thus a very effective marketing arrangement. The reason it is, generally referred to as pay-per-click, PPC advertising. Because the right keywords in search queries trigger ads on search engines, marketing advertisers usually bid on such key search terms used by customers to get good traffic sent to them from search engines. This is why PPC ads tend to get very good results most of the time.

11. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one good way marketers earn commissions for helping to promote and market products/services for merchants online. This relationship comes about by way of affiliate marketers helping to post affiliate links on their social media accounts or blog articles on their business websites. Affiliate marketers earn commissions when internet users act on their marketing efforts through clicks or sales from the affiliate links they posted. Big e-commerce businesses like SFI, Amazon and Alibaba do act as affiliate marketing networks to manage this delicate relationship between merchants and affiliates and it becomes a win-win situation for all parties.

12. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy of using emails to promote content, events, and direct traffic to business websites. When marketers use content marketing and sales funnels to generate leads, they rely on emails to nurture these leads to customers and make sales. Business emails are especially helpful when used as follow-up emails to potential purchasers and new customers, newsletters to inform subscribers of newly posted blogs or social media content, welcome emails to new subscribers, insider info, special promos, limited time offers, special coupons and or new discounts.