12 Most Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

The main aim of blogging online is to attract readership. Through this readership, bloggers attract traffic back to their websites. Every blog post attracts varied reaction from different readers. It is this reaction that directly determines the amount of traffic the blog post attracts. Therefore, if you make blogging mistakes, you will not only be lessening your blog’s potential to reach your target audience, it can severely damage your online reputation as well. This should be avoided at all cost. Understanding, avoiding or rectifying these here 12 common blogging mistakes is one great way to enhance your online presence and to reach a wider audience with your blog posts.

1. Ignoring the Power of Headlines in a Blog Post: If they don’t grab attention easily, blog headlines are no helpful headlines at all. A compelling headline is really crucial for grabbing readers’ attention. But, if your headlines are weak or uninteresting, people may not readily click on your posts. That goes a long way to reduce your click-through rate and overall blog traffic.

2. Neglecting Content Quality: Your blog cannot easily attract traffic if the content is of low quality. A poorly written, uninformative, or low-quality content can damage your blog’s credibility and reputation. When your blog content is of low quality, it will attract fewer backlinks and shares from other websites.

3. Choosing the Wrong Blogging Platforms: If you make the mistake of selecting an unsuitable blogging platform, it can limit your blog’s capabilities and customization options. Such mistake may also impact your ability to monetize and grow your blog effectively.

4. Not Optimizing Blog Posts for Sharing on Social Media: Most bloggers have found social media to be a valuable channel for promoting their blogs. So, if your blog content is not optimized to make it easily shareable, that mistake alone is sufficient to hinder the reach and growth potential of the blog.

5. Ignoring Mobile Optimization: Google now reports that a huge percentage of internet users do so via mobile devices and many of these users browse blogs on mobile devices. That makes it imperative for you to optimize your blog website for mobile. If your blog isn’t mobile-friendly, it can lead to a poor user experience, higher bounce rates, and lower search engine rankings. That ultimately results in severely lowering the amount of traffic it can attract.

6. Failing to Directly Engage with your Audience: When your blog posts lack engagement, such as comments and social shares, it is a direct indication of a lack of interest from your audience. This development can harm your blog’s reputation and make it less appealing to potential readers.

7. Inconsistent Blog Posting Schedules: If you want your blog to have a strong online presence, you must be consistent in your blog posting. Irregular blog posting is capable of confusing your audience and this can lead to a decline in readership. In blogging, consistency is key to building a loyal readership and maintaining a strong online presence.

 

8. Not Using Multimedia Blog Posts: If you want your blog to appeal to most internet users, you must consider using multimedia blog posts. Experience has shown that text-only blog content can become monotonous fairly quickly. So, if you fail or neglect to incorporate images, videos, infographics, and other multimedia elements in your blog posts, it can make the blog less engaging and less shareable. That directly affects the traffic the blog is likely to attract.

9. Failing to Use Data-Driven Analytics Insights: You need blog analytics to gauge the performance of your blog at any point in time. If you ignore analytics and user data, it simply means you may not understand what works and what doesn’t in your blog. Not knowing what works and what doesn’t in your blog can lead to a lack of improvement and stagnation in your blog’s performance.

10. Inconsistent Blog Writing Style: Consistency is hugely important in blog writing. If you are inconsistent is your writing, you risk confusing readers and it can make your blog appear less professional. So, if you endeavor to maintain a consistent style in your blog writing, it helps you to build brand identity and trust with your audience.

11. Overlooking the SEO Potential of Blog Images: If you want your blog images to be found and indexed by search engines, you must make deliberate efforts to optimize them. Optimizing your blog images for SEO can help to enhance your content. But, if you neglect or overlook image optimization, it can mean missing out on potential traffic from image searches.

12. Neglecting SEO in your Blog Content: Just like images, your content needs to be found and indexed by search engines. That helps to enhance the content for organic traffic. If you fail or neglect to optimize your blog posts for search engines, you miss out on potential valuable organic traffic. Such mistake can lead to lower visibility and fewer visitors to your blog. Technically, neglecting SEO in your blog content is a significant error in blogging. 

How to Get More Organic Traffic through On-Page and Off-Page SEO

The best way to get organic traffic to your website is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. This is why understanding how to increase organic traffic through SEO is an essential skill for digital marketers. If you put the right strategies in place for your marketing campaigns, it is possible for you to get more organic search engine traffic to your website. Organic traffic is about the most suitable traffic for getting leads and boosting conversions.

This post will be discussing proven techniques that can help you get more organic traffic through on-page & off-page SEO. The following techniques will help you to maximize your marketing efforts and generate higher volumes of organic web traffic to your website over time.

Consistently Create High Quality Content

Content is an indispensable part of SEO. The higher the quality of the content, the better it is for SEO. The better the SEO, the more organic traffic the content attracts. Internet users always surf the internet with clear intent which they feed into their computer search console as queries. When your content has high quality and solves user queries, it scores higher with search engines. It is great for your marketing efforts if you invest in consistently creating content that adds value. Your content will not add value if it does not solve any of the four user intents queries classified as:

Navigational Intent: This search links people to find a specific website or resource.
Investigational Intent: This search links people to research a topic or a subject matter.
Informational Intent: This search links users who are looking to learn something new.
Transactional Intent: This search links people who are looking to buy something on the internet.

For SEO purposes, your content must focus on long-form pieces that are well-researched and organized using headings and subheadings. If you add attractive visuals such as images or videos to break up the text, it is great for SEO and can directly add more engagement.

Optimize Meta Tags

Meta tags are important website elements that help search engines understand what your website content is about and how to rank it in SERPs. It works with the right and proper deployment of keywords on the content. For SEO purposes, it is best to include the right keywords in your meta titles, descriptions, and headings to give search engine bots a better idea of your content. You must make sure your keywords are carefully selected to work well in your website with the popular search terms in your niche or industry. Be sure to keep your title tags really short but must include a CTA and a main keyword at least once in between the characters.

Optimize Site Speed & Structure

If your website loads fast, it is of high quality in the eyes of search engines. That makes site speed a critical factor in search engine rankings. When you set up your business website, be sure to run a speed test on it to identify any issues, then implement strategies to enhance its performance. Some of these issues include but not limited to optimizing site images, minifying CSS & JavaScript files, using a CDN, and more. The site structure must be effective enough to make it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index your content. This is made possible by using breadcrumbs, internal links, and an XML sitemap to create a clear path through the website. All these make it easier for search engines to easily read and understand the content. They ultimately help to rank it higher in their SERPs. That translates to more organic traffic.

Focus on Topical Authority

Technically, topical authority is a measure of how knowledgeable and authoritative your content is in the eyes of search engines. If you are able to create good content around specific topics and subtopics, it can help to establish topical authority for your content. This can ultimately boost your site rankings for related keywords. You can use online tools like Ahrefs Content Explorer to identify potential subjects/topics that you can effectively write about. For best results, make sure to stick with that specific subject/topic you choose until you’ve covered every aspect of it through direct topics and subtopics. Doing this helps you to establish yourself as an authority on that particular subject/topic. That helps to increase the chances of your website ranking for related keywords.

Diligently Monitor Your SERP Rankings

For SEO purposes, it is important to diligently monitor your website’s ranking in the SERPs of search engines particularly Google. The info you get can help you to analyze what you need to change or improve upon to enhance your ranking. Online tools like SEMrush are handy to track keyword rankings and identify any issues that might be affecting your website’s visibility. Additionally, it helps to closely monitor the SERP landscape with a view to identifying any changes that could affect your website ranking. This includes closely monitoring your competition, checking for algorithm changes and or updates.

Implement Technical SEO

Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of your website to make it search engine friendly. These technical aspects include redirects, crawling errors, sitemaps, indexing issues, and more. Online tools like Screaming Frog are quite handy to help you identify any issues that are affecting your website’s performance. If you carry out the requisite fixes, it can have a huge impact on your organic search visibility.

Leverage Schema Markup

Technically, schema markup is a way of adding additional information to web pages that help search engines understand the context more clearly. This can include anything from product prices to business opening hours. Schema markup is essential for getting your content listed in the SERPs of search engines. Adding schema markup to your website is fairly easy. It is a matter of simply adding a few lines of code to each page. You have plenty of online tools you can use that can even make schema markup easier for you.

Build Quality Backlinks

Technically, backlinks are one of the most important search engine ranking factors in internet marketing. This is because they are a key driver of organic traffic. A backlink happens when another website links to your own website. For SEO purposes, the more high-quality backlinks you have pointing to your website, the higher its authority and the better its chances of ranking in SERPs. If you want to get quality backlinks to your website, you must consistently create high quality content that people will want to link to. To get more quality backlinks, you can also use outreach tactics such as guest blogging, articles marketing and broken link building to acquire links from other websites.

Last Line

SEO and organic traffic are firmly linked in digital marketing. If the SEO of your website is good, it increases its chances of getting more organic traffic. So, if you diligently implement the foregoing tactics/techniques, you stand a good chance of attracting more organic traffic to your website.

How to Utilize SEO Strategies to Increase Traffic to your Website

If you market online and you want traffic, you must first build a user-friendly website. Next is to get the website into popular social media platforms. This done, you can begin to implement SEO strategies to increase traffic to the website. Search Engine Optimization, SEO is one great technique to get search engines to notice your website, rank it properly and send organic traffic to it. Here are some SEO tips for optimizing your website for more traffic.

Build a User-Friendly Website

Your website is your business window on the internet. The friendlier to users your website is, the more traffic it receives. Internet users are notoriously always in a hurry. To get their attention, your website opening speed must be very fast and the aesthetics eye-catching enough to arrest the attention of users. If users find your website easy and convenient to do business, they’ll keep coming back. That means traffic. If you are unable to do it yourself, you can hire the services of professional webmasters to build you a user-friendly website. That is the kind of website that will always attract good traffic.
 
Optimize your Content for Search Engines

In digital marketing, content is king. If this content is of high quality and well optimized, it attracts good traffic to your website. You can take advantage of deliberate SEO techniques, to optimize your content for search engines. Such techniques include but not limited to creating keyword-rich titles and meta descriptions. You can also specially select and include relevant keywords in the body text of your content. Additionally, you can include internal and external links to the relevant pages on your website. Doing all these will help search engines index your content and improve your rankings. If your content ranks high in the SERPs of search engines, it translates to good organic traffic.

Increase Your Search Rankings

It takes deliberate SEO techniques to increase the search rankings of your website. Researching keywords, selecting relevant keywords, using meta tags, posting high value content on your website, using quality backlinks and some other SEO techniques all contribute to get your website rank higher in the SERPs of search engines. When your search ranking improves, the organic traffic your website gets improves too.

Optimize Your Website for Mobile Searches

Some online reports now indicate that over 90% of internet users access the internet using mobile devices particularly smartphones. Now that means one huge volume of data coming via smartphones. Search engine algorithms do not fail to take note of websites that are mobile-friendly. Search engines therefore take that into account in their rankings. So, if your website is optimized for mobile, it is search engine friendly. That means good organic traffic to the website.

Implement Link Building Strategies

Link building is yet another very important SEO strategy. It is a technique of getting other websites to link to your website/blog. If the websites linked to yours have very good online reputation and search engines see their content as highly valuable, it rubs off on other websites they are linked to. So, if you deliberately build backlinks to reputable websites, it is a good strategy that can help your own website to rank well in the SERPs of search engines. If the links you build back to your website are of good quality, this will help boost your rankings and increase the visibility of your content. The more visible your content is online, the more traffic it attracts. Good strategies for building backlinks include guest posting content on other sites, submitting articles to Article Directories, and participating in online discussion/chat forums.

Track and Analyze Marketing Results

If you track and analyze your online marketing results well enough, it is easy to know where you can tinker with your SEO techniques to get more traffic. As soon as your marketing campaigns go live, it is important to track and analyze the results you are getting from the campaigns. Google analytics tools are always very handy to do this tracking. With these tools, you can measure the right metrics like clicks, impressions, leads and conversions. By analyzing this data, you can identify which marketing channels, platforms and ads are performing well and which ones need to be improved upon for better performance.

Wrapping up

Organic traffic is about the most valuable traffic sources marketers want for their websites. Most of this traffic comes through search engines particularly Google. If you have a good SEO strategy in place on your website, it helps to improve its search rankings. That means good organic traffic. The foregoing SEO strategies can be of help to attract that kind of traffic.

7 Surefire Techniques to Get High-Quality Backlinks

One major challenge internet marketers keep grappling with is the continuous changes in search engine algorithms. If they are unable to cope with these changes, it becomes hugely difficult for them to remain competitive and relevant in their niche market. These changes usually affect backlinks as well since they are important ranking factors in their own rights. This is exactly why savvy content marketers are always on the lookout for how best they can use backlinks to enhance their ranking on the SERPs of search engines. Savvy marketers rely on effective marketing techniques to get high-quality backlinks that help their sites to rank well. These here seven marketing techniques can help you to get suchlike backlinks to boost your online marketing.

1. Prioritize Quality

Yes, backlinks are important for search engine optimization (SEO) ranking purposes but quality links are more important. With quality backlinks, most sites can climb the Google ladder and gain real authority. Quality backlinks are really important component of any SEO marketing campaign. These are links from other websites that Google considers to be authoritative and important. The more quality backlinks you have therefore, the more respect Google accords your website. That affects your website ranking as well if Google believes it is of high-quality and user-friendly.

2. Focus More on Long-tail Keywords

It is simply not enough to get backlinks for your website, the type of backlinks is important as well. If you focus more on using log-tail keywords on your content, the chances that you’ll get high-quality backlinks increases. One of the most effective ways to do this is to create some unique content that has long-tail keywords that people can’t really find anywhere else. Long-tail keywords are hugely important to attract quality backlinks. If you focus on using log-tail keywords on your content, you tend to attract more quality backlinks as well.

3. Take Advantage of Social Media Posts

Presently, social media is exactly where nearly everyone is at 24/7 around the world. This is why links from social media can be very good for your SEO strategy. To do well on Google, links need to be credible and from reputable sites and most social media sites and platforms are reputable and credible. So, if you habitually make posts on social media and add links with selected keyword phrases, you can get quality backlinks from the process. The more of such posts you make on social media, the higher your chances of getting backlinks.

4. Make Use of Influencers

Savvy marketers who can effectively utilize influencers tend to get more high-quality backlinks in the process. By endorsing and even recommending your content on social media, an influencer can provide a new angle for your blog post by making it much more interesting and applicable to their own audience. But first, you must have to make contact with influencers who are ready and willing to cooperate. Having something beneficial in the deal for them is one great way to get them to cooperate. You can directly source influencers from popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and others.

5. Focus on Link Building Trends

Search engine algorithms change from time to time, so you must keep up with the trends as related to backlinks. If you are not conversant with link building trends especially as dictated by the changes in the algorithms of search engines, it will be difficult if not impossible for you to build the right backlinks that can help your SEO ranking. These algorithms tend to change to be able to cope with new technologies, trends, and opportunities that savvy internet marketers might deploy to get quality backlinks in a highly competitive business environment.

6. Quality Guest Blogging

Guest blogging has been one of the most reliable ways to get backlinks in the past but not anymore. Article marketing, blog commenting and social media posts are now heavily contending for attention as well. Guest blogging has however not diminished in its usefulness to generate backlinks. It is still a great way to generate links that allow good websites to have more visibility on the internet. However, guest blogging is not without abuses though but search engines usually come down hard on the websites they trace these abuses to. So, if you’re looking for credible and legitimate ways to earn backlinks, it’s always better to focus more on quality rather than quantity even in guest blogging.

7. Diligently Track Your Results

Working on the internet without tracking your results is like working in the dark. Getting quality backlinks is multidimensional. There are online tools you can take advantage of to help you qualify backlinks. You can use your own website to create quality content for your target audience and get backlinks from your efforts. With Google analytics you can diligently track your results to see how well you are doing. Posting regularly on social media platforms can help you to link influencers and a wide variety of people on the platform. In-house tools peculiar to each platform can help you tract your engagement and backlinks.  Guest posting on other websites helps to increase the reach of your articles to a wider audience and you get backlinks from your efforts. These are backlinks you can accurately track to know how well you’re doing.

How to Take Advantage of Backlinks to Rank Well in Search Engines

In digital marketing, it is now generally agreed that backlinks are important ranking factors in SEO. If these backlinks have high-quality, they are so much better for SEO ranking purposes. There is no doubt at all that quality backlinks can and do have substantial impact on search engine rankings. So, if you manage to get backlinks to your website and such links are from high quality websites, they are quality backlinks. You can take advantage of such backlinks to rank high too in the SERPs of search engines since backlinks are some of the vital ranking factors in the ranking process. Here are some proven techniques you can use to rank well through backlinks.

Increase in Page Authority

Linked domain authority (LDA) is a major component of Page Authority you can take advantage of to increase Page Authority. LDA essentially quantifies the power that a page wields on linking websites. LDA is a direct measure of how powerful an individual page is. This power is measured by how much weight it has on other websites. So, the higher the DA, the more important the content is. Search engines like Google tend to treat websites having high DA with higher respect than other sites. They rank them higher as well. LDA combined with link quantity and quality helps this ranking a great deal.

Linking to Other High Quality Domains

In practical SEO ranking terms, backlinks are a factor in the process but there are other factors as well. It is great to build backlinks but where those backlinks come from is hugely important as well. High quality domains are a great source you cannot afford to ignore if you want to get quality backlinks. So, if you want to have high quality backlinks, you can deliberately embark on quality link building by reaching out to other domains by way of guest posts, article marketing and other forms of content marketing. This is about the best way to attract quality backlinks to your own domain that can help your SEO ranking.

Increase the Number of Links from Other Domains

There is a debate as to whether it is the quantity or quality of backlinks that really matters more for SEO ranking purposes. What is not in doubt however is that Google uses backlinks from other websites to assess how valuable your own website is. That information affects the ranking of your website. To be on the safe side, it is best to go for both quality and quantity when building backlinks. When search engines track link points back to your website, they are able to estimate how many quality backlinks you have based on the popularity of the sites that are linked to you. Google takes this into account when ranking your site higher. Why the quantity of links matters as well as the quality is that the more the number of backlinks you have, the better the chances of Google finding more quality backlinks from the lot, and that affects your ranking.

Keep an Eye on Google Algorithm Updates

It is true that Google updates its algorithms periodically. If you keep an eye on these updates, you’ll always know what Google wants with backlinks for its ranking purposes. If you know what Google wants, you can in compliance with that requirement build some high-quality backlinks to enhance your organic backlink growth. That helps your ranking as well if you are doing what Google expects you to do. Therefore, you must be ready and patient to know what Google wants with backlinks at any in point in time then research well before embarking on your link outreach to ensure you get quality links that Google algorithms will so identify.

Explore Domain Age and Trust Flow Measures

For SEO purposes, Domain Age and Trust Flow are both ranked as moderately important ranking factors. Aside site authority which DA confers, trust also matters in SEO ranking. Domain Age and Trust Flow measures significantly help to improve your website’s trustworthiness. This is one main reason backlink building that enhances trustworthiness of your website is still very valuable in your SEO campaigns. If you use proven link building techniques like targeting long-tail keywords or writing quality guest blog posts on topics related to your niche, you can build trust over time.

Shop for Links Based on their Strength

Usually, powerful backlinks are helpful for your website ranking. You can only get such backlinks from higher domain trust networks like Universities, Research centers and powerful traditional news media like the New York Times and Washington Post. The links from these sites have more strength and authority over and above links from ordinary blogs or ordinary websites. It may not be very easy for everyone to get links from such powerful and authoritative domains but you can get links from them if you work hard at it. If you are able to create high-quality content that attracts these powerful and authoritative sites organically, you can get links from them. Because links are also weighted by how recently they were published, you therefore get more valuable links from such authoritative websites that publish high-quality content consistently, regularly and in high volumes. That usually creates more new content to link to. In the eyes of Google, your website gets more value for a new link than an old one and that helps its ranking.

How to Build a Sound Strategy for Social Media Marketing

If you are marketing online, it is virtually impossible for you to achieve social media marketing success without building a sound marketing strategy. If you cannot get the strategy right, you’re probably going to struggle in vain without achieving any tangible results. Building this strategy can be a fairly complex task composed of many different tactical facets. If you’ve never built a marketing strategic plan before, the best way to go about it is to first and foremost review the elements and what goes into a good marketing plan.  You can then adapt the results of that review to develop your own social media marketing strategy.

Here is how you can build a sound social media marketing strategy for your business.

Consistently Post Great Content

In social media marketing, content is king. This content must be informative, educational and even entertaining to attract audience. The more of such content you produce, the more traffic you attract to your business. Visitors are usually attracted to valuable content and nothing else. For your content to be valuable to readers, it must be well researched and written in the right context and length. It must have relevant and related images, authoritative and with detailed information or entertainment. To make it visible to search engines, relevant keywords must be surreptitiously embedded in the content. You can then share the content multi-channel to widely attract traffic.
 
Target Buyer Personas

Marketing messages that target buyer personas are usually very effective. It really doesn’t matter how large your social network is. What matters most is how many in your network fit your buyer persona. This is because only the people that fit your buyer persona are the real folks that will actually buy your products. That’s where the money is and you are in business to make money, right? Smart business owners always create content and strategies to convert consumers based on identified characteristics they’ve factored into their buyer personas.

Engage your Audience

Only an engaged audience is a responsive audience. Never lose sight of that. Having a very large audience of followers doesn’t mean much if the audience is not responsive. Even if the audience fits your buyer persona and you don’t engage them, they don’t respond. Engagement helps create the impetus for message amplification. This ultimately may result in viral messaging and consequently more traffic. You can only make engagement happen by consistently creating value in terms of content, being a real person with a strong push encouraging your audience to engage. By way of analytics data, you can get to understand how your social networks respond. That info enables you to make informed decisions about what works and what isn’t. You can then make conscious efforts to capitalize and improve on what’s working to get better results.

Post High Quantity Content

The content you post must not only be of high quality, it must also be consistent. The more content you post, the more traffic you get! Quality matters a great deal too. If your content is of poor quality, major search engines like Google will ignore it. You must as a matter of policy avoid plagiarized material or duplicate content like plague. Search engines are not very tolerant of such materials. A vital part of your content strategy should be to create a content marketing calendar to help ease the burden of creating high-quality content on a consistent basis. If you are writing about a trending or current matter, make sure you are up to date with conversations around the subject matter. If your audience is following and responding, it helps to build the type of relationship that encourages them to widely share your content.

Spend Quality Time on Marketing

Social media marketing is fun and work. You must therefore devote quality time and attention to it. Social media marketing takes time, quality time before it starts getting some traction. If you run a small business, devoting 10-20 hours a week to social media marketing is about ideal. Even if you choose to hire someone to manage your social media marketing, make sure they know what they are doing and have a clear understanding of your own social media marketing goals.

Use Cross-Functional Skills

Every business activity requires skills, real skills that produce results. So is social media marketing! Some of such skills you need are: deep understanding and use of language, strong business intelligence, great writing skills, good marketing background, good technical and working knowledge of the computer and internet technology and lots more.

Make your Strategy Easily Implementable

For a strategy to be easily implementable, it must be clear and easy to understand. Therefore, you must endeavor to write well and use the right tools of influence within your writing to get good results. This influence allows you to create content that motivates the reader towards the actions you need without appearing spammy. On social media just like many other online channels, nothing is guaranteed. You must therefore have a simple strategy that you can easily implement and adapt depending on how circumstances pan out.

Spend on Paid Ads

Yeah, you heard right. If you want quick marketing results from social media, you must spend a bit of money on paid social media ads. That can supplement your free social media marketing particularly if you have very limited marketing budget. It is best still to intensify action to get more organic traffic. That benefits your business better.

Make your Marketing Social

Social media is where you can do serious marketing and also have lots of fun if you make your marketing social. Serve your social media audience vital marketing info as well entertaining them in the process. Engage with them and generally share mutually beneficial info that is easily sharable. You can generally spend your precious time and money understanding your audience enough through your buyer personas by giving them exactly what they want. That way, they’ll respond to your marketing messages more favorably.
 
Market for Real on Social Media

Social media marketing is real marketing no doubt. That marketers like to call it social media marketing does not make it any less marketing. Social media marketing like all marketing involves content writing, communication, consumer behavior, market research, market segmentation, market surveys, direct selling, and branding, marketing tactics/techniques, marketing strategies and lots more. Your marketing is real when you do all these and more on social media to get results.

How to Create a Low-Cost Website for your eCommerce Store

These days, many more people are taking their businesses online. The reason thousands of eCommerce websites get launched every day. A website serves as an online business window and front office for many businesses. That is where they get to make their first contacts with their prospective customers online. If you are taking your business online, you have to learn how to create a low-cost eCommerce website that will serve your needs. Even if you are not too skillful in computer programming, you can take advantage of the lots of educational resources, software and step-by-step guides available online to build your own website. With these resources, almost anyone can build an eCommerce website step by step. Here is what to do.

Choose Your eCommerce Website Builder

Luckily you can have unlimited access to DIY services from the websites of reputable Website Builders like Wix and WordPress. If you want to run an affiliate program, you can join a reputable eCommerce platform like Strong Future International SFI. On this platform, you have access to a free webpage to do your business from. This is more so when you don’t have the right technical knowledge to do things right. On SFI platform, you can set your eCommerce store up and running in a matter of minutes. If you choose to build your website on WordPress platform, it allows you to add eCommerce functionality plug-ins to the website. These allow you to customize your eCommerce website as you choose to then add more options if you so wish.

Choose a Suitable Domain Name and Hosting Platform

Here is where things become a bit tricky. You must carefully choose a domain name that is not already in use by anyone else. The hosting platform must first sort that out before hosting your website. Your domain name should ideally be your business name or its variation, if the original match is already taken up. You may be required to pay monthly hosting fees when your store is up and running. That in essence may be your only true cost if you are building a DIY eCommerce website. No matter how your website comes about, make sure you take into account crucial operational factors like reliability, security, reputation, uptime, loading speed and more to make sure it is really useful to your business. For low-cost purposes, you can consider the hosting plans of Hostinger, Hostgator and Dreamhost.

Pick the Right Theme/Template to Customize

If you are building your website DIY on WordPress or Wix, you have access to a range of free themes you can choose from and customize for your eCommerce website. On WordPress, you can easily integrate your eCommerce website with WooCommerce through plug-ins. If done correctly, the website will become really suitable for displaying products, taking orders, receiving payments and shipping out purchased products. When your chosen theme is right and suitable, it easily molds into your eCommerce business. You must make sure that the theme you choose to customize has the right visual appeal and is easy to navigate. This is in addition to other vital and necessary traits like mobile-friendliness and high flexibility for easy adaptation.

Add Your Products/Services to the Website

This is where the real marketing takes root: adding products to your website. The way the products are displayed and the descriptions accompanying them are of vital importance for marketing purposes. Be sure to accompany your displayed products with a clear and concise product description. This is because the more informative this description is the more impactful it is. If you provide the necessary information in the right order, it makes it easier to skim, assimilate and understand.

Use only High Quality Professional Photos of your Products

The average human being is highly attracted to the visuals of your marketing products. So, if you use high quality and professional photos of your products, they attract attention easily. If you are marketing affiliate products, embedding these photos with affiliate links/codes helps to direct buyers to the appropriate website where the products can be purchased. Using the right keywords on the products description helps major search engines like Google to find the product on your website. Ultimately, these efforts help to make the process of choosing the right product fairly easy for the consumer.

Set Up your Acceptable Payment Methods
 
If you built your website DIY on Wix or WordPress, you can easily set the payment options you prefer. Most eCommerce website builders and plug-ins offer multiple payment options to eCommerce stores owners. They have access to online payments via multiple payment processors, Debit/Credit cards, Cash-on-delivery and so on even though each method may come with its own fees, processing time, and ease-of-use considerations.

Set Up your Shipping Options

Onsite, you can also set your preferred shipping methods which your customers can choose from depending on their convenience. Setting up the right shipping option is necessary and hugely important because it can serve as a marketing technique as well. This is why Free Shipping can be one of the top reasons many people buy products online and save costs. Even if the products cannot be delivered free, be sure to assure consumers that you are using the most reliable and cheapest method to deliver their products.
 
Test and Launch Your eCommerce Website

Before you launch your eCommerce website, make sure to test the website well enough to be sure it does what you expect it to do. That way, you can always take quick steps to rectify whatever faults you find with it before launching it. Thereafter, you must keep an eye on whatever faults you’ll encounter along the road through user experience and comments. It is hugely important to be sure the website is optimized for mobile devices. You can then test how it performs on cell phones and other smart mobile devices. This is because, according to Google reports, a very high percentage of eCommerce traffic comes via smart mobile devices.

Conclusion

Any business owner who is determined and serious about it can easily create a low-cost eCommerce website by DIY approach. Even though DIY approach to create the right eCommerce website is a possibility, it usually takes quite a bit of time and effort to get it done. Additionally, it is quite a difficult option for people with minimal technical knowledge. However through DIY approach, you can always take full advantage of low-cost eCommerce website creation options that offer a lot of flexibility, tools, and plug-ins. Any time you wish, and as you wish, you can easily maintain and modify the website on your own without any outside technical assistance. Doing so helps you to save time and costs.

Best Strategies to Master On-Page and Off-Page SEO Skills

Most online business owners rely on organic traffic to grow their businesses. That sort of traffic comes largely from search engines. This is why online marketers always want to optimize their websites for search engines with a view to getting high ranking in the SERPs of search engines. This ranking usually translates to good organic traffic back to such websites. If as a business owner you are looking forward to ranking your website high in the SERPs of search engines, you just need to understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You will need to master some on-page and off-page strategies so that you will be able to optimize your website for better rankings by search engines. This is because for SEO to be really effective on a business website, it must be on-page and off-page. Both strategies have their unique roles in the search results as well as organic traffic from search engines.

This article will discuss some on-page and off-page SEO strategies/techniques to see if you can master them well enough for the benefit of your eCommerce business.

On-Page SEO Strategies

The technical details of optimizing the content of your website to be search engine and user friendly are collectively known as on-page SEO. On-page SEO focuses directly on website content and how it performs to attract traffic to the website. The following techniques are very helpful for on-page SEO.

1. Keyword Research

SEO on content works with keywords. Depending on the products you are marketing and the niche of your business, you can research keywords to determine which will be suitable to help search engines locate your products or website. It is best to use on your content, long-tail keywords/phrases with high search volume and lower keyword difficulty. For marketing purposes, long-tail keywords generally have a high conversion rate. When your conversion rate is high, you can get better leads through such keywords.

2. On-Page Planning

To get good results with on-page planning, you will need to be very precise and accurate. Part of this planning is to make sure you use different keywords for different pages depending on the products or message on the pages. Be sure the keywords targeted on one page are not conflicting in any way with the keywords on another page and all the website pages are interlinked with suitable internal linking. Give the pages a clear hierarchy and proper categorization. Carefully insert images and videos with the right spacing and with alt tags on all the pages. All these greatly help your on-page plan to deliver good results.

3. Search Intent Analyzation

Detecting the search intent of your website visitors helps to bring them over to your website through the right keywords related to that intent. You must therefore be able to analyze the intent of your visitors in tandem with your goals. Next is to focus on each set of visitors based on their search intent then direct your marketing appropriately using the keywords related to the intentions of each set and the objective of your website. That helps organic traffic a great deal.
 
4. Optimize for Mobile Devices

Google reports now indicate that a very large percentage of search data is attributable to mobile devices. If you do not want to miss out on this search data, it is best to optimize your website for mobile devices particularly smartphones. Google greatly values websites that are optimized for mobile devices because most of searchers are now using mobile phones to search for their queries. This is why it is hugely important to optimize your website design to make it mobile-friendly.

5. Leveraging LSI Keywords

Your marketing content gets better results if you add some keywords in the content related to your focused keyword. It is such keywords/phrases that Google considers related that are known as LSI Keywords. You get better results with your content if you add LSI keywords inside the content, its headings and subheadings as well. Be careful to space the keywords sparsely in your content to avoid penalties from Google for keywords stuffing.
 
6. Page Loading Speed

You can always tinker with your website design and content to improve on its loading speed. If a website loads fast, it is more customer-friendly than slow loading websites. This is the reason why low-speed loading increases bounce rate on a website. Besides, if your website is slow loading, Google will not rank it high in its SERPs. To tinker with the loading speed of your website, you can use lazy loading, compressed images, low-size scripts, and proper coding to increase its loading speed.
 
7. Content Optimization

For good organic traffic purposes, the content on your web page should be well optimized against the focused keyword of the site. Sparsely populating the content with such keyword is always very helpful. This keyword should be in the introductory paragraph, last paragraph, headings and subheadings and a bit here and there in the main body of the content. Adequate care must however be taken at all times to avoid keywords stuffing.
 
8. Page Optimization

Search engines usually like websites with good page optimization and they reward such websites with high ranking. To get this done, your page title must be suitable to the content and with appropriate length say around 50 characters. It should contain your focus keyword particularly at the beginning. You can boost its chances with search engines if you add an intuitive meta description that is about 150 characters long. The meta description should contain the focus keyword and one LSI keyword if convenient. Make sure your meta titles are engaging well by adding appropriate questions to lure your readers to click through.

Off-Page SEO Techniques

Off-page strategies are basically off-site techniques you can perform outside your website to improve the ranking of your website in the SERPs of search engines. Next are some of the most important off-page SEO strategies most marketers find useful. They are practically all about backlinks really.

1. Guest-Post Articles

Marketers usually guest post articles as a way to create contextual backlinks for their web pages. Such guest articles are usually submitted to other websites of the same niche as the marketer’s website. When marketers create niche-based content they insert their links into it in a natural manner. When these articles are published on other websites, the marketer gets backlinks from those websites to his own web page. This is one of the most authentic link-building techniques that help website ranking. When Google finds the links to your website to be genuine and from reputable websites in your niche, it helps the ranking of your own website. If you are guest posting articles, you must take adequate care to avoid penalties from search engines for spamming.

2. Strategic Link Building Techniques

Anywhere an online marketer can post content and he earns a backlink from the content is a strategic link-building location. Such places are quite many on the web but the most popular with marketers are: blog commenting, web 2.0, forum submission, document submission, articles directory listing and so on. This link-building strategy requires adequate care and great caution to avoid spamming penalties from search engines.

3. Social Media Platforms

These days, smart marketers have found ways to leverage the power of social media to market content on various social media platforms. If your content is good and your social media following is high, you can continuously market your web pages on social media and invite your readers to visit your website. You need a bit of ingenuity though to get good results from social media marketing. What really matters is quality, good quality and engaging content on social media to get attention. Generally, you can use video content, images, live streaming and leverage the many in-house features available on many social media platforms to effectively market your content.

4. Shareable Content

If your content is of high quality and engaging, it will be easily shareable. It is thus hugely essential that you should always endeavor to continuously create shareable content on your webpage. Make sure your shareable content is complimented with the right social media icons that can easily facilitate its sharing throughout the internet. That will directly help the ranking of the content. Why because Google in particular always has high value for a web page that is more widely shared on different digital media platforms.

Summary

It takes quite a while and a great deal of efforts to optimize your website for search engines. Even at that, SEO on a website is a highly technical business which is best left for professional webmasters to do on your website if you are unable to do it yourself. Doing it and getting it done right is hugely important for the success or otherwise of any eCommerce business. If you try the foregoing on-page and off-page techniques and you are not getting satisfactory results, hire the services of SEO experts to help you out. It is essential however for you to know some of these basic techniques that can help improve your own SEO skills. If you do, your eCommerce business will be a lot better for it.

How to Use SEO for Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, affiliates get paid commissions to promote products for product merchants. They can do this effectively if they have in place reliable ways to get good traffic to their websites where there are affiliate links which their website visitors can click and make purchases. As an affiliate marketer, you can get better organic traffic if you bring in SEO which stands for ‘search engine optimization’ into the mix of your marketing techniques. SEO is the technical practice of optimizing website content to boost its ranking for online searches. When done correctly, SEO can help your website to be found more easily thereby significantly increasing its popularity in online searches. That way, SEO helps to boost traffic, get more leads, increase conversions and sales.

If you introduce SEO into affiliate marketing, you have a perfect blend of two marketing strategies that allow marketers to bring more traffic to their websites in a perfectly organic and natural manner. You can thus effectively use SEO for affiliate marketing in the following ways.

Be Original

If you want to optimize your website, make sure you are original. Being original does not only help to keep your business integrity intact, search engines like it. If you are not original, many search engines, Google inclusive, will penalize your content. Search engine algorithms never fail to detect and penalize duplicate content. If they detect that your content is heavily plagiarized, it could be pushed further down the search ranking or even removed from the results page entirely. That cannot be good for your marketing business. To avoid such penalties from search engines, you must always ensure all your website content is completely original and unique to your business.

Focus on Creating High Quality Content

High quality content is what helps to attract readers to your website. If this content is focused on your business niche, so much the better. You must endeavor therefore to avoid random topics in your content. If your content is focused, it directly attracts all the people looking for such information online. That is the kind of content capable of helping to push the products you are marketing online. Such content will most likely attract the right readers who may end up purchasing the product you are marketing. Basing your content on unrelated topics may get you traffic, but such traffic may not be interested in the products you are marketing. It cannot help your sales figures either. 

Carefully Select Your Niche

Before you start creating your optimized content, be sure to have a clear niche to focus your content on. Such niche can be anything you like and are passionate about. Choose a product that fits into this niche for you affiliate marketing, making sure the product has good market. If you have a genuine interest in the niche, it will help your content creation and marketing efforts. The more you know about the topic, the easier it is for you to produce well-rounded, informative and high quality content that sells.

Use the Right Keywords

Keywords are the baits marketers use for search engines. They are the exact words and phrases that people will search for in order to find your business online. This is why it is hugely important to carefully research, select and choose the keywords you use in your website. The best keywords must be relevant to the content on your website. This helps your website to be found by interested readers using the keywords on search engines. If search engines find your website easily, it translates into highly valuable organic traffic for your business.

Choose a Relevant Domain Name

Your domain name is your website identity online. It is a very essential part of your website, so you must choose it carefully and wisely. When choosing a domain name, you must have two very fundamental issues in mind. The first issue is to carefully choose a domain name that will be useful for creating a big, powerful brand, something that really resonates with your customers. On the alternative, you can choose a name that’s short, apt, precise, and perfectly describes exactly what your business offers. Some name that can easily turn up in online search results is what is best.

How to Find the Best Products to Sell Online

E-commerce business is often thrilling, exciting and can be profitable if you are selling the right products. Even though there are many product options available to sell online, how to find such products can be hugely tasking particularly if you are not too experienced in e-commerce business. The good news is that technology has made this task fairly easy to perform if you know what you are doing. Following are some of the most efficient practices anyone can rely on to determine what products are best to sell online.

Personal Insights from Experience

Personal insights derive from what you know and have even experienced. That is about the best place to start. Just take a good look around you and your neighbors. Talk to people in your family and your neighborhood to know what products they are really using or consuming at any material time. Look around your home, office or work space. Can you identify any specific products that make your life easier or that your life hugely depends on? The identities of such products can help you decide what products to sell online.

Feedback from Customer Reviews

You can analyze feedback and gain valuable insights about products that are selling well from large and very popular e-commerce platforms like Alibaba and Amazon for instance. Gaining insights about products directly from the large customer base of these and similar platforms is quite helpful to business owners even though many rely also on some other methods to gain such insight. One of such common methods is reading customer reviews/feedback on products.

Diligent Competitor Analysis

You can research and study your competitors with a view to identifying what products they are selling and how well they are selling the products. The reasoning behind that is, if your competitors can do it, so can you. By studying your competitors well enough, you can forge a way to avoid any saturated market segment and refrain from choosing too many niche products. All you really want is to sell more products and take less risk in doing so.
 
Various Online Resources

Various online resources can actually serve as a treasure trove for valuable information. Most popular among these online resources you can rely on and utilize are Shopify’s Trending Product List, Google Trends, Amazon Suggest, The Facebook Ad Library, Kickstarter.com, Wish.com, Pinterest Suggest, Exploding Topics, amongst others. For an e-commerce store owner, it helps to also check out as many e-commerce web forums you can access to get information. Through these forums, it is possible to find new and exciting ideas/insights about products that customers are looking for which you too can sell online.

Social Media

With presently over 4.5 billion people active on Social media, it is one huge market where you can identify products that are selling well. You can always check hashtags and trending videos to know what people follow more or watch more. Trending products normally have high views on their videos. Pay particular attention to products related to fitness, foods, fashion, beauty, hospitality and sports as they trend on social media and you can decide on which of the products to sell online.

From Keyword Data Analysis

Analyzing data generated by online tools can also give good insights into products that are in demand online. You can rely on online tools that provide information/data on search volume, competition, and cost-per-click among your target audience. Keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planners, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Trends, or Keywords Everywhere can be very useful and handy to generate information/reports about products that people are looking for online. For consumers searching for products through search engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a useful tool that can be used to assess their product demand online.

Resourceful Ways to Market a New Business

One of the most important things you will need to do when starting a new business is to market it well. How you carry out this marketing depends on the type of business you have chosen and the resources at your disposal. That plus a bit of research on what sort of marketing works best for the type of business can be really helpful. No solution is perfect though. What helps you to get the best results is always preferable. Find below some marketing options most marketing experts like recommend. 

 
 

Social Media Marketing

As social media is increasingly becoming more popular and the internet is deepening by the day, many more businesses are now using social media as one of their main forms of digital marketing. If you market on social media and your business is new, it is fairly easy for you to quickly build up recognition and brand identity for your brand by spreading awareness for the products/services you are marketing. Your marketing can become more impactful if you grow your audience well and segment it for marketing messages. You need to have accounts on the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. You not only need to have accounts on these social media platforms, you must also be sure to make regular posts, interact with your audience, address their concerns and queries through comments and direct messages. If you do, you’ll get better marketing results.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO is one of the key aspects of digital marketing. A good SEO on your website helps search engines to rank it well. If search engines rank your website high in their SERPs, it benefits from the organic traffic they send its way. A good SEO on your website helps to increase the amount of traffic visiting your website. A good traffic inflow in turn helps to boost the opportunity for leads, sales and even profits. Maintaining your search engine ranking is essential to direct potential customers away from competitor websites and towards your own business’s website. That translates to good business. However, it must be noted that SEO is a bit technical. It involves the careful deployment of specially selected keywords related to your business niche on your website content. If you know how, you can handle SEO yourself, but if not, hiring the services of professional webmasters to do it for you is advisable.
 
Radio and TV Advertising

Advertising on Radio and TV may be old school but they are still very effective traditional advertising methods. More so if your business is new. Radio and TV ads are still about the best ways to reach a much wider local audience and bring in increased sales. Both methods are great to reach offline audience which may be local in your business environment. When people hear your business ads regularly on the Radio and TV, your business name/brand can quickly become familiar to people who will be more likely to choose it over others who may be your competitors. Most people like to stick with what’s familiar to them. Advertising via the Radio and TV can help your business to quickly become like a household name. However, advertising on Radio and TV comes with huge costs. They should only be undertaken if you have the marketing budget to accommodate them. 

 
 

Staging Events

Business owners usually stage and host events to encourage many more people to learn more about their brands and to attract huge media attention. This media attention serves essentially as a free form of advertising for a brand as well as telling the public what the business is all about. By hosting a local derby for kids, charity events, garage sales, health walk, etc. etc., you not only have a great opportunity to raise funds for noble causes, you freely advertise your brand and showcase your business as well.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is quite handy to grow your business and promote your products widely online. It is usually a business arrangement between three parties, Product Merchants, Affiliates and Consumers. What the affiliate simply does is to help product merchants promote their products using unique affiliate links. Once a product is purchased via the affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale. By this arrangement, product merchants can partner with social media influences (affiliates) to advertise products and encourage sales from their huge audiences. This arrangement is an incredibly popular and lucrative way of reaching a wider target audience and selling more products/services. It works well and really profitable if the product merchant manages to reach out to very popular influencers who are interested in his business niche. If a business arrangement is fashioned out with such influencers, it helps to quickly grow a brand and boost sales.

How to Start, Run, and Operate a Successful Blog

You can start and run a private blog for fun or to make money. Even when you start your blog from scratch, you can monetize it and make a small business out of it. That’s exactly what bloggers who want to make money from their blogging do these days. Blogging may appear quite common now particularly among digital marketers who are running their own businesses. These people effectively use their blogs as marketing/promotional tools for their business. If however you are just starting out in your blogging business, you really need quite a bit of guidance to start, run and operate your blog successfully. These here tips can be of help.

 
Decide what you want to Blog About

Deciding on what you want to blog about is hugely important right from the outset of your blogging experience. What you can successfully blog about is what you know and are passionate about because discovering your passion early enough is the key to successful blogging. You must think deep and brainstorm well to come up with relevant subjects and topics for your blog. If your blog mission is well defined, coming up with relevant topics to blog about becomes fairly easy. What your blog readers want to see is high quality and informative content and they stay hooked on to your blog. Just give them such content regularly and consistently and your audience will grow.

Carefully Select a Blogging Platform

The blogging platform you choose to blog from is very important to the success of your blog. You must therefore take adequate care to select a platform for your blog. The right platform to settle for depends on the product you are marketing and the nature of your blog. It is a need based decision that also factors in your skills and your personal preferences. Most blogging platforms have various in-house tools that can help to enhance your blogging experience. These must be factored in too before you choose a platform. Among the many blogging platforms available, experienced bloggers do recommend WordPress, Blogger, Square Space, Wix, Tumblr, and Ghost. For beginner bloggers, WordPress and Blogger are great to use because they are text-based and search engines particularly Google love them.
   
Consistently Create Quality Content

In blogging parlance, content is always king. The more the content you create, the more following you get for your blog. That translates to good traffic too. Your blog can never succeed if you only manage to create poor and mediocre content. This is why you must pay special attention to content creation. In this wise, it is advisable to consistently create high quality informative and educational content that will interest your readers. Grammatical presentation is important too. For this reason, before posting any content, make sure you proofread it thoroughly and correct all grammatical errors as well as formatting mistakes.
 
Create a Brand

For marketing purposes, your blog must reflect your brand. You must therefore create your blog name, logo and even colors to reflect your brand. Figure out your unique storyline that will reflect your brand and be attractive to your audience. Come up with ideas and test run them to see what works best. By the time you get what works best for you, you can proceed to use it consistently and use it as often as possible to consolidate it as a brand.

Network to Build your Community

If you want your blog to quickly succeed, it is not enough to consistently post content, you must network well too. As soon as you start posting, you’ll have to spend a lot of time networking. This you can do by way of blog commenting, cooperating and working with other bloggers. In fact, you must carry out all activities needed to get audience for your blog. This is important because the audience will not just come to you except you work to bring them to you. To build a reliable community for your blog therefore, networking is the answer. For good results, you must spend quality time commenting on blogs, engaging on social media, communicating with your blog followers, reaching out to and collaborating with various influencers.

Be Diligent and Patient

It takes quite a while for your blog to get noticed online and indexed by search engines. For this reason, you cannot expect your blog to have overnight success. Waiting patiently for your blog to start getting the right traffic may be discouraging, but it is not sufficient to frustrate you out of blogging. You must be diligent and consistent at creating and posting content and with time, traffic will come. You must endeavor therefore to be patient with your blog and with yourself. Try to maintain your blogging schedule, create and post content regularly and establish your presence in as many social media platforms as convenient for your schedule. It may take a while but with time, your blog will be a success if you are diligent and consistent in your content creation.