Best Tips to Manage a Blog Successfully

Digital marketers see blogging as a very effective marketing strategy, the reason they embark on it. Many however do not realize that a blog is only as successful as the management of time and content put into it. You cannot simply write content and say you have a blog if it is not widely read. Your blog can only prove successful if it routinely brings in traffic to your website and helps convert readers into customers. If your blog is unable to do these things, it is simply an unsuccessful blog. It is quite a frustrating experience for bloggers if their blogs are not successful. Making your blog successful is hugely dependent on how well it is managed. This management is all about planning and knowing who you want to read your content, and what you want them to do afterward. Here are some great tips to help you set up and manage your blog successfully.

Find Your Niche

A good blog must have something interesting and important to write about. That is why you must settle for a well-defined niche. It is on this niche you can write content to attract readers who may translate to customers at some point. Of course your chosen niche must have a clear relationship with the products/services you are selling. This niche could be in form of a topic, industry, product, or service. You must write and develop content about all things related to the niche. Doing so consistently is one great way to connect with your customers and to attract the attention of search engines like Google.

Carefully Choose Your Platform

Your blogging platform is as important as the blog itself. You may choose to blog out of your business website or some free blogging options many of which are out there online. Even if you already have an established website of your own, you can still have a platform that will easily integrate into your website. One very popular example of such platforms is WordPress that has the advantage of making available to you lots of free blogging tools, themes, memes, graphics, SEO and even blogging tutorials and guidebooks. This arrangement allows you to have a blog that is managed independently, but shows up on your website seamlessly. That is great for blogging if you ask me.

Incorporate Images

Good images on blogs are like traffic magnets because most online users love images. However, any images on blogs must have real quality to be helpful. With this as your guide, you can carefully select and use images based on their quality and relevance to your niche. You can settle for high quality photos, graphics, infographics and videos. On this score, the more the merrier! Most successful blogs on the internet feature images that break up the text and add visual interest. This is a great way to expand your horizons, add interest, and alert search engines like Google that you are incorporating interesting media elements in your website/blog. If they notice, you get more organic traffic as a result.

Give Value Consistently to Your Readers

Content is king in blogging business. The more high quality content you produce for your readers, the better for your blog. Expert bloggers opine that one of the reasons why many personal blogs aren’t successful is because they don’t offer any real value to the reader. With this in mind, you must not only write about your opinion on current events even if hugely interesting and entertaining, but your blog should also offer value to the most readers possible. That is what helps to get the traffic you need. Whatever topic you chose to write on in your niche, your opinion, research, and insight into related topics in the niche is a great way to bring value to readers.

Incorporate Marketing Strategies

In digital marketing parlance, a blog is a great content marketing tool. You get better results from blogging if you are able to incorporate effective marketing strategies into the blog. Most business bloggers use their blogs as good marketing tools. They rely on their blogs to help drive traffic and get customers. Depending on the products you are selling and your blogging niche, you can incorporate some of the following marketing strategies into the management of your own blog for best results. 

•    Encourage interaction with your readers by asking for comments/suggestions.
•    Make interacting easy for users.
•    Leave valuable comments on other blogs/forums with a link to your own blog.
•    Contribute intelligently to e-zines, online news sources, and other reputable sources.
•    Avoid the temptation to respond harshly to negativity or criticism.
•    Write more on topics that are trending in search engines.
•    Portray yourself as offering solutions all the time.
•    Do not unduly delay in your responses to inquiries/comments.
•    Be absolutely honest and truthful in your responses.

Last Line

If you are getting a blog started or you want to revamp one, the foregoing tips from SEO experts can be of immense help to you if you are desirous to succeed in blogging. If you follow these tips, you could be well on your way to starting and managing a successful blog. Once you get the blog going with quality regular content, the results will start coming in through increased readership, interactions and leads, and with time, customers as well. That’s blogging success no doubt. 

5 Reasons to Become an Affiliate Marketer

 

Affiliate marketing enables online marketers with a great option to earn income hassles free in the main. So, if you want to earn some extra income online, affiliate marketing is your best bet.  All you really need to do so is a fair bit of online clout or skills to persuade/influence lots of people online. Now that is fair marketing game isn’t it? If you are capable of helping product merchants to promote their products and they make sales, pronto you are in affiliate marketing. For your efforts, product merchants compensate you by paying you commissions.  For good measure, an affiliate or a publisher can be an individual, a group of people, or a company that markets the product/service of a product merchant to prospective customers. All the affiliate really needs to do is simply to put measures in place on his website or blog, to persuade and influence the decision-making process of the consumers. Once these efforts play a direct role to get a consumer to take a desired action, the affiliate is entitled to a commission. This is enough reason to get involved in affiliate marketing with a view to making quick money online. However, there are other reasons, the most enticing of which include:

1. Cost-Effectiveness: Affiliate marketing is a simple business model anyone can get involved in who has a bit of computer and internet skills. It requires little or no investment at all to get started. This translates into an ease of starting up and to move in real quick. Next is to generate content, attract and direct traffic and to promote products vigorously and very widely and you start getting results even without any prohibitive costs layout. Cheap and easy that is.

2. Performance-Based Rewards: Compensation in affiliate marketing is direct, straight forward and solely based on your performance. The more you promote and help sell, the more commissions you earn. Meaning, you get paid directly only for the work that you do and have done. In affiliate marketing, everything is fluid and action dependent. The more efforts you put into your promotion, the more you get out in terms of revenue. Simple!

3. Handy SEO and Digital Marketing Skills: If over time you’ve managed to acquire some computer and internet skills, they come in very handy in affiliate marketing. Every online marketer craves traffic. Out of this traffic, organic traffic is the best and favorite of search engines. That requires some SEO skills. If properly and systematically done, SEO helps in ensuring a steady flow of organic traffic from search engines. When internet users search online for products using the right keywords, search engines direct them to where they can access products. Such searchers become the organic traffic to such websites. For this reason, affiliate marketing can directly benefit from a good understanding of SEO basics and how it works to help generate organic traffic. 

4. Good Source of Passive Income: By setting up easy click through affiliate links on your website/blog and you write good content often enough, the traffic keeps coming and your affiliate links help to direct these visitors to products/services. When set up, this process is live 24/7 and does not require further direct attention from the affiliate. Passive income generation becomes a given from such arrangement. As an affiliate, all you really need is a fixed investment in terms of your time. That helps to generate continuous results over a prolonged period of time. This is a desirable source of passive income.

5. Convenient and Highly Flexible: Every business owner craves freedom particularly time freedom. The flexibility in affiliate marketing guarantees that. Affiliate marketing grants you the freedom and independence to set your goals and to promote as convenient for you. You have the freedom to choose for marketing only products that interest you. In addition, you can even fix your work schedule as you want. By doing these, you can focus on diversifying your portfolio as you want and as convenient for you. Now, that is much cherished freedom which every business owner craves.

5 Proven Ways to Earn with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an excellent option if you want to earn some extra income online. It is largely performance-based and it allows you to create your own income depending on the efforts you put in. These efforts depend hugely on your affiliate marketing skills/techniques. As affiliate marketing business keeps developing, there are many strategies, techniques and methods many marketers choose to use but it is always best to stick with what works for you. These here 5 proven ways can help you to earn some extra income online through affiliate marketing.

 

1. Market the Right Products

Firstly you must choose and market the type of product people want to buy. That is the right product. Marketing every product that you come across is wasteful and unproductive. It is best to focus on the product you love, have used and you know how to promote. That way, you’ll know the exact type of product that is relevant to your audience and they’re more likely to purchase. That is the best product to promote.

2. Blog for Traffic

Attracting traffic to your website where your affiliate links are can help you to get good traffic, leads and actual sales. That is where a good blog becomes hugely relevant. For traffic purposes, a blog is quite an excellent idea to help drive your affiliate marketing activities. If done correctly, a good blog can help generate decent income from your affiliate marketing activities. The more traffic the blog attracts to your website, the higher your chances of making sales. By regularly updating your blogs and content, you can build up traffic and your audience with time. But, be sure you only blog about what people want to read, understand and learn from. That is what helps to keep them coming back to your website for more.

3. Optimize Your Content

Optimizing your website content is one great way to position your website to benefit from organic traffic. That is the type of traffic that comes through search engines. The reason it is called Search Engine Optimization, SEO technique. Online, SEO optimizes your content so that it ranks high when people search it on search engines. There is usually a significant increase in product review search results if SEO is in place. Your chances of earning a good commission are greatly enhanced if your affiliate marketing product appears in these searches.

4. Market on Social Media

For your affiliate marketing activities on social media, it is advisable to target the very popular platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. Some of these platforms have in-house free tools that are hugely effective for affiliate marketing activities. Facebook for instance is the most popular social media platform and has well over 2.5 billion active users. Now that’s one huge audience to market to 24/7 if you know what you’re doing. Just set up a free account on any of these hugely popular platforms and boom, your affiliate marketing business kick-starts in earnest.

5. Do Video Promotions

Live videos are highly recommended because of their effectiveness. With videos, online buyers tend to trust your marketing information more. For this reason, you must make your video promotions as authentic as feasible. You can for instance make how-to videos of yourself using a product and reviewing it live for the benefit of your audience. Doing so is one great and effective way to promote the product through affiliate marketing because audience response is usually quite great.

SEO Content Optimization Best Practices

For most marketers, content remains key to any meaningful online engagement. This is exactly why content optimization remains hugely important particularly for search engine marketing. That is how Search Engine Optimization, SEO derives its relevance. To compete favorably online, businesses should focus on content optimization. This they can do by ensuring that their content is written in such a way that it can effectively engage their target personas. However, to engage these personas, the content has to first reach them. SEO helps search engines to locate and rank content searchers are looking for. If marketers infuse their content with the right keywords, tags, titles, links and images, it helps SEO. With Google as the dominant search engine on the internet, optimizing your content for Google’s ranking algorithms is the best way to go. If properly done, your business stands to benefit from increased traffic and conversions, lower bounce rates, higher search rankings and enhanced discoverability.

These here are about the best practices that can help in optimizing your content for better SEO.

Diligent Keywords Research

Keywords research is hugely important for SEO because keywords are the real foundation of SEO.  You can take advantage of free online tools for your keywords research. Doing so will help you to discover the right keywords searchers are using online to find your type of business. Once you get the right keywords, you can deliberately use them in your content for the benefit of search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Relevant online keyword tools can help you to find the best keywords related to your demographic. If you deploy these keywords in your content correctly, it helps your SEO.

High Quality Value-Filled Content

Marketers don’t just write content for writing sake. Marketing content is always written for a specific purpose and must be full of value. It is valuable content that helps to drive engagement, leads, customers and sales. Online, if your business consistently puts out quality content, your brand manages to gain some reputation for providing unique and quality content. That helps to attract more followers and a bigger audience. Your content can serve this purpose well if you optimize everything in the content.  These things are comprehensive but range from the keywords to the length of each blog post, web page or article. Expert marketers advise that blog posts should contain a minimum of 300 words to about 2500 words in order to rank well in search engines.

Earn Quality Backlinks

Google algorithms take backlinks into consideration when ranking content.  Links can thus make a considerable difference to your search rankings and SEO. You can earn backlinks by interacting with high-quality web platforms and institutions. If these links are from reputable, high-authority institutions like universities and research institutions, websites and reputable publications, so much the better. Strong and high quality backlinks do not only increase credibility for your content, they also help it to rank high in Google SERPs.

Generate Data to Drive Your Strategy

With the help of online analytics tools, you can collect as much data about your web traffic as you can. Through this data, you can discover striking patterns relating to volume of traffic, bounce rates, popular content, and much more insights into visitors’ behavior on your website. The data also allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your CTAs. You can depend on this data to design your marketing strategies and campaigns factoring in content SEO by optimizing your web copy for maximum engagement. If through this data you can generate reliable user-behavior reports, it is one great way to know which content is effective and which is not. With that, you can always redesign or rejig your strategy and marketing campaigns for better results.

10 Success Tips for Online Marketing

The intriguing thing about online marketing is that many are making millions with it while millions of others are failing miserably. There is tendency to ask, what exactly these other millions are not doing right that is responsible for their failures. The answer lies in style, tactics and techniques. What then do they need to do or do better to succeed in online marketing? You’ll find the answer in these here tips.

1. Register Your Website on Many Search Engines: The Internet happens to have many search engines that do about the same things for internet searchers. They are responsible for directing and sending internet searchers to different websites depending on the information they are searching for. The major ones are Google.com, Yahoo.com, Excite.com, Bing.com, Yandex.com, Altavista.com, Lycos.com, and the likes. You can register your website in as many search engines as you want since registration is free of costs. Alternatively, you can use FreeWebSubmission.com to submit your website free to thousands of search engines. The more search engines your website is registered or indexed on, the better it is for your organic traffic.

 
 
2. Have a Clear Marketing Goal: You must design and build a unique website with your marketing goal in mind. This goal must be clear, concise and achievable. Websites can serve multi-purposes so take extra care to make sure aside from your main marketing goal, your website is flexible enough to serve other digital purposes. If however out of your website you can sell products/services, nurture leads, advertise your business, and build your customer base, market content and lots more, your website is great.

3. Have a Promotion Plan: The internet is a hugely competitive space for digital marketers. Millions of business websites are out there competing for surfers’ attention. To be able to compete effectively in a scenario like that, you must have a workable promotional plan in place and make it an integral part of your marketing strategy. As expert marketers like to advise, if you want to sell real good, be ready to promote vigorously. A good promotional plan helps that process.

4. Experiment Marketing Techniques: Yeah, without experimentation, it is difficult to know for sure what works and what doesn’t in your marketing. This is why you must experiment with marketing techniques to know what works best for your type of business. Most experienced marketers mastered the ropes through this type of experimentation with marketing techniques. You too can do same.

5. Keep a Keen Eye on Your Competition: Some expert marketers even advise outright spying on your competition. The reason is simple. If you follow your competition closely on social media and monitor their websites, it is possible to know what they do in their marketing activities and even why they do it. That is one great way to glean a few tricks/techniques from their activities to help improve on your own techniques. If you monitor your competitors' websites frequently, it will help you not only to generate new ideas, but to always think about doing something better and offering more and better tools to help your customers online. That way, you can become more competitive and even to beat your competitors in their game if you are smart enough.

6. Save on Marketing Costs: This is hugely imperative for the survival of your business. The more you save on your marketing costs, the better for your bottom line, revenues and profits. Consider a toll-free number to take orders and get feedback from your customers to save costs. Email marketing automation is also cost saving. WhatsApp calls, chat bots and Artificial Intelligence AI are all cost-saving for your marketing efforts.
 
7. Be Flexible in Your Marketing: Marketing flexibility combines effectively with marketing experimentation. You never know for sure what really works, when it really works and through what channels. Flexibility allows you to make changes as needed even in your marketing strategy as the need arises. Make your website interactive in nature. That is what helps you to get the right feedback you need to make changes from time to time. No matter how much you earlier planned your website, make it flexible enough to accommodate changes based on what you learn during your marketing operations.

8. Promote Your Website Widely: Aggressive marketing involves aggressive promotion. Any and every opportunity you have, never fail to promote your website widely. You can always up your promotion game by including your email address and website URL on all your corporate stationery and product packaging. Business cards and complimentary gifts/correspondence must be used effectively to promote your website. If you have any mass advertising you decide to carry out, be sure to have concise addresses/contacts where you can be easily reached. Expert marketers recommend the use of active ads, in which with a click, the navigator will arrive directly at your site.

9. Position Your Website for Referrals: Referrals are always a great traffic source for marketers. Your website must therefore be positioned for referrals. If for instance you have an extensive line of products for sale, by way of referrals, you can ask your website visitors for information about their needs so that you can program the site to recommend a certain product/service to meet these needs. What this means is that if you are offering these options, you are simply offering your customers just what they are looking for. That translates to a very valuable service for your customers.

10. Don’t Ignore Feedback: Every marketer needs feedback to help improve on what they are doing. If you are not getting enough feedback in your marketing efforts, you can pointedly ask for feedback from your potential customers and customers. You can for instance ask your website visitors if they want to be notified about price slashes or new products/services or about an offer you plan to launch into the market. If you have built a credible email list over time, sending these notifications by email becomes very easy and effective.

4 Smart Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy

To make your data safe online, you need some online privacy arrangements. These days, every business owner needs to take deliberate actions to address the many challenges facing consumer data online. One way to go is through consumer data privacy protection. Even with strong regulations against data hacking in many countries of the world, the practice is still not abating. What to do? Just find creative ways to protect your consumer data online. It is just not enough to simply resent data hacking and hold strong opinions about privacy. What matters most in the end is what actions you can take on your own to ensure your data stays private for your business. Here are some recommendations.

1. Use a Private Search Engine
 
To avoid being tracked easily online by any and every one, you can use a private search engine. The privacy of your data is better guaranteed that way. Major search engines particularly Google cannot guarantee your data privacy. You know why? Google makes money by tracking you, collecting as much information as possible on you, and then sells your attention using ads based on that. You can’t stop Google from making money can you? If you use private search engines like DuckDuckGo, you can still get great search results without being easily tracked and targeted by others. You have a better protection for your data privacy as a result.
 
2. Use a Virtual Private Network, VPN

Good examples of VPNs you can use and depend on are Express VPN or Norton Secure VPN. Online, it is possible for people to spy on the websites you’re visiting, where you’re located, and even the identification number and type of device you are using to access the internet. The most reliable way to stop these persons is the use of VPN. Most VPNs readily protect your private information from online predators. They can even make it appear to spies as if you are browsing elsewhere different from where you actually are. They are capable of disguising your internet access device as well.
 
3. Check Permissions

As many small business owners very well know, many apps and browser extensions people like to use usually come with a list of permissions that you must have to sign off on before you can start the services. Without these permissions, the services may not even work in many cases.  So, if you don’t give the required permission, it is virtually impossible for unauthorized persons to have access to your data. If you double check the permissions an app has access to, it is one great way to stop the app from accessing specific data it doesn’t have the permission to access. 

4. Manage Your Privacy Settings

This is hugely important for your privacy management. Any time you are on social media, you inadvertently leave a data trail about you on the platforms. This holds true as well on major search engines like Google. Through privacy settings, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for instance allow you to decide for yourself what info you choose to publicly share or privately share or not share at all. Through these privacy settings, you can limit who can find you via your phone number or email address and whether or not your profile can show up on search engines. You can also through privacy settings regulate who can see or comment on your posts and who can share your posts. What you choose to do depends on what you intend to keep private or what you want others to see and share. This no doubt varies for one business owner to another as their individual privacy settings take care of that.  

How to Understand Google Analytics Terms

Digital marketers have a lot of analytics terms they use in relation to their businesses. It is imperative to get a hold on these terms and to use them appropriately since analytics tools base their measurements/metrics on these terms. 

Here are some common terms you can measure using Google Analytics.

Keywords: Digital marketing relies on keywords as search terms to aid web users. These users find businesses if they use their keywords to search for products/services. Google analytics helps to identify and provide these keywords. Search engines use these keywords to improve the search engine rankings of websites.

Conversion Rate: Many web users habitually visit many websites. Of this lot, the percentage of visitors who do what you expect them to do on your website is regarded as “converted.” Such activities may include making a purchase or registering to download a free e-book, get a discount coupon, download how-to video or signing up for email newsletter.

Visit: This is any session in which a visitor interacts with your website irrespective of whether they do anything on your website or simply move on to another site.

Unique Visitors: This refers to the number of web users who visit your website within a specified time period. Irrespective of the number of times same person visits the site within that time period, the visitor still counts as one unique visitor.

Average Time on Site: This is the average time measured in seconds or minutes a user spends on your website.

Exit Page: This is the last page of your website that a visitor views before leaving your site. Knowing the last page your visitors visit before leaving your website can give you a lot of marketing insights into what works and what doesn’t on your website.

Traffic Sources: This refers to places sending the most traffic to your website. It could be referral sites, social media sites, search engines and traffic exchanges.

Referral Sites: These are sites where people come to your site by clicking on your link on the sites. If your website gets a lot of referral site traffic, it is an indication that your online presence is strong on those other sites.

Search Engines Traffic: This is the same thing as organic traffic. It refers to people who visit your site because it showed up in their search results. A measurement of your search engine traffic gives information on how effective your SEO is.

Page Views: Any time a web user views a page of your site, it counts as a page view. One visit may contain many page views depending on how long the visitor spends on your website and how many pages they visit.

New Visitors: This represents web visitors who are coming to your website for the very first time. The information is vital because marketers need different strategies to market to new visitors as against repeat/returning visitors.

Returning Visitors: Returning visitors are visitors who make a comeback to your website for one reason or another. Some of such reasons may include to get more information, make inquiries and even to make a repeat purchase.

Bounce Rate: This refers to the number of users who exit your website after only viewing just one page. The higher the bounce rate, the less the time visitors spend on your website.

Pages per Visit: This refers to how many pages users view on your website per each visit. The more pages they visit, the better your website engagement.

Direct Traffic: These are people who access your business by typing your URL directly in the address bar of their browsers. Direct traffic is a very good indication of your web authority and customer awareness. It also indicates how effective your marketing ads are.

How to Market Online with Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find you online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. Irrespective of whatsoever you are marketing online, be it a tangible good/product or even if you are offering a service, you need a good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. By doing so, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links.

 

Every search engine may have its own proprietary algorithm but most tend to follow the one developed by Google since Google appears to be the largest search engine at the moment judging from the high percentage of searches attributable to it. Even though the exact components of the Google algorithm and the weighting factors assigned to each component may not be very well known to marketers, SEO experts spend a lot of time and effort conducting experiments to try to determine what these factors are and how they affect the weightings/rankings. What is well known is that links showing up on the first page of the search results on SERPs tend to garner most of the clicks especially those among the top three results. That really counts for something in SEO marketing. Web searchers click on these links first and the beneficiary websites get more organic traffic. Marketers must therefore place more emphasis on SEO with a very keen eye on what SEO experts believe are some of the most impactful factors/activities that determine website ranking. These are:

1. Website security through HTTPS protocols.

2. Gaining backlinks and linking to authoritative online sources, which act as a validation of your content.

3. Mobile-friendliness.

4. Site speed.

5. Providing a positive user experience.

6. Domain age.

7. Social signals, such as clicks from social and other forms of engagement.

8. Producing valuable content on a consistent basis for your website.

Besides these, there are other technical activities which play a role in getting found online. These activities have to do with the choice of and use of specific keywords throughout your website. A key SEO requirement is that the keywords you choose to represent your content must also match closely with user intent as reflected by the words used and the query. These are huge technical matters which may best be handled by SEO experts.

Because of the huge technical challenges in SEO, most business owners/marketers do hire the services of SEO experts to help them out. If however as a business owner you have the education, experience, the right SEO software and the knowhow to do it yourself, all well and good. This option may be less expensive and more effective to meet your business needs. If you do not know how to handle SEO for your website, you are best advised to approach professional agencies or individual SEO experts to help handle it for you. A good SEO on your website is very important and may even be indispensable to the success of your overall online marketing strategy.

5 SEO Strategies to Boost Your Website

No matter what business you are in, so long as you are marketing on the internet, the success of your business depends on its ability to be found online. That ability is enhanced by the SEO strategies you are using on your website. If your SEO strategies are of high quality and strong enough, they are highly beneficial to your brand and its marketing efforts. In addition, your SEO strategies are critical to the web presence and visibility of your website, especially within hugely competitive markets as found on the internet.

Good SEO strategies are a sure way to boost your website visibility and rankings. These SEO strategies help to tinker with the lot of ranking factors that determine your website’s position in the SERPs of search engines. These ranking factors are at times compounded by the ever-changing algorithms of major search engines particularly Google. These technicalities do make SEO tough to execute effectively on websites but it is always worth the bother on the long run.



As a marketer, if you focus more in these here 5 SEO strategies for your website, you can boost its visibility on search engines and its overall performance.

1. Top-Quality Content

Top quality content is very vital to the success of your website. Without it, your marketing message easily gets swallowed up and lost in the vast labyrinth of the digital market space. You need top quality and powerful compelling content to get noticed by search engines. It is what helps you to stand out in their SERPs. Because search engines need to be guided to understand the context of your content, you need to incorporate some content SEO practices on your website to facilitate that. Some of these practices include, making sure your web pages have at least 300 words worth of content so they can be crawled by search engines, using ALT Text on images and including H1, H2 and H3 Headers in your content. You can also incorporate long-tail keywords, internal and external hyperlinks into the text of the content and making sure to always write a descriptive title and Meta description as well into the content. Doing all these tends to make your content top quality that is usually attractive to search engines.

2. On-Page SEO

Professional webmasters always like to tell marketers that on-page SEO is important because it helps search engines better understand websites and their content. For search purposes, on-page SEO is what helps to easily identify whether your content is relevant to a searcher’s query or not. On-page SEO typically includes optimizing your headlines, HTML tags on Title, Meta and Header as well as on Images. It also involves making sure your website has such a high level of authority, expertise, and trustworthiness to make it easily noticeable by search engines.

3. Website Loading Speed

There are literally hundreds of factors which can have direct impact on your website loading speed. Website loading speed is very vital for your website SEO. This is because, the slower your webpages load, the less likely they are to be indexed by major search engines like Google. And, of course, page speed has a direct impact on both traffic and conversions. Fast loading web pages help to promote good user experience. Web crawlers who are habitually pressed for time cannot stand web pages that take an awful lot of time to load. To increase the loading speed of your web pages, you can use specially adapted Google tools to help analyze the content of your web pages. These tools also help to generate suggestions/actions which you need to help you improve on the loading speed of your web pages.



4. Mobile Optimization

The world is increasingly in a hurry and permanently on the move. This is why many people now rely on mobile devices to do many things online and on the go. From Google apps reports, about 60% of Google searches are now attributable to mobile devices. Now, that is a very huge chunk of search information if you ask me. Therefore, optimizing your website for mobile searches is a very smart idea if you’re looking to attract organic search engine traffic to your website. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to analyze your site and determine whether or not it is mobile-friendly. The tool also provides you with some suggestions/actions needed to help optimize your website for mobile devices users.

5. Link Building

Ever since Google included links as part of its ranking algorithm, link building has become vital SEO requirement for websites. Links help to provide the all-important signal to Google that a website is a quality resource worthy of citation. So when Google discovers a website with more high quality backlinks, it tends to give it higher search rankings than others with less. Adequate care must however be taken in your website optimization efforts to make sure the website is only attracting links from other websites with high domain authority, a decent amount of backlinks, and a significant amount of traffic. That is how to attract quality links which are good for your website SEO. You can easily access Google tools to help you identify such great sites which you need to attract backlinks from.

Essential Tips to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer

These days, one of the most popular ways for marketers to earn money online is by way of affiliate marketing.  If well established, it can easily become a very reliable passive income source. If you are desirable to get involved in affiliate marketing, all you need do is to reach out and become a partner with any business of your choice whose products/services you’ll like to help market. Preferred choices for marketers are mostly ecommerce websites. When you link up with your preferred ecommerce website, you can then start referring your blog readers and visitors from your website to any of their products/services. By doing so, Product Merchants arrange to pay you a commission by way of pre-determined percentages if an individual uses your affiliate link to visit the ecommerce site to make a purchase.

It is recommended you really understand these here tips before you decide to join any affiliate program. They will help you to take the best possible decision about the most suitable affiliate program to help you succeed as an affiliate marketer. To enhance that, you’ll do best to keep a close eye on your website’s analytics and SERP’s because of regular policy changes by major Search Engines.


 
Here are some time-tested business tips to help you become a successful affiliate marketer.

#1. Select the Right Niche

A product/service niche stands distinct from others because of its unique style, profession, lifestyle, culture, behaviour or geographic need. If you get your niche selection right, it allows you to appear as an authority on products connected to that niche. That authority deeply resonates with a distinct group of customers interested in that niche. It allows you to build a strong connection with an ideal audience of potential customers.

#2. Use Only the Right Content

Blogging is all about content marketing. Good content remains key if you want your blog to be successful. Without good content, you can also not succeed in affiliate marketing. Content is considered good when it is educative and informative enough to attract readers. If it is relevant to the needs of your audience, that is when the audience will be sufficiently interested in it to want to follow your affiliate link to the product/service site. It is only when that happens a sale is likely to take place warranting the payment of commissions to the marketer.

#3. Be Authentic

Buying decisions are easily taken when buyers have cause to believe in the authenticity of their sources. That is why buyers always look out for and rely hugely on the recommendation of an authentic source before buying a product they are not too familiar with. Being authentic therefore always counts heavily in favour of influence marketers. Smart marketers build authenticity and authority by creating content around products they know and have actually used in the past. That makes it easy for them to convince others to try the product as well.

#4. Manage Timing Well

Affiliate marketing because of the diversity of the world and the uniqueness of the internet is a 24/7, 365 days a year business if you really want to succeed in it. For that reason, if you are not online, be sure some automated strategies like AI and auto-responders are helping you out to get things going. That is the only way you can hope to work all the time in reality. With good web analytics tools, you can find out what times of the day/nite and in which parts of the world your visitors and sales are coming from. For that reason, the better you manage your timing, the more sales you make. 


 
#5. Stay Up to Date

This is a given. With rapid changes in technology and the internet, if you are unable to stay up to date, you quickly get left behind. For instance, to stay on top of SERP, you must endeavour to keep a close eye on any changes in policy or in the algorithms of major Search Engines like Google. Your business can get hurt on the internet real bad and pretty quickly if you are negligent about keeping an eye on changes impacting directly on the SEO of your business website.

#6. Learn to Use Tracking

If you are in content marketing, you must learn how to track, collect, analyse and use data to your business advantage. The more and better data you can gather about your website, the better and easier for you to keep giving your audience the right content. If you have your business on social media, it is easy for you to use social media tracking and analytics to gain a very significant understanding of the behaviour and demographics of your audience. That information is very vital to determine the right content to produce for your audience.  It also allows you to know which of your marketing strategies works well and which social media channels are best suited for your type of product and promotion.

#7. Make Things Easy

Keeping it strictly simple and easy is always a good marketing advice. The reason most people like to shop online these days is because of its relative convenience. That is why you must ensure your website is well designed and user-friendly to attract more visitors, leads and sales. If for instance your audience routinely encounters avoidable difficulties in interacting with your website particularly opening your affiliate links, chances are, you’ll be losing a great deal on conversions and sales.

#8. Avoid Overpitching

Yeah, nearly everyone out there on the internet wants to sell but not everyone wants to buy. Many online surfers are at times just having fun and not interested in buying anything. As a marketer, it must be your content first before any product you are selling. When you get people to be interested in your content, it is possible to lure them to buy, but if all you are doing is just pushing affiliate links without good content, you are overpitching. That sends negative signals to potential buyers and your sales efforts may be stagnating as a result. You must endeavour to have a balance in your content which not only positively highlights the product but manages as well to keep your audience interested in what you have to say. If you habitually put all your focus in highlighting the product that you are marketing, chances are, you will frustrate your audience and they may stop following you on your affiliate marketing programs. To avoid overpitching, your focus must remain on producing useful and informative content related to the product/service you are marketing. That helps faster in arresting the attention of your audience to want to make some purchases without being necessarily “harassed” into doing so.


 

Essential Plugins Your Blog Needs

Every blog needs plugins to help fortify its functionality and availability for search engines. You can access some plugins free while some others come at a premium. If you are running your blog on WordPress you will have free access to many essential plugins that can add functionality to your blog. Knowing the service you want from plugins is important before you decide on which to install. There are a variety of plugins you can install depending on your blogging experience and the level of dexterity you’ve at blogging. What you choose to install is determined by the type of functionality you want for your blog. That is what digital marketing experts recommend.


 
Here are a few plugins of choice for many bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that has links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. These get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your site visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Backs up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox. It helps to make sure your blog is safe in the event of a crash, security compromise or file corruption.
W3 Total Cache: Helps you create static pages of your web pages to enable your website load faster. Fast loading websites are search engine friendly.

Plugins are really essential to enhance the functionality of your blog. In digital marketing world, the competition is so stiff that any little thing you can do on your blog to give you some edge no matter how little over your competitors is always highly welcome. That is where plugins become really essential. They manage to help out providing such little essentials to enhance your blog. If you want to go far as a blogger, it is wise not to ignore them.


 

Why Your Blog Needs a Good SEO Strategy

It requires a bit of technicalities to set up a good blog. Experts advise that no one should try to learn everything about blogging at once and right from the word go. The process is gradual and takes some bit of learning on the job.  It is best to begin with and to learn from the basics as you make progress in your blogging efforts. Once you begin and start getting some results, it acts as the tonic and motivation to encourage you to learn more and to do more. One of the things you’ll learn along the way is SEO strategy which from my own experience appears to be the hardest part of blogging. Every blogger really needs it because without it, search engines will tend to ignore your blog in its entirety. If that happens, your blog loses out in the much needed traffic which search engines would’ve been sending to it.
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No doubt Search Engine Optimization, SEO, involves a bit of technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you get a good SEO strategy in place. How the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent by search engines. Simply put, SEO is a way of playing around with and position keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.

When you are getting started as a blogger, it is very essential to have a good SEO strategy. With it in place, search engines will be sending you free and high-quality targeted traffic. This is about the best organic traffic you can get on the internet. You cannot afford to miss out on it. A good SEO strategy positions your blog in very good stead to receive this traffic steadily. If you are not too sure of what to do, don’t allow the technicalities involved to discourage you. There is a way out. You can arrange to work with WordPress because it has a content management system which is optimised for search engines by default. With a good web-hosting, lightweight theme and SEO WordPress plugins, it helps you to find your way around many technicalities involved in developing your own SEO strategy. With your blog linked to WordPress, you are all set to receive organic traffic courtesy of search engines.

That is one SEO problem resolved. The second is how to research the demand for various keywords related to your blog niche. This is where you’ll need to sign up with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. These tools will help measure your traffic inflow and even the sources of the traffic. They let you know exactly what keywords people are using to find your blog posts on the internet. As part of your own SEO strategy, these same popular keywords can be deployed to write more content for better search results.

Aside Google Search Console, you can also take a look at other keyword research tools to find out which works best for you. Some of such user-friendly tools are:

Google's Auto-Suggest: As you type in a keyword in Google, it will automatically show you suggestions for longer tail keywords. These keywords are showing up because people are searching for them in Google. The reason Google is suggesting them to you.
UberSuggest: A free keyword research tool.
Ahrefs: A keyword research tool for deep researches.

Last line! Even though SEO is a blogging technicality, you should not allow all the technical analysis to demotivate you. In blogging world, you can always manage to find your way around many technicalities even if you are a newbie. What is important is to first have a blog running. Along the way, you can learn about more technical things and how to go around some of the technicalities. That is what all bloggers are doing in our highly saturated and competitive blogging world.

 

How Some Digital Marketing Trends are Fading Out

In digital marketing world, what is trending today may not be trending by tomorrow. The fast pace of these trends can at times be quite amazing. That is primarily due to the fact that the world of digital marketing is constantly evolving.  As a marketer, you must be conversant with this trend if you want to stay relevant in the business. You must routinely re-examine your current strategies and evaluate them in terms of their future relevance. Intensify what works well and discard what doesn’t. That is one great way to stay relevant in the highly competitive world of digital marketing.

Expert marketers have identified some notable trends which may be phased out due to less effectiveness. These are:

Marketing Automation

Customers now recognize that marketing automation lacks human touch and they find that unattractive. Not many people like dealing with programmed machines like autoresponders which are not as smart as chatbots. Personally, I don’t. It helps a great deal to make your customers feel that they are highly valued and each one of them matters. Wholesale marketing automation denies them that. The reason it is fast losing appeal.

Texts Optimization

Texts optimization used to be mostly for SEO purposes only. Now, Search Engines are becoming smarter and their algorithms keep changing very frequently. Because of this, the rules of optimization keep changing across the board. If you get caught in their web, the punitive actions could be very devastating for your business. The reason it has become extremely risky to just be playing around with texts optimization. It is fast losing appeal particularly with newbies in digital marketing. 


 
Shallow Blogging 

A good blog is expected to have great content which is informative, educating and even entertaining. If your blog lacks this, it can hardly make impact in the highly competitive business of blogging. It is no longer any blog but blogs with enough depth in the subject matter to help readers solve problems. Without enough depth, a blog reader may not go beyond a few seconds on your blog post to see if there is something different on offer. The world is now moving towards more innovative digital marketing ideas which bank high on quality. Shallow blogs now don’t stand any chance at all. The real reason they are losing out of appeal.

Long Video Ads

As things stand today, shorter videos have taken precedence over the longer ones because marketers have since discovered that shorter videos are more marketable. Popular video giants like YouTube have quickly latched on to that. They now have a preference for hyper-short video ads particularly the ones which adhere to tight time constraints. Experts now recommend ads in the 6-10 seconds bracket for commercials to match the unfolding future digital marketing trends. Exactly why long video ads are fast losing appeal!

Organic Reach on Facebook 

Due to abuse and loss of ads revenue, Facebook has severely limited by way of changes in algorithm the organic search of posts particularly on business pages. Chances are, it could be phased out completely in no distant time. Facebook now prioritizes meaningful conversations or points of interactions between closely related individuals over posts generated from business pages.

From the look of things right now, going forward demands a change in strategy and there is no better time than now to reinvent yourself and your digital marketing business. Get kicking!


 

4 Ways Digital Marketing Can Help Your Businesses

 Most people out there on the internet either want to buy something or sell something. Internet provides unfettered interaction for everyone to do their own things the way they please. Because the world is rapidly moving from conventional methods of marketing to digitization, everyone out there tends to face real business competition from fellow marketers. Even at that, the internet has managed to unlock the door of endless opportunities for everyone out there. There is now a greater preference for digital marketing than other conventional or traditional marketing methods. With digital marketing, it is by far easier to quickly interact with your clients/customers thereby expanding your business visibility much more seamlessly. Here are some very valuable benefits your business can derive from digital marketing:

#1. Customer retention

Every business needs customers. Not just getting them but retaining them to sustain their patronage. Digital marketing is one way through which businesses can significantly increase their reach to get customers. Social media takes the fore front in this quest. If you want to acquire and retain customers for your businesses, customer engagement is very important. You need digital marketing to engage customers, promote your product/services virally to reach a very wide range of customers and potential customers. Because of the ease and simplicity of use, you can through interaction with customers easily assess their needs and reactions to your ads. That information if met with quick and timely responses helps to provide real time solutions in your business. Somehow, with quick and helpful solutions, you can manage to win more customer loyalty as well as attract more customers to your business.

#2. Increased Conversion Rate

Upgrading potential customers to customers is one very important desire of every marketer. Marketers have since discovered that most people now depend on search engines to look for information about anything and everything happening around the world. Search engines also come in very handy if anyone wants to buy or sell something on the internet. All these through digital online interactions! For that reason, businesses with online presence stand a better chance to promote their products/services more effectively and efficiently. Digital Marketing directly targets users and places the product/service at their reach thereby making it easier to move them from potential customers to actual customers at a very high rate of conversion.

#3. Cost-Effective

In every business, the bottom-line is often costs. Either by way of minimization or elimination of costs altogether, that is what often counts. The lower the costs, the higher the profits and vice versa! Who wouldn’t want to keep profits up at times like this? By far, digital marketing incurs much lower costs than traditional media marketing because of the leverage of internet technology. With digital marketing, even the costs incurred can be more easily amortized over time to deliver a better Return On Investment, ROI. Digital marketing allows businesses to remain competitive even with much smaller advertising budgets. For sure, that is good news for any business. Digital marketing makes it relatively cheaper for most businesses to increase business visibility and profitability because it is easy to target a desired market through an already receptive audience which has been primed over time by deliberate targeting to be interested in what you have to offer. That is like knowing where your potential customers are and taking your business there without dissipating energy and much valuable resources searching all over the place looking for them.

#4. Versatility

Digital marketing leverages on internet technology to do wonderful things in business marketing. It is extremely versatile and easy to deploy even by newbies in the business. When it comes to branding, image building, advertising, new business leads generation and general advancement of any business, digital marketing is handy and helpful with cost effective results. It can be adapted even with timing and location specificity to get any information out there in front of customers and potential customers anywhere in the world 24/7. That says something about its versatility. Now this tip!! If you want to have an advantage over marketers who are not using digital platforms for marketing, digital marketing holds the awesome power to turn your presence into a web sensation. Internet technology does the magic.