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Showing posts with label Skills. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Skills. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 03, 2023

How to Build a Sustainable Passive Income Online

Folded wad of Dollar bills.
Many people work online just to earn a second paycheck to supplement their regular income. This second income can come in form of passive income which you earn without having to put in too much additional effort afterwards. Passive income can come from as many different income sources you are capable of creating. If you are desirous to create your own passive income online, here is what many experts recommend.



Thoroughly Research the Market: You need a thorough research online to know the business environment you want to operate in and to identify your target audience. Your research efforts will help you to distinctly identify the people that you want to sell to and exactly what their needs, wants and desires are. Since you already know your own business, it helps to also know who your competitors are. That includes knowing what they are doing and how they are doing it including their strengths and weaknesses. This vital info will help you to decide on how to create the right product/service to bring into the market that could fill any gaps in the market you have correctly identified.

Focus on Your Skills and Interests: You need skills, practical skills to be able to create a passive income stream online. So, if you focus on your skills and interests, you can easily identify what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing, and what you’re passionate about. If you manage to create a product/service that aligns with your skills and interests, you’re more likely to succeed to earn passive income going forward. Combining your skills, interests and past experiences particularly with previous jobs and even hobbies you enjoyed in the past can help you to create something positive and passive income earning.

Choose the Right Marketing Platform: No matter how good the product/service you create is, without the right online platforms to market it, earning money from it will be pretty difficult. For this crucial reason, you must carefully identify and choose online channels where your target audience is most active and engaged. Even within the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others, the type of product/service you are marketing and the audience you are targeting will determine which of the platforms is best suited for your marketing activities. If you are selling physical products, your best platforms should be Strong Future International, SFI, and eBay, Etsy or Amazon.
 
Build a Responsive Email List:  During your marketing campaigns, since you’ll need to send regular emails and newsletters, it advisable to diligently build a responsive email list over time. This email list is a very effective way to stay in touch with your target audience and promote your product/service. With it, you have at your disposal, a very valuable marketing asset you can depend on to regularly send out newsletters and promotional emails to a large number of recipients with a view to keeping them informed and engaged. That way, your email tool can become a reliable marketing asset to help you generate more sales. You can build an email list over time by creating a lead magnet that your target audience will find valuable. Some of the most popular lead magnets with digital marketers are free e-books, video courses, and or discount codes for your product/service. After creating your lead magnet, you can then use a smart online tool like Mailchimp to set up a landing page and steadily capture email addresses of visitors to your website. That helps to quickly build up your valuable email list.

Automate Your Marketing Processes: Artificial Intelligence AI, is quite crucial to help automate some of your marketing processes and Automation is key to generating passive income online. Automation helps business owners to save time and resources and allows them to focus more on other aspects of their businesses. You can for instance, use smart online tools to automate your social media posts or email marketing campaigns. That is where autoresponders and chatbots become quite useful particularly since you cannot afford to be online 24/7. You can effectively use autoresponders to respond to your email inquiries while chatbots can handle customer queries and automate your customer support if you are unable to for any reason do so yourself real time.



Utilize Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is increasingly becoming popular among digital marketers as an effective way to generate passive income online. The marketing model simply entails partnering with product merchants to promote their products/services in exchange for a commission on each sale generated. You can succeed in affiliate marketing if you carefully select and vigorously promote products/services that are relevant to your audience and align with your brand. The more sales you generate, the more commissions you earn.

Consistently Create High-Quality Content: It is inevitable these days that if you want to make money online through content marketing, you must be able to consistently create high-quality and impactful content people want to read. Online, creating high-quality content is essential to building a successful passive income stream. Even if you are creating this content through a blog, a YouTube channel, or an online course, what is most important is that the content you produce must be highly informative, engaging, impactful and valuable to your audience. Content quality is therefore more important for marketing purposes than quantity. This is why it is always much better to focus more on quality over quantity if you are creating content for marketing purposes online. For more effective content, you can thus concentrate your efforts on creating fewer pieces of high-quality content that your audience will find valuable. Low-quality content can neither impact nor resonate well with your audience, the reason it is not good enough for marketing purposes.

Leverage Social Media: These days, social media because of its huge popularity and ease of sharing info has become a very powerful online tool for marketing and promoting products/services widely. This is more so with the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and the likes. By leveraging social media platforms with over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, you can easily reach a wider audience and generate more sales. More sales generated directly translate to more commissions earned if one of your income streams is affiliate marketing. To get the best out of social media, you must consistently create quality content and share it widely on the most popular platforms. If the content you create on social media is informative, engaging, and valuable enough to your target audience, it helps to generate more sales.

Wrapping Up

Because of the diligent planning and consistent efforts needed to accomplish it, creating a passive income stream online may take quality time and effort. If you get things right, it can be a powerful tool for eventually achieving financial freedom and independence. You can get things right by focusing on the foregoing tips. If you do, it is possible for you to create a successful and sustainable passive income stream online.

Monday, October 17, 2022

Online Business Ideas with Good Earning Capabilities

A wad of $100 Dollar bills in a currency notes counting machine.
If you want to do business in the digital world, you can simply launch an online business. By doing so, you can be your own Boss, work any which way you want, where you want and any time 24/7 that is convenient for you to work. Out there on the Internet, business opportunities are limitless. Just launch a good business idea and boom you are in business. You have a very wide range of online opportunities to earn income with a good business idea. This however depends on your skills, talents, enthusiasm, inclinations and the resources at your command. Find below some tested and proven online business ideas with good earning capabilities you can try your hands on.



Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a very simple business model. It is performance-based. You just need to help product merchants to market their products and earn a commission when a sale is made. Simple! All you need do is to offer a product to consumers online by promoting a unique affiliate link. If a buyer clicks this link and purchases the product, you earn a commission. You can promote this link any which way that suits you. You can do it through your website/blog content, social media posts, blog comments and any other way many people will get to see the link online. Many people prefer to join reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI, promote products and earn commissions.
 
Blogging

You can make money through blogging if you blog on a good niche and your blogs are of high quality, informative and educating enough. Once you are able to grow your blog audience appreciably, you can monetize the blog and earn good money. Google AdSense monetization code is about the most popular way to monetize your blog. But, you can also make money through a mix of advertising, affiliate marketing, sponsored articles, and selling e-products like e-books and online courses.

Virtual Assistant Services

Our fast-paced world is now producing very busy executives and business persons. These people require assistants to handle most of their routine chores. That is where Virtual Assistant jobs become relevant. Many busy executives now hire people to help them manage their to-do lists, their calendars, their emails, their social media handles, and perform other routine administrative duties on their behalf. Virtual Assistants are now very much in demand for reports production services, editing, uploading of videos, basic bookkeeping services, typing and transcription of meeting minutes and notes, creating and editing reports, gathering unpaid invoices, setting up and administering webinars and suchlike services. Virtual Assistant fees are lucrative depending on your skills and versatility. Online job placement sites are good places to look for Virtual Assistants jobs.

SEO Consulting

This is quite a technical job that requires good training and experience to excel. It pays well and the demand is high particularly now that many more people are taking their businesses online. Many online business owners will readily pay you for your service if you can help them to set up a good SEO on their websites. In online business, competition is really quite high. This is why every business wants to get noticed online and ranked by search engines. A good SEO helps out with that. The job of a good SEO consultant therefore is to help business owners enhance their websites to enable the websites receive better search rankings on the SERPs of search engines. SEO consultants routinely evaluate their clients’ websites and advise them on what they can do through SEO to improve their websites’ positioning in search engine rankings.

Graphic Designing

If you have the requisite artistic gifts to produce eye-catching visuals and graphics, you can become a good graphic designer and earn good money online. With new websites and new businesses being launched online daily, the demand for graphic designing is really quite high. It is some kind of business you can successfully do at home and at your convenience. If you are able to quickly make available to customers a variety of high-quality work and design alternatives on time for them to choose from, you get good patronage. You earn as per your pricing.


 
Photography and Videography

This is yet another great online business idea that requires good training and skills. With the right equipment and skills, you can habitually document your day to day experiences and observations with graphic images and videos. If you are convinced about the mass appeal of your skills and images, you can either display them on your personal Website, YouTube channel or sell them outright to photographic websites online. To earn good money from this business idea, you must have the habit of traveling frequently to wild, iconic and exotic places where you can record good videos and take exciting photos for exhibition and sale.

Websites Flipping
 
This is one business idea where good webmasters make good money. What they do is to buy a URL that is undervalued and under-optimized. Next is to retouch and possibly redesign the website and optimize it to improve its value before selling it for a higher price than they paid for it. Doing this frequently and profitably is “website flipping.” In principle, this operates like what happens in real estate business. The main difference however is that when flipping websites, instead of selling physical and tangible real estate, you are selling intangible and virtual digital assets all for profit.

E-Commerce Store

E-Commerce store is an online store where you can sell physical and digital products. You may choose to sell your own products alone or in combination with products from other product merchants. On this store, you can sell any product that is selling well and in great demand. If however you are faced with the concerns of physical logistics, you can concentrate on selling digital products that are quite simpler to handle and manage. Some of such digital products that really sell well are eBooks, software, images, worksheets, training materials, movies, games, auto-files, and suchlike digital products.

Summary

An online business idea is as good as the skills, experience, abilities, capabilities, and the personality of anyone who wants to earn money from the idea. Your ability to earn good money from any of the foregoing business ideas therefore depends on how you can market your own unique skills online to attract patronage. Most of these ideas are based on skills and performance-oriented services. Doing things better than anyone else by providing high-quality products/services is what enhances your earnings. It requires a lot of hard work and dedication to business to accomplish.

Sunday, July 10, 2022

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

A digital marketer working on SEO on a computer with notepads, pencils and a cup of coffee on the table.
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.

Sunday, June 05, 2022

Simple Ways to Monetize Your Business Website

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



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Monday, May 23, 2022

Tips to Step Up Your Social Media and Content Marketing Efforts

A lone marketer working on a computer with a pencil on notepad and a cup of coffee on the table.
Digital marketing strategy is as unique to digital marketers just as it gets results for them in their own unique ways. Therefore, no digital marketing strategy can be wrong really for as long as it gets good results for the marketer. It is all a matter of results. To get these results, marketers do depend on many platforms and tools that are most relevant to their needs. To step up your social media and content marketing efforts, you can learn from your own mistakes and experiences as well as those of other small business owners. That helps you to get started and you build from there. These here are useful tips from the experiences of members of the online small business community.



Be a More Productive Content Marketer

To step up your content marketing efforts, you must painstakingly write good quality content in the form of blog posts and even social media content for the benefit of your readers. Doing this diligently and consistently takes quality time and efforts, even though it helps to enhance your productivity. You get more productive in your content marketing efforts if you hone your skills and create an intentional schedule to help you get more done within manageable time frame.
 
Blog to Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Blogging is the most popular form of content marketing. Good bloggers can indeed use blogs to profitably boost their affiliate marketing activities. The more good content you create as a blogger, the more traffic you attract and the better for your affiliate marketing business. If your blogging is good, you can leverage several marketing strategies to help you earn more affiliate income.

Promote Your Brand with Tweets

Getting your business on Twitter is good for your affiliate marketing. Once you grow an active twitter community, you can always find out which tweets have been most impactful in your marketing activities. You get to know this through some of your most liked tweets. That info provides you some insights into how to grow your brand and community on Twitter.

Leverage Your Social Media Skills

As the internet is deepening and technologies are advancing, social media continues to evolve. For your social media marketing to be effective for a long period of time, it is best to focus more on your social media skills instead of specific social media strategies. That is what gets the best results particularly if you are marketing content through blogging. It is more advisable then to leverage these skills adequately.

Increase Engagement with Social Media Polls

If you want good traffic, it is always better to explore all ways to increase your engagement. It a way to deliberately get people involved in what you are marketing. Social media polls are a way to go in that quest. Polls are a great way to get more people involved with your social media accounts. By doing so, they get to interact better with what you are marketing through the accounts.
 
Market with High Converting but Low Cost Ads

Most marketers are always operating very tight marketing budgets. Stretching what you have to get the most benefits is one great marketing skill on this issue. That is why you need to invest more in low cost but high converting ads. If you already have a mastery of the skills of organic content and social marketing, you can then go for paid ads. To get the best returns from your marketing investment, it is best to create high converting but low cost ads.

Get Expert Help

Expert help is always welcome in business decisions. In this case, if you want to better propagate your brand, it is best to consider working with a branding and communications agency. Agency help is useful because most small businesses don’t always have the resources to hire full time staff for their branding and marketing activities. By paying moderate agency fees, professional agencies can be hired to step up and fill that gap. You can work with some agencies to outsource some of your important branding and marketing tasks.



Leverage LinkedIn for Branding

Popular social media platform LinkedIn is quite suitable for serious business minded people to interact and network for business. Like minded business persons get to interact on the platform for mutual benefits. They do offer paid jobs, business partnerships and collaborations. Through these relationships, users can effectively leverage LinkedIn for small business branding and marketing.

Avoid SEO Mistakes

If you want organic traffic to your business, optimize your website for search engines. That is SEO which is an essential component of any blogging or content marketing strategy. It comes about by the deft use of keywords on your content. However, excessive use of these keywords is keywords stuffing which search engines do penalize. It is an SEO mistake to stuff your content with keywords. Such common mistakes can make your content marketing efforts less impactful. In extreme cases, search engines may even penalize your website by dropping it from their SERPs completely.

Take Advantage of Instagram Hashtags

Hashtags are unarguably very popular marketing tools for small businesses on social media, Instagram in particular. Through hashtags, businesses can directly popularize their brands on the internet. They help Instagram users to grow their following on the platform. If you want to grow your following on social media therefore, you can take advantage of Instagram hashtags to do so.

Saturday, April 23, 2022

Strategic Tips to Earn With Affiliate Marketing

Dollar bills spilling out of a computer screen.
Affiliate marketing is a growing trend to earn additional income stream online. It simply involves an affiliate helping a product merchant to promote products and the affiliate earning commissions for his efforts. It is wholly a performance-based way of earning income online. The more effort the affiliate puts in to promote products, the more commissions he earns. It is one great opportunity for internet entrepreneurs to utilize their skills and market knowledge to explore new horizons and make money from their efforts. Anyone can go into affiliate marketing and make money. If you have basic knowledge of market trends, products, and public behavior, you too can make some success out of affiliate marketing. In terms of tools and equipment for the trade, all you really need are a laptop, smartphone or tablet and a stable internet connection. These devices are required to stay connected with the market in the form of organization and customers. Unlike some brick-and-mortar businesses, you don’t really need any offices, infrastructure, or even specific qualifications and experience to do well in affiliate marketing.



However, a variety of software applications are available to help affiliates do well in their marketing efforts. Tools like affiliate tracker, optimizer, and booster with maximum options can be useful to optimize your earnings as an affiliate. These tools are helpful for efficiently managing processes that would otherwise require a lot of effort and time. In combination with ICT, these tools can be quite effective to help affiliates earn more commissions on their efforts.

These here tips in combination with the following strategies can be quite helpful for affiliates to make money through affiliate marketing.

Diligence and Persistence: Diligence and Persistence are hugely essential for successful affiliate marketing. Just do the basics by carefully drawing up a list of potential customers, make contact with them, and follow up through emailing. 

Accurate Tracking: Google analytics is very handy here. It will help you to visit and track your market thoroughly to seek more opportunities of making money.

Choosing a Niche: You can market better if you restrict your marketing to your niche. You must therefore choose the most suitable niche that aligns with your taste, passion, talent, experience and qualification.

High Quality Products: Marketers say, a good product sells itself. If you diligently promote high-quality products, it helps to make your business stable, reliable and profitable.

Select Online Tools to Enhance Affiliate Marketing

To save up on your time and resources, you need online tools to enhance your affiliate marketing. The following are some select tools that have proven useful to enhance online earnings with affiliate marketing.



PartnerStack: This tool is about the best available solution for launching and promoting new products online. It helps to drive progress and more revenue for affiliate marketers.

Voluum: This tool is a multipurpose affiliate marketing software application. It usually comes with a full package of features for tracking, optimization, and sources of traffic to the required destination. It has proven useful for businesses of all sizes and even start-ups.

Tapfiliate: This is a versatile affiliate marketing tool for managing diverse marketing from one location. The reason it is a top choice for many freelancers. It helps out at all levels of a business organization because of its unique and highly supportive features.

Wrapping Up

Anyone can make money with affiliate marketing if they follow the rules and are prepared to work hard. Using the right tools, strategies and techniques help the process a great deal. If you have the interest, you do not have to make any elaborate investment on infrastructure nor do you need any huge capital layout. With the correct use of simple tools and techniques, you can earn money with affiliate marketing. With improved skills and use of technology, you can facilitate increased earnings with little effort and less time. Online, affiliate marketing still remains one of the best money-making options available to marketers.

Friday, March 18, 2022

Want to Make Money From Home, Try These Small Business Ideas

Some Dollar notes partially covered with a surgical mask on a brown table top.
Are you still wondering how you can earn a living working from home? Even if you have a 9-5 job, you can still work from home and earn some good money on the side. Circumstances have forced more and more people to work from the comfort of their homes in recent times particularly because of the covid pandemic restrictions. This trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Remote work at home is fun, convenient, profitable and quite suitable for stay-at-home-mums in particular. So, if you are keen on becoming a home-based entrepreneur yourself, you may consider the following small business ideas for starters.


 
Content Writing

Anyone with the right skills and knowledge can write content for their blog or for marketers. Content is written principally to attract traffic to a business website. Content is hugely important for online marketing purposes because it is key to search engine rankings. Great content can be packaged in form of blogs, video scripts, and eBooks to attract prospects, leads and customers. Content writers can use existing content writing platforms like Fiverr or Upwork or go it alone on their privately hosted blogs. Whatever way you choose to write content, so long as it attracts traffic, it is OK. That is the traffic that will enable you to promote and sell products and to earn commissions if such products are from a third party product merchant.

Online Teaching/Tutoring

If you have the academic qualifications and inclination, you can teach subjects in any educational area online to earn money. Online teaching business is a perfect business to start from home. When people are generally restricted as in recent episode of covid pandemic, more and more people became interested in online school and home schooling. At such times, anxious parents usually arrange some form of teaching for their children and wards outside the traditional classroom education. That creates a lot of demand for online teaching. It is one job anyone can undertake from the comfort of their homes provided they have a good web cam, a good backdrop, microphone, and lighting backed by a decent computer and reliable internet connection.
 
Virtual Assistant Services

Most busy Executives these days require the services of Virtual Assistants, VA to help them out with routine jobs. If you have the temperament, great organizational, communication and detail skills, you can become a Virtual Assistant.  VA can be an excellent business opportunity for anyone who is willing and able to work for busy Executives. To do well, you’ll need to have unhindered access to a computer, the internet and a phone. VAs usually support Executives by way of a variety of routine tasks such as handling communications like social media handles, emails, phone calls and even Whatsapp and text messages. They can help their employers to schedule meetings and events, travels, hotel reservations, and any other routine administrative details.



Marketing and Branding

You can have a viable home business if you have a penchant for packaging and branding products or people. It is just like some sort of consulting or coaching business. To get known in this business, you can raise your profile through public speaking, writing articles, growing your following on social media or contributing to existing blogs and newsletters. It is simple to get started. All you need to get going is a functional Website, Logo, Business name, e-mail, Business cards, online stationery (for proposals and invoices), a cell phone and a good idea and you are in business for real.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one great way to earn income from home by promoting products for product merchants and getting paid commissions for your efforts. To get started, you need to select good products related to your business niche to promote through your blog content. With a good computer and access to the internet, you get going with affiliate marketing. Since advertising is costly, product merchants are always looking for affiliates to help promote their products as a cost-saving opportunity. That is where affiliate marketers get to be in business. All they need is to have a blog or a website where they can steadily promote products for product merchants. It can even be done through some sort of sponsored content with influencers particularly on social media. This way, affiliate marketers can build quite some profitable business by simply driving traffic to a business website. If clicks/sales are made from the website through the affiliate links embedded in the content, the affiliate earns a commission.

Web Designing

Web designing requires skills and knowledge of the computer and the internet. In the digital space of the internet, starting a web design business from home can be a lucrative business avenue. Most people are taking their businesses online, and these people need functional and well-hosted websites for that purpose. With an internet access and solid hardware and software that meet your needs, you can design websites for online business owners and make good money. If you can arrange good hosting for the website and help to optimize the content with relevant keywords, you make money too. Search Engine Optimization SEO, on the website is one skill set in high demand you really need. Through it, websites get high ranking on the SERPs of search engines and that helps such websites to receive good organic traffic from the search engines.

Selling Products Online

Yeah, you can do business out of an eCommerce store of your own. These days, many more people are doing a large portion of their shopping online. You can take advantage of that to sell your own products/services. It is up to you to sell whatever product/service you choose. You can do so through a number of online platforms like Etsy, Amazon Marketplace and the likes that may offer you free or low-cost slots for your online store. If you understand the platform you are using well enough and how to use it to sell your products/services, you can make good sales and earn income. However, you must make sure you have the right marketing strategy suitable for each platform and the products/services you are selling are in demand.



Transcription Services

The world is increasingly interconnected and there a lot of info out there that needs transcribing. Researchers, medical services/hospitals, journalists and even graduate students do need transcription services a great deal to help them with huge data that needs transcribing. This data may be in the form of audio and video. What the transcriptionist simply does is to listen or watch the content then type out the exact words spoken. This is often with time stamps to enable their clients use the materials in their work without too much stress. The main skill you need is the ability to listen well and type fast enough to get the whole stuff down for easy read. As a transcriptionist, you earn less if you work for a service than if you work directly for yourself. That is typical of most freelance jobs though.

Customer Service

Customer service is usually one huge headache particularly for big companies. Because the field is wide and varied, some companies are flexible enough to allow for home-based or remote work to handle their customer service. The service entails so much since you can never know with customers. However, in dealing with customers many companies usually need help to take orders from customers, answer questions, guide them through billing and a number of other activities that customers may spring up requiring quick handling. Good customer service operators get paid handsomely.

Friday, February 25, 2022

8 Best Online Side Business Ideas for Everyone

Dollar symbol on a brown money bag with scarlet letters spelling PROFIT on the side.
Even if you have a full-time job, you can earn extra income working online. You can start by working part-time and earning extra money through a side business. You can even pursue a hobby productively and turn it into a money-earning venture. This is what is most practical for anyone to do these days by way of side hustle. Even if you intend to become a full-time online entrepreneur in future, starting with a side business is a great way to go about it.

Here are some of the best side hustle ideas anyone can earn money from while still keeping a full-time job.

1. Content Writing

Online, content writers are in high demand because most marketers rely on good content to market their products/services. Even if you intend to become a full-time writer or blogger in the future, you can learn the ropes and perfect your writing skills by starting with writing part-time as a side hustle. Many online businesses particularly start-ups are always in search of good freelance content writers to write for their websites/blogs. If you are keen on earning money this way, just search online for contractual content writing jobs on different hiring and freelance platforms.

2. Creating and Marketing Online Courses

It is a truism that everyone knows something better than others. You may even have some expertise on some subject matters without realizing it. This knowledge if valuable can be packaged shared and sold to others. So, if you are an expert in any subject matter, you can create online courses on it and sell to interested parties. You however need to work with a course format depending on the marketing platform you choose to sell your courses. For instance, Thinkific.com is one website where you can start with limited courses and unlimited students for free. That’s one great way to launch out your courses for quicker acceptance.

3. Proofreading and Editing

If you are good at detecting formatting, grammatical and spelling mistakes, you can use this skill to earn some extra income by way of freelance proofreading and editing. Even with the advantage and options of having several online language checking tools, many companies still prefer human proof-readers to help them out with their content. If you have these skills, you can market them effectively on the very popular online marketplace Fiverr.com where clients can easily locate you.

4. Stock Photography

If have photography skills, you can join the VistaCreate Contributor Program to earn extra money by submitting your photographs. It is simple to get started. Just upload your images, and if any of the photos gets selected for listing, you’ll earn remuneration. You can thus make good money by selling images to various online stock photography platforms. Photographs that are always in demand have to do with nature, people, events, landmarks, or activities. Even after capturing these photographs, with the right skills, you can make them even more attractive by editing them. For a wider marketing advantage, you may also choose to try selling your photos on some other platforms with good reputation online.

5. Making and Selling Handcrafts

Making of handcrafts is one great skill nobody should allow to waste. So, if you know how to make handcrafts, you can earn good money by selling them online. You can start small and scale up as your crafts get more popular and the demand is increasing. Building a reputation for your handcrafts is the most critical part here. It is advisable to first visit the online marketplaces that sell handmade crafts to find out about the trending products. Alternatively, you can create something unique yourself to sell out there. To access a global market with your handcrafts, the online handcraft selling website Etsy.com is where to be.


 
6. Selling eBooks

With the requisite knowledge and writing skills, you can package and sell eBooks online. With eBooks, you don’t even need any publisher to approve your manuscript to publish a book. You can make money from eBooks by self-publishing and that’s it. Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing lets you publish your eBooks for free. For your eBooks to sell well be sure to write on trending topics about Foods, Dieting, Herbal medicine, Career Progressions, Sporting skills, Musical skills, Travels and Hospitality all tending towards self-improvement/motivation.

7. Remote Tutoring

If you have the passion, the knowledge and the skills to teach, you can hook up to the popular online tutoring platform TutorMe.com. On this platform, you’ll have the option of teaching any of the more than 100 subjects on offer depending on your knowledge. These options include regular school and university subjects, languages, hobbies, and art which you can deliver by way of remote tutoring. That way, you’ll be able to effectively teach students from all over the world right from the comfort of your home or office. For remote tutoring to be effective and profitable, the tutor must have a stable internet connection and a computer with a good quality webcam as very basic requirements.

8. Affiliate Marketing

If you are a good content writer or blogger, you can earn money by way of affiliate marketing. Through your content, you can promote links to products from product merchants and if sales are made through these links, you earn a commission. If your content has a large following, you can make substantial passive income from the content you write. You may also choose to join directly any of the many affiliate networks online to earn money from your content.

Thursday, October 14, 2021

5 Proven Ways to Earn with Affiliate Marketing

A laptop computer computer with affiliate program on the screen, a smartphone, an Ipad and a white mug of creamy beverage on the table.
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.

Tuesday, September 21, 2021

How to Earn Money Online with Internet Technology

Dollar notes partially overlapped with a surgical mask.
It is convenient, it is sleek, it is cute and it works leveraging internet technology to earn money online. If you’ve tried to earn money online, you may have been scammed a few times with over-hyped eBooks, webinars and get-rich-quick schemes. Well just take that as your learning process. You can actually earn good money online if you follow the rules and do what is legit. Any get-rich-quick scheme online is in most cases a scam. If it is too good to be true, it usually is. Never you forget that cliché.
 
If you’re interested in legitimate ways to leverage internet technology to earn extra cash, pay good attention to the following.



Market Yourself as a Brand

This is exactly how celebrities and sports personalities make good money with internet technology. But first, you must have an engaging personality and live for social media. If your personality becomes engaging enough based on what you do regularly on social media, you can monetize these activities and earn good income. By the time your social media accounts particularly on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook have very large following you become some kind of influencer. You earn money through products endorsements and recommendations to buyers. By fully establishing and building your online brand, you earn more income as your online following continues to grow.

Embark on Affiliate Marketing

If you provide content online, you can help promote affiliate links and earn commissions from sales made through these links. That is affiliate marketing. It simply means linking products merchants and buyers through affiliate links and you get paid commissions from sales made through the links you are promoting. A commission-paying affiliate is any product merchant that offers a commission for selling its products online. You can earn these commissions if you connect your followers/viewers to their products through blog posts, videos, email marketing, or social media accounts by way of affiliate links. When a click on these links takes a buyer to the product merchant’s platform to purchase a product, you earn a commission which is usually calculated as a percentage of the final sale.

Start a Blog for Money

If you know something or you have a skill that can benefit others, you can blog about it to grow a following. When your blog becomes hugely popular, you can use it to promote affiliate links and earn commissions on product sales. You can also use your blog as an influencer to endorse and recommend products and get paid handsome commissions for these efforts. If you are blogging for money, always make sure your blog posts are of high quality, educating and highly informative. Be sure that all your content is current and up-to-date when posting. That is what helps to build loyal and dedicated following for your blog. The more the following, the higher the income you earn from the blog.

Sell Photos Online

Photography is a great skill. If you have the skill, you can earn money online selling photos. Before deciding on which photos to sell, you must settle for a niche that you’re exceptionally good at then start creating images in this niche. Some good images to sell can include abstracts, city-life, scenery, buildings, and iconic structures and so on. The idea is to build up your portfolio until you have multiple images to post online to attract attention. Next is to decide on which platforms you’d like to sell the photos on. Many of these online platforms offer different incentives particularly on copyrights and payment methods. Depending on what you prefer, you can settle for pay-per-view or outright download payment offer and you earn money from your photos.

Teach Online Courses

Online teaching skills help to earn money. You can teach cooking skills, yoga and sporting skills, teach languages, offer language translations, teach music or playing a musical instrument and so many other skills that can benefit others. Many people have specific skills/talents they can teach. We all have specific talents we can teach others to earn some extra income online. What really matters is to ensure you market your skills in the right online platforms to help you earn money from teaching these skills. How you teach these skills can vary depending on your preferences. You may choose to teach these skills by way of online courses, Webinars, eBooks, or even a profitable blog dedicated to your specific talent/niche.

Start an eCommerce Store

You can run your own small business and make money online by opening your own store in an eCommerce platform. You can consider eCommerce dropshipping as a convenient business model. It is hugely popular with eCommerce stores owners. Dropshipping allows an eCommerce store owner to sell various products to its customers while the manufacturer/supplier handles the shipping part of the sales chain. It saves the eCommerce store the huge costs of warehousing, safety/security of the products and the cost of shipping. Thus, when a sale is made from the eCommerce store, the product remains in the supplier’s warehouse until they ship directly to the customer. To get started, you must first create a website, find a reputable supplier, and start posting.



Organize Periodic Garage Sales

This is one great way to sell off your extra junk online. Solid items you no longer need such as used furniture, clothes, tools, appliances, books, bedding, sports equipment and children’s toys etc. etc. are eligible for periodic garage sales. Periodically selling off such items online can be a hassle-free way to earn some extra money. If you search well online, you can locate many websites that allow users to post items free of charge, complete with photos and a description. If you’re looking for a local seller, find an online platform that caters to your area. To sell unique or specific collectors’ items like antiques, paintings and rare photographs you need to find specialized and reputable websites for such rare items. You can make quick money from such sales.

Monday, May 03, 2021

Why Email Marketing is Important to Your Small Business

Email Marketing graphics envelopes floating out of virtual space over a white computer keyboard. 
To some digital marketers, email marketing now appears “old school” but it still gets some great results. Email marketing is not only convenient, it is also cost-effective particularly for small business owners who are characteristically low on marketing budget most for the time. Crafting effective email campaigns requires some knowledge and skills. Once you get it right, the results are amazing. That is why email marketing is so important to small business owners who operate on low marketing budgets.

 

No doubt other messaging channels are also very important to business owners depending on their types of businesses. Notwithstanding that, email remains the main channel of communication for small businesses. Business owners effectively use email messages to lead consumers through the whole sales and marketing funnel, converting them to customers in the process. They rely on emails to assist their website visitors to interact with their apps, engage them more, and consequently increase their brand loyalty. Without a doubt, email marketing is one of the most efficient channels for customer retention. Ambitious marketers never lose sight of that fact. There is some credible research report indicating that “a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit” Profit motive is what largely drives most small business owners and anything they do that helps them to increase profits, gets done more and better. That is the lot of email marketing.



To create effective email campaigns, marketers must pay special attention to two big areas of crafting email templates and handling email recipients. Experienced marketers can manually build email templates fairly easily. However, to save time and to guarantee efficiency and effectiveness, delegating your database management and sending logic to a dedicated and reputable email marketing service can also be considered.

If you resolve to follow DIY route, please pay attention to the following tips. Before you start creating your email campaigns, decide firmly on the following:
Your objectives/motives
The goals you want to achieve
Your recipient audience
Your type of marketing messages
The role great content will play
How to segment your audience

This information will help you to make the all-important decision on the type of email campaigns your business needs. Your emails even if largely technical must be transactional in messaging to be effective. For as long as they have marketing, branding, and even sales purposes, they’re great to form part of your marketing and product strategies. Meaning? For your emails to be effective for proper branding and sales, they must have well-crafted templates and carefully worded and optimized messages with great aesthetics appeal to boot.

Friday, April 23, 2021

Tips to Generate Revenue Through an E-commerce Shop

 

A pack of currencies on a table. Dollars notes, gold and silver coins, a pink wallet and a potted plant.
E-commerce is readily the world’s largest market at the moment. Many smart small business owners are tapping on to that to open their own e-commerce shops and selling products/services online. Many rely on their online marketing skills in synergy with e-commerce entrepreneurs/platforms to make money. Even with the huge competition, once you have a good marketing strategy, you can manage to set up your brand and get it noticed online. If you work with some easily accessible and reputable e-commerce platforms, you too can make money from your online shop. 


 
These here tips can be of help in that quest.

Invest in Knowledge: This is fundamental. You cannot make money from a business you know next to nothing about. Business is technology. Business is skills. All these you must invest in to have the requisite knowledge to make money from your online shop. Fundamentally, you must endeavor to have the necessary tools and training you need to properly manage your shop in relation to the e-commerce platforms you are doing business with. If you do, you can generate more money from your shop than you ever imagined.

Understand your Market: Take concrete steps to thoroughly understand the market you have chosen to operate it. Avoid unnecessary assumptions because bad assumptions kill businesses. Research your market to get facts. Base your strategies and projections on these facts as a guide. Every decision you make must be guided by the needs and wants of your market. That is what gets results.

Understand your Niche: Even if you are very passionate about selling, without a good understanding of your business niche, you will always struggle. What matters is to be sure to sell not only what resonates with your business passion but what people want to buy. Gladly, everyone has absolute freedom to make these decisions for themselves. Once you have done your background check and you now know what sells and what you will like to sell, the journey to make money will commence in earnest.


 
Invest in Marketing: As every business owner very well knows, constantly reminding customers and potential customers what your business can do for them is a duty. That is marketing. It is good for business to make some investments in getting heard and noticed. The power and influence of marketing in the growth and success of your business cannot be overemphasized. If you cannot market well, just forget it, you cannot sell well. Around the world today, everyone is busy trying to keep up with all kinds of hugely demanding responsibilities. These are the people whose attention you need to sell your products/services. It takes good marketing skills to be able to do so. You need these skills to offer not only quality but also consistency because it is not so much the pricing that sells. Rather, it is the quality.

Deal only with Reliable Suppliers: Your supply chain is a major live wire of your business. If it is unreliable, your business cannot be reliable. You know why? If for instance you are selling physical products, it means you have limited control over how efficient your sources of supplies are. That can be troubling and even unsettling at times. The way around this fundamental challenge is through diligent consultations. If you consult known and reputable suppliers widely, you can settle for the reliable ones to do business with. That will save you significant inconveniences that could cost your business new customers, and worse still, even your reliable customers. Last line: No matter how reliable your suppliers are, be sure to have other equally competent options on the cards. In business, you never know for certain what comes next. The better the options you have, the better for your business.