10 Steps to Optimize your eCommerce Strategy for Maximum Results

You need a combination of a whole lot of tactics to optimize your eCommerce strategy to get maximum results. These results include but not limited to increased conversions and a boost in sales. Your first focus should be how best to create an engaging and seamless customer shopping experience. This includes getting people to visit your website and turning clicks and visits into paying customers. Optimizing your eCommerce strategy is the best way to go if you want to get maximum results.
The following key steps are really handy if you want to optimize your eCommerce strategy.

1. Drive Sales and Revenue: The ultimate aim of having an eCommerce store is to make sales. You can make these sales by focusing on conversion optimization techniques. Do things that can help you to get traffic, get leads and conversions from this traffic. This helps to drive sales and revenues.

2. Enhance Product Presentation: The internet is a hugely competitive market space. Out there, the products you are marketing must stand out uniquely to attract buyers’ attention. You can enhance this attraction with clear, concise and compelling product descriptions, high-quality visuals, and engaging videos.

3. Streamline the Checkout Process: Seamless checkout process on your website is one great way to make the website user-friendly. A user-friendly website attracts and retains customers and potential customers longer on the site for them to do business on the site. This is because such website makes for easy and efficient transactions. Something that really excites buyers!

4. Build trust: The backbone of any business is trust. The more the trust customers have on your business, the more business they do with you. You can enhance this trust through strong security/admin policies and clear transparent business measures.

5. Optimize for Mobile Users: Some reports indicate that 60-70% of internet users now do so through mobile devices particularly smartphones. You’ll be losing out on this huge traffic if your website is not optimized for mobile devices. You must therefore make sure your website has a responsive design and fast loading times.

6. Personalize Experiences: One other great way to optimize your eCommerce website to personalize customer experiences when marketing to them. You can deploy the services of recommendation engines to get this done effectively.

7. Recover Abandoned Carts: Sales are best on an eCommerce website when there are minimal abandoned carts. When your website is user-friendly and has seamless checkout process, fewer and fewer carts get abandoned. You can effectively deploy targeted emails to recover abandoned carts. This helps to boost sales.

8. Conduct A/B Testing: You can never know how well your ads are doing without regular testing. Conducting A/B testing can help you determine better CTAs and pricing.

9. Prioritize Performance Optimization: User experience plays a key role in getting visitors to deal on your website. This is why you must always prioritize the performance of your website for smooth user experiences. If your website is user-friendly, it helps you to do good business on the site.

10. Utilize Analytics Data: Google analytics tools are handy to help you get valuable data particularly about the KFIs of your website. Such data is always handy for you to make vital data-driven decisions on the site. This is with a view to getting more clicks, leads and conversions.

Final Words

If you diligently implement the foregoing strategies, it is possible for you to maximize conversions and boost sales in your eCommerce store

How to Tactically Use Content to Propel Your Digital Marketing

In digital marketing, it is practically impossible to market successfully without good content. Marketers usually depend on specialized, high-quality content to propel their digital marketing campaigns. It is content that helps marketers to share vital marketing information with their audience. With good content, they can successfully nurture the audience, educate them, and convince them to buy the products/services they’re promoting. This is why smart marketers always explore many ways to add content to their digital marketing mix in a strategic way for best results.

 

Here are six tactics you can strategically add content to your marketing to propel your marketing strategy.

1. Landing Pages: The landing page is where visitors to your website first get to when they land on your website. That makes the page strategically important. You can thus create a selection of at least four landing pages that you can use to test different offers. With these four possible landing pages, you can direct ads from your social media accounts four different ways. This way, you can directly experiment with which kinds of messaging that will lead to the best conversion rates.

2. Monthly Guest-Contributed Articles: Practically, guest posts can help distribute your content to new audiences and bring more qualified traffic back to your site. This is their most important use by marketers. So, if you are able to create at least one guest post per month, you can earn valuable backlinks to boost SEO for your webpage. This helps to drive more organic traffic to your blog posts and the landing pages you’ve created.

3. Monthly Email Newsletter: Sending out content via email at least once a month is an effective marketing strategy. But be sure your emails aside helping to stay in touch, also incorporate other relevant pieces of your content. This content should have links to some of the blog posts or snippets of your most recent guest-contributed articles.

4. Monthly Blog Posts: If you can do at least four monthly blog posts, that is, one a week, your content will be effective. What matters most however is that these blog posts should be informative and of high quality. They must be regular as well. If these blog posts are optimized for the keywords you want to rank for, they help attract good organic traffic to your website.

5. Quarterly Piece of Gated Content: At least one quarterly piece of gated content can be great for your marketing strategy. Technically, gated content is high-value content that offer leads the chance to learn a lot in exchange for their email address. These pieces of content mostly infographics and or whitepapers should be tested for effectiveness before use. Doing so helps to identify what information is most compelling for your audience and is best to use.

6. Quarterly Press Campaigns: Press campaigns are great tactics for a marketing strategy particularly when carried out at least once per quarter. If professionally packaged, a press campaign brings multiple messages together in a coherent story. They are effective when they earn press mentions that can hopefully include backlinks to aid your SEO.

All told, content is not a separate strategy from digital marketing, it is an integral part of it. Content aids your marketing success when it effectively helps you to share important marketing information with your audience in order to nurture them, educate them, and convince them to buy from you. It helps your content strategy when you habitually test and tweak your messaging, try different versions of your content, and in different formats to know what works best for your strategy.

Last Line

Content writing and digital marketing are kind of inseparable. You can’t do one without the other. If you want your marketing strategy to succeed, just allow your digital marketing strategy to be fueled and fed by content and your marketing will be great. Once you understand how the subsections of your digital strategy work together, you can achieve marketing success.

Effective Small Business Social Media Marketing Techniques

These days, irrespective your brand or industry, you cannot afford not to have social media as part of your small business marketing strategy. That is unless you want your small business to stagnate. As a marketer, depending on your experience, your brand and even your temperament, you have the option of using many marketing techniques for your marketing campaigns, but social media marketing should always be a sure choice. You have the option of exploring several social media marketing strategies among which are:

Influencer Marketing

If you have a massive following in your social media handles, you can become an influencer for brands. First, you must grow your audience to a reasonable size for it to be effective for influencer marketing. If you do not have that sort of following yet particularly on the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes, you can partner with micro-influencers to get your brand in front of your niche audiences. Most Micro-influencers tend to have 10-100 thousand followers and often come off as more relatable and approachable for partnership arrangements than the big celebrity influencers.

Messenger Marketing

If you need quick one-on-one messaging, you can use social messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, AI-powered chatbots and Skype. Feedback in instant and reliable and you can market any product/service through these messaging apps. Aside customer support and resolving customer problems instantly, messenger marketing is very effective using these apps. Through the instant messages, you make product/service suggestions to customers to help solve their problems. Promos, discounts and new products arrivals can be better announced using these instant messaging apps.

Employee Advocacy Programs

Smart marketers can deliberately turn their employees into extensions of their social media programs. That way, you can easily start an employee advocacy program. There are online platforms like GaggleAMP and Dynamic Signal that encourage employees to share content on their social network in exchange for points, prizes, and internal recognition. If your employees take advantage of these platforms to share your content on the platforms, a combination of their collective following in addition to yours can help give a much wider exposure to your marketing content than if you relied on yours alone. There is always a very big difference in the reach of your business through employee advocacy programs.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Do you know you can actually do practically anything and even advertise on social media for free? Great if you do! But, in case you don’t, be informed that you can do organic social media marketing for free just as other free social media activities. Some of these free activities include, publishing marketing content, publishing posts, commenting on articles/content, inviting users to like/share your page, engaging with reviews, and actively interacting in social media groups. Most marketers know that it is hugely challenging to grow a large and engaging following particularly on pay-to-play networks without spending money, but you can still do a great deal of marketing on social media without expending a dime. That is done by way of organic marketing.

 

Social Media Advertising

Many social media marketers find social media advertising intimidating, but it is incredibly lucrative if you know what you are doing.  Once you learn the ropes and do what is expected, getting the right results is a given. Through social media advertising, you get access to tons of metrics. Through such metrics, it is possible to know if the strategy you are using is earning you profits or helping you to make losses. Whichever it turns out, you can always at any time adjust your strategy to get the best results. The most result-oriented social media advertising you should be using at any point includes techniques like Facebook ads, sponsored posts, YouTube ads, and LinkedIn InMail.

Live Streaming

Live streaming is a great way to showcase your products and engage with your customers in a more personal way. Live streaming because it is real time, manages to turn talk-at-you marketing into back-and-forth mutually beneficial conversations. It still promises to get more personal as internet technology tends to deepen marketing activities by the day. Such experiences can make the difference between a one-off purchase and a life-long customer. Smart marketers always explore viable ways to Host a webinar or go behind the scenes of a product launch to build trust and relationships with the audience particularly through live streaming.

How Small Businesses Can Improve Their Social Presence

If you are a small business owner and you are not on social media, you are losing out on your social presence. With over 4.5 billion active users on social media, it is one place you cannot afford to be out of if you know what’s good for your business. Without social media, when you create a blog post, you may not be getting enough likes and comments. For someone who is keen on promoting a business, that scenario can be depressing. Communication/interaction is usually a two-way street on social media. So, if you want to create meaningful and authentic customer opportunities to interact with you, social media is where to be. It directly helps your business to increase its social following and even reach its target audience much better. That helps its social presence the more. If however you believe your social network is good enough, you can take a step back, identify and analyze the exact areas that may require more of your attention. That is quite like getting your priorities right, that is, and working a bit smarter.

If you want your small business to improve its social presence, pay more attention to the following.

Deliberately Seek to Build Relationships

All business is about human beings and being human enough in all your business dealings helps to build lasting and mutually beneficial relationships. On social media therefore, your priority should be to build relationships and not just followers. It is a huge mistake on social media to present your business without personality. People are more curious to know about the personality behind your business than what the business is promoting. When dealing with any business, people want to feel they’re dealing with fellow humans instead of unfeeling robots because they want to build relationships. Therefore, human presence on social media has become an important expectation among many followers. With photos and bios of the vital team behind your business well known on social media, it helps to enhance personalization with your social media followers. That translates to building the much-needed connection and social presence. This is why the followers who regularly interact with you and your content are by far more valuable than those who totally ignore you.

Make a Firm Commitment on Social Media

Making a firm commitment on social media may be hugely challenging but it is worth the while. Having a solid social media strategy is one way around the challenges. Explore all ways to prioritize social media in your marketing activities. You can start by choosing your platforms carefully, establishing your goals, structuring your content calendar, selecting your social media team, and automating your social media strategy as much as practicable. You must however be sure your social media strategy matches your goals then set metrics to measure your success. Jumping from one social media platform to another is not helpful. Carefully select the platforms that can directly help you to build your social media presence then work with those platforms. What should always be at the back of your mind is how to leverage these platforms to help your business with with customer retention, brand awareness, lead generation, and consequently more sales.

Choose Only Relevant Platforms

In recent years, social media has grown exponentially. The platforms together with their in-house marketing tools have managed to develop some kind of specializations. How then do you know which platform(s) to work with? That depends on relevance to your type of business particularly as they relate to your audience and business goals. This is besides the fact that their huge popularity is good for most businesses. With over 4.5 billion active users spread among the very popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and others, you have some choice options available to you. Taking a hard look at your business, your business goals and your success metrics, knowing what roles these platforms are capable of playing to help you out based on their peculiarities and in-house marketing tools, you can decide to make your choices based on their relevance. You can build your social presence much faster, if you have the right social media strategy and you are using the right social media platforms for your business.

Powerful Tips to Improve Your Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Digital marketers can easily grow their businesses with the right affiliate marketing strategies. If used right, affiliate marketing can readily become an excellent way to enhance your business through increased profits, more leads and to easily forge connections with other brands, and lots more. Affiliate marketing is all about mutually beneficial partnerships between product merchants, affiliates/publishers and consumers. When consumers access and purchase a product through an affiliate link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale as determined by the product merchant. Quite a simple relationship no doubt!

 

Here are some powerful tips that can help you get more value from the affiliate marketing strategy you have in place for your business.

Create High-Quality Content around Your Offers

This you can do by deliberate efforts. The content you create should not only be of high quality, it must bear some relationship with the products you are promoting. The aim of such content is to attract potential customers to your site, offering them valuable information or advice, then directing them through the right CTA to buy your products. With the right links, you can also direct them to your affiliate partners. In digital marketing, blogging is about the best way to create and distribute content to promote your affiliate offers. If you can get visitors to read content on your website, it becomes easier to generate an impressive commission from your affiliate partnerships. If your content presents as authoritative and valuable information in your business niche, and appears to offer powerful, actionable content, then readers are more likely to click the affiliate links within the content.

Connect with the Right Affiliates

To succeed with affiliate programs every product you offer should resonate with one or more of your buyer personas. That can only happen when you connect with the right affiliates who share a similar passion in the products you are promoting. Buyer personas are essentially what help business owners and marketers define the goals, needs, and interests of people who visit their websites. That way, they can effectively market to them and get good results. You get more clicks and sales from your affiliate links if each product you offer appeals to at least one segment of your audience. With your buyer personas in place, you can then look for patterns in pain points or aspirations, and use this information to connect with the right affiliates for your business.

Optimize Your Content for Relevant Keywords

This is important because you want to receive valuable organic traffic from search engines. That brings search engine optimization, SEO, into the mix. If your content is optimized with the right keywords, it helps its ranking in Google SERPs. When these keywords are centered on search intent, you get better results. Google’s free Keyword Planner is a very useful tool that can help you to select the best keywords for your business niche. These are the ideal keywords to insert in the content you create. The quality of this content is enhanced if you focus more on conversational posts that educate and entertain users. By strategically connecting your affiliate links to relevant keywords, there’s a good chance that most of your posts will rank higher in the Search Engine Result Pages, SERPs of search engines particularly Google.

Significantly Market on Social Media

It is smart to make your social media engagement a very important part of your marketing strategy. Aside its huge popularity, sharing marketing messages on social media is like a piece of cake. With over 4.5 billion people currently using social media regularly, it is one huge market marketers cannot afford to ignore. If you factor in that many of these people use many social media platforms for shopping inspiration, it becomes more obvious why affiliate marketing works so well on the platforms.  If you use social media as a marketing channel, you have access to very many ways to reach your audience. This is in addition to the many free in-house marketing tools they place at your disposal. Through social media, you can build an audience real quick, promote new products, and see more sales through your affiliate programs. You can therefore take advantage of very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, to easily connect with your target audience.

Segment Your Email List

If you already have a credible email list, it is more useful if you can segment it for marketing purposes. By segmenting your email recipients into separate email lists, it becomes easier and more effective to market to them. Segmenting gives you the all-important freedom and flexibility to create custom offers, both affiliate and otherwise, for your subscribers. Better still, you can also take deliberate steps to personalize the leads because personalizing and segmenting your leads can have a noticeable impact on your affiliate sales. That in combination with well-made buyer personas significantly makes it easy for you to create multiple campaigns geared towards customers with specific interests, goals, and problems. 

How to Profitably Engage Affiliate Marketing for Your Business

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy many business owners rely on to sell their products/services. It is an effective and low-risk method of building audience for your business by partnering with like-minded individuals and brands. This partnership is hinged on mutual benefits for product merchants as well as affiliates. Affiliates work on commission-based formats which the products merchants put in place. All the affiliate does is to promote unique affiliate links to products through their content/blog. Any time a purchase is made through this unique link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale. This process is easily adaptable and beneficial for most types of business models. Here are some proven ways you can profitably engage affiliate marketing for your business and be glad you did.

Establish a Clear Brand Identity

Affiliate marketing is most effective when you already have a clear brand identity. Therefore, before launching a wide-scale affiliate program, it is advisable to first build a solid brand identity. Since most affiliates will promote your products across multiple online platforms, your brand identity ensures uniformity and continuity across these platforms. This is why you must clearly establish a viable brand manual that denotes clear brand colors, fonts, and voice. That makes it possible for all your affiliates to properly present your brand identity to avoid confusing and or inaccurate promotion messages.
 
Collaborate With Complimentary Brands

Affiliate marketing is a versatile concept that is suitable for promoting most brands. It works with collaboration with other brands as well. This collaboration is a type of partnership that allows for cross-recruiting and premised on a wider audience base. It is mutually beneficial for brands when one brand promotes for the benefit of another brand in some kind of cross-selling. By this arrangement, both brands can benefit from the promotional activities as well as earn commissions both ways from referrals and purchases.

Launch an Affiliate Email Campaign

Email campaigns are still very effective in online marketing activities. More so when such emails are specially designed for affiliates. If you launch an affiliate email campaign, it serves as a form of internal communication for your existing affiliate network. This method allows for clear and concise brand collaboration. You can thus set up an email campaign to update affiliates about upcoming promotions and sales as well as provide up-to-date marketing materials to make their marketing activities more result oriented.

Work to Improve Conversion Rates

Without good conversions, it is pretty difficult for marketers to make sales. You can therefore make optimizing conversion rates the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy. If you do the right things, affiliate marketing has a high chance of success when it comes to improving conversion rates on your website. For effectiveness, you can handpick and choose your affiliates to ensure brand compatibility. Take a step further by offering enticing promotions such as incentive bonuses, free products, and enticing commissions to keep potential partners interested. If the affiliate team you have selected is well trained and works in efficient collaboration, it can create the right synergy to improve your conversions rates.

Partner With Podcast Hosts

It is difficult for marketers to ignore Podcasts these days because they are widely consumed by the population. Aside from being easily absorbed, Podcasts are effortlessly entertaining modems and therefore great as effective affiliate marketing tools. Online, Podcast hosts typically come with a loyal and trusting audience. What that means is that Podcast followers take brand partnerships seriously. So, if you partner with podcast hosts to entice them to plug your brand into their episodes, the results are great. For this reason, you can grant Podcast hosts an exclusive discount code for their listeners, as well as a set percentage of profits. Your business benefits a great deal from such arrangements.

Target Slow Selling Products

It is smart marketing for marketers to deliberately use less popular products to motivate higher commissions. Some products may be slow selling but once a sale is made, the commission volume can be huge. If you deliberately target such products, affiliate marketing may just be a great way to get your slow selling and less popular inventory off the shelves. At times what such products really need to sell is a little extra promotional attention and incentive. That means deliberate and specially targeted marketing efforts for such products. So, any which way you can use to push your slower-moving products unto the spotlight through affiliate marketing can be really great for your business.

Run Influencer Campaigns

If product merchants can effectively partner with Influencers, the results can be astounding. Marketers can thus use influencer campaigns as very effective form of affiliate marketing. By running a well-coordinated seasonal or long-term influencer campaigns, such collaboration allows your brand to utilize affiliate links as the right incentives. You can therefore start a profitable and mutually beneficial affiliate marketing campaign by simply partnering with one or more influencers to promote your products/services.

Essential Online Marketing Tips for Ambitious Small Business Owners

Are you running a small business online? If you do, how about having a proven online marketing strategy that can help you generate more sales? That’s one essential strategy you need right now because as more and more people are shopping online, so more small business owners are moving their businesses online and doing more business. If you are an ambitious small business owner and you are desirous to make more sales online, you need essential and effective online marketing strategies that can work according to your needs. Below are some online marketing tips to enhance your small businesses marketing strategy.

Directly Target the Right Customers

Without customers, you cannot expect to be in business. The Internet is a deep and fiercely competitive digital market. If your small business is online, that is where it is expected to source customers from. Hugely challenging no doubt! Because the Internet has many users and the competition out there is stiff, advertising your brand without a good target market can be time wasting and fruitless. If you directly target your customers with your marketing messages, it makes it easier for your potential customers to find your business online and interact with you. If you use distinct buyer personas to identify your target market, your marketing messages return better results and you make more sales as a result.

Optimize Your Business Website for Mobile

Many more people now depend on mobile devices to do business online. As a result, mobile marketing has gained in popularity in recent times. Google now attributes over 70% of its data traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s one huge market any smart business owner cannot afford to miss out of. So, small business owners can easily take advantage of this traffic and expose their businesses to the global arena. What to do? Just optimize your business website for mobile searches.  Mobile-specific marketing may need a considerable investment, which can be challenging, especially for small business owners. But, the cheapest and most practical way around that is to optimize your business website for mobile devices and you get to do more business out of these devices.

Market with Affiliate Programs

If you want your small business to do well in online marketing, just launch an affiliate marketing program for it. That way, more affiliates/vendors help you to market your products through their own online channels in anticipation of earning commissions. These affiliates are people who believe in your products and are willing to help you sell to earn commissions. They share links to your products and even your marketing messages on different online platforms to reach a massive audience. If you make sales that are directly attributable to the efforts of these affiliates, you'll need to pay them an agreed commission. However, affiliate programs may not be suitable for all kinds businesses online. For this reason, you’ll need to evaluate what your own business needs and take appropriate steps to market your products for best results through affiliate programs.

Take Advantage of Online Customer Reviews

Because many online reviews rank well in search engines, they can help boost your small business. Through these reviews, your brand can gain more recognition online and you make more sales as a consequence. Through reviews, previous customers always sincerely give their experiences with a particular product. Reviews can also be a great way to encourage internet users to take particular actions like making a purchase for instance. Because potential customers tend to believe in reviews, many online shoppers rely on reviews to make their buy decisions. Even if some reviews are negative, you can respond in such a way as to keep the customer satisfied and your business better positioned to meet such challenges.

Market on Social Media

Every small business needs proper marketing to do well online. In today's business world, nearly everyone is on social media around the globe doing one thing or another. Getting your small business in social media environment is one great way to put your brand in front of billions of social media users. If you want potential customers to see and associate with your brand online, just get it on social media. Doing so is one great way to stand out from your peers and become a reputable brand worldwide. The hugely popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others have in-house tools that can help small businesses market their products to a very wide global audience. Depending on your type of business, you can do your own evaluation and use only platforms that are really beneficial for your marketing activities. Once you have your business on any of the platforms you choose, your main focus should be on engaging with social media users and sharing informational posts about your business and products consistently. This is one great way to establish your unique brand voice online, and it helps your business a great deal.

5 Tips to Consistently Create Successful Blog Posts

Anyone can start a blog but not everyone can make a success out of it. The biggest challenge about blogging is not just starting a blog, but operating it and filling it with relevant content consistently. For some people, that could be really daunting. A personal blog is simply a platform on which the author can express their thoughts, communicate with readers, and indirectly promote particular products/services. These days, many bloggers even turn their blogging passion into a profitable business and they make good money for their efforts. Good blog posts on a regular and consistent basis make this possible. So, if you want to consistently create good blog posts to make your blog successful, pay attention to the following tips.

1. Carefully Choose Your Blogging Platform

For convenience and good hosting, you must carefully choose a blogging platform to create your blog. The blogging tools the platform offers are also very important in this consideration. Two options are really quite popular among bloggers. You can use a free platform or launch a website with your own domain and hosting. Alternatively as is increasingly popular these days, you also have another option of blogging on one or more of the very popular social media networks. Whatever platform you choose must help you to properly position yourself and your blog on the internet. That way, you can easily build up good following and audience for your blog. The bigger the audience/following your blog has, the higher the chances that your blog posts will be read widely.

2. Define and Stick to the Main Subject of Your Blog

Having a clear subject or business niche for your blog is also vital. You may choose to blog about your profession, a hobby, or any aspect of your life that interests you and you feel will interest bothers. Once chosen, you must adhere strictly to the theme with your blog posts to help build trust for the blog. Research and develop topics based on this theme with the interest of your readers uppermost in your considerations. Thereafter, you can write about anything and everything always making sure to highlight trending events and expressing your opinions about them with a view to arousing the interest of your blog readers at all times. By doing this consistently with high quality and information content, chances are, your blog will be in demand. This helps the blog posts to succeed exceedingly.

3. Provide only High-Quality and Informative Content

The content you share on your blog must be useful to your readers. Such content must be valuable to readers and informative enough to help solve their problems. It is such content you must post regularly and consistently to keep your readers hooked up to your blog. You must continue to be true to your blog and your readers by posting only valuable and reliable content at all times. That way, your blog will be easily recognized as an authoritative and trustworthy source of information. Adopt a writing style that is easy to read and understand while completely avoiding slang and vulgar expressions. Write only what you know to be true and factual and diligently research what you are not too sure of before writing about it. Above all, pay attention to readers’ feedback/comments and respond to them politely, factually and promptly. You can even filter good ideas from this feedback that can help you to craft more helpful blog posts.

4. Decide on a Blogging Plan/Calendar

For your blog to be successful there is a need to clearly outline your plan, purpose, and the main task of the blog. This you can do by creating a clear and concise blogging plan/calendar. This plan must be purposeful and with datelines for posting content. It could be daily, weekly and monthly in concept with specific times of the day depending on which audience you are targeting and in what part of the world. A list of probable topics and even some outlines for some of the topics helps to ease up the job and keep to schedules. That helps to display a reputation for your blog while showcasing your competence. Your reading audience likes that and it usually helps your blog posts to succeed widely. It is advisable to pay particular attention to a variety of content while making sure your content is not overly promotional of any product/service. Your blog content is successful if it attracts visitors to your blog. It takes other website marketing strategies like CTAs to get these visitors to make purchases. You should therefore endeavor to build a strategy that works in a way that makes your blog visitors wish to purchase something once they hit your website through the informative content and positive customer reviews your blog makes available to them.

5. Regularly Rejig and Improve Your Blog

Trends change and so are blogging tools and techniques. Therefore, you must regularly rejig and improve on your blog to keep up with trends and changes in techniques and technology. You can collect relevant data about the performance of your blog posts through in-house metrics and analytics tools. Info from the data helps you to decide what to improve on and what to discard all together to improve the overall performance of your blog. In addition, as you garner more blogging experience, your blogging skills improve as well. These skills come in handy to help keep your blog up-to-date with changing trends and techniques. A blog post that is not attracting traffic is not good enough. If you discover such posts, you can then consider among other things to see how you can improve the blog content with images/graphics because blog posts with images tend to increase the number of views significantly.

Conclusion

You must understand that successful blogging is not an immediate business. It takes time, efforts and diligent blogging to get good results. With time and effort, you are likely to get more consistent results in form of increased traffic, public recognition, and increased audience loyalty. Once you are diligent in your blogging efforts, these results will keep coming in to enhance the effectiveness of your blog. That by all accounts is blogging success.

5 Tested Ways to Boost Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you are a digital marketer and you want to ensure broad coverage for your marketing activities, you can combine all the marketing channels you are using with direct mail in your marketing strategy. An effective combination of both can help boost your marketing strategy even though both can be a bit complex in planning and execution. With good planning, popular direct mail examples include flyers, brochures, newsletters, catalogues, postcards, packages, coupons envelopes, and postcards can help to give a great boost to your marketing strategy. A bit of creativity with these direct mail examples in your marketing strategy can help you to reach more customers and to do better business as a consequence.

Here are five tested ways to give your digital marketing strategy a boost:

1. Carefully Set Your Marketing Goals and Objectives

This is a given if you want any worthwhile results from your marketing campaigns. For your marketing campaigns to be successful, you must have very clear goals and objectives to measure your success by. Right from the outset of the campaigns, you must clearly define your goals and objectives. For effectiveness and measurability, such goals should be specific, measurable, and achievable. They must in addition be relevant and time-bound. The more specific and measurable your goals are, the better for your success.
 
2. Always Analyze Your Content Against Competition

No one does business in isolation, least of all digital marketing. Competition abounds on the internet which you must constantly analyze and measure your content against. To find out which content is worth using in your campaign, it is advisable to do some research into the success of your competitors’ content. This content gap analysis will help you create a digital marketing strategy that is unique and not just generic but more engaging. For effectiveness, you can strategically add a Call-To-Action, CTA to any content you create.

3. Carefully Define Your Target Audience

You could be marketing in vain if you do not have a clear audience you are marketing to. Therefore, before you start a digital marketing campaign, it is essential to understand your target audience and location. Because one combination of words and images might be appealing to one customer but not another, a clear understanding of your audience helps to make that distinction clearer and how best to direct your marketing messages to the right audience. The best way to make sure you are targeting the right market is by segmentation. That helps you to know and clearly define who you are marketing to at any point in time and what marketing messages will have the best effect on the audience.

4. Diligently Monitor the Effectiveness of Your Campaigns

Yeah, you can never know how well you are doing in your marketing campaigns if you cannot effectively monitor your results. For this reason, you must always make sure to properly align your strategies with your goals. That way, you can keep track of who responded to your campaigns, from where and through what channels. Routine and regular reviews of your campaign results will help you to evaluate what worked and what didn’t. An accurate data base for these results will help you to diligently track your engagements. This will allow you to not only track your effectiveness but also make follow-ups with your leads/customers.

5. Leverage Different Marketing Channels

Do not ignore any marketing channel. The bottom-line is to directly reach your customers and to get traffic. So long as any marketing channel helps to get traffic to your website, you can effectively leverage such channels for that purpose. It is best to always use a variety of marketing channels. This will ensure that you reach more customers and get more traffic back to your website. Some of the best known and effective channels you can consider using include website marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and content marketing or blogging.

How to Turn Your Blog into a Profitable Business

To turn your blog into a profitable business, all you need is strategic planning and a bit of tenacity, if you want to get things right. Part of that planning should be how you can consistently provide good content to attract readers and to grow your audience. Even if your aim is to make blogging your full-time job, you cannot afford to ignore these basics in your strategic planning. The blogosphere may be currently housing over 600 million blogs on the internet and with less than 10% of them profitable, that’s OK.  You can make your own blog profitable if you do the right things in the right way. It may not be easy though but it is an absolute possibility. 

These here tips will show you how to turn your blog into a full-time profitable business if you diligently and consistently do what they suggest.

Establish a Content Strategy

In content marketing in which blogging is a foremost tool, content is king. First step is to build a content strategy based on user intent. If you are able to build a content strategy based on user intent, you'll be telling both searchers and search engines particularly Google that you care about providing value for readers on the internet. This is because getting more eyes on your content is hugely important and pivotal to creating a profitable blogging business. With time, if you consistently share highly valuable content with readers, it helps you to position yourself as an industry expert. Not only does this help build your reputation as a thought leader, but it also fosters trust with your target audience. The more people read and share your content, the more profitable your blog becomes.

Ensure Your Business is Legally Registered

Before you can turn a profit with your blogging business, there’s a need to make sure it's legal first. This is one legal way to ensure the protection of your content as a valuable intellectual property. Depending on which country you’re blogging from, be sure to comply with local laws and internet protocols/regulations in your blogging activities.

Create Strategic Workflows

All businesses thrive on efficient processes and consistency. Your business blog is no exception. If you create workable strategic workflows, they will help to support your business every day of the week to ensure consistency and efficiency. To do this, you can sit down to design a series of steps to follow diligently for every part of your business every day of the week. That helps to establish very clear processes anyone can easily follow in a predictable and imitable manner to ensure a timely and consistent publishing of your content to the benefit of your readers. Profitability derives from this consistency and reliability in the long term.

Establish an Affiliate Marketing Strategy on Your Blog

Yes, you need affiliate marketing on your blog if you want to make it profitable. This is because affiliate marketing is one of the most common ways to earn money blogging. It is simple to operate and to earn income. It simply entails promoting other peoples’ products/services by way of affiliate links on your blog and you earn commissions for sales made through these links. Anytime your blog readers click on the links you embed in your affiliate marketing articles and make a purchase, you get paid a commission by the product merchant as per agreed terms. Simple isn’t it?

Weave Your Products/Services into Your Content

Besides affiliate marketing, you can also integrate your own products/services offers into your blogging strategy. There is practically no limit to what you can do when it comes to how you weave in products/services in your blog content. You have a lot of room to maneuver when it comes to matters of promoting your own products/services through your blog content. Part of your marketing strategy then should be by deliberate planning to map out how your products/services will integrate into your content strategy. Through this strategy, you can sell outsourced products, you can dropship products, you can buy products wholesale and sell as retail, you can promote slash in prices and even new products in your inventory, you can sell digital products like eBooks, software apps, and online courses and lots more. All these activities help to generate unlimited income through your blog.

Take Advantage of Collaborations

Collaborations, guest posting, and running ads are three methods that can help to boost your blog profits if well handled. The main aim is to make your online presence strong enough to attract attention. Collaborations, guest posting and running ads help this process significantly. All of these options can help boost revenues for your business in very unique ways. Collaborating with successful brands helps you to build important business relationships and expand your audience reach. Guest posting helps you to build a reputation as an industry expert/thought leader and quality backlinks to your blog. This eventually raises your site's authority score with search engines particularly Google. Running ads if professionally handled can help put your blog in front of more people in a shorter span of time.

Be Serious with Cyber Security

With cyber crimes on the increase, you cannot afford not to secure your blogging business. Losing your blog content can be quite frustrating and awful. In extreme cases, your blog content can be wiped clean due to a cyber-security flare-up. If that happens, starting a new blog from the scratch is no mean fit considering the time and efforts you’ve invested on your blog to make it a profitable business. To avoid frustration and to continue on the path of profitability for your blog, it is essential to take cyber-security seriously. For effectiveness, your blog security should be all embracing. Ranging from providing users access to your blog to running virus protection software on it, you can take several measures to protect your blog from cyber-security threats. Experts recommend the use of 3-step verification for access, free access through VPNs, virus protection software installed and updated regularly and securing the services of a cyber-security expert to routinely conduct a health exam on your equipment, website, and all the online portals you use for your blogging business. Hopefully, all these can help to protect your blogging business and keep it on the path of profitability at all times.

4 Ways Influencer Marketing Can Benefit Your SEO Strategy

Influencer marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies available to digital marketers. This is because it characteristically delivers such good results that you can hardly get from any other marketing strategies. If you have a direct marketing strategy of increasing your search engine ranking, influencer marketing is one of the easiest and most effective marketing methods to get the best results. A high SEO ranking can directly help to differentiate your business from its competition. The higher your business ranks in SERPs, the better your brand grows. However, you can hardly get these results if the influencer(s) you choose to work with aren’t right for your type of business. Therefore, before you start any influencer marketing campaigns, you must make sure the influencer(s) you settle for are right. Make sure the strategies you deploy to reach your influencer marketing goals are ethical at all times because there are strict penalties set by Google and other major search engines for websites that try to be overtly manipulative in their strategies. Allow that to guide your activities as you market along. Here are some of the best ways influencer marketing can benefit your SEO strategy.

1. Create Unique and High Quality Content
 
For most marketers, content creation can be hugely challenging. It has to be done all the same because you need to create good content to attract organic traffic to your website. If the content you create is good enough, it will help your website to rank well on the SERPs of search engines. To be good enough your content must fit into what major search engines like Google consider in content such as readability, keyword usage, and overall content quality. In addition, the number of its social media shares and audience engagement are also very significant ranking factors for websites that search engines consider. So, to regularly create content that your readers love, it won’t only be just high-quality; it must be unique to boot. Influencers can play a massive role in creating your website content that is widely shared to their large audiences. Some influencers can directly help to create sponsored content and share it widely for you. In some cases, influencers can ask their followers to create content suited for your brand and add your business’s branded hashtag to it. Such content is called User-Generated Content, UGC. The more of such contents that are produced for your brand the higher the awareness that your brand benefits from the efforts.

2. Increased Brand Visibility
 
Every digital marketer must always factor in stiff competition in its marketing strategies. That is the nature of online marketing. Marketers must always find ways to overcome such daunting challenges to have successful marketing campaigns. Traffic and engagement on a website are some of the critical factors used by major search engine particularly Google for SEO ranking. For this reason, if you are unable to bring traffic to your website and ensure that there’s enough engagement on it, your ranking would be affected. This is where influencer marketing becomes hugely imperative. It greatly helps your brand visibility. Much more than any other digital marketing strategy, influencer marketing can bring massive traffic and engagement to your website. That is why influencers are called influencers as a result of their ability to influence their huge followers/audiences to take desired actions. By working with influencers therefore, you give your content more spread and credibility. Thus, with a broad content reach, you inevitably attract more visitors to your website. That is good traffic. The more traffic you get, the higher your SEO ranking. The more visibility you get, the more the engagement you get as well.  More engagement also means more website traffic and that helps to boost your SEO ranking.

3. Build Brand Authority and Credibility

Even though there are no reliable metrics to determine brand authority and credibility, you can closely observe a few factors that makeup brand authority. These factors relate to how people perceive your brand to determine if they can trust you or if your information is accurate and verifiable. People can make informed decisions on these factors from your website traffic, engagement rates, reviews, on-site activity, purchase rates and such related factors. It is best to maintain real credibility across this various range of factors. When your website commands some brand authority, it helps its SEO ranking. Influencers have great potentials to improve your credibility when their own influence rubs off on your brand. They can use their credibility and influence to give real positivity about your brand through their large audiences. It is hugely important to make full disclosure to your readers when your content is sponsored through influencers. That helps to enhance your sincerity and credibility. By marketing with credible influencers therefore, you greatly enhance your business ranking and reputation.

4. Build High-Quality Backlinks

As most digital marketers very well now, link building is a very effective SEO strategy, despite the huge challenges involved in getting credible links. Influencer marketing comes in very handy to tackle these challenges. One major factor that can influence your ranking on search engines is the quality of your links, be they internal links or backlinks. The authority of websites that link to you is a major factor search engines take into account to rank your website. To rank high enough therefore, you need to get high authority websites to link to your website. Doing so does not come easy though. Again, you can rely on influencers to help generate good backlinks to your website as a way of boosting your website rating.

By working with credible influencers, you stand a very good chance of having access to several high-authority websites. Now that’s a huge plus for your back linking activities.  Influencers can create content on these websites and link the post to your website. That becomes one good backlink. In addition, influencers can deliberately share your links as a way of helping to build your link profile. If they do this, chances are very high that many in their huge audiences will do same. Increased sharing of these links means increased popularity for your brand. With the help of search engines the probability becomes greatly enhanced that your website will fall into high authority domain websites’ hands. If these websites like your content and attach some premium to it, they may choose to add the link to some content on their own websites where it is relevant. The good traffic these high-authority websites receive will thereafter rub off on your website through such backlinks.

5 Tips to Monetize Your Website

If you are desirous to monetize your website, you must first work to create a proper monetization strategy. That is what you really need to be able to drive relevant traffic that converts real good. Even if you have a great website and steady traffic, you may not be able to make money from your website if you have no monetization strategy to do so. These here tips will help you to create that strategy and effectively monetize your website to earn money for you.

1. Sell Digital Products

To sell digital products on your website, you must first create such products that people will like to buy or you collaborate with other content creators and help to promote their products. The commonest digital products that really sell well are eBooks, educational courses, how-to templates, workout programs, research findings/data, travelogues, healthy food recipes and Industry trends. Make sure the digital products you offer on your website are essentially relevant stuff and of the highest quality available. You make good money selling digital products because creating and selling them is hugely cost-effective. It is much easier and cheaper distributing digital products than physical goods because you do not have to worry about handling, warehousing and shipping costs.

2. Join Affiliate Marketing

First be sure your website is designed to be able to handle affiliate marketing. Next is to reach out to product merchants whom you can promote their affiliate links on your website. You earn a commission from all sales made through the links you promote on your website. You can insert these links in your blog content and other articles on your website. You can also create side banners with images that promote affiliate products. Alternatively, you can decide to join reputable affiliate programs. The right affiliate program to join is directly dependent on the niche of your website. The most popular of these programs are ClickBank, SFI, Amazon, and eBay where you can seek niche-specific products that you can effectively promote to your audience. These programs will help to drive traffic to your website and each successful conversion will net you a commission. The more conversions you get, the more money you make. It is as simple as that.

3. Run Paid Ads

You can earn money through online advertisements on your website even if it is not your primary monetization method. These days, to earn money from online ads, you must factor in the huge impact of mobile devices in online traffic. What this means is that your website must be optimized for smartphones and tablets, not just computers. To run video ads, you can create inPage, inBanner, and inApp video ads which make it easier to insert professionally-looking online ads. You get paid by product merchants whose products ads you run professionally on your website. This payment depends on the number of clicks and views.

4. Publish Sponsored Content

If you write a popular blog or you have a large social media following, you can publish sponsored content and get paid for it. Having a great blog allows you to sell guest posts to make money. Here is how it works. You deliberately seek out interested parties who would like to publish an article on your website and get a do-follow link to help their SEO campaigns. By this arrangement, your website will benefit from good content besides the payment you’ll receive for publishing the content. However, you must ensure such content is genuine and original. For ethical reasons, you must notify your readers that the content is sponsored.

To find leads for good content, start with Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media platforms. You can also join relevant online groups and advertise yourself as someone who invites interested parties to post on your website. With time, and through this collaboration, you’ll be able to find more leads, get more sponsored content and make more money.

5. Paid Membership

Paying for a membership on a website when you can probably find a free alternative usually presents some kind of dilemma for some marketers. These are marketers who are not too conversant with the benefits that may accrue to them for doing so even though some of these benefits might not seem so obvious. Membership sites create relationships and loyal communities. They also give website owners a pre-qualified audience for marketing and upselling. Growing a significant community also establishes you as an authority in the industry. Finally and most significantly, as the website scales and your value increases, the community will keep you on your toes and encourage you to create the best possible content you can. Checking all these marks should be good enough to turn a membership site into a sustainable source of income. Other than just the membership fees, you can also consider other monetization methods as the membership grows.

Last Line

All told, these five website monetization tips are just a few of the ideas website owners can really depend on to make money form their monetized websites. The business niche of your website and the efforts you are prepared to put in matter a lot in the eventual income you’ll generate from your website. You may choose to work with just one of the methods or you combine as many of them as you are comfortable with. The bottom line is the amount of income you generate with your website if you monetize it with a good strategy.

How to Get More Social Media Followers and Drive Sales

With now an estimated 4.2 billion active users on social media worldwide, the quest for followers can be quite challenging since it depends on many factors. The benefits are enormous as well if you can have a large number of followers on any of the social media platforms. Even though it can be pretty difficult to gather a huge following, the techniques and tactics you deploy in your social media activities play a very significant role in that quest. If for instance you are an active blogger, it is only when you have a huge following that you can profitably monetize your blog. Same thing applies if you want to become a social media influencer and join the league of good money-makers on social media. If you are able to deploy the right techniques and tactics you can easily generate a good following, build a great reputation from a loyal audience and drive sales for your business. Find below some tested and reliable techniques you can use to get more social media followers and drive sales for your business.

Have a Social Media Strategy

It is true that haphazard marketing on social media hardly ever yields good results. Therefore, you need to have a strategy that works well to help get the best results. This strategy must be such that can effectively help to drive more traffic to your website or blog. If your social media strategy is right and effective, a huge bulk of your readers can come from social media networks. You must therefore endeavor to formulate a social media strategy that helps boost traffic to your business website or blog.

Create Valuable Content

In social media marketing, content is king. Good content is what helps to attract readers to your page. The reason readers come to your page is because you are offering them something that they need. Therefore, you must endeavor to create content that is of value to your readers. One very easy and effective way to get that done is to think from your readers’ perspective and create content along that perspective.

Offer Free Stuff

Yeah, everyone likes free stuff. Nothing attracts people more than free stuff. You can offer up promotional coupons, eBooks, free templates, how-to guides, and other useful stuff to ingratiate yourself with your audience. They respond accordingly and that helps to attract traffic to your website/blog.

Choose a Specific Niche

A specific niche allows you to target a specific audience interested in that niche. The success of your blog depends on you finding your passion and your ability to create compelling content. Expert marketers advise that your niche should not have too much competition as your blog will need to compete against highly rated sites. If it does, the content can easily be stifled out and unnoticed by readers. That scenario cannot help your traffic. Be sure to choose a subject matter that you are very knowledgeable about and one that people can take insights from and with a demand that will impact your potential following. That means you will also need to get an accurate picture of your target audience in terms of age, level of knowledge of the subject matter, and other factors to make a meaningful impact on the audience.

Focus on a Few Social Media Platforms

It is quite impactful to focus your content on a few or even a single social media channel. If you don’t, you risk not capturing the right amount of followers to make your blog worth looking into. Carefully identify your target readers’ demographics and then identify the social networks that they prefer. If for instance your blog post is geared more towards professionals and businesses you might want to consider using LinkedIn. If however your target followers are younger and more visual, you may tilt towards Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest for best results.

Build Trust Diligently

In any human endeavor, trust building takes time and efforts. This is even more delicate when you factor in that you are dealing with all kinds of people with various backgrounds on social media. For most readers, it could take some very little things to get them to trust you or distrust you. All of it depends on the content they read from you and expect from you. If you manage to build a track record of creating useful content that serves them well, and you are diligent, consistent and reliable about it, it helps you to build trust.

Create Quality Content Regularly

This helps to establish and build your social media presence. If your content does not attract readers, it is not worth the while. Therefore, you must regularly churn out quality content that readers need. To sustain the interest of your readers, it helps to set out a calendar for your content creation and posting. Doing so helps to guarantee regularity and consistency in your quality content production.

Increase Engagement Rates

How people engage your content is directly related to the relevance and quality of the content. Therefore, one credible way to increase your fan base is to get more engaged followers. You can only get more engaged followers if your content is important enough or interesting enough that people share, link to, like, and even make comments on. To sustain this engagement, make sure to reply to comments as well as collaborate with other content creators for mutual benefits.

Use Analytics to Understand Your Audience

Social media analytics is all about feedback data. You can rely on this data to better understand your audience. Social media analytics data allows you to get the right insights about who your followers are. With that vital information, you can regularly tweak your content to align with their needs. If your content aligns well with their needs, it is better engaging and good for traffic. If you back that up with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you can maximize your audience and income with ad sales.

Use the Right Hashtags

Many social media users tend to ignore hashtags. Hashtags are hugely important to help direct more followers to your website/blog. This is because posts with hashtags have higher rates of engagement than posts without hashtags. To take advantage of this, you must make sure that the hashtags you use are relevant, funny, interesting, easily recalled, and in good taste. It is such hashtags that are really great for engagement.