How Web Development is Important for your Small Online Business

Professional webmasters define web development as all the actions, updates, and operations required for building, maintaining, and managing a website to ensure optimal performance, user experience, and speed. They actualize this by professionally creating web pages and apps for the Intranet, a private network, or the Internet during a web development process. This process includes creating and maintaining web pages as well as web design, web development, web publishing, and database management. Webmasters use a variety of online tools to create apps and websites for the benefit of online business owners. The results range from basic and simple websites to complicated web applications and social media platforms, and from countless online shopping web pages to content management systems (CMS). These web development activities are of huge importance to online small businesses particularly in the following ways.

 
Coping With Changes in Technology

Daily, online technologies are advancing just as the internet is deepening. Web development thus helps your small business to cope with Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Science, and others in terms of need and application. Good web developers take advantage of new technologies to design websites that greatly help small business owners to explore and take business opportunities online.
 
Improvement in Marketing Tactics

To make sales, every small online business needs to attract traffic. Improvement in marketing tactics which a good web development engenders can help this process. Through it, a small business can directly increase sales by engaging marketing tactics that enhance good communication with customers and potential customers. It also assists in making good business decisions by precisely assessing data, your website insight, and other vital information. Good web development makes your website more appealing and user-friendly. That helps to keep your customers and potential customers actively engaged on your website without which you’ll be steadily losing them to your competition.

Increase in Business Accessibility

A good web development enables users to access your website from anywhere in the world and at any time 24/7.  It provides the right space for everyone to view your website and the information they require about your business whenever they need it. Anytime anywhere a customer wants to know more about your business and its contact information, your website is where to go. It provides enough relevant information to help customers solve their problems and acquire your products. With good web development on your website, it helps to boost your chances of closing great business deals and to generate leads.

Generating More Leads

Every business thrives on sales. The more the number of sales made the higher the profits. Therefore, by deliberately building a website that helps with marketing, generate leads, attracts more customers and generate sales, your business booms as a result. A good website development enhances the ability of a business to offer more online transactions and a great opportunity to capitalize on online sales through good leads generation.

Establishing Brand Identity

Good web development enables a business to create and construct a website that meets the needs of customers. Good customers experience on your website aids in the development and protection of your brand’s identity. It also ensures consistency across all of your digital and physical media. If your web development is good, it enhances customer experience on the site. This experience encompasses the entire customer journey from your website to your shop and from your website chatbot all through to the checkout processes. When the customer experience on your website is seamless, and with smooth continuity in the consumer journey, it helps to establish a great identity for your brand.

Resourceful Advertising

A well-developed website allows you to display all meaningful information about your business online. Your business website is your business window to the world on the internet. This is why the information you provide on it must include product/service details, pricing, contact information, and much more. You can even showcase your current attractive offers and promos on the site to attract viewers’ attention. That provides a great opportunity to promote or even endorse these products/services to generate leads and sales. On-website advertising provides an effective and cost-efficient more resourceful digital marketing way to reach out to your target audience as against traditional marketing methods.

Blog Smarter and Make Money Online

Many digital marketers are presently into blogging for the sole purpose of making money online. A huge percentage of them are trying real hard but not many bloggers are actually making good money online. Many of these bloggers keep wondering why this is and exactly what they need to do or do better to start making money too. The real difference between bloggers who are making money and those who aren’t is simply style. With over 600 million blogs active on the internet, less than 10% are really making good money. Now, that sounds a bit depressing but not to worry. You can make money too if you learn to blog smarter than most others. Most bloggers do about the same things with their blogs online, but those bloggers who manage to do these things a bit differently tend to have an edge over others. They tend to work smarter than others that is and they make more money too. Here are a few things you do better than others to enable you blog smarter and earn better.

Setting Up a User-Friendly Website

A user-friendly blog website is usually one of the very basic requirements for smart blogging. The site can also effectively serve as a credible business window in the internet world. If you aim to attract web visitors to your blog, the site must be well designed and friendly enough to welcome them. It is through this site you can deploy the right marketing techniques to advertise your business and attract customers. Through it, you must have the right information readily available to help the website visitors make their buy decisions on your e-commerce store. If your blog website is good enough, it should directly reflect your brand’s character personality and answer queries/questions or concerns visitors or even customers may have as they hit the site.

Deciding Your Business Niche
 
Blogging experts always advise that you must carefully choose the business niche you are passionate about for your blog. Doing so together with the demand for the product/service you are marketing hugely determine how much passive income you can make from your blogging efforts. That is smart blogging. It is why you must carefully decide on a niche you are passionate about to blog in. By doing so, you are more likely to blog with unlimited enthusiasm because of the passion you have for it. If for instance you are passionate about sports, you can settle for sportswear or sports equipment as your niche business. You can blog passionately about sports wears for instance with unlimited enthusiasm. This together with good products sales help you to make good income from blogging about such products.
   
High Quality Value-Filled Content

Smart bloggers don’t just write content for writing sake. Good blog content is always written for a specific purpose and must be full of value. It is the valuable content that helps to drive engagement, leads, customers and sales. Online, if your business consistently puts out quality content through your blog, your brand manages to gain some reputation for providing unique and quality content. That helps to attract more followers and a bigger audience. Your content can serve this purpose well if you optimize everything in the content. What smart bloggers do about that is somehow comprehensive but ranges from the keywords to the length of each blog post, web page or blog articles. Smart bloggers habitually use blog posts that contain a minimum of 300 words to about 2500 words in order to rank well in search engines. Good ranking in search engines translates to good organic traffic.

Optimizing Blogs for Search Engines

Without good traffic, it is virtually impossible to make money from your blog. Organic traffic with is attributable to search engines is about the best quality traffic you can get on your blog. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, makes that possible. With a good SEO on your blog, search engines will rank your content high on their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic. Many bloggers who are struggling to make money from their blogs either choose to ignore or neglect SEO on their blogs. That is not smart. To make SEO easy to implement even by bloggers, expert marketers recommend the following tools.

•    Google Trends: This tool helps to check the level of interest in a keyword and determine which keywords are becoming more popular is Google Trends.
•    SEMrush: This tool helps to provide information about website traffic, backlinks, keyword positions and ideas for search engine optimized content, among other things.
•    Moz: This tool helps to check the positioning of your website in search results. It is some kind of ranking based on link authority and importance of your website when compared to others. A website’s Moz ranking is determined by the number of backlinks it has, the value of those links, and the authority of the website’s domain. Moz ranking range is usually from 0-100. The nearer the score is to 100, the better the SEO of the website.

Website Marketing

The greatness of a website is in its design and user-friendliness. To blog out of your business website, it must be designed and hosted for that purpose. Professional webmasters are always handy here to give you a good website design you can blog out of. That is one very smart thing to do if you want to blog for money. A good blogging website must be user-friendly and fast loading. It must come with a full complement of social media buttons for easy sharing of your content as well as a Call-To-Action, CTA button. The wider you share your content, the more traffic your blog gets. Widely sharing your content is smart blogging no doubt.

Social Media Marketing

Sharing your blog content on social media is one very smart blogging strategy. Presently, social media is where over 3 billion people are active 24/7 around the world doing one thing or another. Now, that’s one very huge audience to get your blog content into to attract traffic. Social media is very popular and simple to use. It is highly effective too for content marketing. Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are about the most popular of these platforms. Sharing your blog content on these platforms helps to give it a very wide exposure. That is good for traffic and smart for blogging. Because of the ease of sharing content on social media, making your content go viral is fairly easy to do. Social media platforms in addition help to provide an easy-to-use two-way communication and inquiry channel making it easy to connect with your readers and to establish business relationships fairly smoothly.

Email Marketing

It is smart blogging to effectively share your blog content by email. But, first you must build your email list. As your blog audience grows, your followers grow too. Your followers list directly complements your email list as vital assets. Your followers automatically get email notifications if and when you post new content. Your email list is one very vital marketing asset you can diligently build over time and segment as well to receive your blog content. That is smart blogging too. Email marketing serves efficiently as a direct communication with your blog readers. Most people because of their busy schedules prefer blog content delivered by email which they can read at their own time and convenience. It is smart blogging to ensure everyone in your email/followers list gets notified every time you make a new blog post.

Diligent Keywords Research

Smart bloggers do not go into real blogging without diligent keywords research. Keywords research is hugely important for SEO because keywords are the real foundation of SEO.  You can take advantage of free online tools for your keywords research. Doing so will help you to discover the right keywords searchers are using online to find your type of business. Once you get the right keywords, you can deliberately use them in your blog content for the benefit of search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Relevant online keyword tools can help you to find the best keywords related to your demographic. If you deploy these keywords in your blog content correctly, it helps your SEO.

Smart bloggers always crave a robust online presence for their blogs. Working out of their blog websites in digital space, bloggers want to be noticed by people who are actively searching for goods and services online. Smart bloggers are aware that a very large percentage of searchers habitually turn to Google for every search query and question. As a very active search engine, Google works with keywords to decide exactly what to serve to people in direct response to their search queries.  When people enter a “keyword or phrase” on the search engine box and hit the search button, Google displays millions of webpages offering similar products/services relating to the keywords or phrases. These keywords and phrases tend to work like connectors, connecting brands to their curious audiences online. Smart bloggers deliberately optimize their blog content to position their blogs for organic traffic. It is the clever placement of these keywords and phrases on their content that helps these bloggers to get this much-needed traffic.

Every search query on Google has an intention. The reason smart bloggers classify search intent into three categories. These are navigational, transformational, and transactional search intent. Bloggers depend on keywords to help them understand user search intent. That is what smart bloggers use to design quality and effective content. Once you understand search intent and how it works, you will find it easier to deploy and display more relevant information to correctly target your audiences. For instance, a searcher with transactional intent will use a brand name or location in the keyword to target a “product categories” page. Such keywords help search engines to direct the searchers towards the right blog content. That helps to save time for searchers by eliminating the hassle of surfing websites aimlessly in search of what blog content they need to read.

Earning Quality Backlinks

Google algorithms take backlinks into consideration when ranking blog content.  Smart bloggers know this and they take maximum advantage of it. For bloggers, links can thus make a considerable difference in the search rankings and SEO of their blog content. Smart bloggers earn backlinks by interacting with high-quality blog platforms and institutions by way of blog commenting and guest blogging. If these links are from reputable, high-authority institutions like universities and research institutions, good blog websites and reputable publications, so much the better. Strong and high quality backlinks do not only increase credibility for your blog content, they also help it to rank high in Google SERPs.

Optimizing for Local Searches

Smart bloggers know that every small business is local. They know that most searchers first search for businesses “near me” on Google when they get online. The reason they usually optimize their blog websites for local searches. Such blogs get to benefit from the huge local search results out there. If you blog for business and your business location is part of your local SEO, major search engines like Google take note. That helps to increase the visibility of your blog particularly to local searchers which is the target audience of the business you blog for. On social media, if you set up your business as a location on Facebook for instance, it can ensure that users tag you on account of that location. That again helps to amplify the visibility of your blog/business.

Smart bloggers carefully place geographically-related keywords as often as possible in the titles, headers, image tags, body, and meta descriptions of their blog websites to increase local visibility. Even when describing the products/services you are blogging about, you must ensure that you are optimizing your location. Make sure your location is in the blog/business listings as in GMB, social media profiles, and your blog website pages. That helps your blog/business visibility in your locality a great deal because more local traffic finds your blog as a result.

Wrapping Up

Blogging for business online is a hugely competitive one because most digital marketers are currently blogging as part of their marketing strategy. These bloggers do most of the foregoing things and much more to project their blogs within the huge competition out there on the internet. However, it is only smart bloggers who get to make good money from their blogs. That comes down to as low as 10% of all bloggers on the internet. Not to worry though. If you blog smart yourself, you too can quietly join that somewhat elite group and make money from blogging. Just get your hands on it and commence smart blogging now. Good luck!

Tips to Improve Your Website’s User Experience

In present day digital marketing world, user experience has become increasingly important. This experience is influenced by many factors ranging from good design, good hosting, aesthetics, loading speed, optimization, and usability to security. These factors play a huge role in determining how comfortable users are with your website. They help to mold user impression on your website, whether positive or negative. When user experience on your website is positive, it influences positively the impression prospective customers have about your brand, including the level of quality of the products you are marketing from the website. A positive user experience is hugely critical to the performance of your website. Enhancing this experience therefore is good for your business. 

As a marketer, you can take deliberate steps to make sure you’re giving your web visitors the best user experience possible. For this reason, it is recommended you pay special attention to your website’s page load speed and quality content. This attention begins from the website design to its launching. Professional webmasters are up to their game in helping to design and launch a user-friendly website. The fees they charge pale into insignificance when the website starts to deliver quality results for your business. Some of these results are attributable to SEO or Search Engine Optimization which plays a very significant role to make your website discoverable online. That helps to increase online presence for your business. Your online presence has a direct bearing on the traffic, leads, customers, and sales the website can attract.

Significantly, good website design, usability, and user experience are more important than ever in website development for very obvious marketing reasons. If not well handled, these things can hurt your business engagement process and may directly result in lost sales, a development which no marketer can be comfortable with. To avoid missed opportunities and even lost sales, as soon as users hit your website on account of fast loading speed, do things to keep them there a bit longer. That is, such things that help to reduce bounce rate. When visitors hit your website and they bounce right off the site, the fault lies more with your website and your marketing activities than the ever-hurrying visitors. If visitors leave your website too quickly, it simply means you have a very limited window of time to capture the visitors’ attention and provide them with enough information about your products/services.

What to do when visitors bounce off your website too quickly. There are a lot of things you can consider improving upon. Most significant is your marketing content. You must therefore deliberately create high quality, educational and informative content that gets right to the point of what you do and why you do it. Significantly, most website visitors do not spend time sifting through lots of content to find what they need. They want it thrust upon them directly as soon as they hit any website. That requires skillful content marketing techniques to accomplish. If you do the right things to make people find your site online, get the information they need and easily get in touch with you to learn more about your products/services, you keep their attention longer.

Page load speed is also critical to enhancing user experience on your website. Most consumers usually expect an instantaneous response when navigating a website. That appears to be why major search engines like Google take page load speed into consideration when ranking websites. Website page load delays can indeed interrupt a user’s consciousness and do hurt the user experience of a website. If page load speed is fast enough, your website can make it high on Google SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic to your website. If you have the technical skills fine but if not, you can work with a web developer to improve your website’s page load speed. Doing so can actually create a better user experience for your website. Over time, that effort alone can significantly increase your website’s ranking in organic search results.

Quickest Ways to Improve Your Blog Ranking

Webmasters and online marketers now rely heavily on blogging to improve their website’s ranking on search engines. That is because they have come to realize that blogs have become a powerful source for online marketing. However, many newbie bloggers still fail to know that without proper SEO, many blogs never get to rank high in search engines.  The real reason their blogs and websites remain relatively unnoticed by web surfers. Therefore, if you want to utilize your blog for effective marketing of your business, you’ve got to do all you can to improve your blog’s ranking by search engines.

Here are some tips which can help you to quickly have your blog ranking high in search engines:


 
Get Your Blog on Social Media
 
These days, social media is where everyone seems to be. As a result, you get to find social networking sites in almost every corner of the web. Because of the popularity of social media sites, they have become the best places to meet people with the same interests online. That makes them very ideal places where you can get important links. You can easily create a brand name and improve your brand popularity on social media if you regularly post high quality articles which get noticed and attract comments from readers.

Do Blog Commenting
 
This is particularly very helpful when you comment on blogs which are already very popular. The popularity of such blogs somehow helps your comments to be indexed by search engines. That helps your own blog ranking as well. Adding relevant comments to other’s blog posts is another effective way to increase blog traffic. You must be sure your comments are relevant to the topic and informative enough to attract comments. When readers find your comments useful, they naturally get more curious to find out more about you. That consequently attracts clicks on your link back to your own website or blog. That means more traffic!

Give Your Blog Wide Exposure

To boost your blog’s search engine ranking and traffic, you must explore all ways to give it maximum exposure. One of the best ways to do so is by syndicating it with RSS feeds to give it full exposure. With RSS feeds, whenever any modification or addition is made on your blog, your audience gets updated quickly and seamlessly.

Do Social Bookmarking

This is one online activity which only experienced hands in the business can use effectively. When properly done, bookmarking helps immensely to increase both traffic and search engine ranking of your blog. Technically, what social bookmarking does is to allow your blog users to save and create a collection of their favorite bookmarks, categorize them and later share them with other users. These other users can further subscribe the bookmarks to other’s lists and even add bookmarks from other lists to their own. This way, your blog gets further propagation thereby getting exposed more and more. The more bookmarking you do, the more blog traffic you get and that helps your search engines ranking a great deal.

Major Drawbacks to Using Link Cloaking Software

This is the type of issue which could best be directed to seasoned Webmasters and not to amateurs like most of us Affiliates in SFI business. However, let me try to explain it in the plain language through which I understand it. Link cloaking software became useful to protect links from being hijacked by ubiquitous online predators and or hackers. The main drawbacks to using link cloaking software are as follows.

1. It can only be used effectively by experienced online marketers.
2. Some smart online thief can always find a way around the software.
3. The software does not provide foolproof-all-round protection.
4. Link cloaking is not considered as a very reliable security measure.
5. It becomes more reliable only when combined with encryption like WPA, Wi-Fi Protected Access and suck line encryption.
6. You can’t use the software in isolation and expect perfect results.
7. You can only discover if it is ineffective after you have been “hit.”

These are about the major drawbacks I can recollect when you use link cloaking software.
 

Best Keywords to Use when Placing SFI Ads

If you want to profit from the use of keywords/phrases on the Internet, you will have to be professional about your efforts. When placing ads, professional Webmasters always say that phrases appear to be more effective than just single words. The first thing to do therefore is to identify your competitors or those in the same market niche as yours then research them using Google analytics to find out which keywords/phrases work best for them. From your results, you can then derive your own keywords/phrases with a view to bettering the advertising efforts of your competitors. That is the best way to go about it. 

 
In doing so, you must take into account the following tips:

1. Try to avoid highly Generic terms that are used across multiple niche markets.
2. Avoid using keyword/phrases that lead to keywords stuffing.
3. Avoid heavily used and abused words on the Internet like “blast” and “MLM” etc.
4. Research your competition and see what they are doing that works best for them.
5. Identify the sites which rank very high in Search Engines where your competitors’ ads are shown and find out their search terms and phrases.
6. Avoid search terms which do not sufficiently describe the information page you want your visitors to see.
7. Concentrate on creating useful, information-rich content which uses keywords naturally within the context of your text.

Having said all that, you are no doubt aware that the primary aim of every online ad is to attract the attention of visitors to your site. You will therefore need to focus your ads both generally and for specific targets based on the keywords/phrases you have decided to use. In SFI, such keywords/phrases must lay emphasis on the following key areas:

- the freedom to join SFI without upfront costs.
- the opportunity to start earning immediately.
- the potential of building a lasting residual income. 


 
Arising from the above and from my own experience, I have found the following keywords/phrases very useful and I do recommend them as well.

”Free to join,” “Work at home,” “Earn a second paycheck,” “Build Residual Income,” “Free training/support,” “Earn money online,” “Residual income opportunity,” “No obligations to join,” “Home business,” “Real Internet Income.”

I hope this information is helpful? Good luck in your marketing efforts.

How Best to Set up SEO on Your Website

 My first thought here is to ask “why don’t you leave such a technical matter to professionals?” Search Engine Optimization, SEO is a highly technical matter which Webmasters can best handle. If however as an affiliate in SFI you want to delve into SEO yourself, make sure you use words and phrases on your site which Search Engines are looking for based on your site tags. The higher the SEO, the more visible your site becomes on the web in the “eyes” of Search Engines. Of course you know that the more “visible” your site is, the higher the number of “hits” to your site. The higher the number of hits, the higher the probability of conversions, sales or even PSAs recruitment! 


 
You may also do the following to increase your SEO.

1. Have a regularly-updated and useful blog on your site.
2. Use words and phrases in your blog which are relevant to your site tags.
3. Participate in popular forums with very good “comments” linked to your blog.
4. Post articles in highly-ranked and very popular Articles Directories and linked to your blog.
5. Submit your site URL to popular Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and many others for “indexing.”
6. Have a business page for your site in social media sites like facebook and link it to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

These are a few things I can remember now on how to optimize your site but please talk to Webmasters who are experts in the field as I am no expert in the field myself.

I hope this answers your question. Good luck in your SEO.