Best Ways to Boost Your Affiliate Commissions

No doubt everyone is in affiliate marketing to make money online. This money is made by way of affiliate commissions due to each affiliate from their individual promotional efforts that lead to sales. Affiliate marketing operates on performance based business model. For any affiliate to earn more in commissions, such affiliate must make more efforts to promote products. Each affiliate can boost their commissions when they do the following well enough.

 
Use the Right Marketing Tools

Without the right marketing tools, it is difficult to be successful in the ever-competitive world of affiliate marketing. You need these tools to save time, work smarter and to receive affiliate commissions accurately and quickly. If you are really keen on increasing your affiliate marketing commissions, you’ll need to discover and use solutions like smart tools and techniques that can help you to be more productive. Exactly why most successful affiliate marketers use specific tools and resources that allow them to reduce their efforts, work smarter and increase their affiliate marketing commissions.

Understand Your Audience

It is when you understand your audience you’ll know the right ads that can resonate with them. Online studies indicate that people don’t hate ads for the sake of it. Many simply despise bad and irrelevant ads. In marketing, irrelevance is one major aspect of bad publicity. When ads are not relevant to what you are selling, they don’t stand much chance of helping your sales. When you understand your audience well enough, it is then you can adequately serve them the sort of content that is not likely to confuse them, annoy them or make them lose interest very quickly in the content. If your audience has no interest in what you are selling, it is always pretty difficult to sell to such audience. You can boost your commissions in affiliate marketing if you routinely promote only items that meet the immediate needs and wants of your audience. You can do that successfully only if you understand your audience well enough.

Promote Products on Social Media Platforms

These days, social media is where nearly everyone else is doing one thing or another by way of social interactions. Presently, there are about 4.65 billion active users of social media worldwide. Now that’s one huge market out there! In marketing, smart marketers always go where the customers can be found. Once you get your business on social media, you have unlimited access to this very huge market worldwide. Once you choose the social media platforms that represent the best connection between the products you promote and your target audience, you can make more connections, more leads and conversions that can help boost your affiliate commission.

Always Look for New Offers

Marketing new offers in affiliate marketing can help boost your affiliate commission before other marketers wise up to it. If you are the first to introduce new tools and exclusive offers, you make the money first. So, always try to look out for new offers by looking through the control panels of affiliate networks like Strong Future International, SFI. If however you are using ShareASale for instance, you can view your “power rank” to find new affiliate products to promote. If a product is in the Power Rank, it simply means it is already generating huge sales. That is the kind of product to sell more of to boost your affiliate commissions.

Use a Variety of Ads

Even if created by yourself or supplied by product merchants or affiliate programs, you need to use a variety of good ads you can choose and deploy as you please. You can change them often and try different versions to see which ones work best for your customers. It takes quite some experimentation really and you need to constantly rotate the ads to get more attention. Whatever ads you choose to use should be suitable to use on your website, social media channels, and email. The ads that get the best results are the most suitable to use. It is such ads that help to boost your affiliate commissions. 

Create a Trusted Brand

Creating a trusted brand usually takes a bit of time and diligence but if done right, it helps to boost your affiliate commissions. Endeavor to create a transparent brand from scratch. The type of brand that instills trust and provides what the visitor needs, irrespective of the product you are marketing. Be sure to directly project your brand authority and honesty to a keen online audience. This is hugely important because most people tend to trust brands that are honest, transparent and consistent. If you make meeting these conditions a priority, it pays off on the long run with enhanced affiliate commissions.

Work with Bloggers and Influencers

If you can locate reputable bloggers or social media influencers in your niche who interact with your ideal buyer on a regular basis, you can consider working with them. Bloggers and influencers will help out with a wider publicity of your products to their own audiences. You can even benefit from direct product recommendation from an influencer. All these can result in more traffic, more sales and more affiliate commissions for you. Bloggers and influencers can even make additional income for themselves from the traffic they send to your website. If everyone benefits, it makes everyone to get more serious with the relationship.

Have a Coupon Site

If you want to launch a new product that is not yet widely known, forming a limited-time affiliate agreement with a coupon site is smart marketing. Since your product is new in the market, giving away a few free samples for testing purposes is always a good idea. It is one good strategy to encourage some new customers to visit your website and become your brand advertisers for free.

Build a Responsive Community

If you build a responsive community, it quickly helps you to establish yourself as a trusted brand. Brand loyalty first comes from your community. Most returning visitors come from the community and having returning visitors is about the best and most cost-effective way to grow your business. Once you start an affiliate site, don’t hesitate to deploy all strategies that can help to quickly grow your community. Some of such strategies include but not limited to building a responsive email list and becoming active on many social media platforms. To build a credible email list, just install a plugin on your site and create a simple form that allows you to collect the email addresses of all visitors who sign up to get your token offer. If you get popular on your social media handles, it helps to expand your ads network through your following. That ultimately results in getting on-demand traffic to your website. Good traffic leads to more clicks on your affiliate links and ultimately more sales and more affiliate commissions.

Optimize Your Product Pages for Conversions

If you want to increase sales, you need to provide a positive consumer experience on your website. That means optimizing the website for that purpose. To do this, you need to improve your product pages to increase conversions. Check the use of keywords on your content, how your ads and CTAs are placed, page loading speed, mobile friendliness, page aesthetics, graphics and color usage on the page as well as all other optimization techniques that can help enhance visitors experience on your website. When the consumer experience on your website is good, it generates leads and converts better. That ultimately helps to boost your affiliate commissions from more sales.

Offer Bonuses and Incentives

This is a given. You do better business when you offer good business incentives. Some of such incentives can be bonuses, discount coupons and so on. If consumers feel better treated by your incentives, they will appreciate your honesty and won’t mind doing more business with you. As an affiliate marketer, it is smart marketing to always provide an incentive for people to click your affiliate link. This is somehow a fantastic strategy that can turn out to improve your affiliate sales and distinctly set you apart from other affiliates in your business niche. That means more sales and enhanced affiliate commissions.

Post How-To Articles as Tutorials

Most people always go online for a reason. The search for information is about the most paramount reason why people go online. If you know a skill and can adequately teach it through high quality and informative articles, you attract people looking for that type of information or skill. Most internet users know that online articles/tutorials are a popular technique for quickly acquiring information and new skills. Such people often go in search of how-to articles or videos. You can deliberately write articles to teach your target audience a skill that requires them to use the product you are promoting. You can also write articles to instruct product users on how to in a step-by-step way use the product you are promoting. Such articles generate interest better, attract traffic and boost sales and affiliate commissions.

10 Strong Online Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Business

With a strong online marketing strategy, you can reach many more customers and consequently increase your sales. The reason expert marketers never fail to recommend to online business owners to have a strong online marketing strategy. This is because they know from their own experiences that online marketing strategies do help many online businesses in their strategic marketing efforts. You too can apply these strategies in your own business and watch the results you get. You can effectively use these here strategies to get more customers and to retain the existing ones. 

1.  Start a Blog

A blog is readily the most popular content marketing strategy available to marketers. If you take to blogging to market your products, you can deploy your blog to many uses. A blog for instance allows you to post new keywords and optimize your search engine strategy from time to time. Through your blog, you can directly offer advice, share information and easily connect with your customers. It helps to build good business relationships by first building trust with the blog readers. From there, you can generate leads and even customers with time. If you want to build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with your blog readers therefore, start a blog. Lasting relationships start with trust and a blog can help you to build this trust.

2. Market with Affiliate Programs

It is smart marketing to get as many eyes as possible to see the products you are marketing online. Affiliate marketing comes in very handy to attract these eyes. In affiliate marketing, you can partner with people who believe in your business to help share information about the business. That way, many more people get to notice your business and you can increase traffic to your website as a result. Affiliate business partnership is simple to operate. When affiliates send traffic to your website, you pay them commissions for every visitor they bring to your website as well as any sales made as a result of the affiliates’ efforts. Affiliate marketing is very effective and can directly help to improve your online marketing efforts without needing you to do a lot yourself.

3. Take SEO Seriously

You must take your search engine marketing seriously because a strong SEO strategy can improve your site’s ranking and increase the chances of your site being associated with the keywords you use on your website. SEO helps your ranking in the SERPs of search engines. A high ranking on these SERPs translates to good organic traffic to your website since the ranking makes it more likely for people to choose your business over your competitors.

4. Deploy Email Marketing

Technically, for any online businesses, email marketing is not just about sending out emails. It is much more than that. For effective and efficient emails, you must look for ways to ensure that you cater for the needs of every individual you are sending emails to. It is therefore hugely important to carefully consider and segment your email lists to meet the recipients’ needs in a personalized manner. If you factor in the shopping characteristics and purchasing habits of your customers, you can use the vital information to develop an effective email marketing strategy. 

5. Get Your Business into News Stories and Articles
 
This is one great way to bring your business to the attention of many eyes on the web. If you cannot do it yourself, it is advisable to work with good public relations professionals to get your business into news stories and articles on topics related to what your business offers. If properly handled, it can help to establish you as a trusted expert and consequently make more people know about your business. You may choose to sign up for free online services that specialize in connecting businesses with writers looking for some information about your industry.
 
6. Write Informative Online Press Releases

This is yet another great way to get more eyes to see your business online. If you write online press releases about your business, it will help you get out very valuable information about your business out there in a formal setting. Through such press releases, blogs, newspapers or other media sources will get to see your information. These sources could rely on your information to write about your business/industry without you having to put a lot of effort to connect and claim a story.

7. Hold Regular Contests and Giveaways

Contests and giveaways are very powerful incentives to attract customers. Regularly holding contests and giveaways can be one of the most cost-effective ways to increase sales for your business. This is because most people love contests and giveaways since they provide good opportunities for them to get some freebies and discounted products. Characteristically, whenever a business encourages promotion from customers in exchange for a free product/service, it usually leads to a remarkable increase in sales and connections.

8. Build a Credible Opt-In Email List

You can easily build a credible opt-in email list through promotions and giveaways as incentives. Customers usually sign up on such lists to get email correspondence about promos, giveaways, discounts and suchlike incentives. The list helps you to better connect with potential customers and existing ones and you do better business as a result.

 
9. Engage a Consultant/Coach

No matter how good you are in internet marketing, you can still use some advice to do better. That is when consultants/coaches with proven track records become handy. Even if you are not that good in digital and internet marketing, you can still succeed in online marketing with such help. On the internet, you can find internet marketing and paid marketing consultants that can help you out. Many of these people are real professionals with good track records in their trade. You can rely on their advice to do most of the things you need to do to succeed in online marketing much better. Their advice can be hugely helpful, especially for small business owners who need to focus more on their core business for business growth.

10. Take Your Web Design Seriously

Your business website is your window to the wide world of internet business. That makes the design of the website of paramount importance for you to attract customers and make sales. In internet business, a great web design is one proven and effective marketing strategy. This is because the design of your website directly determines the amount of attention and time a web visitor will spend on the web page. Since your website is central to all your digital marketing efforts, make sure that it is well designed, well optimized, neat, easy to read and with good aesthetics to make it eye-catching and attractive. So, if you do not give the design of your website the seriousness it deserves, you may end up losing customers you would ordinarily have easily attracted to the site. Even if you don’t have the requisite skills to design a good website, you can hire the services of a professional webmaster to help you out. A good website designer will deploy his skills to help make your website attractive, fast-loading, modern and mobile-friendly. That way, the website will become quite effective and useful to help you attract more visitors to the site.

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.

Tips to Help Boost Your Small Business Online

If you are marketing your small business online, boosting the business must always be a major concern to you. Just relax, there are a few things you can do to help boost your small business online. What you really needs is to diligently explore any and every available avenue to help your business stay strong while you stay connected to your customers. Here are some things you can do to achieve that aim.

Leverage Digital Marketing

Nearly everyone is now on social media doing one thing or another. The reason social media has become a real fertile ground for digital marketing. With over 60% of consumers now admitting they shop online, marketing to them where they shop is a very smart marketing idea to grow your small business. Through digital marketing, you can get to meet customers where they are by posting and advertising on powerful digital platforms. You can create and market with your own website, through social media and through email campaigns to make contacts with customers and prospective customers, get leads and grow your small business. That is a great way to leverage digital marketing for the benefit of your small business.

Know Your Customers, KYC

For effective marketing campaigns, you must take conscious steps to get to know your customers well enough. You can through surveys directly ask your customers, prospective customers and the general public for their opinions about your products/services and to find out what they want and how they want it served. That way, you can be guided to craft great marketing messages that bring in sales, leads and customers. If you find personal surveys herculean, you can use free or low-cost online tools to help you out. A low-cost Customer Relationship Management, CRM tool is a very effective tool to help you stay connected with your customers.

Source for Cheap Funding

Better funding for your business helps to fuel growth. You can actively source business grants and cheap loans to grow your business. In advanced economies, such money is always available for small businesses, provided you look in the right places. If you do, you can get grants, loans and awards to help your small business grow. Simple online search for “small business grants” may help you to get funding for your business. In the United States for instance, Small Business Administration, SBA and U.S. Chamber of Commerce are great sources to check out for small business funding.

Support Your Community

As the cliché goes, “if your business supports your community, the community supports your business.” It pays to be visible and to be a good and caring neighbor. You can stay engaged with your community by embarking on periodic community service assignments such as sponsoring local sports activities, free medical outreaches, boot camps for youths and such like community services. Through these activities, your business gets better exposed in your local community and it thus gets better patronage in reciprocation. This approach also helps you to foster stronger relationships within the community as a veritable means of survival and growth for your small business.

Digital Marketing Tips to Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is absolutely critical to the success of any digital marketing strategy. Because content is typically focused on the conceptualization, publication and distribution of content for a targeted online audience, it is an indispensable strategy to the success of your online marketing efforts. By strategically publishing quality content that is unique to your business, you can enhance your social media marketing, elevate your SEO and establish long-term relationships with your target audience. Content marketing enables businesses to increase brand awareness and credibility, sustain brand loyalty, generate online sales, and grow their online community of engaged and responsive customers. Boosting your content marketing strategy therefore becomes synonymous to boosting your entire business.

These here digital marketing tips will help to boost your content marketing strategy that can significantly trigger the type of positive customer actions that generate traffic, leads, and sales/revenues for your business.

Directly Engage Your Target Audience

Content is considered good when it has the quality and strength to reach your target audience. If your content isn’t visible, easily accessible or is reaching the wrong audience, it won’t produce good results for your business. For this reason, it is essential that you must first clearly identify your target audience and then strategically implement content that will interest them, leading to meaningful interactions. The direct result of such engagement is usually increased traffic, leads, and sales/revenue. That means direct engagement with your target audience is critical to transforming your customer reach into actual conversions, developing long-term relationships with potential and existing customers. It creates the all-important opportunities for your customers to continue learning about and purchasing products/services as well. When you directly engage your customers, your business benefits from positive customer experiences, strong brand loyalty/recognition, and above all, you get very valuable customers to the bargain.

Take Advantage of Your Evergreen Content

Because of its relevance, it is advisable to always take advantage of your evergreen content in your content marketing efforts. For many marketers, to have a content that remains visible and relevant over the long term is a constant struggle. To create evergreen content that is not expected to expire over the short term, marketers must be sure to always create the type of content that is topical and relatable, and will continually engage and attract users over the long term. News reports, statistical trends and seasonal/trending topics certainly cannot be part of such content. Most marketers regard evergreen content as a critical success factor in their content marketing strategies. This is more so when they hugely depend on it to drive more traffic, lower content maintenance costs and sustain high SEO ranking. Evergreen content can be repeated shared multi-channel including social media platforms over the long term. Smart marketers never fail to take good advantage it.

Make Copywriting the Foundation of Your Content

What exactly do copywriters do? They essentially write content for the main purpose of advertising, promotion, campaigns and any other marketing-related activities. Such content is written specifically to establish a recognizable brand image, increase brand awareness and ultimately persuade existing and potential customers to take a particular action, such as a purchase or subscription. Good copywriting helps marketers to easily convey their business visions and message in an engaging, memorable, and interesting way. The reason marketers rely on it to form the real foundation of the many content types they like to engage with, be they video scripts, infographics, blog posts and articles or mailing lists. Exactly why it is really crucial that copywriting content pieces must be easily readable, easy to understand, attention-grabbing, relevant and topical to encourage customers to act upon any such content a marketer publishes.

Boost Response with Call-To-Action, CTA

Good content must ideally be presented in an interactive and conversational tone as against a passive way of relaying of information. A CTA not only speaks to your audiences directly but actively encourages them to act upon the content you are making available to them. Marketers rely on CTA to help them prompt a positive response, interaction or sale from a customer. If well crafted, an effective CTA must use specific words or phrases that clearly establish a brand’s image and purpose. It can be incorporated into sales scripts, advertisements, promos, social media platforms and webpages to enhance its effectiveness. An effective CTA with the right words/phrases encourages prospective and existing customers to act immediately and in a specific way that is beneficial to the business.

Boost Connections with Blogging

Blogging is readily the most popular way of marketing content among marketers. A blog is a website/webpage which is updated regularly with informative and educational information. As a marketing strategy, businesses frequently use blogs to reach out and connect with their target audiences. Blogging is one great and hugely effective way businesses market to prospective and customers on a more personal and intimate basis. Blogs can be effectively used to advertise and promote products/services, build brand awareness, generate leads, encourage sales and establish a distinctive and recognizable brand image. Smart marketers can use even a single blog to serve all these purposes. It is possible for instance for a marketer to write a blog post that provides instructions on how to use a product/service, insert clickable links on the content allowing customers to immediately make a purchase or search for more information to help their buy decisions.

Take Advantage of CMS, Content Management Systems

It can be very tasking for business owners to manage a website alongside running a business. Content Management Systems, CMS, obtainable online do provide a way around such challenges. Business owners can depend on CMS to manage the conceptualization, modification and publication of their online content and with very good results to boot. With a CMS in place, it becomes easier for business owners to manage their content on various digital platforms even if they don’t have specialized or advanced technical knowledge/skills. You can therefore take great advantage of CMS to provide the interface you really need to build and run a website without writing the code from scratch. What this means is that basic infrastructural functions such as generating webpages and embedding images are handled efficiently by the CMS. That frees up a lot of time and resources for the business owner to better focus on the visible aspects of his platform instead. By doing so, a business owner can invest more valuable time into actual marketing strategies as a viable way to build his brand instead of merely running his website.

How to Boost Your E-Commerce Site's Conversion Rates

If your e-commerce site is getting good traffic but is not converting well enough, you have a marketing problem on your hands. What that means is that out of the two ways of generating sales with an e-commerce site, one is doing poorly. Since the traffic your website receives is satisfactory, your focus should be on how to increase the conversion rate of the existing traffic. That requires some marketing skills if you want to get more sales from your existing traffic. 

These tips will help you with the skills to increase your site’s conversion rate.

Make Your Product Pages User Friendly

Online surfers are always notoriously in haste. Your best chance of making a conversion when they hit your website lies in the fleeting seconds they spend on the site. That comes about if you are able to hold their attention a little bit longer on your product page for them to take positive actions. To enhance that, you must think and put yourself in the shoes of your website visitors. That is, if you are a shopper yourself what holds your attention in a product page? Take into account the things you look for when you shop online and be sure to have those things in your product page. Because a product page is usually the last stop of online shoppers before a purchase is made, make sure yours has very high quality description text and high quality original photos that present your product in a very appealing way. You can throw in any other aesthetics that clearly differentiates your site from your competitors’ sites. If you splash in fair and competitive prices as well as good shipping policies, the conversion abilities of your website will be greatly enhanced.

Make your Website’s User Experience Great

Your e-commerce website converts well if it is usable and user-friendly. You must make it a priority to spruce up your website well enough to ensure it provides a great and memorable user experience. Make sure that your site is doing everything right from a technical standpoint. Just tick off the technical expectations of your website and be sure that they do not only do what they are meant to do, they do these things very well and fast enough. Here are some technical things you must check off right.
1. Good website design and hosting.
2. Website security.
3. Website aesthetics and general appeal.
4. Loading speed.
5. Mobile-friendliness.
6. Navigation.
7. Check out process.
8. Available payment options.
9. Communication/feedback and CTA buttons.
10. Customer support.
It is not advisable to depend solely on conversion rates to determine whether your site is providing a good user experience or not. Collect and study the data of your visitor metrics. You can get great insights from there about user experience. If your site has a high bounce rate or the average visit duration is too short, it is a pointer that something is wrong with the user experience your site is providing. In that case, you can go through and spruce up the above technical details once more.

Build a Mailing List in Your Digital Marketing Strategy

If you blog for business as is expected, you may get good traffic but if this traffic is not converting well, you cannot make good sales. Your blog merely provides good informational content to attract all sorts of visitors but it is the commercial content which your product page provides that helps conversion more. What that means is that technically, your blog and your product pages are ranked by search engines for different search terms. That poses some technical challenges no doubt because you must have to isolate and market to people who are interested in buying products. Using your mailing list to send marketing messages by email helps that process a great deal. If you manage to stay in the minds of people who may buy your products through effective use of emails, you make better sales from that effort. However, for best results, your email marketing messages must be direct and professional to avoid being spammy. A good mailing list takes time and efforts to build but it is a very valuable marketing asset to marketers when in place. If you build one in your marketing strategy, your website will convert more. To build a credible mailing list, you can get your website users to voluntarily leave their contact email addresses with you in exchange for some value you are offering. Such values include eBooks, Discount coupons, Gift cards, Quiz draws, Token gifts, Newsletters, Research findings, Poll results and so on.

5 Digital Marketing Tips to Boost Your Online Business

Digital marketing is gradually becoming a top choice method to sell products/services online. With the huge depth of the internet, getting noticed out there is always a very tough challenge for marketers. Nevertheless, with a good digital marketing strategy and the right techniques, marketers do get some traction to sell their products/services. Every digital marketer needs the right mindset and skills to do well on the internet. With effective digital marketing, it is much easier and convenient for marketers to sell around the world 24/7.

  
 
If you market online, these here, five simple digital marketing tips can help boost your business.

1. Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

Google reports indicate that over 60% of searches are now attributable to mobile devices. Now, that’s a huge chunk of search data which marketers should not neglect to take advantage of. Optimizing your website for mobile devices becomes very essential. With that, your website and ads can load well and look great on mobile devices particularly smart phones. These days fewer people are looking for stuff through computers. Many are browsing with smart phones and doing business on the go. Optimizing your website for mobile devices puts the site in the range for these devices to pick up easily.

2. Promote with the Right Social Media Platforms

Yes, there are quite a lot of social media platforms out there and some are hugely popular. Some new ones are emerging too with each offering something good for marketers but in various degrees. Some now have in-house analytics tools to help marketers build strategies and monitor their ads campaigns. What matters most on these channels is who exactly are you targeting? That is what determines which channels to promote on. For instance, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are very popular platforms with young people. But, you’ll find serious-minded business persons and adults on Twitter and LinkedIn.

3. Construct Your Ideal Buyer Persona

As a marketer, you cannot sell well if you don’t know who you are selling to. No one markets successfully in the dark. The reason you must construct your own buyer persona. You must put down the concise profile of your ideal customer that takes into account age, gender, education, hobbies, interests or any other stuff that stands them out. With this information, you can decide what to post on social media by specially designing ads and promos to suit your ideal buyer persona. You get very good results from such efforts.

4. Focus on Customer Retention

Expert marketers say, it is better and cheaper to retain a customer than to source for a new one. The reason appears rather obvious. Once someone buys your products, the fact that the person is interested in what you are selling is no longer in doubt. A good marketer must latch on to that fact with follow-up emails to entice repeat buying. Sending info about new products, reviewed prices and promos helps to nurture that relationship enabling your customers to buy more products through repeat purchases.

5. Market with Influencers

Now that paid ads appear to be a dozen a dime on the internet, many buyers no longer respond favorably to paid ads. Marketers then need to be more ingenious. That is where influencers come into the mix. Influencers are very popular social media personalities with huge following. Many buyers make their buy decisions because of the recommendations or endorsements of influencers. You can pay influencers commissions as affiliates or you collaborate with them on agreed terms to market directly to their huge following based on their endorsements.

How to Use Automation to Boost Your Online Marketing Business

Experienced online marketers make money by embarking on such marketing activities that help to keep costs low and revenues high. Marketing automation tools are extremely essential in the task of achieving such marketing objectives. To hone their marketing strategies and increase efficiencies, online business owners are increasingly leveraging automation and reducing human intervention to manage routine daily tasks. Marketers now rely on automation to restructure the digital marketing activities that help them to nurture leads, sales and business communication messages. Automation also helps to reduce the tendency of task repetition and delayed timelines. These technologies help marketers to achieve high ROI by simply integrating data and processes that automate marketing tasks. That comes about through high operational efficiency that allows businesses to manage effectively and efficiently, multiple marketing channels with automated tasks.

Find below, some of the benefits digital marketers derive from automation that help boost their businesses in a great way.
 
Effectiveness in Spending

Every responsible businessperson always keeps a keen eye on costs. Personnel maintenance cost is always a major cost element for most businesses. When automation replaces human tasks, the spending on human resources is relatively less. That helps to free up resources for other business activities that help the overall increase in the ROI for the business.
 
Generating and Nurturing Leads

Generating leads and sales are crucial to the survival of any marketing business. Automation helps marketers to better focus on strategies for nurturing leads and customer acquisition. By using effective marketing automation tools, marketers can get great insights into customer behavior and their purchase journey. That vital information is essential for marketers to redesign or tweak their marketing strategies for better results. With these insights, they can customize follow-ups with customers in a more personalized and engaging manner.

Refining Marketing Strategies

Automation gives marketers ample time and information to enable them analyze better, customer behavior and their purchase journey. With that, they can evolve more strategies that better help and enhance customer experience. They can in addition create more personalized content to reach out better to potential customers, process and nurture the leads.

Integrating Marketing Strategies

Automation helps marketers to integrate and execute marketing campaigns better. Marketers rely on automation to handle mundane and repetitive tasks by eliminating repetition through template-based workflows and integration of marketing channels onto a centralized platform. In doing so, marketers save valuable time and resources while still getting very good results from their marketing activities.  When marketers integrate their marketing activities into dedicated platforms for social media marketing, email marketing, and data analytics, the results are great.

Improving Time Efficiency

Time as a vital resource is very crucial to the success of many businesses. For that reason, by leveraging automation tools, marketers can indeed handle better, activities that help to expedite time-consuming tasks. Doing so helps marketers to free up valuable time for other vital business tasks that require direct human intervention. With more time available to them, marketers can be more innovative, focus better on important tasks and be more result-oriented in managing their businesses.

Highly Economic Ways to Boost Conversions

Most online businesses are always looking for ways to increase their conversion rates. For such businesses, affiliate marketing always comes in very handy because of its unique qualities of helping to boost conversion rates. It is economical too and advert budget friendly because it delivers effectively on a pay-per-performance model. What that means is that merchants pay commissions to affiliates only on the basis of the conversions they help to garner. That appears fair enough on the surface but merchants still have to experiment with different affiliate partnerships and sales strategies until they find the one that works best for them. That requires some unique strategies to get right.  When merchants manage to get that right, they can then expect a remarkable boost in conversions and ultimately business revenue figures.


 
Here are some strategic effects which help to enhance the process.

Effects of Someone Your Consumer Trusts

This comes into effect by simply targeting people your consumers can trust and bringing them on board your referral marketing chain. In this regard, bloggers and social media influencers are particularly effective because they already have a large following of persons who trust and rely on their recommendations to make a purchase decision.  These people are very effective at helping to grab conversions from their loyal and dedicated fans/followers on the basis of the relationship they’ve established which subsists on trust. To get the desired results, you must as a matter of deliberate policy try to build very strong relationships with your affiliates, be on the lookout always for affiliates who really like your product/service, are trustworthy and have a full engagement of a large following. Such affiliates help a great deal to boost conversion rates at very cheap costs.

Effects of Hyper-Targeting

In modern day online marketing, you get better results when your ads are specially designed to appeal to a very specific group of people. That is hyper-targeting. As a remarkable improvement over traditional marketing methods, marketers are now able to focus on a very specific demographic, down to age, gender, location, education, and even brand preference. The results of such hyper-targeting could be very impressive. When you introduce affiliate marketing in the mix, it not only allows you to control what message is sent about your brand, but also who sends it and to whom. That makes it imperative for you to work with affiliate partners who are closely aligned with your target audience. Doing so enables you to deliver at all times, a clear and powerful message to your consumers from someone they trust.  That is what helps to get the best results which reveal this method as a very effective strategy for boosting conversions. However, for it work satisfactorily, it is advisable that you know very well your target consumer at the outset. Research deep to find out your consumer’s core values as well as where and how they spend their time online using the right online tools which enable you to make changes in your marketing strategy as necessary.

Effects of Bolstering Valuable Content
 
Online marketers have since found out that one great benefit of affiliate marketing is that it contributes immensely to your presence on the internet and, ultimately, your search engine rankings. Influencers, bloggers and publishers who routinely write highly informational and educative posts about your products/services work in anticipation of Google’s need for user-friendly content that serves a useful purpose to the reader. When Google likes your content, it ranks it high on its SERPs. That gets it better noticed for greater readership and ultimate conversions. To be so favoured by search engines, affiliates must habitually write good content that people like to read. Such content must be SEO compliant for better rankings and merchants must regularly frontload their affiliates with vital and current information about their products/services.

Effects of Leveraging Special Promotions
 
Affiliate marketing can help grow your conversion rate by helping to attract new and repeat customers through special promotions. Most online shoppers depend on someone they trust to take most of their buy decisions. In that category are influencers, bloggers and publishers whom the buyers trust and are already following. Even if buyers are hesitant to commit on account of price or some other impediment, a recommendation from influencers or bloggers helps that process along for them to commit to buying. Special promotions which come highly recommended by these online influencers help boost conversions for the business.

Promo codes, discounts, deals and sales on their own may help grow conversion rates but without a good reach, their effects are severely limited. It is influencers and bloggers who help to provide this much needed reach and eventual boost in conversions. So, when merchants combine affiliate marketing with special promotions, they manage to get their promo deals in front of many more people as a result. That helps them to pick up more conversions from both brand-new and repeat customers. For this to work effectively, merchants must always look out for the best ways to regularly offer exclusive deals and discounts using affiliates special promo codes and partnering with such affiliates for freebies and giveaways.

Effects of Building Your Backlinks

Google maintains that, “having other sites link back to your site is like a vote for the quality of your site.” That appears to be why Google uses the number and quality of backlinks to a website as part of its ranking considerations. If your site has high-quality influencers/publishers linking back to it, Google is more likely to rank it higher on its SERPs. That alone can help in a great way to boost conversion rates for your site. Even though backlinks can help merchants rank higher on Google’s SERP, it is possible only if they’re done in precisely the right way. Expert Marketers advise adequate care when building backlinks to avoid “spamming” which Search Engines routinely and mercilessly penalize. For this reason, merchants must not ignore suitable keyword search and usage. All their affiliates must be provided with specific anchor texts for use on their sites and cross-posting actively encouraged among the affiliates. All these help the value of backlinks, search engine rankings and a boost in conversion rates.

 

How Affiliate Marketing Helps to Boost Conversation Rates

By exploring some delicate ways to fuse some tried-and-tested sales strategies alongside some proven modern marketing methods, affiliate marketing can indeed help companies grow conversion rates exponentially. It is all about online promotional efforts effectively using affiliates to push your brand online. These affiliates are made up largely of bloggers, social media influencers and publishers whose main marketing function is to promote products/services for a merchant in exchange for a commission paid them by the merchant. Traditionally in affiliate marketing, affiliates get paid based on specific actions completed by consumers such as link clicks or subscriptions. That is why affiliates promote vigorously to get more of such direct actions from their promotional efforts. The more direct actions they generate, the more the commissions they earn. Conversion rates get boosted by way of boosted direct actions from the promotional efforts of affiliates. That is how affiliate referral programs using well-known promotional tactics with increased vigor gets to have a direct boost on conversion rates. 

In affiliate marketing, one of the biggest reasons why revenue grows for merchants is because of a spike in conversion rates. If affiliates increase their promotional efforts to get enhanced commissions, their efforts help to boost conversion rates as well for the business of the brand they are promoting. This works well when affiliate’s posts help to turn blog readers to customers thereby helping to boost the affiliate’s business as well as the business of the merchant. Direct actions from affiliates resulting in attracting readers to theirs websites do result in making such readers to make a purchase, sign up for a mailing list or perform some other desired action. These sequential actions inevitably count towards a boost in conversion rates for the business of merchants. That is if the affiliate marketing works well and desirably. Do you know how affiliate marketing works well to get expected results? What it does is to simply help to connect your product/service with its intended consumers through a channel they trust. Such trusted channels are usually bloggers, publishers and influencers with large following built largely on trust. The more of these followers/readers they manage to lure to a brand, the more commissions they earn and in turn the more they help boost conversion rates for the business whose brand they are promoting.


 

Tips to Give Your Small Business a Boost

For your small business to succeed, you must take steps to promote the products/services extensively. Even though most traditional marketing methods are expensive and may not be affordable for all type of businesses, there is a way out. That way is digital marketing which is also very effective and less expensive. Digital technology revolves very rapidly but even at that, online marketing techniques are still very effective for most types and sizes of businesses. The reason is, digital marketing techniques are more customizable and easier to track and can easily add more value to a business or brand. In today’s digital landscape, below are some tips about proven ways to market a small business online for good results.

Optimize your Website for Search Engines
 
It is like a jungle out there on the internet and the competition is very stiff. The reason you must explore technical means to ensure Search Engines notice your website. The power of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) cannot be underestimated by digital marketers as it allows a business to appear in more search engine searches with specific keyword(s). Optimization of a website entails the creative use of target keywords in titles, content, responsive design, fast loading pages, and easy to navigate web structure etc. It is a highly technical online field which you can get done with the services of experts if you do not have the knowledge and expertise to do it yourself.


 
Social Media Ads

Social media is exactly where to be right now if you are a small business owner. Nearly everyone is on social media these days. So, why not explore ways on social media to put your products/services where they can easily be found by the multitude of persons. That place is social media particularly the very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. That is where you get the most ideal marketing platforms for digital marketers as they allow for easy sharing of information and they are hugely popular to boot. It is helpful to participate/interact on these platforms and to even place cheap ads on them for astonishingly good results.

Guest Blogging

If you are very much at home with the subject matter of your type of business and you are a good content writer, guest blogging is good for your business. There are millions of bloggers and very good blog sites out there on the internet. Many of the sites are already very popular to warrant being associated with because collaboration with expert bloggers in your industry is one of the best ways to give your business a boost online. If you explore ways to reach out to them and convince them with the good content you write how your experience or knowledge can add value to their blogs, they easily take you on. Most of the very popular blogs are open for guest posts with peculiar guest posting rules and guidelines. These you can take good advantage of. If however you are unable to write good content yourself, you can contract guest blogging services from experts to help you reach your target audience by selecting the right blogs/websites to make your posts live on.

Direct Blogging

Blogging is all about content marketing. It is just finding a way to get out your knowledge and expertise which benefits others. Online marketing experts insist that creating a blog for your business website and publishing high quality, problem solving and informative content regularly on it is one of the most effective online marketing tactics to generate good results for any business. When your blog becomes very popular online, it translates to traffic and eventual sales.

Email marketing
 
These days, some marketers argue that email marketing is obsolete but they do not deny the fact that it still turns in good marketing results. Email marketing campaign is a very effective method to reach and attract target customers but first, you must build a list. When established, email list becomes a very valuable asset for your email campaigns.  It comes very handy for sending out large quantity emails with valuable content, knowledge or product offers. Feedback from these mails can give your business some valuable exposure and even sales.


 
Video Marketing

Video marketing is visual content marketing which habitually gets better traffic and results than written content marketing. You can easily create product reviews, tutorial videos and some sort of interesting video content that people want to view then get it on YouTube and even Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Getting it on YouTube is more advantageous though. YouTube is the most powerful and free video marketing platform that allows anyone to create and market promotional video content free of cost. That appeal no doubt is to every good marketer’s delight. What is most important in visual content marketing is to be mindful at all times that people always want to watch something interesting and appealing much more than just a promotional content. That is what gets the much needed traffic and sales better.

Creative Influencer Marketing Tactic: Boost a Newsletter

 Every active digital marketer knows or should know what a Newsletter is. When properly used, they are a very useful marketing tool. Marketers have since discovered that Newsletter services are an interesting (and more private) alternative to public blogging and social media. This is the real reason some influencers are using them on their own or as a supplement to their web presence. With Newsletters, promotion opportunities are similar to blogs, with branded content naturally woven into the influencer’s images and copy. That is the catch, using them to effectively get your product or service out there.

Just like public blogging, there are also many options with Newsletters. Aside from all of the options, it is very important not to be overly rigid in your marketing requirements. Influencer marketing works best when brands can be mentioned and promoted organically. This is the view of many experts in digital marketing. For real effects, it is best to establish permissions, goals and brand assets, then allow influencers to work their magic, whatever the medium. In the end, there are plenty of ways to go beyond the blog to hit your specific key performance indicators. Newsletters come in very handy as one of those very effective ways.

How to Boost Sulforaphane Content of Cauliflower

Like broccoli, cauliflower contains sulforaphane, which is easily lost through improper cooking. Boiling or blanching cauliflower causes the greatest loss of antioxidants, so your best bet appears to be steaming. Unfortunately, research has not identified ideal steaming times for cauliflower.

Moreover, research reveals different varieties of cauliflower respond differently to various levels of heat and cooking times. In one study, blanching purple cauliflower at 70 degrees C significantly increased sulforaphane content compared to 50 degrees C, while immersion time had no significant influence. In Roman cauliflower, on the other hand, both temperature and immersion time played a role. 

Research shows steaming broccoli for three to four minutes is ideal, so I'd suggest using this as a general starting guideline for cauliflower as well. You can also boost the sulforaphane content of your cauliflower (as well as broccoli and other members of the cabbage family) by eating it with a myrosinase-containing food.

Facts Credit: mercola.com