How to Generate Awesome Content for Your Blog

Great content always makes great blogging. On the part of bloggers, great content means coming up consistently with topics that are engaging and constructive. Such topics that can keep your readers devoted to your blog and grow your audience. It means always finding hot stuff for your blog that will interest if not amaze your readers. The Internet is the collected knowledge of all humankind and with it comes the best ideas that humans have ever had. The real challenge to bloggers however is to be able to tap into this potential and to find something to write about that will make some impact within this body of knowledge. Once your audience likes the content you write, you are bound to make some impact.

Even though the Internet is well equipped to give bloggers a load of information and solutions, there are times they suffer from the old writer’s block and unable to write good content. If you are a blogger, any time you find yourself in such a situation, try these here tested strategies to help you write good content.

Think, Observe and Take Notes

In whatsoever you do and wherever you go, always think content. Be observant enough as not to miss out on anything or any information that may be of help to you when creating content. For this reason, always be prepared to take copious notes and to record any information that you may need later when writing content. It helps to carry around a portable notepad and a pen/pencil to jot down any information you may find useful later as you move around your daily activities. Such notepad comes handy to record the details of any idea in case your memory fails you as it often happens. Ideas that come around this way usually flesh themselves out pretty quickly when crafting your content.

Repurpose and Repackage Old Content

Once in a while, you can single out an old content for repacking as a new content. You repurpose and repackage such content as new and it continues to pull traffic. Repurposing and repackaging is not the same thing as copying and pasting such content. That is a no no.  You can actually give a new lease of life to an old content by taking the salient points out of the old post and combining them with new ideas and good images to make a brand new content. Repurposing old content and repackaging it remains a very good strategy to generate content.

Read and Note Comments in Niche Blogs

If you are diligent enough, you can get good content from comments on your own blog and comments on other popular blogs within your blog niche. The most popular sites usually have comment storms of hundreds of comments all saying what they liked or disliked about any blog post. You can note all the comments asking for more information or clarifying information on the original post. These are treasure troves for more content. A good content is one that gives readers what to want to read. Knowing what your audience is looking for helps you to craft content to meet their needs. Comments from your blog niche readers give you a unique insight into what the readers in this particular niche care about and are talking about. From these comments, you can get new ideas and inspiration to write more effective content. Through your content, if you manage to give your readers something they probably haven’t heard about yet and are yearning to know, you’ll have them hooked on your content.

Base your Post off Other Successful Posts

Style your posts around previous posts that are doing well and pulling good traffic. These are posts that bloggers like to call evergreen blog posts. You can also target the best performing posts of the top five or more blogs you follow. Determine what makes them unique and why they’re doing well. If you are able to correctly figure that out, it becomes simple to craft a post that mimics the style and the structure of the successful post. That’s one relatively easy way to give yourself ideas for new content in a short space of time. Even if the content may not perform as well as the original, it still has a lot of potential to do well.

Experiment with Ideas

By experimenting with new ideas in your content, you can always manage to come up with new thinking and new direction in the ever evolving world of blogging. A good blogger always utilizes all information at his disposal to craft content that appeals to his audience. The more he experiments with ideas, the more he arouses this appeal. No matter how skilled you are as a blogger, you cannot maximize your skills if you are unable to experiment with ideas.

Use Content Ideas Generators

Good thinking and good observation may not be enough to give you all the blogging ideas you need. You can thus supplement your thinking with good content idea generators. Online, a content idea generator like Hubspot’s Topic Generator is a small app that allows you to input words or phrases and then randomly generate topics that may or may not be of use to you to create blog content. If you input say about two or three nouns, the app automatically generates topics that you can streamline to fit whatever blog niche you’re writing on. This app is far from being a sophisticated tool, but it saves bloggers the time they would otherwise have expended physically juggling some nouns around on a pad to make some sense.

Be Active on Social Media

Presently, nearly everyone is social media 24/7 around the world doing one thing or another. Smart bloggers are taking good advantage of the enormous audience of social media. If you are a blogger, social media links you with your audience in the most direct manner that has ever existed since the dawn of the Internet. This simply means that social media allows you to observe first-hand the things your audience is discussing with their social groups real time. This vital insight has a lot of potential for generating leads for great content creation by bloggers. By creatively using this information, you can easily craft content around the most important topics that your users have chosen to discuss on social media.

Use User Generated Content  

You can have awesome content for your blog from user-generated content. Do this by diligently following the comments from your blog audience. Observe how your blog community relates with and discusses with itself. Through this observation, you can determine what they care about then use their questions and concerns to craft great blog posts for their benefit. If you spend quality time monitoring the trend of discussions of your audience, you can easily come up with some blog topics to address their concerns. You can even play the devil’s advocate by directly posing questions to your audience to elicit responses. Based on their responses, you can then craft some riveting content to meet their needs.

Best Tips to Manage a Blog Successfully

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

Find Your Niche

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

Carefully Choose Your Platform

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

Incorporate Images

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

Give Value Consistently to Your Readers

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

Incorporate Marketing Strategies

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

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

Last Line

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

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.

6 Social Media Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Social media marketing is hugely popular with business owners. Nearly everyone actually wants their business on social media because of its popularity and ease of social media marketing activities. As a result of inexperience, many marketers tend to make avoidable mistakes when marketing on social media. Such mistakes stem from creating good content, sharing it online and engaging with social media communities. If you manage to avoid these social media marketing mistakes, your online business will do better even amidst the huge competition in digital space. 

If you are desirous to make some appreciable success in your social media marketing activities, here are six of the commonest mistakes you can do well to avoid.

1. Creating Content for Yourself

Many businesses are on social media posting only content they like not what their audience likes. That is a mistake. Content that helps to grow your business is the type of content your audience likes and appreciates. It is such content that gets them hooked up to you and your business because you are regularly giving them what they like to see and read. If you focus more on topics you are knowledgeable about and tailor your content to meet what your audience yearns for, the content serves a great marketing purpose. From your audience feedback and FAQs, it is easy to gauge what your audience wants to know. Creating content that answers questions/concerns from your audience is the best way to provide definite value for them. Such content is what helps to get good results for your business.
 
2. Random Postings

Posting content randomly is a great marketing mistake. What your business needs is consistent and regular content postings since social media algorithms tend to favor consistency in terms of both the number of posts and the type of content you regularly share. Aside from this, if your audience knows what content they expect from you, it helps them to connect better with your business.

3. Not Engaging Enough

When your social media content is not engaging enough, your audience/community cannot grow fast enough. Sporadic posting just for the sake of it never gives good results on social media. What works is what manages to get your audience engaged. You must never lose sight of the fact that social media platforms are primarily meant to cultivate useful social interactions among all shades of people. It helps brands to cultivate strong online presence. For most brands, such connections are the key to long-term relationships which generate leads and sales. Social media helps you to build a valuable audience free of cost provided you do your part to post high value engaging content regularly.
 
4. Absence of Calls-To-Action, CTAs

If you plan your content well enough and the quality manages to provide real value to your audience, it is great for your business. A follow up of such content with an appropriate CTA is great for selling your products/services. If a CTA is absent, many consumers may just read your content and move away. That is a great business opportunity lost. By placing a good CTA at the beginning or end of your content post, it tells your audience the immediate action you want them to take after reading your post. If this CTA is short, inviting and to the point, the audience acts appropriately. A good CTA helps consumers to make their buy decisions and to purchase from your business.

5. Not Editing Photos and Videos

The average human being easily gets attracted to visuals. Good products photos and how-to videos accompanying your content are good for business. With a lot of bad images out there on the internet, it is bad for business to add just about any photos/videos in your content. If you are not taking photos or shooting videos by yourself, be sure that any photos/videos you admit in your content are well edited to match your marketing message. Even if you are not a professional photographer or videographer, you can use online tools to tweak a few things up to make your marketing images/videos look much better.
 
6. Ignoring Direct Messages

If you want to connect easily with your audience on social media, never ignore Direct Messages, DMs from them. Ignoring DMs or comments from your audience is an indirect way of telling them they don’t count. And, that you don’t really care about them or whatever they have to say to you about your business. If you want to benefit well from social media marketing, you must spend quality time daily to engage with your audience, answering questions, and checking your direct messages. Sometimes, there are great questions and business opportunities you are likely to miss if you ignore DMs from your audience.

Creative Digital Marketing Campaign Tips for Small Businesses

If you run a small a small business online and you do not have creative digital marketing as an integral part of your marketing strategy, your business will struggle. To run your small business successfully online, promoting the business in the right and appropriate manner is imperative. You can only do so by using the right tools, the right techniques/tactics and in an appropriate manner. Doing business in virtual world is hugely competitive and if you don’t know what you are doing, you may actually be hurting your business if you are unable to promote it well with the right techniques and online tools. Here are some tips that can help you out.

 
Tip 1. Be knowledgeable about online marketing tools and techniques. It takes a good knowledge of online tools and methods of successful digital marketing to create an effective digital marketing. It is not all about creativity and originality that seems to occupy the thinking of most digital marketers. There is not one perfect marketing technique either. Every business owner keeps trying to do things that help him to get desired results. This is because there is no one-size-fits-all thing in digital marketing. What works for your business is what you do in your marketing campaigns. Fact is, there are literally hundreds of different marketing techniques which successful marketers have used and are still using. You can also try out such methods to see if they’ll help you get the results you want.

Tip 2. Integrate social media into your content. Incidentally, since the advent of social media, consumers now prefer to see social media integration into their content. If you are a business owner, before spending any money to develop content for your customers, do not ignore social media integration into the content. This is because social media allows you to easily reach out to a much larger audience made up of followers/friends built up over time. Viral sharing can also make that content reach friends of friends which can be in the region of hundreds of thousands of prospects within a short while. That is great for marketing. Business owners who are unable to properly leverage their content through social media usually find it extremely difficult to achieve their marketing goals. Before creating content therefore, be sure it is the type of content that can be leveraged through social media to reach a very wide audience of prospects in quick time.
 
Tip 3. Don’t rely exclusively on SEO. Relying exclusively on search engine optimization, SEO as a form of creative digital marketing is a great marketing mistake. Granted SEO is the type of strategy that can improve your website rankings and bring more traffic to the site but it is also capable of getting your potential customers bored with your site. Combining SEO with other website marketing techniques is a better option. This is because prospects come to your website mostly to learn or know about things through your content, not just to merely click on your ads.

Tip 4. Don't focus all your marketing efforts on optimizing keywords only. This approach may prove effective for some businesses but for others it may prove to be a huge waste of time. This is because search engines through their sensitive algorithms have a great habit of penalizing or even yanking off or removing websites that flout their strict rules. No matter how great your keyword/phrase is, if you use it excessively on your content, search engines will see it as “keyword stuffing” and your website can be penalized for that or even banned altogether. That can become a huge disaster for your marketing campaigns.

Tip 5. Trying to overly attract visitors to your website with pop-ups is a marketing mistake. This tactic may easily draw attention, but it is actually an ineffective way to draw visitors. You know why? Pop-ups are annoyingly and irritatingly slow and they tend to bug browsers. Worse still, search engines appear to hate pop-ups and they often penalize websites for using pop-up ads. Well-designed and natural looking ads are thus preferable. 

Tip 6. Do not create too much content for the sake of it. For content creation, quality rather than quantity is always the best option. You may want to create too much content to promote your business, but be careful. Even if you actually craft copious information about your products, it should not be at the detriment of quality. In content marketing, quality not quantity is king. Technically, if you overload your web pages with content, it reduces their relevance with the search engines. Users may thus perceive it as spam. The best way around that is to balance the amount of content you have with cleverly created SEO. SEO may be a huge factor in any marketing campaign but without some creativity and originality in the way you write and distribute your content, it cannot be of much help to boost your SEO results.

Tip 7. Make your website design simple but attractive. Avoid creating a website that looks like the next big design trend. Functionality is more preferable in website designs. Even though some businesses take advantage of the latest graphics software to create websites that may appear over the top in style, these sites may be functionally poor. All you need is a simple but functional website since prospects that happen on your website are there for information not entertainment. They naturally expect to find a site that is easy for them to navigate and use.

Tip 8. Creative digital marketing requires that you test your ideas before launching them. The best way to test an idea is to launch a short version of it and gauge your response. If it doesn't convert well enough, then you know that it needs more work on it to make it better. If however it converts well, you can determine whether or not you were able to tweak it properly. If your ideas don’t get tested well enough, it is difficult to determine what will work and what won’t. Being creative and implementing digital media correctly can earn good results but it takes time for tests to be carried out and perfected.

Top Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

If you are a small business owner and you market online, you need content marketing tactics to help your business build a strong online presence and to attract customers. Content marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies that help to bring that about. Small business owners do not just need to write good quality, educational and informative content, they must widely promote it multi-channel on the web to make it effective. These here tips can help small business owners to write and promote the right content that gets results.

 
Know your Audience

You must know your audience well enough to be able to write and promote to them the kind of content that will make impact on them. If you want your content marketing strategy to help your business, be sure you know your audience well enough. First, you must build an ideal customer persona that you are trying to reach with your content/promos. Next is to identify where this ideal customer can be located, the salient demographics, shopping patterns, order sizes, expense sizes, and how you can put your business before them. Next is to figure out how to best target this audience cost-effectively to get good results. With this information, you can better curate each of your advertisement or piece of content to have maximum impact on your audience.

Be Active on Social Media

Lately, for many small business owners, social media has become a very important and dependable tool for their digital marketing activities. Through social media, business owners can build a very valuable community of friends/followers which they can segment for effective marketing purposes. Sharing info on social media is easy and a good piece of content can easily go viral to the overall benefit of your marketing efforts. You can only get the best results from social media if you are active on it. What this means is that opening a social media account and having your profile on it cannot help your business much. You must stay active and engage your community to get good results. Answer comments and messages, and create content that encourages your audience to join in the conversation. This you can do by regularly posting quality content in form of photos, videos, blog posts, infographics etc on the most popular platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and others. You must however observe their community rules fully if you want to get the very best from these platforms. 

 
Hire a Marketing Agency

Allowing a professional digital marketing agency to handle some of the marketing activities of your business can free up quality time for you to manage the business properly. Such agencies don’t only have the experience; they also have the resilience to run things in the long term to get the best results. They usually deploy a variety of skill sets and strategies to put your business out there in the minds of prospective customers and customers. If you have the knowledge and skills, you may be able to handle some digital marketing tactics in-house yourself. But, many of these tactics could be more effective when carried out by an agency with specialized knowledge and skill-sets backed by experience. When compared with the results your business will get, the fees you pay the agency can be well worth the while in the long term.

Word of caution: Deal only with agencies that have verifiable case studies, reviews, and testimonials to back them up and they come highly recommended by businesses/persons they’ve worked with in the past.

Diligently Track your Leads

Good online analytics tools can help you with leads tracking if you want to optimize your digital marketing strategies. With these tools, you can easily chart where your leads are coming from and which marketing channels are worth investing more of your time and resources. With diligent leads tracking, you can determine which strategy is delivering the best results and through which channel. You will also know which leads are converting better to customers and which customers are doing more business with you. This info helps you to periodically reassess what you are doing, continue with what is good, rejig certain things or discard others completely.

How Content Strategy Influences Your Internet Marketing Business

Content strategy is your ability to create unique and engaging content and effectively promote it to your audience through various web and social media channels to grow your internet marketing business. In digital marketing terms, content includes written text, images/graphics, video, sound, and even links. Digital marketers deliberately create good content for the sole purpose of reaching out to their audience to deliver something of value to them. That something of value is expected to encourage the audience to take some desired action. If well crafted, good content should be clear, easy to read/watch/use, educational, compelling, informative, and even entertaining. 

If you are a business owner, content marketing is hugely important to the success of your marketing campaigns. You need it to promote your image and grow your brand reputation. To achieve this, you must decide on a specific content at the outset of your marketing campaigns. It is important to develop a detailed plan for it early on. That will enable you to set clear goals and milestones for your content strategy project. Measuring your progress alongside these set goals enables you to determine how much progress your business is making as your marketing campaigns progress.

For your content strategy to deliver good results, it requires creativity and originality. It takes diligence and thoroughly researched information to write unique and engaging content that gets results. Next is to organize and optimize the content for search engine rankings through which it gets organic traffic that benefits your business. As a business owner, if you habitually craft content articles that are relevant to your target audience, they read well, and are well written in a way that compellingly engages readers; you get some of the best results that help to grow your online business.

Granted, content marketing may not be entirely about engaging readers alone. There is much more to it. Smart marketers can use good content to establish and maintain positive relationships and also provide reliable feedback to their audience. For this reason, marketers must always be very sensitive to the concerns of their customers, what they say and what content they are responding to. Because it is very important to stay connected with your audience as a direct benefit to your business, you cannot afford to ignore audience feedback. This feedback gives you the all-important opportunity to regularly fine-tune your marketing strategies with a view to engaging better through web multi-channel including social media platforms. If you do so, your business benefits from more attention, more traffic and more clicks.

Getting your content on social media hugely benefits your business. Social media allows unfettered and mutually beneficial interactions between businesses and their audiences/customers/followers. Through that, businesses get to know not only their audiences but also those who are outside of their target demographic. When content marketers connect with followers on social media, they can develop meaningful relationships that translate into increased patronage and sales. You can use social media platforms to gauge how satisfied your customers are with the products/services your business is offering. If you allow your content strategy to effectively serve as your online sales tool, your business benefits from pulling in more sales from social media.

Businesses can also use social media effectively to build or grow their brands through engagements. Social media engagement is one of the most important components of a content strategy. It makes available to marketers veritable platforms to interact and work with friends/followers. This allows marketers to get the most from their content marketing efforts while simultaneously exposing the content to potential customers who also use and regularly visit the social media platforms. That helps to build your brand by way of viral effects.

Your content strategy can only be successful if you know your customers well enough. If you do, you can easily determine what content they want and how best to deliver it to them and through what marketing channels to deliver it to make it appeal to them. If marketers know their customers well enough, they can craft good content that is both compelling and informative and promote it multi-media and multi-channel online. That is what makes it effective. If it is effective enough, it helps online businesses to attract web traffic, build their brands, get leads, make more sales and grow their revenue base.

How to Identify Your Primary Content Marketing Objective

Content marketers use content for a variety of purposes such as attracting website visitors, increasing engagement on social media, and growing email lists. Any content created without a primary objective is usually not very effective. So, before creating content, you must take into consideration your primary objective. Doing so helps to prepare the ground for you to create content that can significantly help you to accomplish this objective. You know why? Different types of content usually work to generate different results. It is therefore worth the while to clearly identify your main objective(s) right from the outset before you create the type of content that will help you achieve it. 

Below are popular marketing objectives engaging the attention of content marketers that you can make one or more primary objective(s).
More website visitors
Reduce bounce rates
Reduce abandoned carts
Increase website engagement
More traffic
Higher social media engagement
Increase brand awareness
Increase brand authority
Grow your email list
Grow your social media audience
Convert more visitors into leads
Attract more backlinks
Make more sales
Run a PR campaign
Improve your Search Engine Optimization, SEO

These are just a few of the many objectives you may have for creating your content. You must put them into consideration before creating your content marketing strategy. That is about the only way you can be sure to create the right kind of content to achieve your primary objective(s).

How to Create a Content Distribution Plan

If you want to be an effective and efficient content marketer, anything you do, you must have a plan for it. It is not enough to simply create good content. Without an effective content distribution plan, the content may not be too helpful in your marketing activities. It is great to plan your topics, write your content, confirm the quality of the content, optimize the content but when you hit “publish”, what comes next? Content distribution of course! That is hugely important for the success of your marketing efforts. After creating your content, you must have a good plan to distribute it multi-platform. That helps to get as many eyes on it as conveniently possible. You may choose to do your distribution manually or through popular online content distribution tools like Buffer or Hootsuite. Next is to be sure that the places you distribute your content will be helpful in its sharing and engagement.

Below are some of such places you can share your content to generate more traffic, views, leads and engagement.
•  Twitter
•  LinkedIn
•  Google Ads
•  Facebook posts
•  Facebook Ads
•  Instagram posts or stories
•  Email list/newsletter
•  Repurpose as YouTube video
•  Pinterest
•  Reddit
•  SMS (text message marketing)
•  Blogs
•  Messenger bots
•  Guest posting on third-party sites like Quora, Bing ads and Medium.com
•  HARO (Help a Reporter Out)
• Google-My-Business, GMB posts

If marketers have a good content distribution plan, together with improving their Google listings, improving their local SEO, and expanding their website marketing activities, their shared content can generate more traffic, views, leads and engagement.

Effective Content SEO Strategy in Brief

Developing a content SEO strategy by marketers is not always a very easy task. Marketers need it for good marketing results though. It is thus inevitable that marketers must have a good content SEO strategy if they want their marketing businesses to survive competition. A good content SEO strategy requires good planning, skillful and deft deployment of carefully selected keywords in your content. Despite the difficulties involved, it is doable and worthwhile. Expert marketers recommend that for a good content SEO strategy, deliberate efforts must be made to properly place and site targeted keywords in your content. Doing so helps to provide the ideal content that appeals to a very broad audience. That is what helps a business website to get valuable organic traffic.

To have an effective content strategy, marketers must first search for and settle for the keywords suitable to their business niche. You can do this by using comprehensive SEO toolset like Ahrefs.com. This tool helps marketers to identify keywords not only based on their search volume, but also with information about how difficult it might be to rank your business within the keywords. Now, that is very valuable insight that smart marketers cannot afford to ignore. With such insights marketers have access to very valuable information to enable them work smarter not harder, by getting the most out of their own individual efforts.

Marketers can also use software that utilizes data and online search results to analyze briefs for search volume, SEO difficulties, and the length of content to help content writers compose very valuable drafts. Automation can help these processes even better to save valuable time and resources, by streamlining the content pipeline to add consistency and stability to it. The bottom line is a good SEO strategy and these efforts come in very handy in that quest.
 
It is imperative for marketers to attempt to provide at all times, content that Google can insert into its “People Always Ask” results. For organic traffic purposes, this must also be an important element of your content SEO strategy. Marketers now know that these types of Google-featured results aim to predict what else a user might want to know. That is why Google inserts a trustworthy source amongst its search results and even clips out a section of your article source to embed in the page. When marketers work to build outlines on their content pages that are detailed and thorough enough, Google may surface these pages and offer keyword rankings based on the natural value of the information the content serves.

In matters of using links in content SEO strategy, you can hardly have anything as helpful as building links even though experts recommend that links be used very sparingly and intelligently. If not, they could backfire on the marketer through punitive actions from search engines. About four to five internal links per article is ideal and recommended. If a major search engine like Google for instance detects that your backlinks are, stuffed densely and haphazardly into the body of your content, it will reject them and punish your website for it. Additionally, these links must be to credible and verifiable sources. When backlinks cite properly to credible sources, they help to increase your own credibility through offering accurate information.

It is good for your content SEO strategy if you endeavor to streamline your articles with Google requirements. If you write for Articles Directories for instance, it is a requirement that you include an “Author Box” or “Resource Box” on your articles. This box must include the author’s name, photo/Avatar, a bit of information about the author’s background, qualifications, experience and in some cases a link to his website. This works to help the author meet Google’s standards as a source of credible and authoritative information. Google is very particular about providing its users with the highest quality information. If you have built your own online identity/reputation as a trusted source, Google is glad to share your information with its users. That helps your content SEO strategy a great deal.

How Affiliate Marketing Benefits Influencers

In affiliate marketing, merchants rely heavily on influencers as dependable affiliates to market their products. If you’ve had a bit of experience in Internet marketing, there is no doubt you already know why and how affiliate marketing works. Affiliate marketing derives its effectiveness by serving as an online referral program for merchant’s products/services. It thus serves as a very powerful marketing method where a trusted influencer helps to get a merchant’s product/service in front of the right buyers by way of influencer activities online.

Online, many affiliates know very well that affiliate marketing has lots of benefits for businesses and consumers. What many of such affiliates tend to overlook are the benefits in the affiliate relationship for themselves. Since it is¬ human beings who are influencers, many affiliates usually have lots of good reasons why they personally recommend items to their follower’s base online. They all know that all well-known affiliate marketing structures inevitably involve three parties, viz: the merchant/ business selling a product/service, the publisher/blogger/influencer promoting the product/service and the consumer. Without all three benefitting adequately from the marketing structure, it cannot yield good results. Influencers too benefit a great deal from this structure, the reason many take their influencer activities as real business.


 
Following are some of the most visible benefits influencers derive from affiliate marketing arrangements. 

Affiliate Marketing Helps to Grow Influencer Followers

The real strength of influencers always lies in their followers count. That is the income earning asset. Like every marketer knows full well, earning followers organically is always a very big challenge. For many influencers, to get in the big league, they do so many things to grow their followers count first before thinking of making money. With the advent of social media, many influencers now find it much easier to grow their followers count by promoting products /services on many social media channels. This way, they do increase their online popularity through valuable and well-tailored content they routinely post on these channels. When any of their posts manages to go viral on social media, their followers count benefits immensely as a result. What many readers want online are trust, authenticity and authoritativeness of content. Influencers who manage to give their followers these tend to earn more followers as a result. Social media is darn so popular that the ability of influencers to benefit from it is a given. All they need do is to always stand ready to give new ideas and content as well as brand new audiences which affiliate partnerships makes possible. Naturally, if a merchant whose products an influencer is promoting has a strong presence online and he opts to share the influencer’s content, that alone can help grow the influencer’s followers count in multiples. Affiliate partnerships with well-known brands are also a great way to boost influencers’ reputation and legitimacy. That ultimately leads to more followers for such influencers down the road.

Affiliate Marketing Enhances Unlimited Income for Influencers
 
In affiliate marketing, influencers tend to earn differently depending on their followers’ strength or the products they are promoting. There is practically no limit to what influencers can earn from their affiliate efforts. Earning income is probably number-one reason why most influencers choose to enter into affiliate contracts. On the average, many influencers earn some $5000-$50,000 per annum from affiliate income alone while some others by combining other online income streams earn some mind boggling sums. Many influencers with some 50 million or more followers earn big in affiliate marketing. At some point, the bulk of this income comes from passive income from contents they’ve posted in the past which had embedded ads and links.

Affiliate Marketing Allows Influencers to Work from Anywhere
 
Flexibility of work output stands today as an asset in an increasingly busy world. Building up influencer presence online can be quite tasking but with work flexibility, it can be taken on anywhere 24/7 provided there is internet access. That is work freedom which modern day workers really crave for. As an influencer, no matter where you are in the world, so long as you have a working internet connection, you can fully support and grow your affiliate marketing partnerships from there. If this coveted freedom allows you unfettered work to keep producing content such as photos, videos and blogs, you get to earn more clout and money as a result. Because of this work freedom, many influencers now use their own website/blog as a great way to combine their influencer marketing business with their affiliate income. They add passive income to that by working with merchants to embed banner ads/links into their websites and content. Inevitably, that translates to more earnings down the road.

 

How to Boost Your Website Conversion Rate

 If you are in digital marketing or you are blogging for business, you need a great website out there on the internet. What makes a website great is its ability to covert visitors to customers. The higher the conversion rate, the better the website. Ensuring that a website converts well is the main reason behind creating, updating, and maintaining your business website or blog strictly for that purpose.  If your business website or blog is unable to acquire qualified leads and customers, it is clearly unhelpful to your business success. That is why expert marketers advise that it is not enough to build a great website or blog, you also need to constantly optimize the design, the content and the usability of your website or blog. That is what helps it to convert better.

Here are a few things you can start doing immediately if you are not already doing them. If you do these things effectively, they can help boost your website or blog conversion rate significantly.

Adopt Simple Webpage Designs

Simple webpage designs engender easy accessibility to your website. The easier it is to access your website, the more visitors it gets. This is more so when you have simple and very easy to follow landing pages which are easily navigable. Online surfers appear to have the “attention span of a crazy gnat.” Therefore, your webpages if simply designed can be quick in attention-arresting bearing in mind that web pages with low visual complexity,VC and high prototypicality, PT always appeal more to visitors.


 
Develop Quality Landing Pages

A landing page is the first port of call for all visitors to a website. The better the quality of its design, the more visitors it attracts. Part of the good quality of a landing page is that it must be well optimized and regularly rejigged for easy compliance with the ever-changing algorithms of Search Engines. Among the many essential elements your landing page must have include:

Good visuals supporting what your page offers
A simple, attractive and well optimized headline
A strategically positioned call-to-action button leading to your offer
Proof of past accomplishments from real life testimonials, case studies and so on

Some expert marketers advise that apart from increasing the quality of your landing pages, you may also need to increase their quantity. Reason being that having more landing pages at times translates directly to more opportunities for conversions. That is good for business no doubt.

Track Your Conversions Effectively
 
Without effective tracking of your conversion efforts, you can never be sure if you are doing great. First you must set goals and measure your tracking records against these goals. That’s why you must put a credible system in place to track your conversions effectively. What readily comes to mind here and very popular with marketers is Google Analytics tool. It is very simple to install and use for tracking website visitors. If you’re able to track conversions effectively, it becomes easier to make adjustments as necessary and to implement new strategies for better results.

Routinely Test Your Web Page Elements
 
There are many elements to routinely test on your website to see how well they are converting. The most recommended are page copy, visuals, headlines, page background, CTA button size, color and location. The results from these tests give you the information you can use to optimize conversions for your webpage. For accuracy, it is advisable to test a single page element at a time. This way, you’re able to pinpoint the changes responsible for your results. A web tool like Crazy Egg which allows you to set the elements you want to test on your page and for how long is about the most popular and efficient tool for such tests.

Regularly do Competitive Analysis
 
If you want to succeed as a digital marketer, you must devise ways to “spy” on your competitors to find out their strengths and weaknesses and how to take advantage of the information you gather from such efforts. This is with a view to regularly do competitive analysis. Since every online business always has very strong competitors, it is smart to keep abreast with them otherwise you risk being run out of business. Experts recommend you study the following elements in your competitors’ websites using smart web tools which use artificial intelligence then compare with yours. These elements are essentially what all potential customers get to experience in different websites before they make their choice on where or what to buy. These are elements you can explore for better customer experience to enable you have some edge over your competitors.

Such elements you can look at are:
 
Payment Platforms
Call to Action
Website Design
Page copy
Product/Service Offer
Product/Service Features

Studying these elements puts you in a position to clearly identify who your competitors are and what are their strategies. Armed with such vital information, you can then explore ways to gain some advantage over them. This you can do by building better and higher-performing landing pages which can help convert more of your website visitors.

Use Testimonials to Convince Visitors
 
Characteristically, most potential customers are always skeptical about new products/services online. Satisfied customers testimonies are usually very handy to allay such skepticism because they have credibility. Such testimonies are easily believable because the customers giving the testimonies have practically nothing to gain from marketing your products. The reason they are believable even to skeptics. You can add case studies, past sales figures and customer reviews to testimonies to help convince more potential customers.

Use Lead Magnets and Content Upgrades Efficiently 

Most website visitors need to have something of value no matter how token to convince them to give you something in return. That is where lead magnets become very handy. A lead magnet is something of value like a piece of content that is capable of solving immediate pressing problem(s) for your website visitors. Commonly used lead magnets are, Videos, Discount Coupons, eBooks, Checklists, Webinars, etc, etc. Content upgrades when efficiently used can act as some form of lead magnet that is more targeted. What that entails is you’re making efforts to entice your website visitors with a piece of content that is highly relevant to the page they’re currently viewing. That helps to keep them longer on your website and as such, more likely to convert.

Benefits of Sharing Content on Social Media

 It may not be out of place to assert that nearly everyone appears to be on social media these days. For online marketers, many have since discovered the awesome power of social media as it affects marketing online. That power derives mostly from the ease of use and ability to share content widely and quickly. Marketing experts appear to agree that the single most powerful feature of social media is the power of sharing. When users post quality content which is in alignment with the interests of their friends/followers, many of these friends/followers may resolve to share that content with their own connections as well. That scenario helps to give the content a “viral effect” which directly benefits the business of marketers. Such benefits come mostly by way of attracting the much needed traffic to where such businesses are located online.

As a marketer, sharing your content helps to accomplish a number of goals in your business, the most obvious being the ability of your content to reach and be seen by a large number of readers. Effective sharing of content manages to do so much more. It is potentially exponential and the multiplier effect is enormous. Depending on the number of friends/followers at each level who in turn take on the sharing, a viral process is triggered as a result. The more quality content you post, the higher the chances that it will in turn be shared by others at each level.


 
The ability to share good content somehow reinforces your connection with the friends/followers who share the post. When a fellow marketer agrees to and actually shares your content, it simply means he/she is vouching for the quality of the content. Such friends/followers are actually chesting out directly affirming that your content is a good one by sharing it. If their own friends/followers like and appreciate the content as well, they also share it. What that means is that you have contributed value that has helped others to bond with their friends/followers. This relationship when appreciated with gratitude somehow helps to reinforce your connection with others.

Many marketers have found out that sharing somehow helps to create more links to your content. Here is how it works. For example, if you have a link on any content of your blog posts, each subsequent sharing creates another link to your blog. If that post is also shared on social media it also creates a link to your social media profile. Each share creates more backlinks to you or your blog. More sharing increases and enhances more ways you and your business can be found. That translates to exposure. So, the more ways other people can find their way to your content, the more popular that content becomes. In online parlance, popularity simply means more traffic to your business.

If you make a good post and it gets shared more and is “liked” by many more people, the search engines usually give it a higher rating since they see a clear proof that it is good content. Therefore, the more your posts get shared, the more exposure you get on the search engines. The more exposure you get from search engines, the more traffic they send to your site. Social media sites do love real activity on their platforms as well. That is why sharing on their platforms also increases the rank of your social media profile on the sites.  That no doubt is good for any online business.

 

Ease of sharing within and with other social media sites is another great benefit. As people are different so also are social media sites. Everyone, depending on their preferences and the nature of their businesses always has a preferred social media site. That you are not on the same platform with me does not mean I can’t help share your content. If for example I am your friend on Facebook and you share your blog post, I can easily have your good content therein shared to my own friends/followers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many others. Other persons in those other platforms can also share the content within their own platforms. Here is the benefit. Even if you the original content “owner” may not be active on all the social media sites, further sharing by your friends/followers on these other sites helps to spread your content farther and more widely. That is much better than what you can do on your own within the one site you are active on. More and wider sharing of your content greatly expands your reach exponentially. Your business gets to benefit directly from that.  

Effective Online Marketing Channels

Digital marketing is perhaps the best way for a conventional business to establish and maintain a presence in the current digital world where many people spend a lot of their time on the internet. Even though most channels cost little or nothing at all to deploy, you are best advised to stick to what suits and works best for your own brand of business. Learning on the job is very crucial for the tactics you may have decided to use. As you make progress, you tend to acquire new skills which you really need to engage your online audience effectively. The following are a few of the tactics you may wish to try out in your own business:

Content Marketing

This is very popular with bloggers. It is a marketing channel that focuses on what to publish, the target and when to publish. The most common and easy to use instruments are: Blogs, eBooks, online Courses, info graphics, podcasts and webinars.


 

Affiliate Marketing

This is a marketing channel where you have to promote products from other people and earn a commission from sales attributed to your marketing efforts. It provides you the means to involve people in any brand you choose, promote, sell and get a commission on the products/services so sold.

Influencer Marketing  
 
This involves the use of known stars, celebrities, sports personalities and very popular people as influencers to help promote your brand. What the influencer does is simply to assist you to connect with a broad audience. It thus involves the collaboration between brands and social media influencers to market any brand’s products. You can easily find good influencers among fashion and beauty bloggers with many Instagram followers.

Video marketing
 
This is a marketing tactic relying heavily on visuals to catch attention. Presently, there is some research evidence pointing to the fact that 80% of online users visit a business website after viewing a video. That fact has been quickly latched upon by online marketing professionals. The real reason they now routinely generate videos of people using their services/products or testimonies about their brands/products. Such videos are usually shared easily and very widely on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook accounts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you own a business website, it is useless if it does not attract visitors. SEO is a technical activity with the aim of improving your website for effective search results. The main objective of SEO is to help your website achieve higher ranking by delivering quality results when someone types a query into a Search Engine. Such activity helps to send free and organic traffic to your website. The essence of optimizing your website is to make it user-friendly and technically strong.  This you can do by utilizing pertinent keywords deployed appropriately Off-Page, Technically and On-Page.

Highlights of Digital Marketing Advantages

Engagement of large audiences: Marketing campaigns can be targeted at individuals who are looking for your products and services online thus enhancing and increasing conversion rates.

Highly targeted communications: Social media advertising platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram enable you to set your target audience based on their interests, locations and demographics.

High Flexibility: It provides you a platform for quickly sharing product updates and new features.

Overcoming geographical barriers: The World Wide Web, WWW, audience has no geographical barriers. You can market to the entire world from the comfort of your home or office anywhere in the world with internet services.

Extremely low cost: You can reach large audiences quickly and economically and in many instances even free of charge.


 

Importance of Audience Targeting in Digital Marketing

To target your audience effectively, first you must correctly identify who exactly they are and collect as much information about them as you can find. Doing so involves a considerable amount of time and resources which most marketers can least afford. Audience targeting is not only all-important, it is the foundation of every marketing component most marketers ever implement. If you are able to target your audience correctly, it is almost a given that your messaging, content and effectiveness will attract, convert and retain connections to customers more effectively and efficiently.


 
Here are some credible ways to check costs and save some time in digital marketing using audience targeting.

Content Creation:

When you know exactly who your target audience is, it is fairly easy for you to determine correctly, their interests, needs, concerns and desires. This information helps you to create content that speaks to and on those issues intelligently. Doing so helps you to attract traffic efficiently to your message, your content, your website or blog.

Content Sharing:

You can’t share content effectively without knowing the interests of your target audience. If you know their interest, that information allows you to share content that focuses pointedly on them. Sharing content that interests your audience readily creates affinity and connection with them. That somehow manages to open the much desired door into the world of your prospects. By targeting the correct audience with the correct shared content, somehow, you get to open to them the many opportunities your business provides.

Paid Media Targeting:

Since this involves some costs, you must be sure of what you are doing before you get involved. To use paid search marketing or paid social media marketing efficiently, be sure that your audience targeting is accurate. If not, you will be dissipating valuable energy and resources needlessly. If you spend money on digital media advertising that is not specific to your proper audience target, it is akin to blindly throwing money away. A real waste no doubt! Proper audience targeting is what makes paid media advertising effective. Anything contrary is a clear waste of time and resources which you can least afford.

Website Ads/Messaging:

Experts always say, “Know your customers well enough before you can successfully sell to them.” If you don’t know who your target audience is, how will you know the specific solution that your product or service can address for them? If the messages on your website or blog are untargeted, that will make it ineffective. Most internet surfers always have “the attention span of a crazy gnat.” For that reason, your website or blog always manages to get a few seconds of their attention if they drop by. If your messaging is targeting the wrong audience, that time span may not be enough for you to retain their attention long enough to notice your message and be influenced by it. So, if you fail to retain their attention long enough, it adversely affects your ability to earn their business. Meaning, you are needlessly wasting your time and resources without results.