Best Affiliate Marketing Tips for Beginners in the Business

Anyone can get involved in affiliate marketing because it is a very simple business model. What affiliates simply need to do is to introduce and promote a product/service. Once people buy the product/service, the affiliate as the marketer, earns a commission off the sale. By this arrangement, an affiliate marketer can be a company or an individual. Affiliates are not expected to be directly involved with the product’s manufacture, distribution, or other things. Their business responsibility is to just refer or recommend products/services on their websites, blogs, or social media pages to other people. Simple no doubt but for most beginners in the business, it is not exactly so.

Affiliate marketing is attractive to newbies as a low-cost business strategy and it is easy for anyone to join the program. But, even at that, many fail because they neglect to do the right things right and as appropriate. To succeed in affiliate marketing, everyone needs a guide, more so if you are new in the business. If this is your first time in the business, there are a few things you have to know to guide you to succeed. These here tips are some of the most important of such things.

Tip #1: Know the Product You Are Promoting

To succeed in affiliate marketing, you must know and believe in the products/services you are marketing. That may sound simple and basic but a lot of newbie affiliate marketers tend to ignore this vital tip. It is not easy for any marketer to successfully carry out a compelling campaign for a product/service they do not believe in. If you know your product/service well enough, that is good, but it is better still if you also know your target audience. If you do, you’ll have a more reliable marketing and your conversion rate will improve significantly. This is because if you know your audience well enough, it is easy for you to know the type of campaign strategy that can compel them to pay attention to what you are promoting. You will succeed better and faster if you can focus your marketing campaign on products/services you know and directly target a market segment where the products/services can be better appreciated. That is how best to make more impact and get more conversions by way of increased marketing efficiency.

Tip #2: Nurture a Relationship with Your Audience

In online marketing, relationship matters a lot. Affiliate marketing doesn’t start in a vacuum and you cannot market to a vacuum if you want to succeed in the business. This is why you must always aim to connect directly with your audience and to nurture and maintain that relationship. If an audience knows and trusts you, it is easy to effectively market to them. With that relationship, your marketing will impact your audience better particularly when that audience is already segmented for marketing purposes. With a segmented audience, you can specialize your marketing for better credibility since without specialization, it is virtually impossible for your product/service to have credibility. If you know your target audience, you’ll know the best way to market a product/service that they’ll likely purchase and your credibility helps that process a great deal.

Tip #3: Keep a Keen Eye on Your Stats

Marketing without engagement statistics is akin to marketing in the dark. You need these stats to be able to effectively track where your traffic coming from. Through these stats, you’ll be able to know if your traffic is coming from outbound links from other sites, social media, or from search engines.  You can use the information from such stats to rejig or strengthen your marketing strategy to enable you target your organic visitors better. Data from such stats can help you to find out the type of traffic that is more effective for conversion. You can also find out which copy or ad is more compelling, whether by geography or demographics. To get these insights and data, you can use your affiliate marketing analytics or Google analytics tools. The marketing aim for doing this is to always know where, to whom, and how you should use a specific strategy for your marketing campaigns. Successful marketing campaigns are indispensable for successful affiliate marketing. 

 
Tip #4: Post Only High Quality and Valuable Content

If you must market with content, be sure to market with quality content that adds value to people’s lives. Your content must not only be valuable, it must be unique. You must also figure out how to create something different and original to compel people to associate with you. Such content must have a unique selling point that appeals to your visitors making them to interact better with your website. That is the type of content that compels your content readers to return again and again to your website, page, or blog. When people keep coming back to your site, it is a pointer that you’re doing something right and great for their lives. It means you are helping them to solve vital problems in their lives. So, if you can continually create and post high quality and valuable content, you can build a loyal audience faster. And, if you can maintain that level of quality, in addition to a loyal audience, monetizing your content becomes a piece of cake. Doing well in affiliate marketing becomes a given.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate marketing is cost-effective and sounds simple in theory making it attractive to most people. Even if you are a newbie, you can succeed in affiliate marketing if you follow the rules and take the foregoing tips as guides. If you know the product/service you are promoting well enough, build and nurture a great relationship with your audience to establish trust, keep a keen eye on your marketing stats to gain insights and to gauge how well you are faring while habitually creating and posting quality content to attract good traffic, you’ll do great.

7 Tips to Grow your Small Business with Google Analytics

If you are into online marketing, never you ignore your Google Analytics dashboard. It is through the metrics and general marketing information from your analytics dashboard you can get to effectively measure the performance of your online marketing campaigns. The information is hugely reliable for you to grow your small business online if you can interpret it well and use it well. Many expert marketers believe that small businesses can effectively use digital analytics to improve their marketing efforts and grow their businesses. 

 

Here is how:
 
1. Understand Analytics Terms to Measure: For your business to benefit from analytics data, you must know what Google can help you to measure in its analytics tool and how you can deploy the information to benefit your business. Through Google analytics information, you can measure the number of visitors to your website, unique visitors, returning visitors, bounce rates, page views, keywords, traffic sources, conversion rate, average time spent on your website and so on. This is the type of information that can give you the correct insights to help you design and shape your marketing campaigns and strategy to grow your small business.

2. Why Analytics is Important: The information you get from your Google Analytics dashboard is the best marketing information/data you can get to help you grow your business. You can rely on the data to design your marketing campaigns and strategy, decide on which communications channels work best for your business and exactly where and how to market your business to get the best results.

3. Use Analytics Info to set up Goals and Targets: Analytics information is the best form of information you can use to effectively appeal to the audience you are marketing to. You may choose to set marketing goals like, getting more traffic, generating more leads, making more sales, educating customers about your products/services and so on. The data you get from analytics must be tied to the goals you want to achieve to make it effective. Not having such data is akin to planning without background info. If for instance your goal is to educate customers about your product/service, you must pay attention to the amount of time customers spend on your website and how many pages they view per visit. This info helps you to know which pages are best suitable to deploy the educational info on your website.
 
4. Locate Traffic Sources: Knowing the source of your traffic information is especially helpful if you’re advertising online in multiple channels/places. With the benefit of your analytics data, you can see exactly what avenues your visitors are taking to get to your website. Armed with this info, you can best determine which advertising options are the best investments for your marketing campaigns.

 

5. Enumerate Page Views and Time on Site: Page views and time on site allow you to see which pages your visitors are staying longer on and viewing on your website. This information is especially helpful if you’re posting different types of content. The info allows you to determine which types of content interests your audience more. You can then craft and tailor your content to fit what they’re looking for from your website. That helps to increase engagement on your website.

6. Determine Your Marketing Horizon: The marketing horizon of your business is dependent on your type of business and your website goals. Do you have your eyes on local patronage, national patronage, international patronage or a combination of all? If for instance you want to grow your business locally, analytics data will help you with the info on how well your local patronage is growing. You can rely on Google analytics data to optimize your website better for local searches and patronage.

7. Targeting Demographics: Google analytics data can help you with accurate demographics data about your audience. You need that information to help you plan your marketing segmentation for promotional activities. With accurate demographic information about your audience, you can ensure you’re hitting your target market rightly. If for instance you’re running ads that aren’t targeted enough by location, analytics data will show you where more of your visitors are coming from. Armed with that info, you can then decide on how to modify your targeting to attract more visitors from that local area.

Last Line

Characteristically, web analytics usually display some trends over time. That necessitates very regular reviews. Experts recommend that you can review your analytics at least once a month to get a handle on it and a better overview of what’s going on. If and when needed, judging from these periodic reviews, you can then make changes as needed. That is what works best for your small business and helps it to grow.

Digital Marketing Tips to Succeed in Hard Times

Digital marketing is increasingly getting popular as one credible way to make money online. It daily provides new business opportunities for millions of marketers around the world. Under the tough economic times the world is currently going through because of covid-19 pandemic, digital marketing has become more relevant to survive the restricted life styles of most marketers. Online business marketers now use robust digital marketing strategies to promote their businesses around the world and they are earning good money even in restricted living. Digital marketing now opens many doors to targeted and niche-based marketing. Once you have in-depth understanding of your audience with their demographics, industries, interests etc. you can easily frame your marketing strategy around these parameters. Yes, the economic times are hard right now but you can’t give up just like that. With digital marketing, it is possible to weather these tough economic times.


 
These here consolidated digital marketing tips can help you to enrich your marketing strategy to drive your business to succeed even in these hard times.

Build and Maintain a Credible Mailing List

In digital marketing business, a mailing list remains a very valuable asset for marketers. If diligently and honestly built, your mailing list can be a real treasure trove. It allows you to stay in touch and be able to engage your customers on a one-to-one basis, sharing relevant information, promo materials, content, products etc. Your mailing list makes it possible for you to have active on-going relationships with your customers. If properly used, your mailing list helps to convert leads to customers at a faster rate since it tends to generate click-throughs on your ads better.

Join Affiliate Programs

In the restricted living the world is going through, Affiliate marketing remains a potentially huge reservoir of opportunities for marketers to make money. You can select popular products from product merchants, help promote these products from your blog posts and earn a commission for your efforts. This you can do better by helping these merchants to review their products on your website, write about the products, display their banners on your website or have their businesses regularly mentioned and linked-back to in your blog posts. When your blog readers click through from your website to make a purchase, you earn a commission from each purchase.

Regularly Create Relevant and Engaging Content 
 
Good content remains a very strong pillar of digital marketing. Regularly creating and posting good and engaging content from your blog posts helps to attract the much needed traffic from which you can generate leads and customers for the products you are promoting. The good content you create helps to affirm you as a credible authority in your niche. It not only attracts and engages your blog visitors; it also shows that you know what you are doing. That helps people to quickly build trust in you. Most importantly, maintaining an active and engaging blog greatly helps your visibility in search engine results. That helps your blog SEO a great deal. If your blog can be easily found through searches on the web, it boosts your chances of better arresting the attention of millions of free-roamers on the internet. Such good content helps to engage these visitors and somehow converts some of them into leads and eventually long-term customers. A real boost to the earning power of your digital marketing efforts!

Be Liberal with Free-Products/Giveaways

Many Digital marketers have discovered that one of the most effective ways of expanding their mail lists and wooing new customers is the liberal use of free products/giveaways. Interestingly, these are products you can easily create yourself to help attract customers. These products are usually very effective baits to get your website visitors sign up for your mailing list. You can do this by simply creating such-like giveaway products as free info manuals, pictures/graphics or eBooks to share with visitors to your website.

Use Promotional Offers Generously


 
Many Digital marketers generously use promotional offers to lure customers. These are items of value that do help the customer’s purse. Many customers really like discounted coupons to help them reduce their shopping costs. This is one real appealing factor to a lot of online customers. If you generously use extra discounts through coupons and vouchers to your customers, your business can make tremendous gains from such offers. Before too long, positive words about your business get around quickly, giving the business the much needed boost.

Establish Your Business Reputation Through Reviews and Testimonials
 
Nothing promotes a business faster and better than the words from satisfied customers. The reason you must encourage but not induce your customers to freely and publicly give testimonials about their experiences with your business and the products you are promoting. In Digital marketing, online reviews are some of the most powerful promotional tools for the business. They help conversions much faster if well displayed for potential customers to access. Many online shoppers generally like to compare and go extensively through products reviews before buying a product/service.


 

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Build a solid brand

Expert bloggers almost always settle on a brand to ply their trade. Once this is done, churning out good content becomes the blogger’s main preoccupation. Top players in the blogging world have their branding down to an art and a science. Working on a chosen brand, they invest valuable time fine-tuning the image and the voice that connects with their audience. Their mission and purpose are crystal clear, and they understand the needs of their subscribers which enables them to deliver the right information that attracts the right readers. They serve a specific niche and have a laser focus on serving that audience.

Successful bloggers not only know the demographics of their ideal audience, they know their struggles, dreams, hopes, and fears. They know what they buy, who they follow on social media, where they congregate online, and what motivates them. They use this information to tailor their content to their audience’s needs. Most times, for these successful bloggers, their main preoccupation is how to write to an ideal buyer in a way that will compel them to make a change. That is the catch. First you’ve got to create who is an ideal buyer you are interested in. That leads in effect creating a buyer persona. That done, that imaginary person becomes the fellow everything you do in your blogging business is targeted at.

Going forward, while using SEO best practices and analytics tools, expert bloggers use data so generated to help them make decisions about the needs of their audience and the keywords to target. From same data, they also determine the content to develop and promote that will attract their ideal readers. Doing these things over time, somehow they manage to become thought leaders and authorities in their chosen industries.  These results are expected because they have put in the work to build relationships and trust with their audience. Building a solid brand is one great way expert bloggers get to make real impact in their marketing activities.

3 Trending Social Media Tactics for Effective Ads

Online, marketers are literally at war trying to get customers’ attention. Everyone gets to use one tactic or the other particularly on social media to outdo others. We now generally know that social media has become one of the most fascinating developments of our time. Apart from ease of use and accessibility, social media is also cost effective and very efficient at getting ads across to millions of users within a very short space of time. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram need specialized and different ways of use to get good results. That is where tactics come into the picture. Here now are the 3 currently very popular and trending.

01. Consistent posting. No doubt the most important ingredient in establishing a strong brand persona on social media is consistency. Once you have built up a good base of content, you can create an automated posting schedule most likely to garner high-engagement rates. That is because consistent posting leads to stronger brand recall, increased engagement and more opportunities to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

02. Tracking and analyzing results. If you want to keep conversations on your social pages going, you must be able to track your results and analyze them correctly. That is where tools like Google analytics come in very handy. You can use analytics to look at brand mentions and engagement to learn what is working for you, what isn’t and what needs to be improved upon. You can get details on certain factors like what demographics your posts appeal to most or what countries are most engaged with your brand messaging. With this information, you can target your ads correctly for better results.

03. Latching on to trends. Taking the message to customers where they can be found is one great advantage of social media ads. You can use tools like Buzzsumo and Feedly to enable you to learn about the content that is buzzing within your industry, around your brand or about your competitors. That information allows you to target your ads to trends correctly for better results.

 

How Best to Target SFI Ads

Unless you have the benefit of detailed scientific research, I would recommend that you try to avoid demographics when targeting ads in SFI. However since you have limited your demographics here to two groups, I am forced to ask, why retired persons or homemakers? 


 
I believe that the essence of any campaign ad is to get sign-ups as PSAs and to get buyers for your products. On that account and from experience, the groups which give the best results are the groups you should target. These may not necessarily be retired persons or homemakers. In SFI, it is always very difficult to know what people will do or not do. You will be making a very fundamental mistake therefore to assume that demographics like sex, age, occupation and such like classifications will cause a better response to ads than some other considerations.

In this business, my advice is and has always been, it is best to target any and everyone in your ads. That works for me and I therefore strongly recommend so to everyone. Assuming we take into account the two groups you want to target i.e.:

1. Retirees: These are people with age range 65+ mostly old.
- People who need a second income.
- People best suited for home business.
- People with technology challenges but are still capable of learning.
- People who need excitement.
- People who now live a bit of sedentary life.

2. Homemakers: These are people both young and old.
- People who have the above characteristics and more.
- People who are technology savvy.
- People who are young and ambitious.
- People who need a second income to get out of debts.
- People who need financial security. 


 
These are the characteristics every wise marketer should take into account before targeting ads. You can see clearly that both groups have clearly common characteristics in many instances. It is therefore very difficult to prefer one to the other. Targeting both groups with the same intensity is the wisest counsel in this circumstance. If done properly, better results can be guaranteed.

Good luck in your marketing efforts.

How to Advertise SFI on Facebook and Other Social Media

There are basically two ways to advertise successfully on facebook and other social media sites. These are FREE adverts which every member is allowed to use and PAID averts which only paying advertisers are allowed to use. It is you alone who can make the decision which of the two best suits your intentions. That decision has to be influenced by the following limitations and the amount of money you are prepared to spend on your ads. 


 
FREE ads can reach very limited audience which is limited by numbers.
The ads can reach:
- Maximum 5000 friends on facebook.
- Maximum the number of “likes” you have on the facebook page you manage.
- Maximum the number of followers you have on Twitter.
- Maximum the number of followers and circle friends you have on Google+, LinkedIn and others.
- Maximum the number of members you have in each group you belong to on facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and others.

Apart from limiting the number of persons you can reach, many of these social media sites are very finicky about what they allow on free ads. Many of these obstacles are removed when using paid ads for very obvious reasons.

As for PAID adverts on these social media sites, the ads are well targeted at the right audience using demographics like age, sex, educational background, geographical location etc, etc, and they can reach hundreds of millions of users. That is why paid ads on social media are more effective and more result-oriented than free ads.

To advertise successfully on facebook and other social media sites therefore, it is your lot to choose whether to use free ads or paid ads or both. After you have made your choice, just log on and read the rules then you are ready to go.

Hope this information helps? Good luck !!!