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Effective Criteria for Selecting Viable Affiliate Programs

If you are a digital marketer and you want to venture into the realm of affiliate marketing, it is of absolute importance to have a clear se...

Showing posts with label dropshipping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dropshipping. Show all posts

Thursday, July 27, 2023

6 Ways to Make Money on Instagram even if you are Not an Influencer

Marketing from a smatphone.
Even if you are not an influencer, there are several different options available to you to generate income and make money on Instagram. If you are discerning enough, you can uncover the hidden money-making potential of Instagram. Even if you are an aspiring online entrepreneur, you can convert your passion into a profitable business on Instagram. This applies also to talented content creators who are simply looking for a side hustle to earn a second paycheck or just having fun doing what they like to do.



This blog article will discuss some 6 legitimate and practical ways to make money on Instagram even if you are not yet an influencer properly so called.

1. Affiliate Marketing

If you are a talented content creator, you can do affiliate marketing on Instagram and earn commissions from your efforts. This you can do by tactically adding affiliate marketing into your Instagram strategy. This allows you to open up a reliable new revenue stream even if you are not a typical influencer. Through affiliate marketing, you can directly promote products/services for product merchants and earn good commissions for your efforts. Any sales or desired action you generate through your Instagram account qualifies you to earn a predetermined percentage of the sales value as commission. If you join FREE a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI, you can carefully choose products that resonate with your target audience to promote. Through the unique promo code provided by SFI, you can promote these products widely on your Instagram account and any sales you generate from these efforts entitles you to a commission.

2. Selling Your Own Products

Yes, you can sell your own products and services through your Instagram account and make money. If you create an online store on Instagram, through it, you can effectively exhibit, promote and sell your own products. This is most effective if you have a direct relationship with your followers. You can leverage this relationship to sell products that resonate with them and are related to their interests. You can effectively tap into the authenticity that connects with your audience by totally believing in your product/service, resulting in a seamless and compelling purchase experience. You can use inventive promotions such as intriguing discounts or compelling prizes to pique the interest of potential customers and increase engagement. These dynamic marketing strategies, if used correctly can create an explosive buzz around your promotional activities. This ultimately helps you to attract more new customers and increase your sales on Instagram.

3. Helping Creators Build their Profiles

You need a bit of skills and the right knowledge to be able to help content creators build their profiles for a fee. Knowing how the Instagram algorithm really works can help you to build a great following on Instagram. Armed with this knowledge, you can approach content creators to handle their Instagram profiles and help them to build followers, for a fee of course. So, you can conveniently approach talented and upcoming creators to help build their Instagram profiles. You can make good money from this service.


 
4. Selling Intellectual Property
 
This too requires great skills and talent to make money. If you have the knowledge and the skills, you can create e-books, online courses, or templates and sell through your Instagram account. Instagram thus provides you an enormous potential to monetize your knowledge and expertise by transforming into your virtual storefront. There, you can promote and sell your intellectual property, create an attractive shop directly on Instagram or use third-party networks to reach a larger audience and make more sales.
 
5. Increasing Brand Awareness and Recognition

Instagram platform because of its unique peculiarities has enormous potential for brand promotion. It allows you to consistently create engaging content, and you can leverage that to introduce your viewers to your distinct brand and its services. By the time your brand gains some traction on Instagram, the setting becomes ideal for you to capture the attention of your audience with the attractive products/services you are promoting. This helps to stimulate more sales. You may in addition choose to form profitable alliances with other businesses, promote their products/services and earn commissions by way of affiliate marketing.

6. Dropshipping Products

Dropshipping is a marketing arrangement that offers an intriguing potential to earn money on Instagram. With dropshipping, product merchants can do away with large upfront expenditures. They are thus willing to pay third party entrepreneurs who can help them generate sales without the inconvenience of warehousing products. These third party providers help to fulfill orders and the merchant delivers to addresses provided by the dropshipper. So, if you build an enticing Instagram store, you can easily transform your digital presence into a vibrant marketplace. From this store, you can fulfill orders and get the merchant to deliver the products, and for a fee of course.

Sunday, March 05, 2023

Effective Tips to Market Customized Products

A computer and packaged products for supply.
Typically, customized products are usually not common products, the reason they are made on order. Customized products are so unique that they are usually made to fit customers’ orders. There lies the huge challenge in marketing them. It is for same reasons the products are typically more expensive than standard mass-produced products. Since these products are made to order, it takes quite some different and unique marketing strategies to promote the products successfully than some other products. If your business specializes in producing and selling customized products, the following tips can be of help to you to market the products successfully.


 
Know Your Target Customers

Since customized products are typically produced to fit orders, you must study your target customers well enough, know what they want and how they want it before undertaking the orders. You must know who they are and what their preferences are to be able to market them effectively. It takes quite some experience and practice to study consumers meaningfully. You may choose to talk to them directly, or get them to fill out questionnaires or even ask your friends and close associates about them. Social media is also handy where you can display photos of your past works for consumers to make their picks and even make agreed modifications before you fulfill their orders. If you have such vital info about your consumers, it becomes much easier for you to create an effective marketing strategy to attract more customers to your customized products.

Distribute by DropShipping

If you market your customized products out of your e-commerce store, dropshipping is a marketing strategy quite effective to push the products to buyers. This is because dropshipping is a very convenient and low-risk way to distribute such products. It helps you to save up on handling and storing inventory. You can even bypass that by arranging for the products manufacturers to ship them directly to your customers. Once you get information that the manufacturers have made delivery to the customers, you arrange for your balance payment. Smooth and easy!

Write Clear Product Descriptions

Typically, customized products are always unique in their differences. The reason it is usually difficult to make direct comparisons. So, if you are selling your customized products out of an e-commerce store online, buyers like to really look at and understand product descriptions before making purchases. If the product descriptions you provide in your store are not clear and concise enough, you may be losing customers. This is really why you must never fail to include product descriptions under the images of your customized products. Such descriptions should not fail to include details about what the items can do, how they are made and how they can be of good use to consumers. This usually helps to give a very clear picture of the products to consumers to help them make their buy decisions.

Offer Generous Discounts on Bulk Purchases

Discounts are effective marketing incentives to get consumers to buy more products. If you offer wholesale discounts to consumers for bulk purchases, it can help you promote and sell more customized products. The discounts you are giving may even be more helpful to promote the products than what the products can actually do for consumers. They may even be directly responsible for helping you to attract more new customers who may have never heard of the products before. Customers see discounts as great ways they can save money so they choose to buy more and repeat purchases for that reason. Through discount offers, you can manage to incentivize customers to buy more than one product at once. If that saves them money, they’ll be happy to make more and repeat purchases thereafter.



Skillfully Leverage Testimonials

No matter what products you are selling, consumers always want to ensure that what they’re getting is worth their money, more so on customized products. This is why most consumers rely on reviews before making their buy decisions. Most always check for reviews from previous buyers of the products to have an idea of how the products perform. If previous buyers appear satisfied with the products, they are more likely to buy the products themselves. This is exactly how smart marketers can always skillfully leverage testimonials to increase sales.

Encourage Referrals

If you take deliberate steps to encourage referrals from your existing customers, it can be an excellent way to promote products. You may even choose to have incentives for referrers, like paying commissions or offering discount codes for each referral for instance. You can make contacts directly with customers and make them these offers if they invite friends and family who also make purchases from you. Referring any other persons who may also be interested in similar products should also attract the same incentives. It is not a bad idea either if you can create an affiliate marketing program and offer to pay commissions for every sale the affiliates generate.

Summary

Selling customized products can be quite lucrative if you can get a handle on the tricky marketing techniques. If you take pains to know your consumers well enough, you can create and market these products to their tastes. You can make more money if you offer discounts for bulk purchases, make clear descriptions of the products in your store, distribute products by dropshipping, and encourage testimonials and referrals. By doing these things, you can generate more leads who purchase your customized products, make more sales and increase your revenue base.

Sunday, August 14, 2022

5 Low-Cost Business Ideas Anyone Can Work from Home

Home business work station with a computer, smartphone, notepads, pens and pencils, an assortment of work materials and a mug of beverage.
Working from home is indeed increasing in popularity for many and varied reasons, not least of which is the absolute freedom working from home confers. If you work from home, you do your things your own way. You work when you like and if you like and at any time of your choosing. You have the liberty to take full advantage of and leverage on Internet technology when you work from home. This is in addition to the extremely low cost of starting and working many home businesses on the Internet. Once you have access to a computer and the Internet, with the requisite skills, you can be in business working from home in no time at all. 



Find below some 5 low-cost business ideas that can be very lucrative to make it worthwhile for you to work from home.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Anyone can get involved in affiliate marketing right from the comfort of their homes. Right there and through computer and Internet technology, you can promote products for product merchants and you earn commissions for your efforts. The key to being successful in affiliate marketing lies with your networking capabilities. Even if you are not a skilled blogger or freelance writer, you can be a great affiliate marketer if you follow the rules. You may not even have your own e-commerce store to do affiliate marketing successfully. By registering and working with reputable and popular affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI, you can succeed in the business. What really matters is to promote products in as many online channels and social media platforms as possible. The more purchases are made through these efforts, the more commissions you earn.

2. Blogging/Freelance Writing

Good blogging is a great skill and so is freelance writing. If you are a good blogger or a good freelance writer, there are many ways that you can monetize your website. Selling your products/services out of your website is one of these ways.  You can also sell ads spaces on your blog to earn money. As a blogger or freelance writer, you can write about anything under the sun, provided it is something others want to read and know about. Freelance writers/bloggers get paid to provide written content for businesses. Both require a very low-cost start-up because you only need a computer and internet connection to get started. Both require purposeful networking and getting your name out there in the industry and on the Internet.

3. Dropshipping

Dropshipping is yet another low cost business to work from home. With your internet connections, you can promote products, get buyers and get your linked product merchant to supply the products. Simple! And you earn your commission as soon as the products are paid for. With dropshipping, you can simply sell products this way without the burden of manufacturing costs, delivery costs, warehousing and handling costs, customer service costs and so on. All these costs are passed on to the product merchants. However, there are a few vital steps you must take before you get involved in dropshipping profitably.
1.    Carefully select a niche you want to market in.
2.    Based on this niche, you can determine who your product merchant is.
3.    Next is to sign a contract with your chosen merchant.
4.    Then, you design your online store and
5.    Promote the online store widely.
Online, Shopify, Magento, and PinnacleCart are just a few of the eCommerce online stores you can link up with for dropshipping services. Once you integrate your e-commerce store with these popular websites, you can commence your business of dropshipping in earnest. It helps if you have your blog linked to your e-commerce store. That on its own helps to boost your promotional opportunities. However, you must be really careful to choose the right niche that relates to something many people need and are willing to buy. You can then leverage this need on your blog by offering the right product/service as the right solution to people’s problems.


 
4. Hosting a Podcast

Broadcasting your voice and marketing messages to a large online audience is what podcasting is all about. Usually, marketers approach podcasting as they would blogging. Getting an interested and loyal audience is what is common to both. In podcasting, picking the right niche is hugely important because you want to draw in an interested audience and win more competitors. If you are quite knowledgeable about your subject matter, it helps to boost your podcasting activities. 

The start-up costs for podcasting are relatively low. All you really need are a good computer and a solid microphone and you are on to your online audience. You make money from podcasting through increased sponsorship and affiliate marketing. Transistor, Buzzsprout, and Podbean are some of the best podcasting hosts out there, and it is best to choose your host based on your niche for obvious reasons. Once you’ve chosen your host, you need to choose the right platform based on your chosen niche from popular platforms like, Apple, Google, Audible, Spotify and others.

5. Virtual Assistant

Virtual Assistant is one more low cost business idea you can work from home. Aside the millions of businesses already online, there are hundreds of thousands of new business start-ups every year. Many of these businesses usually need the help of Virtual Assistants to get things going. Virtual Assistants usually handle routine but hugely important jobs for companies and very busy executives. Many available job schedules for Virtual Assistants include but not limited to social media scheduling, scheduling of meetings and travels, booking travel schedules and hotel accommodations, managing emails, receiving and transporting company visitors from airports, making and taking phone calls, essential administrative duties and any other special assignments as may be given from time to time. In fact, as a Virtual Assistant, you have the advantage of a good number of job opportunities available across a very broad spectrum of human endeavors and you get paid handsomely for your services.

Last Line

The foregoing are typical examples of business ideas with very low start-up costs you can work from home. There are many others out there but these here are fairly more common in terms of popularity. The business opportunities may be limitless, but these here five ideas are highly recommended for anyone who wants to start working from home with very low start-up and running costs.

Monday, July 11, 2022

Best Online Business Ideas in 2022

Online business owner working on a computer.
Are you interested in a side hustle in 2022? Try some online business ideas. You can easily get involved in online business and earn some extra income right from the comfort of your home. In the wake of all the pandemic lockdowns and restriction of movement around the world, working online has become particularly attractive. Depending on your background, experience, training and even inclinations, there are several business ideas you can try your hands on online to earn some money. Specialty jobs like skills instructor, teaching, podcasting, affiliate marketing, e-commerce store, dropshipping and so on are available online for people who are keen. Even if your offline career or regular job is still going well, you may still need some online business to earn some extra income. 


 
If you are keen to earn income online in 2022, here are some business ideas many experts recommend.

Affiliate Marketing

If you can help some product merchants to advertise their products for a cut of the profits, you are in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a very simple online business idea really. Just promote products, generate sales and earn commissions from the sales, simple. I guess nearly everyone who can use a computer or smartphone and knows how the internet works can get involved in affiliate marketing to earn commissions. If you are already working online and you have an audience and a good online presence through a blog, podcast, or social media channel, you can monetize this presence with affiliate marketing. Better still, if you have the skills to write product reviews that convert. If you do, your earning potential in affiliate marketing can be much better. If you can’t go it alone in affiliate marketing, it is recommended you join a reputable affiliate program online. Programs like Strong Future International SFI, an affiliate marketing program that is the largest online for selling all shades of products has millions of members working on its programs. The program is FREE and easy to join with no obligations whatsoever.

Social Media Consulting Services

As social media platforms are becoming many and varied with unique and peculiar features on each of them, opening and operating accounts in all them can be hugely tasking for any individual business owner. What to do then? It is best to hire an agency or full-time employee to manage the many social media accounts. This is where a social media consultant becomes imperative to help the business owner free up some valuable time to work on other strategies to grow his business.

If you are a social media consultant, you can help small businesses determine the best tactics, hours, and content for their target audience. You can advise on the best platforms to work depending on the products on sale and the business niche. You can manage the social media accounts to grow the audience and the following. You can effectively help to manage accounts on the most popular platforms like Facebook and Twitter which are about the main business networks mostly because of their special in-house marketing features and huge consumer audiences. More visual platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Snapchat which also have huge consumer audiences require special management to be useful to brands. A good consultant will know how to handle them for excellent results.

Start a Podcast

You can earn money from podcasting if you have the skills and the right equipment. As your podcast grows, you can monetize it by offering paid sponsorship and selling your own products/services. If you are into podcasting, as your listening audience grows, the more you gain their trust. When the trust grows, it increases the likelihood that they will buy what you are offering or endorsing. That is when the money starts coming in. You can easily get into podcasting because you don’t really need expensive or fancy audio equipment to start a podcast. Once you can have the episodes transcribed for easy accessibility and content marketing purposes, you can make a lot of money in podcasting. 



Virtual Training

In a pandemic situation as we are now with widespread restrictions on human interaction, virtual training is gaining ascendancy because life must go on. The situation now makes a lot of people to opt for studying online. For this reason, many hitherto offline institutions have moved online. People with marketable skills in specific fields now translate their knowledge into online courses and training and money is being made. If you have a good skill to teach online and you cannot go it alone, you can join online platforms to offer your services for a fee. Presently, many more people are turning to online platforms to learn new skills and access valuable resources. That creates real demand for online training. Be it fitness, digital marketing, SEO, or UI/UX design services, irrespective of whatever niche you’re in, now is the right time to package your knowledge and skills and sell them to people online. You can make money from the fees you charge.

Launch a Clothing Line

You can launch a clothing line and make money online if you know what you are doing. With a few designs and the requisite designing skills, you can get your clothing business off the ground. Just open your own e-commerce store on Shopify and pronto you are in business. If you can use Oberlo, Prettify, Printful or a similar sourcing app, you can quickly set up your own clothing line. These apps can automatically link your store with clothing printers and clothing manufacturers. They also handle every step of the retail fulfillment process for you, giving you the freedom to design and ship a wide variety of parts from scratch. Then you can start making money.

Monetized Blogging

These days, nearly everyone in e-commerce business is into blogging. Many are into blogging to market content which attracts traffic to their stores. People now practically blog about nearly everything on planet earth. So, if you want to start a blog, it is easier to start a blog now than ever before. Your blog can be a great potential source of income if you take steps to monetize it. Once you decide to continuously create good quality content, your blog audience will start to grow provided your blog content has a very high quality that educates, informs or entertains people. Once your blog following starts to grow, you can then begin to make sales on the blog from the traffic it attracts. You can sell many things on your blog including ads spaces. You can quality physical products, digital products, sponsored posts, training, e-books, etc. But, your blog can only be profitable if you are willing and able to put in the work needed to continuously post high quality and valuable content on the blog.
 
SEO Consulting Services

If you have the technical knowledge and skills for search engine optimization, SEO, you can become SEO professional in consultancy services. This skill simply entails how to get business websites to rank high in Google and knowing how to convert online searchers into customers. Presently, you there are many brands and businesses willing to pay for such professional services. These services are highly technical in nature and may involve editing metadata tags, regularly updating a business blog, or searching for smart keywords to help the business rank high in search engines. A good SEO consultant who knows his trade can work with a solid SEO strategy to change the fortunes of any online business for the better.

 

Start E-commerce Store

If you have quality products to sell online, you can become an E-commerce Associate ECA in a reputable e-commerce business like Strong Future International SFI. You must however know what sells well, what the best price is for products, and how to make your listings stand out on the platform. Doing so can quickly accelerate your success in the business. E-commerce store is also a business you can build around your personal interests, passion and experience, which makes it fun and even lucrative. If you become E-commerce Associate in SFI, you only have to list your products, and the platform takes care of the rest particularly customer service. You can list your products FREE and you are only required to pay a commission if you make a sale. As an SFI, ECA because you have the advantage of low start-up and maintenance costs, there is virtually no limit to your earning potential once you list your products for sale.

Web Designer and Developer

These days, because many more people are taking their businesses online, that has increased the demand for design, launching and hosting of websites. The demand for web designers and developers has increased tremendously too. To be a web developer, you must have the right technical skills and be able to demonstrate them at any time to convince brand/business owners what you can do for them. Web designers and developers always earn good fees for their services.

Dropshipping Business

In digital marketing parlance, dropshipping is usually referred to as the easiest option to start an e-commerce business. This is because you do not need to even have products of your own to sell and also without having to purchase any products up front. You can simply use dropshipping apps to find thousands of vendor products to sell online. Through dropshipping, you can market products to customers around the world all without investing in warehousing, inventory, customer service, shipping, or manufacturing costs. Quite a low cost business to start really. Once the dropshipper links a buyer to a product merchant, the merchant takes over from there. Once a sale is made, the dropshipper earns his commission. Simple!

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

12 Great Business Ideas for Women Entrepreneurs

Lady working from home with a computer, notepads, notebooks, coffee mugs, pens, pencils, water bottle and smartphone on the table.
It is a good sign of the times that women are now looking for more autonomy, work-life balance, and financial freedom, particularly financial freedom. They are taking things into their own hands to get or do what they want rather than wait for anyone to get things done for them. What that means is that when it comes to entrepreneurship, women now own their own hustle real time more than ever before. They now settle for good business ideas that promise location flexibility, time and work schedule independence. Such business ideas are largely prevalent in women-dominated enterprises where other women entrepreneurs tend to be doing real good. Here are some of such great business ideas. 



1. Makeup Artist: Most women and even some men like to look real good if not most times but some of the times. The reason making up is presently a very huge industry where women really do well as entrepreneurs. Aside direct make up, they also make money from selling cosmetics, creams and other items that people can use on their own and in their own homes to look good.

2. Cleaning Business: There is hardly anyone who does not need cleaning. So, women can now make money from commercial/business/office, industrial and residential cleaning business. If you have the right equipment, you can do cleaning business hands-on or you hire the right help to assist you with growing list of orders. It pays well.

3. Personal Chef: Food is life and many people eat to live. For people who can afford it, hiring a personal chef to prepare special healthy meals for them is part of their comfortable living. Good Chefs get hired for this purpose and it is a business many women are good at by their natural endowments. These days, you don’t even need to own a restaurant to be a chef. More individuals and families are hiring personal chefs to cook in private settings. Good business opportunity there no doubt.

4: Event Planning: Always a busy world and people are getting things organized daily. Such social/business/religious events like retreats, conferences, parties, meetings, conventions, trade shows etc. etc. get organized daily. People always need talented event planners to put these events together. The demand is high and the pay is good when you know your trade well enough.
 
5. Interior Designing: This has to do with the aesthetics of your home/office where you spend most of your time. So, if you have the skills for interior designing, you can be in business fast enough by becoming a residential/commercial interior designer.



6. Tutoring: If you have the knowledge and the skills, one-on-one private tutoring is a good business idea. People these days arrange private tutoring for their wards right in the comfort of their homes. The demand is high for private tutoring in these days of prevalent pandemic restrictions and all.

7. Real Estate: You can purchase, renovate and flip valuable real estate properties to make money. If you prefer to keep properties and earn rental charges, you can purchase investment properties, find rent paying tenants and earn weekly, monthly or yearly rents depending on your preferences. If you want to sell properties, you can purchase, renovate and keep for a while to appreciate then sell at a good margin. That’s what making money on real estate entails.

8. Wedding Planning: Wedding planners are always in high demand. Because of the importance of a wedding in the lives of two lovers, good planning guarantees success and sweet memories. Wedding planners make money by costing venues, decorations, transportation, music, food and drinks as well as souvenirs to prepare their charges. That helps to remove a lot of work from the wedding partners leaving them enough time to appreciate and cozy up to themselves more prior to their wedding. Many people don’t mind paying for wedding planning because it helps a great deal to save them from stress.



9. Graphic Designing: This business requires a lot of technical skills to get going. If you have the skills, you can make good money from online business owners by helping them to design logos, landing pages, websites, and hero images and email campaigns. Any online activity with pixels needs good graphic designing to bring out the real aesthetics needed for attraction. Even though there are online tools like Canva people can use for self-help designs, these tools don’t adequately take the place of good graphic design experts who bring in the human touch.

10. Dropshipping: This is one business model of having to sell products without even having to set eyes on them or touch them. Through this model, you can advertise products for a product merchant, process orders for the product merchant while the merchant delivers the products to the buyers. That way, you are able to sell products without storing them in your home or a warehouse. It is one great way to sell products without risking inventory issues.

11. Life Coaching: Coaching isn’t just for sports or sporting activities even though you can earn money there too. Aside career advice, many people sometimes need life advice as well. With the requisite knowledge and experience you can provide services as guidance for good living and healthy life.

12. Etsy Shop: Etsy shop is a very popular online marketplace to sell hand crafts and sculptures. It is one great marketplace creative entrepreneurs can make good money. If you have the skills to make unique hand made products like carvings, sculptures, paintings, etc. etc., Etsy shop is where to go and sell them to make money.

Thursday, February 10, 2022

5 Easy Ways to Monetize your Blog

Dollars bills held out in fan shape.
To earn money from blogging, you must know what you are doing. It is not enough to consistently churn out good content on your blog. Deliberate steps must be taken to monetize the blog before you can effectively make money from it. That is in addition to doing everything blog-related like networking and content writing. By the time you have a real hang on your blog, it is imperative to constantly and regularly update it, test it, and diligently work it to grow it. That requires some bit of patience and practice though. It is by doing these things you can only expect to have some measure of success with it provided you put in enough time and resources growing the blog. Making money from your blog depends on how it is monetized. Following are some of the most popular monetization ways most bloggers usually adopt to make money. 


 
1. Affiliate Marketing

You can earn money from your blog as an affiliate. It is one popular way bloggers earn commissions paid out by product merchants. The arrangement is quite simple. Bloggers simply place unique links or codes on their content linking products on third party websites of product merchants. If anyone clicks on these links and makes a purchase, the blogger earns a commission from the sale. Quite a simple and effective way to earn money from a blog no doubt!

2. Selling Products

You can list products for sale on your e-commerce store and use your blog to promote them. Once the products are listed for sale, you simply use your blogs as an advertisement tool for the e-commerce store. If you sell your own products, orders are taken directly from your website, payments made and you supply the products yourself. Even if you don’t have your own products to sell yet, you can sell the products of other merchants by way of dropshipping. By this method, orders are taken from your website and the products are supplied by a third party merchant who will be responsible for handling, packaging, shipping and delivery to the buyers. You earn a commission from each sale originating from your blog website.
 
3. Offering Services
 
As a blogger, you can offer various services on your blog. Depending on your skillsets, you can sell your skills profitably online. Such skills as learning a new language, playing a musical instrument, singing, dancing and suchlike skills people are interested in and are prepared to pay for. You can also offer writing services, programming services or even Virtual Assistant services to busy Executives. If you have any of such valuable skills, you can through your blog advertise them properly and market yourself as a freelancer. That way, you’ll be able to earn good money from your skills.

4. Advertising

This is one of the most common ways of earning money from blogging. It is also very easy to understand and utilize once your blog is up and running and its readership is growing satisfactorily. You can work with many brands to advertise their products/services on your blog mostly through banner ads, codes or links. It is one easy way to earn money by way of paid commissions once your blog has garnered an audience.



5. Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a free, simple way to earn money by displaying ads next to your blog content. These ads are served through very unique and specialized codes from Google. With AdSense, you can show relevant and engaging ads to your blog visitors and even customize the look and feel of ads to match your site. Google AdSense provides a way for bloggers/publishers to earn money from their blog/online content. AdSense works by matching ads to your site based on your content and visitors. The ads are created and paid for by advertisers who want to promote their products. Since these advertisers pay different prices for different ads, the amount you earn varies. You earn money from AdSense through click-throughs and page views and the rates differ. You can for instance earn up to $1 for 1000 page views. 

Thursday, January 27, 2022

How to Turn Your Blog into a Profitable Business

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



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

Establish a Content Strategy

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

Ensure Your Business is Legally Registered

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

Create Strategic Workflows

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

Establish an Affiliate Marketing Strategy on Your Blog

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

Weave Your Products/Services into Your Content

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



Take Advantage of Collaborations

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

Be Serious with Cyber Security

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

Saturday, January 08, 2022

Best Online Business Strategies for E-commerce Beginners

Lone e-commerce worker on a computer with a straw hat, pencils and slices of watermelon in a saucer on the work table.
Yes, covid-19 restrictions are still somehow in place but people must do business all the same. If you are new to e-commerce, you must first recognize that some business strategies have high potential, and some don't. That is the way it is in the world of e-commerce business. For this reason, it is imperative to first thoroughly analyze the market space to discover which e-commerce business has great potential before you make your decisions, pandemic restrictions notwithstanding. Below are some tested e-commerce business strategies that can help entrepreneurs to earn money online.



Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a fairly easy business to start online even without prior experience. All it entails is to simply promote products online by sharing their referral links. These are affiliate links you can actively share on your blog, social media, email, or other online platforms. Any time someone clicks on your referral link or makes an order through the link, you earn a commission for your efforts. It is as simple as that. Online, there are a vast number of businesses looking for affiliate marketers to help them generate customers through effective links promotion or even word-of-mouth marketing. Large and very popular e-commerce websites like SFI TripleClicks, Alibaba and Amazon do offer affiliate programs that new e-commerce entrepreneurs can easily take advantage of.

Virtual Online Teaching

Teaching all kinds of skills online is a very lucrative business. Experience during the early stages of severe restrictions during the pandemic proved that businesses didn’t have to grind to a halt simply because of the pandemic. Online teaching and learning stepped up to help out. Many people were forced to study online. As a consequence, even offline-based institutions moved online. Many people with valuable and important skill sets in specific areas translated their knowledge into online courses and training and they started earning good money. More and more online learning platforms sprang up as well and the business continued to expand despite the pandemic. As a new entrepreneur interested in online teaching, there are many ways you can sell your online courses. Most common among them are by organizing online training sessions, self-publishing eBooks and making tutorial videos. You earn good money for your efforts.

App Developer/Web Designer

With improvement in technology, app and software development have become a great niche to start a business online. App developers now find good opportunities to create mobile apps and websites. If you are creative enough and have real interest in coding, HTML, CSS, and other aspects of web design, you can become a freelance webmaster/web designer. This is yet another great online business idea. Even if you don’t have the requisite experience in this field, you can leverage valuable web design resources, courses, and tutorials available for beginners and you’ll be in business pronto.

Social Media Management

SMM or Social Media Marketing is becoming increasingly popular with new online entrepreneurs. These are people who effectively use social media marketing to promote products/services online. They deploy social media efficiently as an integral part of their overall online marketing strategy. However, because of the diversity of many social media platforms, it could be hugely challenging to effectively manage them all for best results. One business opportunity this creates is that other businesses can outsource SMM to social media enthusiasts and experts who understand social media marketing and are able to manage social media platforms/pages well enough. Such experts get paid handsomely for their services.

Niche Market Retailer

Online, there are always buyers for almost everything. Even if you don’t have the requisite skills in social media management, affiliate marketing, or other online business ideas, you can create an e-commerce store to sell specific products like hand crafts, home made goods and even retail merchandise. If you promote the store well enough, you get good traffic, leads and sales. Comparatively, setting up an e-commerce store is relatively easy nowadays. Even if you are new in e-commerce business, you can create your hosting service with integrated e-commerce software or list your products on an e-commerce marketplace and you are in business.

Freelance Graphic Designer/Writer

Freelancing business online enjoys a lot of flexibility. Freelancers can freely choose what they do, how they do it and even who they do it for. If new in freelancing business, they can even decide to work with popular and credible freelance platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, freelancers who can help you to decide what to work on and who to work with. Most businesses require the services of good designers to create infographics, logos, posters, and other visual designs. If you have a flair for writing and you have the requisite writing skills, you can use your talent to get job offers to write blog posts, eBooks, and sales copy from people across the globe. There are limitless opportunities for web designers and good writers online.

Handmade Craft Seller

If you have the skill sets for handcrafts, you can create an e-commerce store to showcase and sell handmade crafts/art. Even if you can’t make them yourself, you can get these products from a supplier and sell them online to make money. Other highly creative endeavors like photography, carvings, sculpture and painting and other beautiful works of art can help with good income online via an e-commerce store.

 

Dropshipping Business

Dropshipping business requires you to sell online by simply taking customers’ orders and partner with a third-party wholesaler/retailer who handles the inventory and order fulfillment side of the business. It is one of the best ways to make money online without the need to invest or buy products in advance by way of huge investments. To make your own money, you just need to sell the products with a bit of a mark-up over and above the wholesaler’s price. For e-commerce beginners, it is really lucrative since they don’t have to worry about cost of storage and inventory handling/management to run the business successfully.
 
SEO, Search Engine Optimization Consulting

If you have the technical know-how and a good knowledge of SEO, starting a consulting business for website owners is a good business idea. With more and more people taking their businesses online, the competition for search engine rankings is really becoming tougher. If search engines don’t rank your websites in their SERPs high enough, it doesn’t benefit from highly valuable organic traffic. For this reason, many companies/brands that are obsessed with staying ahead their competition through ranking high on SERPs and turning their searchers into customers need good SEO techniques on their websites. Because SEO is really technical, it requires some good expertise to be able to render the service by way of consultancy. Those who know how can render the service and make good money from it. Good SEO consultants help business owners to analyse how their brand’s websites are doing online. From the results, they can best prescribe effective SEO strategies that help to increase traffic and customers to such websites.

Becoming an Influencer

Most influencers earn money mainly through brand sponsorships. They work by helping brands promote their products/services on their page. This is a very effective marketing method because most influencers usually have a large following on social media, and people see them as some sort of experts in a particular business niche. You can thus become an influencer in food and hospitality brands, sports brands, logistics and travels brands, hotels and accommodation brands, fashion brands and so on. There are several social media platforms influencers can take advantage of to build a large following. The larger an influencer’s following is, the more he earns. To become an influencer, you can start a podcast, become a TikToker, or create a YouTube channel, Pinterest or an Instagram account through which you can be creating valuable content regularly for your followers who rely on your opinion as an expert. That way, you get to build a real online presence, have a lot of following, and you earn money through commissions by promoting/endorsing products for products merchants.

Sunday, August 01, 2021

Online Business Ideas for Enterprising Entrepreneurs

Online work station with a computer, smartphone, notepad and pen.
Because of the peculiarities of the internet, online businesses stand very good chances of taking off and flourishing even amidst present day business restrictions as a result of covid-19 pandemic. The internet now greatly enables everyday business activities such as selling, promoting, marketing, advertising, shopping and such like business activities. Human activities in this vast digital space are by remote participation in the virtual realm. If you want to do business online and you are enterprising and creative, hereunder are business ideas you can start on your own to make money.



Influencer Marketing

Becoming a social media influencer is now a great business opportunity. Once you have been able to build a sizeable following on social media, you can become an influencer and make money. You can help promote all kinds of products through endorsements and recommendations to your social media audience. Particularly on Facebook and Instagram, product merchants can always court your endorsements if your audience is diverse and large. Influencers are some sort of celebrities and the bigger your name becomes on social media, the more promotions and paid sponsorships come your way. That translates to money in the short and long term.

Online Dropshipping Store

Creating a dropshipping store is one of the best hassles-free ways to start a business online. It is fairly straightforward to do.  Business owners who use the services of dropshipping stores tend to sell more products at reduced costs. The reason is simple. Dropshipping cuts out inventory fees or shipping logistic payments. Here is how. The moment a customer places an order on a specific online site, the dropshipping supplier receives the order number from the virtual store and starts preparing it for shipping. Next, the customer’s package arrives from the dropshipping supplier thereby eliminating the need for the seller to handle it directly. That helps cut handling and inventory costs on the part of the supplier. The dropshipping store earns income from the services it renders to products merchants as well as buyers.

Language Translation Services

Many transnational businesses need the services of language translators in many of their day to day activities. For this reason, there is presently a huge need for language translation services around the global world of business. This service can be rendered in form of translating a document from one language to another or in spoken form as part of international business negotiation teams for most corporations. If you are bi-lingual or multi-lingual and you are seeking a new online business, language translation services is one perfect niche you can fill.



Blogging

Blogging is a very popular form of content marketing online. You can blog for fun or blog for business depending on the niche of your expertise. Among digital marketers, blogging is one great business opportunity because you can blog about almost every issue on planet earth provided you have the expertise. If you have and you are able to create high quality, educational and informative content regularly, you can build a formidable following with time. To do this, you can promote your blog on websites, directories, social media and any other online channels to help grow its following. Once this following becomes big, it can garner attention from some major brands in your niche industry. Through these industries, you can get offers for paid promotions, sponsorships and endorsements on your blog. That translates to money to be made.