10 Simple SEO Tips to Help Boost Your E-Commerce Business

As most e-commerce business owners have since discovered, effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies can help increase traffic to your e-commerce store. SEO can indeed help to increase organic traffic, help conversions and significantly grow your business. SEO directly works on your site's visibility and ranking in search engine results. It helps to make your site noticeable on search engine results pages (SERPs) to attract customers and drive deals, attract leads and drive sales.

These here 10 simple e-commerce SEO tips can assist you to improve your site's visibility, attract more organic traffic and boost sales in your e-commerce store:
 
1. Intensive Keywords Research: Carefully conduct intensive keyword research with a view to recognizing applicable terms/phrases your target audience seeks. You can then analyze search volume, competition and value of the keywords with a view to choosing the best keywords for your site.

2. Quality Content Marketing: In digital marketing, content is king. Try to promote high-quality and informative content that caters to your target audience's needs and interests. This content can be packaged in form of blog posts, articles, guides, videos, photos and Graphics. Carefully streamline the content for search engines by combining significant keywords typically and utilizing an exact and brief writing style.
 
3. Mobile Enhancement: Since more and more people are now accessing the internet via mobile devices, try to ensure your site is upgraded and optimized for mobile devices. This helps to give the site a positive user experience and further enhances its SEO. You can utilize a responsive plan or mobile-first approach to ensure your site looks and works well on all screen sizes.

4. Social Media Marketing: These days, nearly everyone is on social media. That makes social media one huge market out there on the internet. You can therefore use popular social media platforms to advance your e-commerce store, engage with your audience, and drive traffic to your site. Attract traffic to your site by widely sharing your content. Robustly participate in social media conversations with a view to building valuable relationships with your followers.
   
5. On-Page Optimization: You can enhance your site's on-page elements to improve search engine visibility for the site. These elements include making convincing titles and descriptions, utilizing significant headings, optimizing image alt text, and ensuring your site's content is organized and easy to explore.

6. Enhance Local SEO: You can streamline your site for local search results to attract customers in your immediate geographic region through local SEO. Local SEO involves incorporating your Google My Business Listing, adding your business address and contact data to your site.
 
7. Technical SEO: Pay special attention to technical issues that can slow down or stop your site's performance and search engine visibility. Specifically, try to set up technical elements that incorporate upgrading site speed, making, and presenting an XML sitemap, and fixing broken links. Incorporate all these in a dynamic effort to guarantee the visibility of your site.
 
8. Build Backlinks: You can gain valuable backlinks from legitimate and reputable sites to improve the positioning of your website and its search engine ranking. You can easily achieve this through guests' blogging, outreach to influencers, and creating significant and valuable content that others will need to link to.

9. Internal Linking: It is good for your site’s SEO if you strategically link the relevant pages inside the site to further develop route and search engine indexing. You can use anchor texts that incorporate significant keywords to help search engines understand the page relationships on your website.
 
10. Analytics and Tracking: It is advisable to use online smart tools like Google Analytics to follow your site's performance, monitor customer behavior, and identify regions for development. Using these tools, you can correctly analyze data on traffic, conversion rates, and customer engagement. From this data, you can make informed decisions/choices and enhance your SEO system to boost your business.
 
Wrapping Up

From the foregoing, it is safe to conclude that if you want to really succeed in today's online marketplace, advancing your e-commerce site for search engines is really critical. These here outlined strategies if diligently implemented can help improve your site's visibility, attract more customers, increase your sales and generally boost your business.

Smart Digital Marketing Moves to Boost Your E-Commerce Store

It is smart digital marketing to ensure your e-commerce store is always improving. Do not be complacent even if things appear to be going smoothly for the store. There are smart digital marketing steps you can always take to ensure the store continues to improve. Since the internet has fundamentally changed the way consumers shop, positioning your e-commerce store for better patronage is a great way to take advantage of this change in consumer behavior. Going forward, there are clear predictions that more and more people will be taking the e-commerce approach in doing business. That simply means more and stiffer competition. In this kind of scenario, there are practical steps you can take now to really position your e-commerce store to do better business online. Here are some of these steps:

Build a Memorable Brand: Yes a great brand can hardly escape the notice of consumers. You must make sure to have a brand that people really know and easily remember. Since the e-commerce space is inevitably crowded, your e-commerce store needs to stand out on more than just price or frictionless checkout. A great brand helps it to stand out. You must therefore consciously build a brand that is memorable enough to draw people to care about your store. That is the kind of brand that helps lower overall customer acquisition costs and increases lifetime value.
 
Use Content Marketing to Build Authority: In digital marketing, content is king. You must make sure to routinely craft highly valuable content that you can market multichannel to build authority for your store. It is smart digital marketing move to market such content through social media, expert and authoritative blogs, marketing and educational videos and vivid graphics. These help to position your e-commerce store as a trusted authority. Good content marketing ultimately helps the store to pull in organic traffic, build customer loyalty and engagement.

Research Your Audience to Personalize Content: Another smart digital marketing move that can benefit your e-commerce store is to deeply understand your target customers. Knowing your customers well enough helps you to tailor your marketing strategies better. You must endeavor to take diligent steps to research your market, analyze data and create clear buyer personas. Next is to carefully use the insights from your buyer personas to craft personalized content and offers that resonate with each segment’s needs. This helps you to effectively target the right audiences with relevant messaging that help to improve engagement, conversions and loyalty.

Leverage User-Generated Content, UGC: You can leverage user-generated content (UGC) across marketing channels. What really matters is UGC like customer reviews, photos and social media posts. Good UGC helps to build trust and authenticity with potential customers. When people see actual consumers using your products real time, it is more persuasive than traditional advertising. Good UGC helps your store to create a sense of community and social proof that drives sales and brand loyalty.

 
Use Email Marketing Effectively: Email marketing has been around for a while but it is still a cost-effective marketing strategy of choice for most digital marketers. It is the only tried-tested-and-true digital marketing method your brand can truly control. If you use email, it is you who decide exactly what messages your chosen audience gets to see and what CTA you want to prompt. Significantly, email is far more predictable than other algorithm-driven digital marketing methods out there online because email really works and works well to marketers’ expectations.
 
Re-Engage Your Existing Customers: It is by far cheaper to service your existing customers than to source new ones. You must therefore focus less on gaining new audiences and more on servicing your existing customers. You can take deliberate steps to re-engage your existing customers if you want to do more business. Take steps to showcase how much you value your loyal customers. This you can do by highlighting user-generated content UGC, feedback and engagement. This info can be re-shared both within and outside your immediate digital community to help you re-engage your existing customers.

Use a Familiar Tone in Texts to Customers: What helps your brand to quickly build authority is the unique way you communicate about the brand. This is what consumers easily remember. So, if you if you use SMS to connect with customers, you must avoid impersonal and common transactional texts in the SMS messages. For your SMS to be effective, it requires a familiar tone, a unique voice and value. This helps to build brand affinity and humanizes brands, making them unique enough to easily stand out among the competition.
 
Focus on Search Engine Visibility: For marketing purposes, it is hugely important for e-commerce businesses to enhance their user experience and search engine visibility. You can therefore leverage SEO for product listings in your e-commerce store. This you can do by improving navigation and using relevant keywords to make it easier for your customers to find products listed in your store. That way, you can directly increase organic traffic, engagement and conversion rates in your store. This ultimately helps to boost sales in the store. 

7 Tips for Effective Selling in Your E-commerce Store

Your e-commerce store cannot grow if you are unable to make good sales out of it. Yes, online, the competition can be really fierce but marketers make sales even amidst huge competition. If you want your e-commerce store to grow, you must devise viable and sustainable strategies to make good sales out of it. No matter what selling methods you decide to use, make sure you formulate a good your sales pitch. These here 7 tips can be of help to you in that quest.

1. Invest in Your Website

Making people comfortable shopping on your e-commerce website helps the site to build trust. Paying good attention to the design and the operational capabilities of the site is therefore hugely essential. You must endeavor to optimize your site’s user experience to enhance this. Make sure the site is responsive across both desktop and mobile devices. The storefront designs should be sufficiently eye-catching to “arrest” user’s attention. The site must in addition be easy to navigate. You can streamline the sales process with intuitive navigation, clear CTAs, and a user-friendly checkout process. A professional-looking website design helps to bolster your business’ credibility and foster trust. This helps with good sales too.

2. Offer Practical Solutions

Your e-commerce website must offer practical solutions to shopper’s problems. Therefore, from your landing page to your product descriptions, the copy across your website should draw in prospects based on their needs. It should clearly highlight how your solution can help solve their problems. This is why you must concisely explain what your product will do for your customer and what problem it solves. This can entice them to make their buy decisions.

3. Provide Personalized Recommendations

To effectively sell out of your e-commerce store, you must make efforts to know your customers and their needs. This way you’ll be sufficiently equipped to sell them what they need. Deliberate personalization is the strategy you can adopt to help you out. Personalization makes your customer’s shopping experience more enjoyable and engaging. It helps to increase the chances of upselling and cross-selling additional offerings. To take advantage of this, you can always display your recommended products that are complementary or related to products the shoppers have already searched for on your product pages.
 
4. Leverage Visual Assets

Even if you are not a professional photographer, you must ensure your visual assets are top quality. Your products photos and videos must therefore be very clear and crisp. Quality of your visual assets counts a great deal to attract customers to your e-commerce store. The reason it is really crucial for products descriptions. As much as practicable, you should use close-up images of a product’s texture or a video of a product/service in action. This helps your customers to better understand the sales pitch. 

5. Deploy and Use Digital Marketing Tools

There are a lot of valuable tools out there on the internet that can help you in your marketing efforts. If for instance you want to attract new customers, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a technique of placing popular and carefully selected keywords within your website content and metadata is quite handy. SEO is free and helps you to attract highly valuable organic traffic and good site rankings. It is one powerful tool that can help improve your site’s visibility. You can also leverage email marketing campaigns to stay in touch with your customers and nurture the relationship. Emails are handy to make product recommendations, promote new products, offer targeted or site wide promotions, and follow up with customers who abandon their shopping carts. Additionally, if you use retargeting ads, you can reach shoppers who earlier visited your site but didn’t make a purchase. When these shoppers come across these ads as they surf the web, the ads can potentially encourage them to return to your website and complete their purchase.

6. Analyze, Test, and Optimize

Do not ignore testing and analyzing marketing results if you want to make good sales out of your e-commerce store. Fact is, there’s always a lot of competition for a buyer’s attention on the internet. By regularly analyzing and testing your marketing results, you’ll be equipped with valuable data and insights to help you make informed decisions about your marketing strategy. If and when necessary, you can change your selling techniques for better results at any time. This is why you must run A/B tests regularly to compare how different pricing or ads positioning affects buyers’ purchasing decisions. You may even choose to experiment with a new software solution for SEO, and testing will you with the right decision. The whole essence is to try to keep a keen eye and monitor your sales data very well. This can help you to improve your sales process for existing customers and attract new potential customers as well.

7. Highlight Customer Testimonials

It is always a good marketing strategy to highlight customer testimonials alongside the products you are selling. You can highlight reviews and customer testimonials on your site to win credibility with potential buyers. Customer reviews is huge validation for your products, and good for social proof as well. This is why you must endeavor to follow up with customers to encourage them to leave reviews of their purchases. You can even occasionally use incentives like discounts on their next purchases to attract customer reviews/testimonials.

Caution: Do not unduly worry even if not all reviews are positive. Yes, if reviews are positive, they are ideal for your business. But, negative reviews on the other hand help to provide you an opportunity for improvement and to show you’re committed to ensuring satisfied customers. You must therefore publicly respond to negative reviews and promise improvement to show you really care about your products and your customers. 

Effective Tips to Market Customized Products

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.

8 Ways Affiliate Marketing Benefits your E-Commerce Store

If you run an e-commerce store, affiliate marketing is a great way to promote your products/services. Through it, you can drive more traffic to your store, optimize your conversions, and get more leads and sales. Technically, affiliate marketing is a simple business model in which affiliates are expected to help market products/services for merchants in return for a sales commission. It creates a mutually beneficial relationship between product merchants, affiliates and consumers.

Reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI help to arrange this relationship, manage it and arrange commission’s payout to all affiliates. SFI relies on very effective marketing tools, training, and customer service to make this relationship worth the while for all parties involved and they have hundreds of thousands of products listed and with millions of affiliates who do the marketing for product merchants. So, if you sign up your e-commerce store as an associate in SFI, your business gets the full benefits of affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is thus a great way to grow your e-commerce store, get more traffic and make more sales in addition to the following benefits.

1. Promote New Products/Services

If you want to promote new products/services, affiliate marketing is very handy. Promoting new products in your e-commerce store can be tough going because getting out the right information about your new products/services is not an easy task. When affiliates step in, they widely promote these products/services to their loyal audiences and the awareness begins from there. After getting the real information about the new products/services, it becomes easier for affiliates to promote and recommend the products/services to their own audiences. Increased sales usually results from such efforts. So, anytime you have an exciting new product/service to promote from your e-commerce store, it makes real economic sense to have an affiliate program set up to get it done.

2. Attract New Customers

Affiliate marketing thrives on the depth and versatility of the Internet. It is one great way to get traffic, attract new customers and leverage the power of the internet. With literally millions of affiliates working for an affiliate program and helping to share products/service information to millions of people in their audiences, your e-commerce store can tap into this huge audience to attract new customers and make more sales. With affiliate marketing, your store can better attract new customers who may not have been aware of the products/services you have listed for sale. Affiliates help to bring good traffic to your store and consequently more new customers. The more traffic your store gets, the more sales it can generate.

3. Increased Brand Awareness

With affiliate marketing, you can increase brand awareness in your e-commerce store by linking your brand with other brands that have a similar consumer base. This also increases the popularity and credibility of your store as a trusted business. As trust and credibility build up for your store, it can lead to increased business opportunities down the road through increased brand value in your e-commerce store. When people take a look at your website and see that they can make money by promoting your affiliate links and banners, they’re more likely to latch on and widely promote your products/services with a view to earning good commissions.

4. Saves Time and Resources

Affiliates can help you to save time and resources by combining their collective efforts to help you out in promoting your products/services online to a wider audience. What the affiliates really need to do is to simply post your affiliate link on their websites/blogs. That link directs potential customers towards the website of an affiliate program where your products/services are listed. There, they will get all the necessary information about the product/service being offered by your e-commerce store to help them make their buy decisions.

5. Increased Conversions

When consumers click on an affiliate link and sign up for your newsletter or email list, they establish a business relationship. It takes a bit of further prompting thereafter for such people to make their buy decisions. Because affiliate marketing allows affiliates to promote their own links and even products on their websites to their own audiences, they can help drive more traffic directly back to your own store. That helps conversions a great deal.

6. Build Credibility
 
Affiliates are usually independent business owners who have their own reputations to protect. They may be people who have painstakingly built their own credibility in their niche industry over time. Many affiliates can even be considered experts in their chosen fields/industries. That makes them credible in their niche industry. They may even be ranking high already with increased visibility in the SERPs of major search engines like Google. So when people are searching for information about a particular product category, these people can be directed to your e-commerce store from the affiliate links on the websites of your credible affiliates. That increases credibility for your own store.

7. Directly Target Customers

With affiliate marketing you can directly reach only those people who would be interested in what you are selling. Your target audience will be more likely to visit your store and buy from it because they already know that is where they will get what they are looking for. If someone searching for a product clicks on your affiliate link, such persons are directed to where they can find what they are looking for in your store. This means that people visiting your store through your affiliate link are already sensitized. Such persons already know that by clicking on your affiliate link, they’ll see what they are looking for or something related to it. What this means is that more people will potentially become interested in what you have on offer in your e-commerce store. Aside directly targeting customers, affiliate marketing also allows you to get more traffic in your e-commerce store through the process.

8. Increased Revenues

Since affiliate marketing as a business model helps marketers to get more traffic, more leads and sales, it ultimately helps to increase revenues for both affiliates and product merchants. When someone clicks on an affiliate link and makes a purchase from your e-commerce store, as the product merchant, you earn income from the sale while the affiliate earns sales commission. This is how affiliate marketing can help your e-commerce store to make more sales and increase its revenues. Affiliate marketing also helps to enhance your revenue because you do not need to spend much money on advertising. Affiliates simple help to promote your affiliate links very widely in anticipation of earning commissions and you start getting traffic and making sales from these efforts at no ads cost on your e-commerce store.

Wrapping Up

There are many benefits your e-commerce store can get from affiliate marketing. The foregoing are just a few of such benefits. If you sign up your e-commerce store on a reputable affiliate marketing program as in SFI for instance, your store benefits from the services of millions of affiliates, good training, great customer service, excellent marketing tools and good management which includes flawless commission payouts. Affiliate marketing is thus one great way to market your e-commerce store to a targeted audience and to increase revenue earnings in the store. It is an excellent opportunity to grow your e-commerce store towards some bigger success down the road.

6 Ways to Gain Customer Loyalty in your E-Commerce Store

Expert marketers like to advise that it is by far cheaper to retain customers than to get new ones. If you run your own e-commerce store, once shoppers make a purchase, they become customers. Anyone who so makes a purchase therefore becomes a customer gained. It is at this time the business owner can now shift focus to providing direct value and establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer. This is the time to use all customer retention techniques to have this customer coming over and over again to make purchases from your store. This is the stage when customer loyalty comes into the mix. This is the time the business owner must take deliberate steps to know the customer well enough together with his buying habits then deliver his own unique personalized value to communicate with and engage the customer. This is with a view to getting the customer to return for repeat purchases.

Following are effective strategies any smart business owner can use to position his e-commerce store well enough to gain customer loyalty.
 
1. Leverage Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is all about rewards and commissions earning. Affiliates help business owners to promote products and earn commissions on the sales they generate. Smart business owners always explore many viable options to reward their affiliates as well as customers. Some choose to incentivize and motivate their affiliates well enough to help sell more products. The activities of these affiliates directly help to grow brand awareness for the business, get customers for the business and help the business to sell more products all in return for commissions. New customers can even become affiliates by referring their friends, family and associates to the business to make purchases. If you reward them with monetary compensation in form of commissions of about 10% or more of the price of each purchase, that helps immensely to build customer loyalty for your business.

2. Promote What Makes You Unique

It is products that are great and unique to you that can help grow customer loyalty for your e-commerce store. These products can be unique in terms of quality, method of delivery and even prices. When your products stand out from the crowd, they inevitably attract repeat customers to your business. They help to build up the loyalty of these customers over time. If you take deliberate steps to ensure you promote only products that distinctly set your business apart from others, it can help encourage customers to buy directly from your business over and over again.

3. Offer Your Customers Repeat Purchase Options

If you want to build and elongate a good relationship with your customers, always offer them enticing repeat purchase options. Such enticement can include but not limited to bulk purchase discount, free and automatic shipping and so on. Once they get a unique value from your business that they do not normally get if they shop elsewhere, they’ll keep returning to your business for more purchases.

4. Extend Your Loyalty Program to Customers

If you don’t have a loyalty program for your customers, have one as a matter of priority if you want to cultivate customer loyalty. I guess you’ve heard about buy two and get one free? Come back for a repeat purchase and get 10% discount? These are some form of loyalty programs that help to get customers back to your business. You can also use reward points or a discount after customers spend a set amount of money directly in your store.

5. Deliberately Build Relationships from the Outset

Good business is all about building good relationships. Once a customer makes the first purchase from your store that is when you start to build a one-on-one relationship with the new customer. Encourage each customer who purchases a product for you to give you a feedback about his purchase experience and even the use of the product. Do not forget to first show appreciation though for the purchase that has been made from your store. Always thank customers profusely and demand to know from them how you can serve them better. Let them know the type of incentives they can benefit from when they return to make more purchases. Release discount codes to them for such purposes if you are using discount codes of your loyalty programs. If they are entitled to commissions when they introduce other parties to make purchases from your store, let them know. All these help immensely to build customer loyalty.

6. Always Encourage Your Customers to Help Share Your Brand Story

There is no business without a story behind it. If the story is unique to the business, that is much better. When your customers help to tell your unique story, it is not only credible, it spreads faster. Make your bragging rights known to your customers, how far your business has come, what it went through and how many obstacles it had to overcome to still be in business. These are the kind of stories people want to hear to relate them to their own stories. Your customers can directly share these stories with their family, friends, associates and even their social media audiences. If convenient, you can offer a token but valuable gift with a purchase or a discount off their next purchase directly from your store for widely sharing your story. Such offers can help bring customers back to your store to claim the gifts. That’s customer loyalty.

7. Highlight Values That Are Intrinsic To Your Business

Well, I have heard it said that everyone brags with something of unique value that is attributable to them. It holds true too even in business. So, if you have an in-house policy of using a given percentage of your sales to support noble causes around the world, let your customers know. You can specifically mention the causes you support with charitable and not-for-profit organizations like the Red Cross, Rotary International, World Wildlife Foundation, Amnesty International and so on to make our world a better place to live in. Consumers who care about these same causes may be influenced to buy from your store and to keep buying from the store in support of these causes.

Best Online Business Strategies for E-commerce Beginners

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.

Effective Digital Marketing Tools to Manage your E-Commerce Store

Digital marketers depend on in-house digital marketing tools to manage their e-commerce stores effectively. Even if they are marketing out of popular and reputable e-commerce marketplaces where buyers and sellers come to make wholesale transactions, they need these tools to succeed. Sometimes, it is the availability of digital marketing tools they helps marketers to decide which e-commerce platform to pitch their marketing tents with. E-commerce platforms like SFI TripleClicks.com, Alibaba.com. eBay, Amazon and a host of others offer an array of digital marketing tools to help e-commerce stores connect with the right buyers and propel their sales.

Here are some of the digital marketing tools that sellers have access to on popular E-commerce marketing platforms.

Analytics Tools

You cannot succeed in digital marketing if you are unable to accurately measure your results. That is where in-house analytics tools come in very handy for sellers to measure results. With the benefits of analytics data and information, digital marketers get to understand how they can best reach their audience with effective marketing. Analytics info enables marketers to see what is working and what is not in their marketing campaigns. Exactly why, analytics have become a very huge and indispensable part of digital marketing. Popular wholesale e-commerce platforms characteristically provide powerful analytics tools to give marketers real time insights into their target markets and the performance of their online e-commerce retail stores. These analytics usually provide accurate and real time information on platform-wide trends for the larger benefit of affiliated e-commerce stores.

Ads Management Tools

Affiliated e-commerce stores can run their own paid ads for the direct benefit of their own stores. To do this effectively, even if they want to run many different ads at the same time, they can take advantage of in-house built-in advertising tools. Marketers can run ads on the platforms and the tools help their products to rank well in searches for relevant keywords. These ads management tools also help marketers to target ads based on geography and click history. Arguably, the best part about these tools is that your business can benefit from Pay-Per-Click, PPC, advertising. Meaning, you are only required to pay for ads when users actually interact with your listings through verifiable clicks.

Lead Generation Tools

In-house lead generation tools allow marketers to target offers directly to one single prospect at a time. This lead generation tactics is unique in its own right and very effective too. It is a bit different from the other digital marketing tactics in mode of operation and effectiveness. One unique lead generation tool peculiar to Alibaba.com is a Request for Quotation, RFQ feed. It is an important section of their website where B2B buyers can post their wholesale needs. Sellers can browse these requests and try to match the needs as much as they can. Matching sellers and buyers easily is always a great marketing experience and mutually beneficial to all parties.

Tips to Optimize Conversion Rate on E-Commerce Business

If you are selling out of some e-commerce platform, you will always want to make sure that your website visitors complete some certain desired actions. The rate at which these visitors complete these actions to become customers is referred to as conversion rate. The higher this rate, the better business your e-commerce site is doing. Conversion rate is a direct indicator of how many new customers you can acquire and how many potential leads become available for nurturing to full scale customers.  High conversions rates show that your brand is attractive and viable, a direct consequence of great, enjoyable and memorable consumer experience on your website. A typical worthwhile experience which they’re unlikely to get if they do business with some other e-commerce site! With the right strategies, it is possible to positively increase your conversion rate. If you let it be known from your website activities/actions that you have real value to offer and you offer it seamlessly, customers rarely forget who you are and where to find you. You get very good return business as a result.

Here are some handy tips to help you optimize your conversions if you’re doing business out of some e-commerce platforms.

Set Conversion Benchmark Targets

Setting benchmark targets in anything you do in e-commerce business is always a good strategy. In that quest, conversions always cover a fair amount of ground when referring to various benchmark targets to achieve. Some of such benchmarks may be very simple and some a bit complicated but they all have to do with numbers and timing. You can accurately get the rate of conversion by dividing the number of conversions by the number of website visitors. When you factor timing into it, say in hours/days/weeks/months, it becomes a set benchmark which you can work towards to determine how good you are doing. What this means is that you can accurately evaluate how well your campaign is going and be able to identify if and when your conversions are growing or not.

Deploy Onsite Call-To-Action Tools

Characteristically, many internet users are always doing multiple things online.  That gets them really busy selling, shopping, socializing on social media, reading and reviewing emails. When surfers land on your e-commerce web page, you need something like a call-to-action to remind them to do business with you before they exit the page. That’s where pop-up reminders become very handy. For effectiveness and better results, a call-to-action on every page of your website and as a pop-up reminder helps visitors remember what to do. If they take the hint, that action can easily translate to a conversion and sale. For good results, make sure your call-to-action pop-up unfailingly helps to remind your website visitors when exiting to reach out if they have any questions/inquiries about any products you are offering.

Use On-Platform Analytics Tools

Analytics are online marketing data gathering tools to help gauge your performance. When deployed on e-commerce sites, they are immensely useful for gauging what your customers want and what they are searching for within your store. They can help categorize your site visitors and even their geographical locations using the terms these visitors type into the search bars of your site. This is exactly why for SEO reasons, your product description must include a word/phrase customers are seeking to search for the product.

Optimize Product Images and Videos

Since major search engines have found a way to index images/videos, it has become imperative to optimize them. Optimizing product images helps to show the relative scale of the product, the brand name, relevant details and evidence of authenticity. This is the information which helps search engines to index these images for easy search. In addition, there is more relevance to the message when the branding is consistent in the images/videos of your products. That is where quality really matters. If you cannot guarantee professional quality of images/videos from your in-house efforts, you can outsource to professionals who can guarantee quality and ease of optimization.

Simplify Your Checkout Procedure

In e-commerce marketing, this is a given. The easier it is for customers to complete checkout procedures on your site, the friendlier your site is to customers. No shopper ever wants to get involved with complex checkout procedures. The easier it is for them to select a product, add to a cart, confirm a shipping address, add a credit card, and make payment with easy finish notice, the better for most customers. The simpler and easier this process is, the better for your e-commerce business. An easy checkout procedure also helps to reduce abandoned shopping carts which can negatively impact your numbers. To really simply your checkout procedure, you can customize your checkout process to a single page. That in essence creates an ideal checkout page for your e-commerce website.

Strong Reasons Why You Should be in SFI Business

Hi, my name is Sule Yesufu, and I've been an SFI affiliate for over a year.

I'm with SFI because they're the real deal. For nearly two decades now they've been providing anyone who's willing to work a real way to earn extra income as an Internet marketer...from the comfort of their home.

One of the things I really love about SFI is that there's never any purchase or sales requirements. Most companies have to have such requirements...or there would be no sales. But with SFI, there's so much good stuff going on that sales, success, and commissions just flow naturally! And because SFI provides such outstanding training and tools, it doesn't matter if you have any experience in marketing or not. You simply need to plug in to their proven system and go to work.

SFI's e-commerce store, TripleClicks.com, is a big part of it. TripleClicks is one of the fastest growing and most popular e-commerce sites on the Web today. And starting from your very first day as an SFI affiliate, you can share in the profits of EVERY sale at TripleClicks. For real! Over 90,000 products from all over the world, 24-hour penny auctions, and a variety of great online games are just part of what makes TripleClicks so special. TripleClicks has something for everyone--and that makes online selling both lucrative and fun!

But the best part about SFI is that they're only scratching the surface of what they're likely to become during the next 10 years. Their potential is off the charts! And that's why I invite you to join my SFI group today and start sharing in the fun and profits. Remember, there are no required costs EVER...and there's no obligation.