5 Reasons You Should Consider Blog Writing as a Business

Blogging for business has been around for quite a while among digital marketers. Presently, many people are into part-time blogging solely to earn a second paycheck, while many full-time bloggers are also making good money blogging for business. Technically, if you have a unique knowledge or idea and you can express it well in writing, you too can be a blogger. Blogging is relatively simple to start but to make success out of it and make money, it takes quite some time and a bit of patience. Once you have the right knowledge/ideas and good writing skills, you can choose a great web-hosting platform like WordPress or Blogger to host your blog. Both platforms are features-rich platforms where you can freely access a range of plugins, themes and templates to help you set up a successful blog.

If you have a plan to set up a business blog, here are 5 good reasons you should do so without delay.

1. Boost Your Online Profile: Every digital marketer always craves to have a great online profile because it is good for business. Blogging which is presently the most popular form of content marketing among digital marketers is one great way to boost your online profile. A good blog is a portfolio to showcase your work and highlight your domain expertise. It showcases your expert knowledge in your chosen industry/niche. As your blog audience grows, your online profile grows with it. A great blog can really boost your online profile no end.

2. Boost Your Skills: You need great skills to be a good blogger. These skills can be so unique and valuable that others will like to benefit from them. Consistent blogging helps you to hone, boost and push these skills. You can therefore easily use your blogging platform to become better at blogging and content marketing by continuously developing better blog content as you blog along.

3. Make Money: Yes, making money is presently the most significant reason for most business bloggers. For both part-time and full-time bloggers, the key attraction these days is to make money. You can make money blogging when you monetize your blog by way of affiliate marketing, selling ads spaces on your blog, from Google AdSense as a publisher, by way of sponsored content and through influencer marketing.

4. Turn Visitors into Leads: If you run an eCommerce store, turning your website visitors to leads and even conversions is a good business strategy. A niche blog can help you to do that. If you have the ability to consistently create useful, engaging content, it will help you pull the right audience to your business. Ultimately, the more you craft interesting content as blog posts, the greater your chances of turning these visitors into leads and conversions.

5. Grow Your Network: Growing your online network is a direct consequence of your blog popularity and increased online profile. You are no doubt aware that as a marketer, the bigger your network, the bigger the business you can do online. If your blog is hugely popular, it can lead to the formation of several networks of like-minded bloggers. You can effectively leverage such blogging networks to help you explore more blogging opportunities as a guest blogger. That further helps to grow the network.

3 Effective Ways to Convert Clicks into Buyers in your Online Store

One of the biggest marketing issues facing online stores owners is how to get people to visit their website. This challenge is further compounded by how to get the visitors you receive to make clicks and purchases without which your online store cannot make any sales. Most times, the real challenge lies in turning clicks and visits into paying customers. Your best way around this challenge is by optimizing your online marketing strategy. If you do, you will be in a better position to maximize results and boost your conversion rate. Quite unlike most other types of websites, the ultimate goal of your online store is to make good sales. You therefore need unique optimizing techniques to make that happen.

Here are 3 tested ways that can help you to effectively optimize your online store for good results.

1. Make Your Products Page Uniquely Attractive

If you run an online business, your product page is about the most important page on your website. Since most of your CTAs are designed to direct users to that page, it plays a critical role in converting visitors into customers. It is the page that showcases the products you are marketing. To perform this role effectively, your products page must be uniquely attractive and glaringly stands out from the competition. Part of this attraction is to include high-quality product images that easily capture the attention of your website visitors. Make sure that all the images of your products are clear, well-lit, and aesthetically showcase all the most important features of each product you are selling. Alongside compelling products descriptions, adding captivating visuals to your storefront are also vital.
 
2. Glaringly Showcase Recommended Products

You can attract more clicks and even sales if you add recommended products on your website. This is in addition to ensuring you optimize your eCommerce store on the website for maximum results. For creative marketing purposes, you can suggest equivalents or related items to your customers. Doing so helps to increase your chances of up-selling and cross-selling. It can directly enhance overall shopping experience for your customers. If you want to make your recommended products stand out even more to potential buyers, you can consider featuring them prominently on your product pages. Utilizing pop-up overlays that work to catch visitors’ attention in a non-intrusive way is one great way to get it done. Even with all these marketing tactics, never you forget to incorporate a captivating/inviting call-to-action, CTA button to your website. CTAs like, “Add to Cart”, “See Ongoing Promos” or “View Similar Items” button are being used my marketers to get astonishing results. Such CTAs are directly responsible for helping your customers to take easy action.

3. Streamline Your Checkout Process

Streamlining your checkout process is one great way to make your website user-friendly.  You must therefore always endeavor to streamline the checkout process for the benefit of your customers. Having a simple checkout process on your website can help you to achieve good conversions. Most customers get discouraged and do abandon their purchase journey when the checkout process is cumbersome. Customers who need additional help to purchase a product are less likely to do so. This is why it is of critical important to streamline your checkout process. You can do this by minimizing the required steps and simplifying ways for customers to complete their purchases. As much as practicable, you can allow guest checkout options so that users are not required to create an account if they do not want to do so. You can even incorporate a variety of payment options beyond just credit cards. Doing so provides the necessary flexibility that allows your customers to freely choose their preferred method of payment.

How to Quickly Expand Customer Base for your Ecommerce Store

Every ecommerce business owner always wants opportunities to positively connect with consumers and increase sales. To achieve this, many of these business owners usually have a strategic approach to building and growing their customer base through viable online platforms particularly social media. If you are an ecommerce store owner and you want to quickly expand your customer base, here are proven and reliable ways you can strategically expand your customer base. 

Make Your Products Highly Visible Online

This is a given. The more visible your products are online, the more people get to find them and the more customers they generate. To make your products more visible, you must optimize your ecommerce website and deploy other effective marketing techniques to enhance their visibility. Finding your products organically online through search engines entails effective SEO on your website. What this means is that your product titles, descriptions, images, and keywords should be tailored to search engine algorithms particularly Google. Such SEO steps largely determine how high your products appear in SERPs of search engines. Higher ranking automatically means higher visibility and more organic traffic. You can help this process by making sure your product images are professionally photographed from multiple angles, have high resolution and include infographics if feasible. This helps customers and potential customers to get a better sense of what they are trying to buy. A better sense of and understanding of the products on display can enhance the likelihood that they will actually make a purchase. Additionally, you can directly sponsor ads online to increase the visibility of your products.

Offer Competitive Pricing

Price remains a key factor in the purchasing decisions of many customers. Online, these customers have unlimited opportunities to scout around for the right prices before making their purchase decisions. So, if your products are priced too high when compared to similar products elsewhere, many customers usually choose to purchase elsewhere. Your competition benefits from this simple decision. It is smart marketing therefore to ensure that your prices are competitive in comparison to your competition. Before fixing prices for your own products, make sure you research the prices of similar products in some other platforms then adjust your prices accordingly. To expand your customer base, you can in addition consider offering discounts and or promotions. Doing so can help you to attract more new customers thereby increasing sales proportionately.

Take Advantage of Customer Reviews

If you want to increase customer base in your ecommerce store, you cannot afford to ignore the feelings and opinions of your customers. You can gauge these feelings correctly from customer reviews. This is because customer reviews are a crucial element in trust building with your customers. To encourage customers to leave reviews, you can consider including a request for a review in your product packaging or as part of your follow-up emails. You can also consider offering incentives, such as a discount on their next purchase, in exchange for a review. Make sure you take good advantage of reviews whether positive or negative by reacting and or responding to them. That is how best to take advantage of reviews to grow your customer base. As a marketing strategy, positive reviews can help increase visibility for your products online. Such reviews can help improve search rankings for the products, and ultimately help to drive more sales for them.

Have a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy

You can have in place a data-driven marketing strategy to grow your customer base. That requires diligent research on many online platforms particularly social media. You can generate data on trend analysis, analytics and any other vital marketing data to help you make well-informed marketing decisions. You’ll get to know about how to optimize the content on your ecommerce store and your product listings. Vital information about effective advertising and pricing of your products can be gleaned from the data you generate. You can effectively grow your customer base if you generate the right data and take marketing decisions based on such data. You must however endeavor to have in place a very sound and effective marketing strategy to bring this about. It is only such marketing strategy that can help you to quickly grow your customer base and make more sales as a result.

How to Create a Low-Cost Website for your eCommerce Store

These days, many more people are taking their businesses online. The reason thousands of eCommerce websites get launched every day. A website serves as an online business window and front office for many businesses. That is where they get to make their first contacts with their prospective customers online. If you are taking your business online, you have to learn how to create a low-cost eCommerce website that will serve your needs. Even if you are not too skillful in computer programming, you can take advantage of the lots of educational resources, software and step-by-step guides available online to build your own website. With these resources, almost anyone can build an eCommerce website step by step. Here is what to do.

Choose Your eCommerce Website Builder

Luckily you can have unlimited access to DIY services from the websites of reputable Website Builders like Wix and WordPress. If you want to run an affiliate program, you can join a reputable eCommerce platform like Strong Future International SFI. On this platform, you have access to a free webpage to do your business from. This is more so when you don’t have the right technical knowledge to do things right. On SFI platform, you can set your eCommerce store up and running in a matter of minutes. If you choose to build your website on WordPress platform, it allows you to add eCommerce functionality plug-ins to the website. These allow you to customize your eCommerce website as you choose to then add more options if you so wish.

Choose a Suitable Domain Name and Hosting Platform

Here is where things become a bit tricky. You must carefully choose a domain name that is not already in use by anyone else. The hosting platform must first sort that out before hosting your website. Your domain name should ideally be your business name or its variation, if the original match is already taken up. You may be required to pay monthly hosting fees when your store is up and running. That in essence may be your only true cost if you are building a DIY eCommerce website. No matter how your website comes about, make sure you take into account crucial operational factors like reliability, security, reputation, uptime, loading speed and more to make sure it is really useful to your business. For low-cost purposes, you can consider the hosting plans of Hostinger, Hostgator and Dreamhost.

Pick the Right Theme/Template to Customize

If you are building your website DIY on WordPress or Wix, you have access to a range of free themes you can choose from and customize for your eCommerce website. On WordPress, you can easily integrate your eCommerce website with WooCommerce through plug-ins. If done correctly, the website will become really suitable for displaying products, taking orders, receiving payments and shipping out purchased products. When your chosen theme is right and suitable, it easily molds into your eCommerce business. You must make sure that the theme you choose to customize has the right visual appeal and is easy to navigate. This is in addition to other vital and necessary traits like mobile-friendliness and high flexibility for easy adaptation.

Add Your Products/Services to the Website

This is where the real marketing takes root: adding products to your website. The way the products are displayed and the descriptions accompanying them are of vital importance for marketing purposes. Be sure to accompany your displayed products with a clear and concise product description. This is because the more informative this description is the more impactful it is. If you provide the necessary information in the right order, it makes it easier to skim, assimilate and understand.

Use only High Quality Professional Photos of your Products

The average human being is highly attracted to the visuals of your marketing products. So, if you use high quality and professional photos of your products, they attract attention easily. If you are marketing affiliate products, embedding these photos with affiliate links/codes helps to direct buyers to the appropriate website where the products can be purchased. Using the right keywords on the products description helps major search engines like Google to find the product on your website. Ultimately, these efforts help to make the process of choosing the right product fairly easy for the consumer.

Set Up your Acceptable Payment Methods
 
If you built your website DIY on Wix or WordPress, you can easily set the payment options you prefer. Most eCommerce website builders and plug-ins offer multiple payment options to eCommerce stores owners. They have access to online payments via multiple payment processors, Debit/Credit cards, Cash-on-delivery and so on even though each method may come with its own fees, processing time, and ease-of-use considerations.

Set Up your Shipping Options

Onsite, you can also set your preferred shipping methods which your customers can choose from depending on their convenience. Setting up the right shipping option is necessary and hugely important because it can serve as a marketing technique as well. This is why Free Shipping can be one of the top reasons many people buy products online and save costs. Even if the products cannot be delivered free, be sure to assure consumers that you are using the most reliable and cheapest method to deliver their products.
 
Test and Launch Your eCommerce Website

Before you launch your eCommerce website, make sure to test the website well enough to be sure it does what you expect it to do. That way, you can always take quick steps to rectify whatever faults you find with it before launching it. Thereafter, you must keep an eye on whatever faults you’ll encounter along the road through user experience and comments. It is hugely important to be sure the website is optimized for mobile devices. You can then test how it performs on cell phones and other smart mobile devices. This is because, according to Google reports, a very high percentage of eCommerce traffic comes via smart mobile devices.

Conclusion

Any business owner who is determined and serious about it can easily create a low-cost eCommerce website by DIY approach. Even though DIY approach to create the right eCommerce website is a possibility, it usually takes quite a bit of time and effort to get it done. Additionally, it is quite a difficult option for people with minimal technical knowledge. However through DIY approach, you can always take full advantage of low-cost eCommerce website creation options that offer a lot of flexibility, tools, and plug-ins. Any time you wish, and as you wish, you can easily maintain and modify the website on your own without any outside technical assistance. Doing so helps you to save time and costs.

Want to Make Money From Home, Try These Small Business Ideas

Are you still wondering how you can earn a living working from home? Even if you have a 9-5 job, you can still work from home and earn some good money on the side. Circumstances have forced more and more people to work from the comfort of their homes in recent times particularly because of the covid pandemic restrictions. This trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Remote work at home is fun, convenient, profitable and quite suitable for stay-at-home-mums in particular. So, if you are keen on becoming a home-based entrepreneur yourself, you may consider the following small business ideas for starters.

 
Content Writing

Anyone with the right skills and knowledge can write content for their blog or for marketers. Content is written principally to attract traffic to a business website. Content is hugely important for online marketing purposes because it is key to search engine rankings. Great content can be packaged in form of blogs, video scripts, and eBooks to attract prospects, leads and customers. Content writers can use existing content writing platforms like Fiverr or Upwork or go it alone on their privately hosted blogs. Whatever way you choose to write content, so long as it attracts traffic, it is OK. That is the traffic that will enable you to promote and sell products and to earn commissions if such products are from a third party product merchant.

Online Teaching/Tutoring

If you have the academic qualifications and inclination, you can teach subjects in any educational area online to earn money. Online teaching business is a perfect business to start from home. When people are generally restricted as in recent episode of covid pandemic, more and more people became interested in online school and home schooling. At such times, anxious parents usually arrange some form of teaching for their children and wards outside the traditional classroom education. That creates a lot of demand for online teaching. It is one job anyone can undertake from the comfort of their homes provided they have a good web cam, a good backdrop, microphone, and lighting backed by a decent computer and reliable internet connection.
 
Virtual Assistant Services

Most busy Executives these days require the services of Virtual Assistants, VA to help them out with routine jobs. If you have the temperament, great organizational, communication and detail skills, you can become a Virtual Assistant.  VA can be an excellent business opportunity for anyone who is willing and able to work for busy Executives. To do well, you’ll need to have unhindered access to a computer, the internet and a phone. VAs usually support Executives by way of a variety of routine tasks such as handling communications like social media handles, emails, phone calls and even Whatsapp and text messages. They can help their employers to schedule meetings and events, travels, hotel reservations, and any other routine administrative details.

Marketing and Branding

You can have a viable home business if you have a penchant for packaging and branding products or people. It is just like some sort of consulting or coaching business. To get known in this business, you can raise your profile through public speaking, writing articles, growing your following on social media or contributing to existing blogs and newsletters. It is simple to get started. All you need to get going is a functional Website, Logo, Business name, e-mail, Business cards, online stationery (for proposals and invoices), a cell phone and a good idea and you are in business for real.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one great way to earn income from home by promoting products for product merchants and getting paid commissions for your efforts. To get started, you need to select good products related to your business niche to promote through your blog content. With a good computer and access to the internet, you get going with affiliate marketing. Since advertising is costly, product merchants are always looking for affiliates to help promote their products as a cost-saving opportunity. That is where affiliate marketers get to be in business. All they need is to have a blog or a website where they can steadily promote products for product merchants. It can even be done through some sort of sponsored content with influencers particularly on social media. This way, affiliate marketers can build quite some profitable business by simply driving traffic to a business website. If clicks/sales are made from the website through the affiliate links embedded in the content, the affiliate earns a commission.

Web Designing

Web designing requires skills and knowledge of the computer and the internet. In the digital space of the internet, starting a web design business from home can be a lucrative business avenue. Most people are taking their businesses online, and these people need functional and well-hosted websites for that purpose. With an internet access and solid hardware and software that meet your needs, you can design websites for online business owners and make good money. If you can arrange good hosting for the website and help to optimize the content with relevant keywords, you make money too. Search Engine Optimization SEO, on the website is one skill set in high demand you really need. Through it, websites get high ranking on the SERPs of search engines and that helps such websites to receive good organic traffic from the search engines.

Selling Products Online

Yeah, you can do business out of an eCommerce store of your own. These days, many more people are doing a large portion of their shopping online. You can take advantage of that to sell your own products/services. It is up to you to sell whatever product/service you choose. You can do so through a number of online platforms like Etsy, Amazon Marketplace and the likes that may offer you free or low-cost slots for your online store. If you understand the platform you are using well enough and how to use it to sell your products/services, you can make good sales and earn income. However, you must make sure you have the right marketing strategy suitable for each platform and the products/services you are selling are in demand.

Transcription Services

The world is increasingly interconnected and there a lot of info out there that needs transcribing. Researchers, medical services/hospitals, journalists and even graduate students do need transcription services a great deal to help them with huge data that needs transcribing. This data may be in the form of audio and video. What the transcriptionist simply does is to listen or watch the content then type out the exact words spoken. This is often with time stamps to enable their clients use the materials in their work without too much stress. The main skill you need is the ability to listen well and type fast enough to get the whole stuff down for easy read. As a transcriptionist, you earn less if you work for a service than if you work directly for yourself. That is typical of most freelance jobs though.

Customer Service

Customer service is usually one huge headache particularly for big companies. Because the field is wide and varied, some companies are flexible enough to allow for home-based or remote work to handle their customer service. The service entails so much since you can never know with customers. However, in dealing with customers many companies usually need help to take orders from customers, answer questions, guide them through billing and a number of other activities that customers may spring up requiring quick handling. Good customer service operators get paid handsomely.

7 Effective Strategies to Promote an eCommerce Offer

Affiliate marketers earn better commissions if they are able to effectively promote products and instigate more sales. To do this, they need good strategies to get results. With the aid of a fitting associate offer and good promotion strategies, they can maximize leads and sales from their marketing efforts.

If you own an eCommerce store and you want to get the most out of your eCommerce affiliate programs, do not ignore the following strategies if and whenever you want to promote an offer.

 
1. Decide on Your eCommerce Offer

This is one vital decision you must take before you start looking for affiliates to help in the promotion. It is hugely important to decide at the outset what you are going to promote and what results you expect. What you decide on will serve as your offer. It is this offer you can use to attract affiliate marketers. For affiliate marketing purposes, the details of the offer must include, your product/brand/business, the commission rate, shipping information, product descriptions and images/graphics related to the product/brand.

2. Position Your Website Landing Page Well

The landing page of your website is the first point of call when visitors hit your website. For this reason, it must be captivating enough to hold visitors’ attention for a while. As a rule of thumb, it is not advisable for the homepage of your eCommerce store to be its landing page. The reason is because most of your website visitors may not pay enough attention to your homepage before they get distracted. Exception however is if you are able to arrange your homepage in such a way that it serves as your products page too. The goal here is to be sure this page helps you to convert as many leads as possible to sales. For best results, marketing experts recommend that your homepage must be eye-catching and interesting enough to hold visitors’ attention a few seconds longer. To guarantee this, your main headlines must be bold, grabby and punchy. The page must have a social proof and of course a CTA. It must have eye-catching media content particularly graphics/images as well as videos. Your marketing story-line must be compelling enough with clear products benefits and features. With these seemingly little but important details in place, you can make your landing page even more effective to help procure more conversions.

3. Track with the Right Tools

The most popular tools in the business for now are Google Analytics tools and many are free to use. With these tools, it is fairly easy to determine exactly how affiliate marketing impacts your eCommerce site. From the insights garnered from the use of these tools, you can have a very distinct idea of how many people click on your ads/links, how many of those clicks turn into prospects and how many of those turn into conversions. For most marketers, such data amounts to a hugely important trove of information that allows them to effectively measure the direction and even success of their affiliate marketing campaigns.

4. Promote with Videos/Visuals

To instantly grab the attention of your website visitors, you need good visuals. The more visitors’ attention you can grab, the better for your business. Technically and for marketing purposes, visual content usually works better than written words because visuals tend to grab attention faster and better. The higher the quality of your visuals therefore, the better they attract the attention of visitors. You can even get better results if you effectively combine videos and written content perfectly. Most affiliate marketers appear to be used to that sort of combination. For this reason, eCommerce store owners should always endeavor to create and share high-quality visuals with their affiliate marketers.

5. Choose a Promotion Strategy

For a successful product offer, strategy is very important. You must decide on a suitable promotion strategy for your offers and get your affiliate marketers to key in. If for instance you decide to go with an advertising network like Google, it is imperative for you to provide all necessary information about your offer and your affiliate marketers will decide for themselves how  best to promote it. Same strategy applies even if you decide to work with larger affiliate networks. However, creating the best affiliate offers naturally starts with the right products. Next is to identify which segment of people would be better drawn to your products. This you can determine by drawing patterns from their online behavior. From this pattern, you can better target them where they can be found then tailor your ads to their biases. That way, you get the best results.

6. Direct the Right Products to the Right People

This requires audience segmentation. Without it, you risk marketing haphazardly with very poor results. A good strategy is to make sure the bulk of your marketing activities are directed towards meeting the right demands of your consumers. For effectiveness, you must always identify the right products that meet the needs of each set of consumers based on segmentation. Characteristically, most online users are always quick to disregard unspecific ads/campaigns that are irrelevant to their current needs. This is why, for effectiveness, online advertising must be targeted with pinpoint accuracy.

7. Promote with Time and Location Consciousness

The Internet is a worldwide 24/7 market place. This is why time and location are two critical factors in eCommerce marketing. You must time and direct your ads in such a way that they have a very high chance of being seen by the people you are targeting. So, you must give very careful consideration to time and location when developing your marketing campaigns if you want to get good results. You must pay careful attention to differences in time zones around the globe. That is what determines when your prospects are most likely to see your ads. In addition, your ads should be shown only to those prospects within the geographical reach of your distribution services. Promoting a product to people you have no means of serving amounts to wasted efforts which you can least afford as an eCommerce store owner.

How to Leverage Affiliate Marketing to Increase Conversions and Sales

If you run an eCommerce store, there is no doubt you contend with many issues daily trying to satisfy the increasing number of people who now find it more convenient to shop online. Now, that can be a very huge challenge at times trying to surmount the many obstacles relating to how to effectively position your products in the market to make sales. How exactly do you tackle real obstacles relating to how to position a given product before the precise audience? This is where affiliate marketing becomes very handy to help remove some marketing barriers and effectively grow customer reach. By being conversant with how affiliate marketing and advertising networks work, you can leverage this knowledge to increase conversions and sales for your eCommerce business.

 

Ecommerce store owners effectively leverage affiliate marketing to promote their products better and to a wider audience. They consequently make more conversions and sales as a result. From experience and because of the peculiarities of the Internet, what works most, however, is localized and personalized product promotion. This is exactly where a partnership between eCommerce store owners and affiliate marketers becomes highly profitable. Because of the tremendous influence most affiliates have on their audience, affiliates are the real drivers of campaign optimization and local targeting.

You may wish to ask, how does that relationship work? Just factor in that influencers, bloggers, content marketers and website owners as credible and effective affiliates. The main function of the affiliate is to promote products to consumers and to entice them to buy. Affiliates get paid commissions each time a consumer takes a desired action or buys products via the direct promo action of the affiliate. The more of affiliate efforts, the more products are sold and the more products sellers/eCommerce store owners make sales. The more products sellers leverage on this relationship therefore, the more sales they make.

When eCommerce store owners leverage effectively on this relationship, below are some of the direct benefits that accrue to their business.

1.    They can widen their brand awareness and business reputation.
2.    They can effectively drive repeat sales.
3.    They can generate the right leads to their websites.
4.    It helps them to keep track, control and measure their marketing progress/success.
5.    It is cost-effective and gives them real value for money since it is performance-based.

However, as a rule of thumb, as an eCommerce store owner, before you decide on which affiliates to work with, you must first decide which products you are going to promote and what results you expect. This will serve as your offer. It is what is on offer that will attract individual marketers/affiliates depending on their niche/products preferences.