Best Online Business Ideas in 2022

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!

Best Strategies to Master On-Page and Off-Page SEO Skills

Most online business owners rely on organic traffic to grow their businesses. That sort of traffic comes largely from search engines. This is why online marketers always want to optimize their websites for search engines with a view to getting high ranking in the SERPs of search engines. This ranking usually translates to good organic traffic back to such websites. If as a business owner you are looking forward to ranking your website high in the SERPs of search engines, you just need to understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You will need to master some on-page and off-page strategies so that you will be able to optimize your website for better rankings by search engines. This is because for SEO to be really effective on a business website, it must be on-page and off-page. Both strategies have their unique roles in the search results as well as organic traffic from search engines.

This article will discuss some on-page and off-page SEO strategies/techniques to see if you can master them well enough for the benefit of your eCommerce business.

On-Page SEO Strategies

The technical details of optimizing the content of your website to be search engine and user friendly are collectively known as on-page SEO. On-page SEO focuses directly on website content and how it performs to attract traffic to the website. The following techniques are very helpful for on-page SEO.

1. Keyword Research

SEO on content works with keywords. Depending on the products you are marketing and the niche of your business, you can research keywords to determine which will be suitable to help search engines locate your products or website. It is best to use on your content, long-tail keywords/phrases with high search volume and lower keyword difficulty. For marketing purposes, long-tail keywords generally have a high conversion rate. When your conversion rate is high, you can get better leads through such keywords.

2. On-Page Planning

To get good results with on-page planning, you will need to be very precise and accurate. Part of this planning is to make sure you use different keywords for different pages depending on the products or message on the pages. Be sure the keywords targeted on one page are not conflicting in any way with the keywords on another page and all the website pages are interlinked with suitable internal linking. Give the pages a clear hierarchy and proper categorization. Carefully insert images and videos with the right spacing and with alt tags on all the pages. All these greatly help your on-page plan to deliver good results.

3. Search Intent Analyzation

Detecting the search intent of your website visitors helps to bring them over to your website through the right keywords related to that intent. You must therefore be able to analyze the intent of your visitors in tandem with your goals. Next is to focus on each set of visitors based on their search intent then direct your marketing appropriately using the keywords related to the intentions of each set and the objective of your website. That helps organic traffic a great deal.
 
4. Optimize for Mobile Devices

Google reports now indicate that a very large percentage of search data is attributable to mobile devices. If you do not want to miss out on this search data, it is best to optimize your website for mobile devices particularly smartphones. Google greatly values websites that are optimized for mobile devices because most of searchers are now using mobile phones to search for their queries. This is why it is hugely important to optimize your website design to make it mobile-friendly.

5. Leveraging LSI Keywords

Your marketing content gets better results if you add some keywords in the content related to your focused keyword. It is such keywords/phrases that Google considers related that are known as LSI Keywords. You get better results with your content if you add LSI keywords inside the content, its headings and subheadings as well. Be careful to space the keywords sparsely in your content to avoid penalties from Google for keywords stuffing.
 
6. Page Loading Speed

You can always tinker with your website design and content to improve on its loading speed. If a website loads fast, it is more customer-friendly than slow loading websites. This is the reason why low-speed loading increases bounce rate on a website. Besides, if your website is slow loading, Google will not rank it high in its SERPs. To tinker with the loading speed of your website, you can use lazy loading, compressed images, low-size scripts, and proper coding to increase its loading speed.
 
7. Content Optimization

For good organic traffic purposes, the content on your web page should be well optimized against the focused keyword of the site. Sparsely populating the content with such keyword is always very helpful. This keyword should be in the introductory paragraph, last paragraph, headings and subheadings and a bit here and there in the main body of the content. Adequate care must however be taken at all times to avoid keywords stuffing.
 
8. Page Optimization

Search engines usually like websites with good page optimization and they reward such websites with high ranking. To get this done, your page title must be suitable to the content and with appropriate length say around 50 characters. It should contain your focus keyword particularly at the beginning. You can boost its chances with search engines if you add an intuitive meta description that is about 150 characters long. The meta description should contain the focus keyword and one LSI keyword if convenient. Make sure your meta titles are engaging well by adding appropriate questions to lure your readers to click through.

Off-Page SEO Techniques

Off-page strategies are basically off-site techniques you can perform outside your website to improve the ranking of your website in the SERPs of search engines. Next are some of the most important off-page SEO strategies most marketers find useful. They are practically all about backlinks really.

1. Guest-Post Articles

Marketers usually guest post articles as a way to create contextual backlinks for their web pages. Such guest articles are usually submitted to other websites of the same niche as the marketer’s website. When marketers create niche-based content they insert their links into it in a natural manner. When these articles are published on other websites, the marketer gets backlinks from those websites to his own web page. This is one of the most authentic link-building techniques that help website ranking. When Google finds the links to your website to be genuine and from reputable websites in your niche, it helps the ranking of your own website. If you are guest posting articles, you must take adequate care to avoid penalties from search engines for spamming.

2. Strategic Link Building Techniques

Anywhere an online marketer can post content and he earns a backlink from the content is a strategic link-building location. Such places are quite many on the web but the most popular with marketers are: blog commenting, web 2.0, forum submission, document submission, articles directory listing and so on. This link-building strategy requires adequate care and great caution to avoid spamming penalties from search engines.

3. Social Media Platforms

These days, smart marketers have found ways to leverage the power of social media to market content on various social media platforms. If your content is good and your social media following is high, you can continuously market your web pages on social media and invite your readers to visit your website. You need a bit of ingenuity though to get good results from social media marketing. What really matters is quality, good quality and engaging content on social media to get attention. Generally, you can use video content, images, live streaming and leverage the many in-house features available on many social media platforms to effectively market your content.

4. Shareable Content

If your content is of high quality and engaging, it will be easily shareable. It is thus hugely essential that you should always endeavor to continuously create shareable content on your webpage. Make sure your shareable content is complimented with the right social media icons that can easily facilitate its sharing throughout the internet. That will directly help the ranking of the content. Why because Google in particular always has high value for a web page that is more widely shared on different digital media platforms.

Summary

It takes quite a while and a great deal of efforts to optimize your website for search engines. Even at that, SEO on a website is a highly technical business which is best left for professional webmasters to do on your website if you are unable to do it yourself. Doing it and getting it done right is hugely important for the success or otherwise of any eCommerce business. If you try the foregoing on-page and off-page techniques and you are not getting satisfactory results, hire the services of SEO experts to help you out. It is essential however for you to know some of these basic techniques that can help improve your own SEO skills. If you do, your eCommerce business will be a lot better for it.

How to Supercharge Your Conversion Rates

You know what? Most marketers are always not too happy about conversion rates. Many always want to have something done to increase conversion rates. This is because it is very important to the growth of any eCommerce store. Even a little increase in conversion rate can make a world of difference in the fortunes of any online business. This is why many eCommerce store owners always worry about what to tinker with to increase conversion rate no matter how little that increase is. It is usually a matter of tweak a little here and there, add here, remove there or try this or that to see what gets the required results. What you can tinker with is quite unlimited really.

Well, expert marketers like to caution that it is not right to attempt to make all necessary changes at once. It is best to make one or two tweaks then wait for the results to come in. You can then move on to the next tweak in an experimental order then see what that yields as well. Following are tested and proven ways that can help supercharge conversion rate for your eCommerce business if you handle them right.

Always Write Very Clear CTAs

Call-to-actions, CTAs are the “business magnets” on a website. Online, no doubt you have come across catchy phrases like “Vote here”, “Opt for coupon”, “Buy now”, “Subscribe to newsletter”, “Download eBook”, and so on. These are clear CTAs urging website visitors to take desired action. If you want to directly improve conversion rate on your website, your CTAs must be short, precise, clear and crisp enough to tell visitors exactly what to expect when they take the invited action. For best CTA results, the links must follow through. If you use a “buy” CTA, be sure it leads users to your checkout page and not to another service/product page. Similarly, a “download” CTA should give users direct access to the promised material without any barriers.
 
Diligently Build Trust

Only a business built on trust stands a good chance to grow and to endure. A vital element of any high-converting page is trust. Irrespective of how great your marketing message is, if the readers don’t trust you, your page won’t convert. As a marketer, you must therefore take deliberate steps to work on and preserve the trust element of your marketing messages. You can gain a lot of trust from social proof and excellent copywriting. Make sure all your mission-critical pages clearly show this. This is exactly why expert marketers always advise business owners not to joke with their business missions, business photos and brand logos. These and audience product reviews and testimonials are hugely important to the trust element of your business. They help conversions a great deal.

Avoid Shoppers’ Analysis Paralysis

Analysis paralysis is a marketing parlance that refers to the inability shoppers to make a decision for reason of either having too many decisions to make or having too much data to analyze and they end up not making any decision at all. A mild state of confusion really and many shoppers do become practically unable to take a decision. This state of affairs can be brought on when shoppers are faced with too many competing products at a time. Knowing quite well that internet users are notoriously snappy (only a matter of seconds per page) in their searches, it serves best to help them take a vital decision even within the short span. Usually, when online shoppers can’t find what they are looking for quickly, they quickly move on and in most cases to a competitor. So what to do? It is always advisable to follow a marketing rule of thumb: “one page, one central message”. If you have several products on sale, it is best to create a page for each of the products. That’s about the best way to avoid shoppers’ analysis paralysis and it helps conversions.

Regularly Tweak Your Copy

Online marketing is always a very dynamic and very fluid business because of the nature of the internet itself. This is why you must regularly tweak your copy for it to remain relevant. At times, this tweaking may just involve some changes while in extreme cases, it may be a complete rewrite of the entire message. If as a business owner, you may not be good at this, you can hire the services of professionals to help you out. This is because copywriting is a fairly technical marketing element closer to science than to art and it needs very clear formulas for it to be effective. What you want is to increase conversion rate for your business, so if you have professionals that can help you out, then that’s really great. All they need do is to make your pages high-converting and your conversion rate improves.

Make Your Data Forms Brief

I once read somewhere that internet users have the attention span of a gnat. Now that’s really fleeting if you’ve had the opportunity of watching that wonderful tiny insect go about its daily business. Many internet users don’t have the luxury of time to fill out forms with too much of their personal info. It is thus advisable to use the data forms on your homepage to collect only very vital info about your visitors. Leave out any info you do not immediately need to establish contact with your visitors. Skip info you can get later when the relationship begins to build up. It is advisable to add only essential data that you absolutely need in order to effectively communicate with them or deliver your marketing messages. Demanding for too much personal details can put users on their guard making them reluctant to share their data. That reluctance at times derives from lack of time and in some cases many of them trying hard to protect their sensitive personal data. If the data you collect is brief, you get more cooperation from users and that helps conversions.

Summing Up

For any eCommerce business, conversion rate usually increases when there is a clear alignment between message clarity and user intent. If this alignment is not there, there is a tendency for users to ignore the messages altogether and that affects conversion rate. What matters most therefore for the business owner/marketer is to be sure their marketing messages convey their products benefits clearly and succinctly enough and without distractions. If these messages benefit exactly what the buyer persona wants or needs, conversion is enhanced.

6 Best and Most Effective eCommerce Marketing Strategies, Experts’ Tips

To grow your eCommerce business, you need effective advertising. That’s about the only way your business can get to reach more customers. It takes many marketing strategies and tactics to effectively advertise online. Some of these strategies can be deployed either singly or in combination depending on the type of products you are marketing and the marketing channels you choose to use.

Based on expert recommendations, below are 6 best and most effective eCommerce marketing strategies to help you reach more customers and achieve your marketing goals.

1. Optimizing Your Website

If you run eCommerce business, your website is the first impression a shopper gets to have about your business. Well, that shopper had better be impressed or else you may lose his business. You cannot expect to directly impress a shopper on your website if your website design and aesthetics are poor and unimpressive. What helps to keep shoppers a bit longer on your website is optimization. If your website is optimized, shoppers stay a bit longer on the website to notice the wonderful products you are selling. If they notice these products, chances are higher that they may get to purchase some of the products. You can therefore optimize your website through a simple site structure that is easy to navigate. The right shopping information should be easily noticeable and CTAs very obvious to get shoppers to take desirable actions. If the website is optimized for mobile devices, better still because Google now attributes a very high percentage of search data to mobile devices.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple business model that thrives on synergy. Since the eCommerce business owner cannot afford to reach all prospects all by himself, he needs to combine the efforts of affiliates to do so. Business owners can therefore partner with publishers/affiliates that can help promote products for them on their blog posts, emails, social media, and videos. In the bargain, these publishers/affiliates earn a percentage of the sales made through their promotional efforts as commissions. That is affiliate marketing. Some product merchants can decide to work directly with reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI who can directly assist them with training, customer care, marketing tools, analytics and easy attribution and payment of commissions.

3. eCommerce SEO

It is expected that many customers research products well online before they even decide to buy. For this reason, if you want to give your eCommerce business the best chance of converting prospects, you must connect with them during the research stage. That is where eCommerce SEO becomes very handy. This is the process of optimizing your web pages to rank high for essential business keywords related to the products you are selling. To improve your eCommerce SEO, you must take deliberate steps to improve your Content Marketing, technical SEO, On-Page and Off-Page SEO. These improvements will help you to engage better in your eCommerce SEO campaigns. Doing so is one great way to acquire more leads and customers from the organic traffic coming from search engines.

4. Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising

With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, eCommerce business owners can reach their audience with targeted ads on Google. What makes PPC ads particularly effective is that eCommerce business owners can take specific steps and actions to improve the chances of the ads reaching their targets. Such steps/actions include conducting diligent keywords research, adjusting ads bids in line with set goals, building relevant landing pages, using Google shopping ads and using retargeting ads. After taking all necessary steps and executing these techniques, you can improve performance through A/B testing. Since you can’t expect a single ad to effectively work for every business, experts recommend that business owners must carefully test various ad campaign elements if they want to improve performance.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective marketing technique popular with eCommerce business owners. It is highly cost-effective too. Marketing with email has very many advantages for eCommerce business owners when compared to other marketing channels. Aside the cost-effectiveness, business owners can personalize email messages, segment the messages and even use email automation software to automate email messages to reach a wider audience reliably. All these help business owners to save time, money, and other resources and still be able to get impressive results from email campaigns. When business owners send relevant emails to their numerous subscribers, it helps to increase the open and click-through rates of the emails. In addition, because the emails are directing the recipients to a relevant web page, there’s a higher chance of converting such visitors. Therefore, if you want your eCommerce business to grow, email marketing is a must rather than a convenient option.

6. Social Media Marketing

Most people worldwide use social media platforms for fun and to connect with friends but many users also follow businesses and check out information and product offers on some of the platforms. eCommerce business owners usually provide value to their audience on social media through the type of content that can solve their problems. That is why many eCommerce businesses tend to focus on social media platforms credible locations where they can reach their ideal customers. In many business niches, there are experts and celebrities who have gained a big following on social media as a result of their excellent performance and prominence in their vocations or industries. As a result, these experts and influencers tend to have loyal audiences who trust their product recommendations. eCommerce businesses do take advantage of this relationship to promote their products. This is influencer marketing which directly compliments social media marketing. Presently, some social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram because of their unique in-house marketing tools allow business owners to sell products directly on their platforms. On social media therefore, there are many excellent opportunities for eCommerce business owners to promote and sell their products to a very wide and diverse audience.

Wrapping Up

Effective marketing is one of the best ways to give your eCommerce business the right exposure online. Having an excellent product is just not enough to do good business out there. Nobody will buy your product if they’ve never heard of it and they don’t know anything about it. By deploying the right marketing strategies as discussed above, it is possible to attract more shoppers to your eCommerce store and sell more products to them. If you need to boost your marketing results therefore, your best bet is to deploy these here strategies in the right way.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce Pay-Per-Click and Social Media Advertising

It is difficult to grow your eCommerce business without effective advertising. Effective advertising helps eCommerce businesses to deepen their online presence and to reach more customers. It takes many marketing strategies and tactics to get good advertising results. You can use some of these strategies singly or in combination depending on the type of products you are marketing. If however you are able to effectively combine some of these strategies, you can achieve many of your marketing goals. Among these strategies, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising and Social Media Marketing are really quite popular with eCommerce business owners. Here is why.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is one great way eCommerce business owners can deliberately and directly reach their audience. They can succeed to directly reach their audience through PPC advertising on Google, You can only do that through specific strategies that can help to boost your chances of success. Some of these strategies include:

Diligent keywords research: By using Google Keyword planner and other research tools, you can find out what keywords your potential buyers are using to search on Google for the type of products you are marketing. When you use these keywords in your marketing content, Google adds your products in the search results of such searchers.
Using Google shopping ads: Such ads are usually created for transactional keywords. The ads will display your products and their prices on the SERPs of search engines.
Using retargeting ads: Retargeting ads are very technical and effective ads. If for instance a visitor has visited some pages on your website, you can send them ads related to those pages. You can directly target a shopper who has visited a product page with the right ads for that product. Doing so makes the shoppers more receptive to your ads.
Adjusting bidding according to your goals: You can achieve better success with your bidding if you increase your ads quality score through high-relevant ads and better click-through rates. That way, your ads can show up more for your preferred keywords.
Building relevant landing pages: For best ads results, your ad copy must align with your landing page copy. That helps to improve your chances of getting more leads and conversions.

By the time you are through with executing these tactics, you can best improve your performance through A/B testing knowing fully well that there is no single ad that works for every business the same way. For this reason, you must test various ad campaign elements to know what works and how. That’s one credible way to improve your marketing performance.

Social Media Marketing

Worldwide, many people are on social media to connect with friends and to have fun. However, many social media users also follow businesses and check out information and product offers on the platforms. On social media, many eCommerce brands do provide value to their audience through content that can solve their problems. This is why eCommerce businesses focus on social media platforms where they can easily reach their ideal customers. Specifically, eCommerce businesses can effectively use social media for:

Customer care
Posting product tips
Sharing products breaking news
Displaying product use cases
Providing industry information
Featuring influencer content
Making promo/discount announcements
Directly selling products
Making new products announcements
Featuring User-Generated Content (UGC)

These days and in many business niches, you can locate influencers, experts and celebrities who have gained tremendous following on social media due to their years of excellent and outstanding performance in their chosen business niches/professions. As a result, such influencers and experts do have audiences who trust their product recommendations. Many eCommerce businesses usually take good advantage of this relationship to promote their products. What matters most for an eCommerce business owner however is to make sure the influencers they choose to market with are in their niche and they have the right audience of followers, without which marketing with such influencers will not be very effective.
 
In addition, eCommerce businesses can sell products directly out of the sites of some social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest by taking advantage of their in-house marketing tools. On social media, there are many opportunities for eCommerce business owners to promote and sell their products. Experienced online marketers never fail to take full advantage of these opportunities.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce Email Marketing

Email may be old school but it is still a very effective digital marketing tool for most eCommerce business owners. Email is highly cost-effective and very easy to use particularly if you already have in place a responsive email list. The ROI for email marketing is very high making every dollar spent on marketing by eCommerce businesses worth the while. Without a doubt therefore, email marketing is one of the best marketing strategies to improve the performance of your eCommerce business. This is because email marketing for eCommerce has many advantages when compared to other marketing strategies. The reasons for this are simple and very easy to discern.

Firstly, through emails, your marketing messages will land directly in your email subscribers’ inboxes. What that means is more and better exposure for your marketing messages.

Secondly, you can segment email messages for different recipients. That makes it easy to send different messages according to your email subscriber’s interests. This leads to highly effective marketing personalization which can make a lot of difference in your marketing campaigns.

Thirdly, by the use of software, you can automate email messages for more reach and effectiveness. This helps to reduce time and costs while still very effective as a marketing strategy. The software is simple and easy to use too. The best and readily available email marketing software you can use today will allow you to personalize your emails based on many criteria such as:

Name
Gender
Location
Birthdays
Emails opened
Website pages visited
Purchase history

By using this personalized info to send relevant emails to your subscribers, you’ll increase their open and click-through rates. Because such emails help to direct visitors to a relevant web page, there’s a higher chance of converting such visitors. That translates to more and better eCommerce business.

Aside personalization, email marketing automation is quite effective as far as strategies go. This is because email marketing automation involves sending a series of messages to your subscribers based on a schedule or when certain conditions/criteria are met.

Here are some examples of automated email sequences popular with digital marketers:

Welcome emails
Up-sell and cross-sell emails
Onboarding emails
Re-engagement emails
Promotional emails
Abandoned cart emails
Lead nurturing emails

To create these emails, you’ll find the necessary tools in some email marketing software. Some modern software packages even provide automation templates marketers can use to create effective email campaigns. When creating email marketing sequences, it is possible for marketers to add triggers or special conditions either to add or remove certain subscribers from the email automation. Email marketing is thus hugely essential for any eCommerce business to thrive.

Effective Marketing Elements of eCommerce SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technical process of organizing your business website to make it visible to search engines.  eCommerce SEO is the process of optimizing your web pages to rank high for essential business keywords. Marketers expect that before customers are ready to buy a product, they must have done some diligent research about the product using related keywords. Those keywords help search engines to include the product you are marketing on your website in their search results made available to such searchers. Therefore, to give your eCommerce business the best chance of converting prospects, it must connect with them during the research stage. eCommerce SEO makes that possible.

If you have an eCommerce store, find below specific tasks you can execute to improve your eCommerce SEO:

Technical SEO: These are specific tasks you can execute in your website’s backend to help search engines to quickly discover the site. You can for instance submit your sitemap to index your pages and make them crawlable by search engine bots. Other technical SEO tasks include how to improve user experience on the website and making it mobile-friendly. User experience on a website improves if the site is fast loading and easy to navigate. If for instance, you can increase the loading speed of your website, it helps to boost its rankings, navigability and usability. Because most internet users now access the web via mobile devices, if you focus on making your website mobile-friendly, it helps it to benefit from the huge search data now attributable to mobile devices.

Content Marketing: Without content, no web page can benefit from the ranking on search engines.  This is why quality and highly valuable content is one of the most vital criteria for ranking high for a keyword by search engines. Quality of your content and its relevance to certain keywords are hugely important in this ranking. So, if you carefully use specific keywords on your content, that is SEO which helps the content to be visible to search engines and for them to rank it in their SERPs. Search engines consider search intent by matching the keywords on your content with the keywords searchers are using in their searches. That helps search engines to determine if your content provides the information a searcher is looking for, then include the content in the search results they make available to the searcher. Regularly creating pieces of content that solve your visitors’ problems is vital for eCommerce SEO.

On-Page SEO: These are essentially SEO tasks you carry out on your web page. Some of such tasks include, adding your target keyword to the page URL, title, meta tags, subheadings, and any other aspects of your website visible to search engines. Header tags are most essential. This is because they serve to break down content to help search engines understand the content better.

Off-Page SEO: Just as marketers can improve SEO for their eCommerce websites through many actions on their websites, they can also do things outside their websites for same purpose. One of the most prominent off-page SEO tactics is link building. This is a process of linking your website to other reputable websites in your niche to help its ranking. When other websites relevant to your niche link to your page, they help build web authority for that page. Search engines notice if that happens and they rank your website better for it. This is more so if the website linking to you already has a lot of high-quality backlinks to your pages. This too helps to boost your chances of higher ranking on the SERPs of search engines.

Last Line

If and whenever you decide to embark on eCommerce SEO campaigns, you can acquire more leads and customers through organic traffic from search engines. A great boost for your eCommerce business no doubt.

How Best to Use Affiliate Marketing to Drive Traffic, Generate Leads, and Boost Sales

Affiliate marketing is now well-established and proven as a very viable option for increasing eCommerce sales. Through it, marketers can exponentially extend the market reach of their business and effectively drive traffic to their business websites and blogs. Most marketers find affiliate marketing extremely attractive as a business model because of the low-cost and low-risk aspects of the business. This is exactly why many small business owners rely on affiliate marketing to drive traffic, generate leads and boost sales. Aside individual small business owners, even the most prominent players in the eCommerce world, such as Strong Future International SFI, ClickBank, Amazon and eBay, all have thriving affiliate programs. This is a clear testimony to the great potential of affiliate marketing for any online business.

To get a team of good affiliates, you can either source them directly yourself or you do so through a reputable agency. If your affiliate team is good, your business can benefit from excellent return on investment. This ROI is not only in sales and subscriptions but also in building brand awareness and market reach. The types of affiliates you decide to work with depend on your business aims and the kinds of products/services you are promoting. Sourcing affiliates directly is OK and can yield good results too but using agencies has an added advantage.  If you use the services of a reliable affiliate marketing agency or affiliate network, they not only provide you with pre-vetted and targeted affiliates, they also manage the transfer of links, images, logos, ads etc. etc. and handle payments as well. By doing this, it makes things easier for the business owner to get more and better managed leads and sales.
As a business owner, if you are marketing with affiliate marketing campaigns, your business has added benefits when compared to other online marketing channels. The reason is simple.
 
Affiliates are independent business persons with their own web channels and audience. This is what they bring to bear to help a business owner whose affiliates they are to widely propagate marketing messages and make sales. Most affiliates usually have good access to consumers with whom they have already established a strong and responsive trust relationship. So, when such affiliates make a personal product recommendation through their own channels particularly when such massages go out to a responsive mailing list of hundreds of thousands, the impact of such messages can be tremendous. When this happens, the conversion rate such affiliates achieve usually out-performs standard marketing techniques in terms of leads and sales. Typically, affiliate marketing not only engenders new demographics for your business, it characteristically draws many consumers to your business website or blog. That means traffic. For many marketers, affiliate marketing is one great way to build traffic and boost online presence for their business in the SERPs of search engines. This ultimately translates to good organic traffic for the business.

 

If you relate with affiliates as individual freelance marketers themselves and do business with them as such, the benefits are great. Most affiliates bring to bear on your business their high skills and tremendous experience in content marketing. Many already have their own established portfolio of websites and blogs, along with well-managed and responsive email lists. Now, these are highly valuable marketing assets affiliates lay out for affiliate marketing. With these marketing assets in place, all a business owner really needs to do is to simply provide affiliates with links to the sales pages of their specific products/services. Affiliates do their promotions using these unique links in their content. For correct and easy attribution purposes, each of these links has a tracking code embedded in it that is unique to each affiliate. When affiliates promote a product/service using these links, for each consumer they send to a product page that converts, they earn a percentage of the value of the sale as commission. The more conversions they generate, the more commission the affiliates earn. This is why affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model. Much unlike a marketing agency whom you are required to pay irrespective of whether their campaigns yield results or not, affiliates are compensated solely based on the results they generate. This is why affiliates are generally more highly motivated. How great they are doing depends on how well they are performing in their affiliate marketing activities. The reason affiliates are best suited to help businesses drive traffic, generate leads and boost sales.

Best 7 Easy Ways to Make Money on Facebook

With presently over 4.5 billion active users, social media has become one huge market out there online. The bulk of these users are on the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Among the lot, Facebook is readily the most popular with over 2 billion active users spread through the young and middle age brackets, a great market in its own rights. Informed and knowledgeable Facebook users already leverage the platform's popularity and active users to make money. However, either out of ignorance or lack of the requisite knowledge, many people still do not know how to make money on this hugely popular global platform even without any tangible investment needed to do so.

Through insightful analysis from credible and reliable online resources like ClickBank, Search Engine Journal, Shopify, eBay, Amazon, Alibaba, Influencer Marketing Hub and others, below are some tested techniques anyone can use to make money on Facebook.

Sell Personal Products/Services on Facebook

Many people may already be used to this method. Selling personal products/services on Facebook is quite popular particularly among young people who are just looking for a side hustle to survive. On Facebook, your followers determine your reach and your primary market. The higher your following, the better your chances of making money on the platform. When your following on Facebook platform is massive, you can easily turn your page into an eCommerce store to make sales and money. With hundreds of thousands of people habitually shopping online 24/7 these days, you can directly expose your products/services to these people via your Facebook page/group. Facebook allows you to post promotional materials about your personal products/services to your followers. Many of these followers may be inclined to help share such materials and even make them go viral. That helps to increase exposure for your products/services, get more leads, make more sales and grow your income.

Launch Affiliate Marketing

You can get involved in affiliate programs and make money on Facebook. If you have massive followers on Facebook, you can collaborate with companies/products merchants to promote their products on the platform and you earn income through commissions. If you register as an affiliate with product merchants, they issue you a unique affiliate link/ID/Code for identification and attribution purposes.  Next is to regularly create content on Facebook with your affiliate links embedded in the content. Anytime someone makes a purchase through the link, you earn a percentage of the sale as commission. That percentage ranges from 5-50% depending on the type of product/service and the peculiarities of the affiliate program.

Create and Operate a Facebook Group in Your Niche

You have access to rewarding opportunities including earning some money if you are operating a Facebook group in your niche. When this group has massive followers and participants, you can decide to sell information products to earn money. In the group, you can share ideas, motivate and encourage members in your field of expertise and earn some sort of consultancy fee. You can even offer paid coaching services and promote products for products merchants in your niche and you earn tidy fees and commissions.

Drive Facebook Traffic to Blogs for a Fee

If you have the skills, you can actively drive Facebook traffic to blogs and you earn money for your efforts. This is readily one of the easiest ways to earn some passive income on Facebook. With the right skills and dedication, you can drive huge traffic from Facebook to blogs and you earn money even without any tangible investment. This is possible though only if you have a Facebook group or page with massive followers. Many digital marketers, product merchants and business owners are always willing to pay for traffic. So, if you place their blog links in your Facebook group and page, you can urge your followers to click the links and visit the pages for a fee. Business owners are willing to pay for this traffic because it increases traffic to their websites. Such traffic helps the businesses to thrive.
 
Get Paid for Sponsored “Likes” and “Shares”

If you are able to monetize “likes” and “shares” on Facebook, you can earn a decent passive income from the effort. But first, you must have massive following on the platform. When you have massive following, you can leverage Facebook's huge popularity and active users to earn income from paid “likes” and “shares”. Business owners and marketers are always in dire need of “likes” and “shares” on their blog posts and videos. If you have massive following on Facebook pages/groups, you can post links there and encourage your followers to share and like the posts and videos for a fee. The more likes and shares these posts and videos get through your Facebook group/page, the more money you earn. 

Create and Publish Quality Videos

If you have the knowledge, inclination and the skills, you can create and publish high quality videos on Facebook to earn income. This is one lucrative opportunity for skilled content creators to earn good money. Many people who already earn money by streaming videos on YouTube are not aware they can do something similar on Facebook. If you have video creation skills and expertise, you can earn a decent income on Facebook showcasing these skills. What you need to do is to choose a niche and create videos with valuable content helpful to your Facebook audience. Facebook pays video content creators for advert sales attributable to the videos. This payment is derived from percentages of sales generated based on the number of views on the videos. The payment can be as high as 45% for the video publisher.

Earn Through Influencer Marketing and Ads

Influencer marketing is one great way to make money on Facebook. The more followers you have on the platform, the better your chances of making money. If you have a massive following on the platform, you are an influencer in your own right. On Facebook, many digital marketers and business owners directly reach out to influencers for paid ads. The idea is to post their products/services on your page for a fee. You also earn money as an influencer if you endorse or recommend products from product merchants to your followers. Therefore, if you have massive following on your Facebook page, you can consider promoting products/services to your audience to increase engagements. You earn income from clicks, leads and sales generated through the increased engagement.
 
Wrapping Up

Anyone with the right skills and ready to work can earn money on Facebook by simply driving Facebook traffic to blogs for a fee. This Facebook traffic can also help with affiliate marketing to earn commissions. Skilled people can earn money with Facebook marketing through advertising and influencing or paid for sponsored “likes” and “shares”. If you know what you are doing, Facebook is one lucrative social media platform you can earn good income from in line with the foregoing strategies/techniques even without investing a dime.

5 Tips to Monetize Your Social Media Presence

With presently over 4.5 billion people active on social media, many habitually spend a lot of time out there merely whiling away their time. Most of these people are not aware that they can monetize their social media accounts and make money out of their social media presence. Even if people merely see their social presence as a hobby, that’s cool. It is easy to make money out of a favorite hobby anyway. Now that you know, here are some tips to monetize your social media accounts and make money out of your social media presence.

 

#1: Just Get Started

First step is to get started by having an account on some of the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. Next is to put in the work necessary to grow your accounts on social media. It may be tempting to try to monetize your accounts right away but it is always advisable to tarry awhile until you are able to boost the numbers of your followers significantly. Depending on the platform, the audience size you really need before monetization varies a great deal. Some micro-influencers do real good if they have 1,500 followers or even less and still make money all the same. What counts the most is your ability to consistently create highly engaging content and offerings on the platforms. Good quality content is what helps to grow your audience quickly. As your audience grows, you can then build genuine connections with your target market. That is where the money is.

#2: Launch Affiliate Marketing

Even if you have your own product/service to sell on social media, you can in addition market products for product merchants and earn commissions for your efforts. This you can do by way of affiliate relationship. If you work with an affiliate marketing partner, that relationship can help you to grow your income by referring potential customers to their businesses. When you partner with a brand as an affiliate marketer, your duty is to promote their products on your social media handles. By doing so, you can earn a commission each time someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchases the products you are promoting.

#3: Create Exclusive Content Course

Many social media users always want exclusive content. Such specialized how-to content that vividly teaches people how to get things done is hugely popular on social media. If you have special knowledge or skills that can benefit others, you can create a course that teaches your social media followers about the craft. Such courses can attract people who are willing to pay for what you have to offer. Even if the courses are free, you still benefit from the traffic you attract with the courses. Such traffic can help you to make money from a sponsored content. That’s how many social media influencers get to make money by offering short, free teaser courses to their followers.

 
#4: Generate Traffic to Your eCommerce Shop

If you have an eCommerce store where you sell goods/services online, you can use your social media accounts to direct potential buyers to your online shop to boost your sales. On social media, your store can greatly benefit from the huge market out there. The ease of sharing information and communication is also great for online marketing. Marketing your products directly out of your website may not give your marketing enough exposure. Doing so on social media adequately fills such marketing gap. You can thus take advantage of social media to showcase your products/services in action real time. That helps your potential customers to quickly and fully understand how you can solve their problems. You get more patronage as a result.

#5: Become a Paid Influencer

On social media, influencers use their popularity and large following to make money. If you have a large following on your social media accounts, you too can become a paid influencer. All you need do is to explore many ways to reach out to brands in your niche and offer to promote and share their products in exchange for commission payment or a grant of free products. Many brands will respond by first sizing up your social media accounts to see if they will be worth their while. If they discover that you regularly post high-quality content that shows a high follower engagement, it will increase your appeal to them that you are really some influencer. They may then be persuaded to take you up on your offer albeit tentatively at the beginning. It is at this point a smart influencer can negotiate higher levels of commission payment and even modes of payment. This is when the money will keep rolling in as your influencer capacity continues to grow by the day.

How Affiliate Marketing Business Really Works

For years entrepreneurs have earned some sort of compensations for referring customers to other businesses even without implicitly referring to the business model as affiliate marketing. That has changed with the advent and popularity of eCommerce. E-commerce thrives on a reciprocal business model of earning and paying commissions out of sales made. That is affiliate marketing in its simplest form. The affiliate earns a commission from the sales generated with his affiliate link while the product merchant pays the commission as per agreed terms and conditions. This business model of incentivizing referrals somehow creates a mutually beneficial arrangement where both parties are motivated to help each another.

 

Becoming an affiliate is simple. Just choose a company whose products you’ll like to promote then sign up. After signing up, you can then commence promoting the products’ links of the company in numerous places and online channels. The affiliate relationship may entail many diverse actions but the commonest is generating sales and earning commissions on your efforts. As long as the clicks come from your unique affiliate links, in-house cookies will track the customer all the way to the final action. That is when the affiliate is entitled to a commission that could range from 5-10% of the sale depending on the program. Because of the cost-effectiveness and easy accessibility of affiliate marketing, the business model has managed to become a global phenomenon. According to credible online statistics, here is why:

•    Affiliate marketing is credited with up to 16% of all online purchases. Really huge.
•    About 80% of affiliate marketers expect their revenue to keep growing.
•    About 80% of brands now have affiliate marketing programs.
•    Presently, the global industry is valued at around $12 billion. Awesome no doubt.

These staggering statistics make affiliate marketing worth the while as a business model and a veritable avenue for making money online. Anyone can make money with affiliate marketing if they choose to. But you must first understand how it works, how to do it and how to apply yourself adequately to the pursuit. If you do, your earning potential is limitless.

The question then is, will you? Then here is what it takes.

You must be able to market vigorously and target your ads sharply. Targeting is hugely essential for affiliate marketing to work well. Irrespective of whatsoever role you are playing in an affiliate marketing strategy, your marketing must always be well targeted for it to work. That is rather obvious. If your marketing is not well targeted, reactions to it will be poor. If people don’t click on your affiliate links and take the desired action, you can’t earn a commission. That is simple enough I suppose. You get the best results by promoting your affiliate links where your target audience will be looking. Expert affiliate marketers recommend the following locations amongst others.

•    Training sessions
•    Blog articles
•    Email campaigns
•    Newsletters
•    Webinars
•    PPC (pay-per-click) ads
•    Social media posts
•    Video content
•    Google My Business platform

Depending on the products you are marketing, you can use all or some of these avenues to promote your affiliate links. You must however explore all ways to be deliberate and precise in your marketing efforts. As even a rookie marketer very well knows, promoting affiliate links to the wrong audience is all a wasted effort you can least afford.

How Online Reviews Help Your Affiliate Marketing Busines

Product reviews are informative pieces of content that bloggers and marketers write. Reviews help readers to form informed opinions before they shop online. Most reviews usually come from affiliate marketers, bloggers and other users as commonly seen on online/eCommerce shops and review sites. Affiliate marketers rely on many strategies to effectively market products/services. Reviews are one of the many marketing strategies available to them. This is why product merchants cherish reviews and they gladly showcase reviews with their products. Product merchants who use affiliate marketing to gain reviews at times have issues with how to manage these reviews when they start coming in large numbers. That is when they turn to review management software to help them handle reviews in large numbers. E-commerce stores who showcase products reviews on their websites tend to have a bit of marketing edge over their competition that don’t. Reviews are that important. 

Reviews do not only make websites more valuable to readers, they are an effective non-direct sales way to easily market products/services online. Here is how reviews directly impact affiliate marketing business.

You Can Generate More Leads and Sales

Generating leads and making sales are a primary concern of affiliate marketing. Reviews tend to help that process along. The more authoritative and beneficial your affiliate reviews are to readers, the more your audience grows, the more traffic your reviews attract and consequently the more leads and sales you generate.

You Can Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Commissions

Of course in affiliate marketing, the more sales you make, the more commissions you earn.  Most affiliates directly aim to get more revenue by vigorously promoting third-party products/services. Reviews help this process a great deal. Affiliate marketing model is inspired by commissions-earning and it is powered by affiliate marketing actions. Reviews help affiliates to grow their audiences, get more traffic, leads and sales. The more sales they make, the more commissions they earn. The earned commissions give affiliates the needed financial incentives to promote and sell more and reviews help this process a great deal.

 
 
You Can Enhance Your Social Proof

These days, more and more people are deciding to shop online. These shoppers are more and better informed, and their expectations are higher than before. Most rely heavily on social proof to influence their shopping decisions. Some credible research data indicates that over 80% of online shoppers check online reviews before buying anything. When affiliates build rapport with a specific audience that fully trusts them, the reviews from their affiliate links give credible social proof to these potential buyers and they do a better business as a result.
 
You Can Reach a Wider Target Audience

Affiliate marketers always have their own unique audiences. To expand their own reach, product merchants simply tap into and take advantage of the audiences of affiliate marketers. Good reviews help to direct these audiences to enhance the marketing of various products/services. With reviews, marketers can rely on mainly conventional marketing tools to be able to reach new audiences at will. Such new audiences could have otherwise been difficult for them to reach easily. This is why when product merchants choose affiliate marketers that resonate with their brands they make sure that their website traffic coming through their affiliate links target those who are interested in their products/services. The wider the target audience that reviews can reach the better for the marketing activities and the more products/services likely to be sold.