Benefits of User-Generated Content for Affiliate Marketing

In affiliate marketing, user-generated content (UGC) is extremely valuable for driving traffic, building trust, and generating leads for marketers. Affiliate marketing is a simple business model where affiliates help product merchants to market their products and the affiliates earn commissions from the sales they generate. It is all about building relationships and networking to earn money online. Many affiliates prefer to build a relationship with the businesses they work with, while others focus on building a relationship with their audience. Affiliates take advantage of UGC to build these much-cherished relationships.  UGC is a content created by users rather than professional marketers or publishers. It comes in such forms as comments/feedback, photos/graphics, videos, reviews and even blog posts. Many marketers hugely rely on UGC to promote their products and drive traffic to their websites. UGC helps affiliate marketing to work better and deliver more beneficial results. Here is how:

More Traffic

Even if the UGC is in the form of funny meme, adorable video or a heartfelt post about a personal user experience, if it is widely shared, it translates to valuable inbound traffic. Affiliate marketers cherish good traffic. This is because good traffic in quite helpful to their business. The challenge however is always how affiliate marketers can make their UGC more appealing and, therefore more shareable. To this end, marketers must strive to make their UGC more relatable than traditional marketing content. They can make it feel less like an advertisement and more like a conversation between friends, family or business partners. That way, UGC manages to provide a sense of authenticity that can be lacking in other forms of marketing. When shoppers see that other real people are using and enjoying a product, they can relate better and are more likely to try the product themselves.

Enhanced Trust

One huge challenge of affiliate marketing is always how to earn the trust of consumers. This is because many consumers don’t quite trust bloggers or websites promoting products. UGC usually comes handy to plug that trust deficit hole because it comes with a built-in level of trust. Consumers see UGC as coming from a real person rather than a faceless entity. The reason they relate well and better with such content. That helps to build trust. So, affiliate marketers can better enhance this relationship by rewarding their customers with deserved recognition through widely sharing their posts and even mentioning them by name. Great for trust building no doubt!

Higher Engagement

UGC is more likely to be engaged with than traditional marketing materials. You know why? It is because it is more authentic and relatable in the eyes of consumers. Smart marketers can use UGC to address poignant issues as well as disclosing more about their personalities and values. Most human beings crave recognition and always want to be seen to matter. This is why people are more likely to share content that’s relatable and not superficial. That translates to higher engagement.

More Leads

Typically, UGC can generate more leads because it can help marketers to reach a wider audience. The more people your marketing messages reach, the more leads you’re likely to generate. The more leads you generate, the more sales you are likely to make. UGC is highly effective to generate leads because it is more authentic than other forms of marketing. That helps to make it more trustworthy and persuasive in the eyes of consumers. Naturally, UGC often usually comes from people who are already customers or fans of a product/service.

Credible Ways to Get UGC for Your Affiliate Marketing Program

For your affiliate marketing business to take advantage of the foregoing benefits, you must first explore all credible ways to get UGC for the business. One of such credible ways to encourage UGC is to offer incentives, such as discounts, free giveaways or exclusive content. With these incentives, users will be more likely to share your content and help you promote your products/services as widely as possible. You can also encourage shoppers to share their own photos and videos or create contests and giveaways. The more fun and engaging your content is, the more likely people are to share it. You may also use influencers and reputable content creators, but adequate care must be taken to make sure the end result looks more like UGC and less like a paid ad. Many consumers do not take paid ads as seriously as they take UGC.

Conclusion

Even though UGC looks like and sounds like users are doing the entire job, it is not really the case. Deft and calculated marketing efforts from the business owner usually help to get the right UGC. Affiliate marketers must be sure they do their research well, make good plans and budgets, gauge strategies, and employ the best analytics tools to measure results. That is about the best way they can hope to get the real benefits of UGC for their affiliate marketing programs.

How to Create Sponsored Content that Engages Consumers

In digital marketing, content that does not attract engagement is not a valuable content. This is more so with sponsored content which many consumers usually avoid because they tend to see most sponsored content as ads. The main issue with sponsored posts particularly on social media and other digital platforms is really about the manner in which sponsored posts are displayed and not about the messages. That is what most consumers resent and it tends to put many off the messages all together. However, in terms of engagement, sponsored content whether as social post, a blog or a video can be as engaging as a non-sponsored content when done the right away. Both can be effective digital marketing strategies when properly deployed. These here are very effective tips to help boost your sponsored content to get the right engagement.

Avoid Text on Photos

As a digital marketer, it is inevitable that you do have to market with texts and photos. How these texts and photos are used in what determines their effectiveness particularly in matters of user engagement. You must therefore ensure always that your content looks very natural to your consumers. Avoid as much as possible text overlays on photos. In the eyes and perception of consumers, text overlays make your content to look like an ad or a meme. For this reason, you must always keep your text limited to your caption, but even at that, you must avoid going overboard there either. In addition, if you habitually utilize too many hashtags, it makes your sponsored post look spammy and that ultimately results in decreased engagement which you can least afford. When your sponsored content is of poor quality and just feels like an ad, consumers are less likely to engage with it. But, when the content is properly placed, doesn’t include too many tags, utilizes sharp photography, and feels organic and very natural, it turns out to be the right content that can effectively generate very good results for your brand.

Avoid Poor Photographs

Sharp and very high quality photographs are a must in digital marketing. Poor quality photographs are about the most common mistakes most brands and influencers usually make within sponsored content. No matter where the photographs are used, whether on social media or other digital platforms, blurry or poorly cropped photos are always a put off for most consumers. Such poor quality photos therefore usually help to decrease engagement a great deal. Expert marketers advise that as much as practicable, digital marketers should utilize an HD camera to ensure the best visual quality for their marketing photos.

 

Avoid Unnatural Product Displays

If marketing pics appear unnatural on content they reduce engagement. Consumers are people and they relate better with any visual content they see as natural and not outrageous or garish. That helps engagement. What most consumers really want to see influencers doing is to see them use a product in a vividly demonstrable form. Seeing things like that simply tells the story in a very succinct and captivating manner. If for instance you are promoting a sponsored content about a clothing item, the influencer must wear the item to clearly show to consumers how it fits. The idea is to make it feel less like an ad and more like an item that just happened to be captured in the influencer’s photo. That looks more natural and tells the marketing story much better even without appearing to be doing so. Engagement is better as a result instead of prominently featuring the product in such an unnatural manner that may even be disgusting to consumers.

18 Tips to Generate More Traffic with Your Content

If you market online, it is inevitable for you to develop innovative content marketing strategies and tactics. Such strategies/tactics can help your business stand out of the crowd and grow traffic. This is why every online business owner who wants to have more traffic and by implication more customers must find a way to market content. Despite the fact that the Internet today is a severely crowded market space, many marketers are still creating content and getting it out on the Internet by way of thousands of new blog posts published every hour 24/7. These marketers know that a well-thought-out content marketing strategy is a very effective way to brand your business, increase engagement, and generate more website traffic. No matter the nature of your online business, content is one great marketing tool to engage with and effectively speak to your customers and potential customers. Growing your website traffic flows directly from such efforts.

If you’re running an online business, here are some of the most effective strategies/tactics online marketing experts recommend to start effective content marketing for your business.

1. Publish only easy-to-read content: If your content is easy to read, it is easy to understand and therefore more effective. If you want to write content that easily guides readers, it must have good headings and short paragraphs that are easy for the human eyes and mind to comprehend.

2. Promote your content on social media: The wider you promote your content, the more it is read. For this reason, you can use social media channels to promote your content widely. That helps to increase web traffic to your site.

3. Don’t ignore SEO: You must pay special attention to Search Engine Optimization, SEO to benefit from organic traffic search engines send to websites.

4. Use keywords wisely: Research, select and use keywords wisely. If you use Google keyword planner, it is possible for you to target and use the right keywords searchers mostly use when searching for your type of business.

5. Monitor your Competitors: You can do this by analyzing your competitors’ content/blogs. That will allow you to understand what they are doing and why they’re doing what they are doing. Such insights will enable you to compete favorably with them.

6. Create a blog for your business: Blogging in one great way to market content. A good blog will enable you create educational and informative content to engage your readers. Take your business niche and commence writing on relevant topics in the business to engage your readers.

7. Create evergreen content: Evergreen content is content that remains relevant and continue to engage readers over a prolonged period of time. If you create such content, it will continue to send traffic to your website, year in year out.

8. Leave your blog posts undated: You can remove publish-dates from your blog posts to prevent them from looking out of date. Not many readers like to click through blog posts if the publish-date is old and stale.

9. Invite Guest bloggers: Bloggers like to cooperate for mutual benefits. You can therefore invite other people as guest bloggers in your business niche to blog on your own website. Doing so helps to bring new readers to the site. Make sure you select only guest bloggers of repute who will help enrich your website with high quality content.

10. Embrace storytelling: People generally love to hear stories. These stories help readers make connections between what they may already be aware of and new things your own stories will reveal to them. Write human angle content that many people can relate with particularly real life stories, challenges, triumphs and trials and with real-life examples. Such stories help to draw readers in for more engagement.

11. Use bullet points, images, and videos: Doing this helps your content to be shared more easily and frequently and search engines love them as well.

12. Make your posts easily shareable: If you use eye-catching social sharing buttons on your content, it makes it more shareable across multiple social media channels.
 
13. Respond to comments from your blog readers: This helps to build more engagement and nurturing of customers. Responding to comments promptly and intelligently helps to show your readers that you value their feedback. It can help sustain customers’ interest to come again and again to your website. 

14. Work with Influencers: You can follow influencers on social media and invite others who are respected individuals in your business niche. They can help share your content to their followers, a consequence of which you may get hundreds of extra views on your content.
 
15. Find good content marketing examples: You can look for successful marketing campaigns to work with so that you can introduce them in your own content marketing strategy.

16. Create irresistible headings: Every content marketer knows that without a great headline, even the best blog post can go unread.

17. Link internally: Internal linking of your content helps with SEO. A good SEO on your content can result in a better experience for your readers. A direct consequence of that is increased traffic to your site.

18. Publish industry interviews: Yeah, everyone always wants to know what is new and trending in any industry. Timely interviews help to fill that yearning. For this reason, you can publish industry leaders’ interviews on your site. Aside from making interesting reading/listening for readers, the famous names recognition that comes with such interviews help boost credibility for your business.

How to Earn Money and Authority by Blogging

If you are in internet business and you don’t have a blog, you are missing out a very vital business boosting activity on the internet. You may already be aware that blogging offers amazing opportunities to build authority and earn income online for any business you are involved in. What counts in blogging is your expertise and how you can convey it for others to benefit from it. Everyone knows at least one thing better than others. That is where they have their expertise. For that reason, it is possible to blog about any and everything on this planet. What counts most is to carefully choose a niche where you are really grounded in knowledge then start writing about it. You can establish authority faster with a specific issue meant for a specific audience than to dabble into all sorts of topics meant for no particular audience. Just write well and write about what you know well. That is all it takes. With sustained efforts and time, your blog can grow into a real business. When it becomes popular, it is capable of generating real income for you and positioning you as an authority in your chosen niche.

Here are some tested and proven ways you can use your blog to gain authority and make money.

#1. Google AdSense display ads

When your blog is fully established with good traffic, you can apply to Google to get Adsense code. Installing this code in your blog allows Google to display ads on your blog. You get paid per view and per click each time a visitor clicks on these Google Adsense ads. If you can drive enough traffic and generate clicks, the money you earn can really begin to add up real good.


 
#2. Video Ads

If you have a sizeable followership on social media sites like YouTube or Instagram, you can also embed codes on the videos to earn money from clicks. If you know how to, you can either create short videos showcasing the products/services being advertised or you use ready-made videos provided by the companies you are helping to market.

#3. Affiliate Marketing

This is one very popular way to earn money online using affiliate programs. Adding affiliate links to your blog posts is another great way to monetize your blog. These affiliate links are displayed in your blog through banner ads and native ads. If any sale is made through these links, you get paid an agreed percentage commissions by the advertiser. A great way to make money online if you know the ropes!

#4. Selling Blog Ads

If your blog becomes very popular and well known, you can sell ads spaces directly to advertisers. Even though it may take time and consistent effort to establish yourself as a trusted resources center, it pays off on the long run if you manage to build your personal or business brand, and maximize your audience reach and performance in the process.

#5. Selling eBooks

This is one great way to build and establish your expertise online. As your authority and expertise grow, you can then start to produce eBooks and online courses for sale. With eBooks and related courses, you can explore deeper into any subject or material that matters most to your audience. That way, you can offer exclusive content that isn't readily available on your blog through the eBooks. Once your readers recognize you as an expert on the subject matter which they relate well with, many will be willing to pay a premium for more information from you.

#6. Expert Consulting

Many bloggers have discovered that you can use your blog to position yourself as an expert in any field. When you become recognized as an expert in any field, naturally people always want to know more from you and many are willing to pay for it. If that happens, you have become a paid consultant. You can then start to offer coaching services directly either through eBooks or webinars. As a coach, you can offer guidance and counseling, strategic thinking, advice in getting things done or learning some skills.

#7. Selling Ad Space in a Newsletter
 
By the time your blog becomes very popular, it is smart to have an email newsletter associated with it. Good quality and highly information newsletter is best. If the newsletter has a high subscription, you can sell ad spaces on it for extra income. What works best is to have a sizeable mailing list with fairly high engagement rates. The money rolls in as a result of the ads you run for advertisers.