7 Promotional Ideas Tips for Your Small Business

It is usually a huge challenge for many small businesses to differentiate themselves from their competition and capture the attention of customers. What makes the difference is how the businesses are promoted. Most small business owners probably know this already. They know how important it is to promote a business with vigor. What most however fail to fully understand is how and where to carry out the relevant promotion activities. What to advertise, how to advertise and where to advertise becomes pertinent. Even though advertising a small business can be challenging because of the characteristic low advertising budget peculiar with many small businesses, there are many routes and steps you can take that are cost-effective. Exactly where these here promotional ideas, and tips are relevant.

 

1. Create and Share Quality Sponsored Content: If you want to get your brand quickly known, think sponsored content. It is one great way to get your brand out there to make it known. What nature of content is best to sponsor? Expert marketers recommend blogs and videos sharing via the right channels. So, you can create original high quality content in blog posts or videos. Next is to work with and collaborate with reputable brands that are willing to share your content for a fee to share it.

2. Promote on Social Media: If you promote on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, you can take full advantage of their in-house marketing tools and their huge popularity to brand your small business. Presently, over 4.5 billion people worldwide are active on social media 24/7. With such a huge audience, there’s no better place at the moment to promote your small business. Most marketers know that each social media platform attracts a slightly different demographic. What that means is that you can better target your ads to reach a very wide audience at minimal costs.

3. Use Paid Search Advertising: Online paid advertising is usually very effective particularly if it is PPC, pay per click. If you invest in paid search advertising, it is possible for you to directly reach potential customers who are looking for what you are selling through the relevant keywords in your content. Therefore, even with a very low ads budget, you can target a specific audience based on location, browser, and other relevant information.

4. Market with Affiliate Programs: Affiliate marketing programs are low cost marketing strategies small business owners can take advantage of. They are excellent high-impact marketing strategies that thrive on a mutually beneficial partnership between product merchants and affiliates.  As a small business owner, you can partner with other brands, content marketers, bloggers, or social media channels to promote your products/services with a profit sharing arrangement. Affiliate programs are a great way to generate leads for your small business through social proof. Building a great brand reputation for your brand derives from there.

5. Sponsor Ads on Social Media: If you advertise online, all you want is traffic. By sponsoring ads on social media, you have the great benefit of your ads appearing in your audience’s news feed, even if they aren’t following your page. That means traffic which is good for your business. Sponsored social media ads can be very successful because, you can directly target specific demographics that are most likely to buy your products/services. That way, you get the most value from your ad spend.

6. Use Influencer Marketing: Some research findings indicate that over 60% of consumers trust influencer endorsements. What this means is that most consumers are more likely to buy a product recommended by an influencer than the one endorsed by the seller. Most consumers rely on influencer endorsements to make their buy decisions because of the trust they have on the influencer. This is why it is much better to rely on Influencers to help build the brand reputation of your business and to generate leads at a lower cost than on traditional advertising which costs higher.

7. Advertise at Your Local Chamber of Commerce: Worldwide, local chambers of commerce are places where business owners and business minded people interact closely. That makes them one great place to advertise your small business if you ask me. Through them, you can easily reach new people in your community at minimal costs. You can also build highly rewarding relationships with other local business owners particularly in your business niche. For business inquiries, many people usually like to visit the website of their local chambers of commerce. That makes the chambers a very effective way to reach new customers.

How to Generate Awesome Content for Your Blog

Great content always makes great blogging. On the part of bloggers, great content means coming up consistently with topics that are engaging and constructive. Such topics that can keep your readers devoted to your blog and grow your audience. It means always finding hot stuff for your blog that will interest if not amaze your readers. The Internet is the collected knowledge of all humankind and with it comes the best ideas that humans have ever had. The real challenge to bloggers however is to be able to tap into this potential and to find something to write about that will make some impact within this body of knowledge. Once your audience likes the content you write, you are bound to make some impact.

Even though the Internet is well equipped to give bloggers a load of information and solutions, there are times they suffer from the old writer’s block and unable to write good content. If you are a blogger, any time you find yourself in such a situation, try these here tested strategies to help you write good content.

Think, Observe and Take Notes

In whatsoever you do and wherever you go, always think content. Be observant enough as not to miss out on anything or any information that may be of help to you when creating content. For this reason, always be prepared to take copious notes and to record any information that you may need later when writing content. It helps to carry around a portable notepad and a pen/pencil to jot down any information you may find useful later as you move around your daily activities. Such notepad comes handy to record the details of any idea in case your memory fails you as it often happens. Ideas that come around this way usually flesh themselves out pretty quickly when crafting your content.

Repurpose and Repackage Old Content

Once in a while, you can single out an old content for repacking as a new content. You repurpose and repackage such content as new and it continues to pull traffic. Repurposing and repackaging is not the same thing as copying and pasting such content. That is a no no.  You can actually give a new lease of life to an old content by taking the salient points out of the old post and combining them with new ideas and good images to make a brand new content. Repurposing old content and repackaging it remains a very good strategy to generate content.

Read and Note Comments in Niche Blogs

If you are diligent enough, you can get good content from comments on your own blog and comments on other popular blogs within your blog niche. The most popular sites usually have comment storms of hundreds of comments all saying what they liked or disliked about any blog post. You can note all the comments asking for more information or clarifying information on the original post. These are treasure troves for more content. A good content is one that gives readers what to want to read. Knowing what your audience is looking for helps you to craft content to meet their needs. Comments from your blog niche readers give you a unique insight into what the readers in this particular niche care about and are talking about. From these comments, you can get new ideas and inspiration to write more effective content. Through your content, if you manage to give your readers something they probably haven’t heard about yet and are yearning to know, you’ll have them hooked on your content.

Base your Post off Other Successful Posts

Style your posts around previous posts that are doing well and pulling good traffic. These are posts that bloggers like to call evergreen blog posts. You can also target the best performing posts of the top five or more blogs you follow. Determine what makes them unique and why they’re doing well. If you are able to correctly figure that out, it becomes simple to craft a post that mimics the style and the structure of the successful post. That’s one relatively easy way to give yourself ideas for new content in a short space of time. Even if the content may not perform as well as the original, it still has a lot of potential to do well.

Experiment with Ideas

By experimenting with new ideas in your content, you can always manage to come up with new thinking and new direction in the ever evolving world of blogging. A good blogger always utilizes all information at his disposal to craft content that appeals to his audience. The more he experiments with ideas, the more he arouses this appeal. No matter how skilled you are as a blogger, you cannot maximize your skills if you are unable to experiment with ideas.

Use Content Ideas Generators

Good thinking and good observation may not be enough to give you all the blogging ideas you need. You can thus supplement your thinking with good content idea generators. Online, a content idea generator like Hubspot’s Topic Generator is a small app that allows you to input words or phrases and then randomly generate topics that may or may not be of use to you to create blog content. If you input say about two or three nouns, the app automatically generates topics that you can streamline to fit whatever blog niche you’re writing on. This app is far from being a sophisticated tool, but it saves bloggers the time they would otherwise have expended physically juggling some nouns around on a pad to make some sense.

Be Active on Social Media

Presently, nearly everyone is social media 24/7 around the world doing one thing or another. Smart bloggers are taking good advantage of the enormous audience of social media. If you are a blogger, social media links you with your audience in the most direct manner that has ever existed since the dawn of the Internet. This simply means that social media allows you to observe first-hand the things your audience is discussing with their social groups real time. This vital insight has a lot of potential for generating leads for great content creation by bloggers. By creatively using this information, you can easily craft content around the most important topics that your users have chosen to discuss on social media.

Use User Generated Content  

You can have awesome content for your blog from user-generated content. Do this by diligently following the comments from your blog audience. Observe how your blog community relates with and discusses with itself. Through this observation, you can determine what they care about then use their questions and concerns to craft great blog posts for their benefit. If you spend quality time monitoring the trend of discussions of your audience, you can easily come up with some blog topics to address their concerns. You can even play the devil’s advocate by directly posing questions to your audience to elicit responses. Based on their responses, you can then craft some riveting content to meet their needs.

Blogging Tips for Beginner Bloggers

Most digital marketers always want to get into blogging but not many really blog right. Some do right but quickly hit a block, get confused and don’t really know what to do next. Many zealously get into the highly competitive world of blog writing only to realize that they are not quite making a success out of it as they would have wished. Some do get some bits of traffic inflow which may be disappointing to them. Many of such bloggers are perpetually struggling to get more traffic. If you are in this category of bloggers or you are just starting out on a long journey of blogging, pay attention to these here tips. Expert bloggers do not hesitate to recommend many of these tips which have one way or another helped them out in their very eventful blogging experiences. These tips have helped me tremendously too.

Write What You’re Passionate About

When you are starting out as a blogger, it is in your best interest to write something you know well and enjoy and are passionate about. That saves you the drudgery of writing on what you do not have sufficient information about that others will like to read. Writing about what you know will help you to easily give out quality info that will attract and sustain your blog readers’ attention. Doing so consistently translates to good traffic. Good blogs content must be uniquely written from your passion. Bland and uninteresting topics and subject matters are not helpful to quality blog content.

If you aim to promote products you love and make money on the side, you can embed a few links to these products in your blog content. Anytime a reader clicks on these links and buys a product, you earn a commission from the sale.

Write Purposefully

Write only what will interest your readers. You must always write with a clear purpose that will not be boring to your readers. That is about the only credible way to keep them interested in your content and to anticipate more. Avoid writing randomly about whatever you fancy or whatsoever comes to your mind. That is not very helpful to your readers and may even confuse them. If you write on purpose, you will not only educate your readers, you will entertain them as well. Problem solving for your readers should always be paramount in your mind. That helps to shape your content. If for instance you blog in the “make money online” niche like most professional bloggers, then the purpose of your blog should be clearly to help people make money legitimately online and to avoid scams and get-rich-quick schemes that abound on the internet.

Write Naturally and Simply

If you write what your readers do not understand, not writing at all is better. Write naturally and simply for everyone to understand no matter their level of education. Avoid grammatical complications and jaw-breaking words. Write conversationally as if you are having a one-on-one conversation with your reader. This is because most people welcome and enjoy conversational speak particularly when it is intent on helping to provide them with valuable information. Good blog content should not be presented like a college thesis, business report, or some complex legal document. The technicalities that characterize such reports are always a put off for most blog readers. Therefore, you must blog to entertain and to inform in a very simple style of presentation just as you are reading here.

Always Proofread Your Work

If you are a beginner blogger, do not unduly worry if your grammar is not perfect from the outset. Start writing and keep on writing to improve your grammar. If you aim to be a good and credible writer, proofreading your work is a must. Depending on the speed of your writing and your thought process, it is inevitable that your first draft in any written document will have errors. Such errors include improper punctuation, spelling errors, a lack of proper paragraphs, bad formatting, and improper words spacing. These are put offs for most blog readers. Proofreading your work thoroughly helps to clear most of such errors. It shows professionalism too. The more you write, the better you become as a writer. It is best to read and re-read your content thoroughly before publishing. That way, you can spot most of the errors and correct them adequately. In addition, you can use online tools to aid your proofreading process. These tools may not be 100% perfect but they are quite helpful and handy to use. Many expert bloggers do recommend Grammarly and ProWritingAid tools for proofreading. I do use such tools too but they have a few tolerable drawbacks even though they can help spot a handful of errors you never even thought your content had.

Be Consistent and Stick with Your Theme

If you want to succeed fast as a blogger, make sure you are consistent. Consistency helps to build trust and credibility for your content fast enough. By consistently sticking to your central theme and avoiding diversions, you build trust easily because your audience likes it. That is one of the best ways to grow your audience as a blogger. Starting with one theme and diverting into another is not professional. It manages to kill the interest of your blog readers. You must strive to give your original readers what they want at all times without diverting to something different. Writing about too many different things at a time could result in you losing track of your blog’s subject/theme. You lose the interest of readers as well. If you want to write about making money online for instance, stick with that. Anyone who is interested in making money online will stick to your content. That helps to grow your audience.
 
Have a Blogging Schedule/Calendar

Scheduling your content not only helps to boost your productivity, it also helps to release your content timorously. Your content writing schedule/Calendar could be set on twice a day, daily, or even weekly, during which time you shut off all distractions like phones and TVs to concentrate on writing. If your blog is designed and specially targeted, you can also time the release of your blog content depending on the audience you are targeting around the time zones of the world. That helps the effectiveness of your content. Blogging is hugely tasking no doubt. So, having a schedule/calendar can help to organize things a lot better and make your blogging easier and more effective. Through these efforts, chances are, your blog writing will start to come more naturally and effortlessly once habits begin to build even if you are a beginner.

Worry Less about Traffic Early on

Most new blogs usually go unnoticed for some period of time. This could extend to several weeks or months without any tangible traffic. There is no cause to worry. Do not let lack of traffic discourage you at the beginning. Avoid the discouraging feeling that you are writing for nobody and wasting your time. Just keep writing and publishing. It takes quite a while for search engines to find and rank your content. Brand new domains are always viewed with caution by major search engines like Google. That is why you need real patience to give search engines time to start trusting your content. In addition, populating your blog across social media platforms also takes quite a while before your content starts trending with enthusiastic audience. All you need is patience. Keep writing and the traffic will come in due time.

Brainstorm Regularly

Take it from me, everyone including yours truly struggles to come up with good ideas to write blog content. The antidote to that is to form the habit of brainstorming regularly. Doing so helps you to be more and better productive in your blogging. If you are brainstorming particularly in a very quiet corner of your home, have a pen and notepad handy to jot down any ideas floating around your mind. If you don’t get distracted, brainstorming can help to get your creative juices flowing unlimited. That way, you could come up with some credible new content ideas within an hour or two. If you go to work immediately after that, you may be able to knock out a few good blog posts from such ideas.

Avoid Becoming Overwhelmed

Focus and deep focus is recommended for beginner bloggers. It is best to focus on just one blog and theme when starting out. As most experienced bloggers very well know, writing about too many things can quickly become overwhelming. That scenario inevitably leads to poor productivity. If as a beginner blogger you out of excitement and enthusiasm decide to start several blogs related to many different themes/niches, you’ll quickly begin to fail once you realize how much work is involved to keep your many blogs online. Many new bloggers usually give up and quit at this point when they realize that updating and posting on too many blogs at a time takes quite a lot of work and time. The only viable solution to avoid being overwhelmed is to concentrate on one blog at a time and master it well. That helps to save valuable time and efforts and to have enough concentration to really improve on and master your blogging activities.

Write with Empathy

Yes indeed! As a blogger, you must realize early on that you are writing for others to read. So, you must put yourself in your readers’ shoes when writing your blog posts. You need to empathize with your readers while attempting to help solve their problems. You can win the trust of your readers faster if they perceive how empathetic you are in your content. That way, they’ll relate better with you as well. You can for instance think about how to help bald men. You can put yourself in the reader’s shoes by explaining a story related to how you handled your own balding problems. That way, you can better help your reader find that very cure you have used in treating your own baldness. By doing this, you are clearly letting it on to your reader that you are human trying to reach out and help another human and not just another fast talking salesman attempting to make a quick sale.

Maintain a List of Future Ideas

This is why as a beginner blogger, it is advisable to always have a pen and notepad with you anywhere you find yourself. As you walk around and network with people all day, any ideas that come up should be jotted down for future use. Experience shows that maintaining a list of future blog posts and ideas is imperative to your content creation strategy and resourcefulness. Sometimes, a random idea could pop into your head at a random time of day and anywhere. If you don’t jot it down for future use, you may forget about it. These notes can be of tremendously help to you when figuring out what to write. They could save you time too. That’s quality time that would have been spent trying to remember or figure out an idea/topic to write about. These days, nearly everyone carries around a smartphone. If the idea of carrying around a pen and notepad is not cool with you, you can install an app on your phone that will sync with your computer. That comes in very handy to jot down ideas when you are away from your computer.

8 Website Ideas to Earn Extra Income Online

Worldwide, internet users now top 4.5 billion. Meaning, more and more people are now using the internet for business and sundry activities and they access via websites. For people doing business online, they need websites that attract considerable traffic. Websites with good traffic inflow are well positioned for making money online with the right ideas. What that means is that a decent website can earn a significant income if the ideas are right. It is all a matter of ideas, good ideas and you can earn extra income from your website. In that quest, here are eight tested and proven website ideas that can help you earn extra income online.

1. Start an Affiliate Blog Website

This idea is to simply create targeted content that will drive inbound traffic to your blog website. If you embed affiliate links carefully on the content, any click through these links and a purchase is made earns you some affiliate commission. The more affiliate products you link to and the more of these products that are sold through your links, the more money you earn from your efforts.

2. Create a Recipe Website

If you have culinary skills, you can create a recipe website and earn some income. Thousands of people search online daily for recipes and meal inspirations. If you’re creative enough to come up with some unique recipes, you can share them online through your recipe website. That helps to create awareness and curiosity. If your recipe website starts to get good traffic, you can take the next step to earn money by selling online cooking courses, advertising, or even affiliate marketing to your audience.

3. Establish a Travel Website

Yeah, the human race is always on the move. That means endless travels. If you enjoy traveling and you like to travel, you can capitalize on something you love doing to earn money. You can take beautiful scenic and destinations photographs; graphically tell stories about the trials and tribulations you’ve experienced in your journeys. Such content will attract an audience with interest in travels to your website. When your following begins to grow, you’ll be able to collaborate with different travel products for sponsored content to earn money. You can promote affiliate products related to travels and earn commissions. In addition, you can sell your photos online as prints; contact various destinations or hotels for discounted or free reservations, and lots more.

4. Create an eCommerce Store

You can significantly increase your potential to earn considerable income online by creating an eCommerce store since more and more shoppers are now going online to make purchases. That comes down to about 65% of all internet users. Now, that’s a very huge market out there. An eCommerce store will help you to get a foot into this huge market at very limited costs and you’ll be able to attract international shoppers as well. If you choose, you can sell your own products and ship them directly to buyers. Alternatively and as a good way to save up on costs, you can implement a dropshipping program. Through it, you can sell products without bothering about warehousing and shipping. The products manufacturers will be responsible for shipping these products directly from their warehouses to the buyers.

5. Start a Personal Blog

A personal blog is content marketing in which anyone who knows something useful that others will like to read can start writing about it. What that means is that you can blog on virtually any niche. The idea is to create readable, engaging, and exciting content that attracts people back to your platform.  As your blog following starts to grow, then you can consider monetizing it. This you can do in many creative ways such as sponsored content, affiliate marketing, advertising, or through Google AdSense. The higher your website traffic, the more advertisers are willing to pay for placements on your blog and the more money you earn from the blog.

6. Build a Job Website

Ever heard of Jobberman.com? Yeah, that’s a great job website. Millions of people worldwide are online daily searching for jobs, any jobs. Having a job website is one great way you can earn cool income online. The approach is simple and straight forward. You can decide to post available jobs to your website and you earn residual income every time someone visits the site.  Or, you can decide to connect job seekers to jobs as a recruiter and you earn on fees. If you have a well-designed job website, you can create a membership page that allows detailed profile creation. This can include resumes, job preferences, personal information, and more. To build website traffic fairly quickly, it is advisable to consider keeping profile registration free, along with a personalized platform for fees paying members. You can make the site more attractive by including early access to job postings, salary insights, and on-going career tips as part of the content.

7. Build a Humor Website

No doubt most people like humor, real humor that helps to brighten their days in a world full of endless struggles and stress. A humor website can become very popular very quickly for this reason. Humor is a very delicate subject matter though. Make sure that the content you post isn’t protected by copyright to avoid being barred from search engine results. Be careful not to engage in humor that denigrates race, ethnicity or religion. These are no go areas. When launching your humor-based content, you can carefully search online for various types of humor and determine which niche you’d like to cover. As your following grows, you can then consider monetization by way of paid ads and automated ads campaign such as Google Adsense.

8. Develop a Review Platform

Most online users particularly on social media like to share personal experiences with restaurants, hotels, resorts, golf courses, businesses, and local travels/destinations. A review website can help interested people connect local establishments with considerable website traffic. You can earn income on a review website by offering highlighted locations, top search placement, and preferred business packages. As your membership grows, your earnings grow in tandem.

Wrapping Up

These eight website ideas may not be the only income earning ideas from a website but they’re certainly some of the easiest to implement to earn income. They all have great long-term earning potentials. What is common to all of them is good content which must be shared regularly and consistently to attract traffic. Your website visitors are the traffic and no visitor returns to a website if there’s nothing interesting on the website either to read or view frequently. To earn money online with website ideas, you’ve got to be very patient. A website takes quality time to establish authority and recurring traffic because it must contend with great competition which the internet is notorious for.

4 Creative Digital Marketing Campaign Ideas

Digital marketing campaigns help to bring down the cost of advertising worldwide. Recent studies show that global spending on advertising is nearing $100 billion and there are indications that the figures will keep going up. Businesses spend this whopping sum on advertising annually because they get results. That said, some businesses also annually spend some good money on marketing campaigns which won’t yield good results. Such businesses tend to find a way around that by relying more on digital marketing strategies which are more cost effective.


 
To save costs in your campaigns, you can get these 4 digital marketing strategies into your own marketing plan.

#1. Get Your Business on Social Media

Social media is relatively free, cost effective and easy to use. It helps to make things easy and simple for good results. Just get your business to be active on the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others. Placing ads on their walls is in most cases free of cost and very effective as well. If your business is active on social media, it helps to make it more transparent to people, making it more likely to get business done. Most customers habitually like any business that is easily accessible with very free interaction. That is what most social media platforms guarantee. The reason they are very effective in digital marketing campaigns.

#2. Write a Quality Blog

Every serious digital marketer has got to have a blog for better marketing results. That’s content marketing because content remains king in digital marketing world. If you are a marketer and you aren’t writing blog content for your website yet, you’re way behind your competition. That is a very cold truth. Digital marketers have since found out that blog content is what improves your site’s SEO by way of driving organic traffic to your website. Better traffic generates quality leads and eventual sales. If you are not writing a blog yet, not to worry, you can get started right now. Successful blog posts directly translate to good traffic.

#3. Create Digital Business Flyers

By design, these flyers should be able to reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers and the message succinct enough to get positive actions. That is what works in digital marketing world. If you are deficient at designing flyers, with some professional help, you can get out highly magnetic and effective flyers on the internet to get you leads and sales.

#4. Deploy Video Marketing for Effects

There is research evidence that 65% of people learn mostly through visuals. That is why video marketing has become a very effective visual content marketing tool. Video marketing comes in many and varied forms. Most digital advertisers are choosing video over text more and more as a preferred option to capture people’s attention because of the good results. Depending on your background and expertise, you can choose to put together a webinar or create how-to videos to attract traffic. You may even decide to open a YouTube channel for effective advertising of your products/services. The resultant effect is good leads, traffic and ultimately, good sales.