4 Realistic Ways to Make Money on Pinterest

You can realistically make money on Pinterest but mostly in indirect ways. Technically, Pinterest is a self-described visual discovery search engine. Users usually take to Pinterest to for instance find an idea for a fresh new recipe or some suchlike visual discovery and there is an endless feed of vertical images and short videos you can view and save to spark inspiration. You can thus indirectly make money on Pinterest by using pins to promote a blog or online business and partnering with brands to earn through affiliate links. This is more so when you have hundreds of millions of active users on the platform. Because Pinterest also serves as an organic advertising tool for bloggers and business owners and also a credible way for popular pinners to partner with brands and cash in on influential posts, money is made indirectly from the platform.

To partake in these money-making activities, you must first convert your Pinterest account to a free business account. Doing so allows you unhindered access to in-house analytics and the ability for advertisers and merchants to create various ads on the platform to earn some income. Next is to tactically use the built-in Pinterest Trends tool to explore popular search terms, then craft pin titles, tags and description text that hits on relevant keywords. That helps to attract the much needed traffic to your e-commerce business.

If either as a side-hustle or full-time income you really want to make money on Pinterest, here are some four realistic ways to get it done.

1. Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest

If you are active on Pinterest, your pins may be your own way of having fun by sharing what you like and are passionate about with others. Some suchlike common topics like sports, gardening, home décor, cooking and fitness for instance. If you consistently post these pins particularly when they obviously demonstrate your expertise in your chosen niche, with time, you’ll amass a sizeable following on the platform. If you are active on other popular social media platforms as well, your influence could open great opportunities to join an affiliate program. If you do, you can then begin to earn a commission for promoting products featured in your pins. Once you become an affiliate, you can effectively use the product tagging feature of Pinterest to add personalized affiliate links to pins. Viewers can then click directly to your product pages outside of Pinterest and make purchases. That earns you good commissions as an affiliate. You can take full advantage of other popular affiliate programs like Amazon Associates and ShareASale that let you earn a commission for recommending products on social accounts to earn more commissions.

2. Free Advertising for your Monetized Blog

If you write a personal blog that is already popular, you can monetize it by selling ads spaces promoted on Pinterest. You can monetize your popular blog by integrating online ads in it or embedding affiliate links for products relevant to your niche. You can then use Pinterest to promote your blog posts in an effort to drive traffic to the website and exposing your e-commerce products. For effects, you can grab an image from your blog or website and use Pinterest’s built-in in-house tools to add text and tweak the design of your pin. If you add your unique link to the post, it will help drive viewers back to your website/blog. Because the unique link you added is visible to viewers and clickable when viewers hover over your pin, it helps drive traffic to your blog. Such traffic could translate to eventual leads and sales.

3. Inspired Entrepreneurship  

Technically, Pinterest was designed as a digital bulletin board that allows for broad exchange of ideas. It certainly wasn’t started with brand deals and affiliate marketing or even monetization in mind. It was one great place to go to if you’re in search of how to save money by doing things yourself. It thus became popular with people searching for DIY ways to improve their lives and living space. If for instance you want to start an online business, you can search Pinterest directly for the best things to sell online as part of your research process. Pinterest is thus great for inspired entrepreneurship. Even if Pinterest does not pay you directly for the content you create, you can still earn income by using the platform as a very effective marketing or influencer tool. This is because the platform allows you to earn income through outside sources like your own e-commerce business, an affiliate program or any brand you choose to work with.

4. Free Advertising for your E-commerce Business

Pinterest is one great platform for e-commerce business owners to take advantage of organic advertising approach and it’s free. This can be done in the same way you would make pins about your business offering, to attract traffic back to your e-commerce business website. What you write in your pins and how the pins are designed is quite significant in this quest. When viewers hover over your pins and the pins are embedded with clickable links, a click therein sends the viewer directly to your e-commerce business website. Sales can naturally result from such online journeys.

3 Simple Ways to Make Money on TikTok

Just like YouTube and Instagram, TikTok as a social media platform is increasingly becoming popular with internet users. Many of these people are using it to generate income and building careers as influencers. This they do through funny animal videos, viral dances and creative visual tricks and mimes to popular songs. Depending on your own inclination as internet user, there’s something for everyone on TikTok, even though it appeals more to younger generations.

What You Really Need to Make Money on TikTok

Just like many other social media platforms, you need followers, real and interactive followers that is. The more followers you have, the more money you can make on the platform. To start with, you don’t really need millions of followers to start making money, but if you have them, so much the better. On the platform, content creators with less than 50,000 followers are known as “nano influencers” while those that have between 50,000 and 150,000 followers are considered “micro influencers”. But, to make money directly from TikTok, you’ll need to have at least 10,000 followers. This is in addition to at least 100,000 video views in the last 30 days.

How is the Money Made?

Basically in three ways:
1. Selling your own merchandise via TikTok.
2. Partnering with brands to post sponsored content.
3. Earning money directly from TikTok through its Creativity Program Beta.

But, you’ll need to follow some key steps to position yourself to make money in these three key ways:

- Identify with a Niche: Posting content in a popular Niche can get you noticed quickly. That means increased views and consequently more money made.

 
- Post quality content regularly: You must make sure you’re consistent in posting quality content. Avoid losing momentum by way of long breaks between posts. This is what can sustain viewership of your videos.

- Build your following: You can start earning with some 10,000 followers but to attract the attention of brands you need around 50,000 followers or more. Then you’ll start earning through sponsorships and other ways.

- Directly engage with your followers: The more interaction you have with your followers, the better your sponsored posts will perform. You can in addition attract more views on your videos as a direct result.

- Jump on trends: TikTok as a popular social media platform is particularly reputed for its viral dances and music videos. If you are able to incorporate the latest trends into your content, you can directly boost the viewership of the videos. That translates to earning more money in the process.

5 Viable Ways to Make Money with TikTok Videos

The buzz is on. TikTok is presently a fast growing short video-sharing social media platform that is hugely popular among young people. This is the population that accesses the internet mostly through mobile devices particularly smartphones. Because of these people, TikTok is gradually becoming a huge sensation on the internet. TikTok presents itself as a social media platform with high entertainment value. Besides this, many young people are now seeking to understand how to make money on TikTok by way of content creation. These content creators are gradually discovering that they can leverage their smartphones to create and share a vast range of short videos to attract positive engagement on the platform. Thus, the most popular content now on TikTok involves dance, comedy, and educational content. This has opened up great opportunities for business and to make money on the platform. For this reason and in combination with the very wide reach of the platform, numerous micro and macro-influencers now find TikTok an ideal platform to share their unique content, engage their large audiences and make money on the platform. This means that TikTok has gradually opened up lucrative opportunities for good business and to make money online.

 
 
Following are 5 viable ways to make some money with TikTok videos.

1. Nurture a Huge Following: Just like other social media networks, success on TikTok is largely dependent on the size of your audience. What this means is how many people are following you. Your first task when you open a TikTok account is to vigorously grow your followers. The trick to do this fairly quickly is to regularly upload high quality videos on the platform. This is what attracts followers. On TikTok, the more followers you have the more influence you have on the platform. It is the size of your audience that determines your influence. It is this influence that brands and businesses are looking for to market their products. That is what earns money for the TikTok account owner.

2. Consistently Create Quality Content: On TikTok, it is just not enough to create content. The content you create must be of high quality and consistent. This is what attracts followers. Therefore, your success on the platform is directly dependent on your ability to upload quality content consistently. This content must be compelling and impactful enough to induce more followers to continue to like, share and encourage others to start following you. That’s positive engagement. The more your followers grow, the more your TikTok account becomes attractive to brands and businesses. That makes more brands and businesses elect to advertise through the account.
 
3. Promote your Content Across other Social Media Platforms: The real power of most social media platforms lies with their popularity and ease of sharing content and information on the platforms. TikTok is no exception. You can directly improve your chances of discoverability and engagement by promoting your TikTok channel on other very popular platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. This is the gimmick that helps many social media influencers to make good money online. They take advantage of the ease of sharing information multichannel to reach their larger followers on many platforms. So, if you have a cohesive social media strategy across different platforms, it gives you maximum reach and engagement across these channels. That translates to a real opportunity to make good money from sponsored ads endorsements.

4. Diligently Engage with Your Audience: If you have a large following on TikTok, you can become a TikTok influencer. As a TikTok influencer, keeping your audience interested in your content and account is crucial if you want to make money from the account. What this entails is that you must endeavor to robustly interact with your followers in addition to generating the quality content. You can get that going profitably by listening to followers, producing the content they seek, answering their queries and creating live streams on TikTok. You can in addition take advantage of the in-house features of the platform such as TikTok rewards to increase referrals to the platform. Doing these can directly help to grow your audience and ultimately make good money on the platform.

5. Strive to Create Multiple Income Streams from your TikTok Account: If you have an active TikTok account, you have many opportunities to make money from it. So, if you really want to generate some good income, your best bet is to expand your revenue streams. You can for example look towards expanding your income through tipping, selling your own products, brand sponsorships or taking advantage of opportunities like TikTok’s creator fund. TikTok offers these opportunities in varying degrees to help content creators make money by diversifying their income streams. If you are able to effectively diversify your income and hugely expand your network, you’ll have more and better opportunities to make money on TikTok.

Lead Generation Strategies to Boost Your Sales Revenue

In digital marketing parlance, a lead is any person/entity expressing interest in the product/service you are marketing. Obtaining such persons/entities by deliberate marketing efforts is lead generation. Marketers acquire leads to grow their customer base by way of leads, conversions and sales. More sales in your business directly translate to a boost in your sales revenue. So, to generate more sales, you must deploy effective strategies to get more leads and eventual conversions. Following are some of the best lead marketing strategies you can deploy to get more leads for your business.

 

Compile a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is like profiling the individuals you want to target with your marketing messages who may be interested in buying your products/services. If you use the right parameters and segmentation, you can have the right insight into the prospective buyer's needs and wants. You can have an insight into their specific purchasing attitudes and the criteria that can drive them to purchase your products/services. If you have these vital insights of your products/services buyers' persona, it becomes easier for you to create actionable and efficient lead generation strategies. With this persona in mind, you can easily fine-tune all your marketing efforts/strategies to resonate well with the buyer who wants and needs the products/services you are offering. That way, you can get more leads, conversions and sales.
 
Enable Sales Chat Feature on Your Website

Communication is really key to successful marketing efforts in this age and time. If this communication is instant and two-way, so much the better! When visitors take advantage of the chart feature on your website, it is easier for you to deal with them real time, address their concerns instantly and eventually convert them to leads. The presence of a sales chat feature on your website can easily turn ordinary visitors into leads because they can talk to you to know more details about the products/services you are marketing. With chat features like Skype for instance, visitors are easily at ease knowing they are talking to “someone.” With AI like Chatbots, you can have a 24/7 chat feature that helps you to maintain a great customer experience no matter what time of the day or night customers are on your website. These chat features are inevitably handy to help you to nurture your website visitors and convert them into leads and customers. The more leads and conversions you get this way, the more sales you make.

Rev Up Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content remains king in digital marketing particularly for ecommerce business owners. When links to products are embedded in content and promoted widely online, they help to get traffic and clicks back to products on the ecommerce website. The best content is content that is highly informative and impactful. If such content is optimized with the right keywords, it attracts the attention of search engines. Search engines like to go for optimized content, rank it higher in their SERPs and send organic traffic to it. Without good content, your website cannot reach the top search results whenever an Internet user keys in a search. The more good content you create on your website therefore, the more traffic it attracts and the more leads it gets. When your web visitors like your content, they stay with it, read it and may eventually subscribe to your products/services. When the traffic to your website leads to sales, it helps to boost your sales revenue. That is what good content helps to enhance.

Collaborate with Influencers

The advent of social media has really made influencer marketing popular. Influencers are celebrities in the online world particularly social media with huge audience and at times fanatical following. If you partner with and collaborate with influencers, they can help talk about your products, try them out, endorse them and even recommend them to their huge audiences. They can even serve as affiliate marketers to your products and earn commissions on the sales they generate or earn discount codes on your products. That way, influencers can help to promote your products/services, bring in more leads and eventual sales. Most influencers are known for constantly creating a buzz and hype in the online world. This can have a very positive effect on the products/services they are helping to market. This celebrity buzz can help to drive interest to your products/services. That translates to leads and sales for your website.
 
Task Your Current Customers for Referrals

If you want to task your current customers for referrals, there are some marketing strategies you can deploy to help turn them into a good source of leads. This is because there's no one better to ask for referrals than your current customers. Your customers already know your brand, they are delighted with it and are thus in the best position to refer others to the brand. For this reason, you can directly reach out to your customers tasking them on referrals. This you can induce with incentives like discount codes, coupons, or thank you gifts for each referral they send to you. You can also encourage your current customers to send new referrals to your business by giving them a warm follow-up and thank you message after each purchase. Doing this routinely can help you to generate more leads through customer referrals.  

Common Affiliate Marketing Channels

You cannot afford to do without affiliate marketing if you want your business to survive stiff competition on the internet. Engaging affiliates as marketing partners is one smart marketing move. This is because you easily leverage the huge audience which affiliates can reach as well as the multichannel available to them to help market your products/services. With affiliates, you can thus widely spread the word about your products/services and expand your reach. This partnership works well because affiliate partners only earn through commissions. Affiliates who have vested interest in maximizing their commissions cannot therefore afford not to put in the requisite efforts to vigorously promote your products/services. These affiliates are also at liberty to use a variety of channels/platforms that work for them to do their promotions. Here are some of such channels.

Large Media Websites

Large media websites are built to concentrate on growing a global audience of millions of people.  They are as a result very good at constantly generating very large traffic. The websites are designed to effectively use banner ads and contextual affiliate links to market products/services to a large audience. This strategy helps to provide your business the much needed exposure which culminates in increased conversion rates. Increased conversion rates directly impact increased earnings for affiliates and product merchants.

Paid Search-Focused Microsites

Microsites are usually promoted on a partner site or in search engine-sponsored listings. These sites are significantly different from the primary stand-alone website of a business. Microsites are important affiliate marketing tools because they help to enhance conversions. This they do by providing more targeted, pertinent material to a particular audience using their clear and uncomplicated call-to-action, CTA. Microsite creation and monetization can result in significant affiliate earnings because of the increased visibility they provide a business.

Influencers

In digital marketing terms, a content provider who has the ability to affect a sizable portion of the public’s purchase decisions is known as an influencer. Influencers are always well-positioned to gain from affiliate marketing because of the huge audiences/followers at their disposal. This is the audience they relate directly with and somehow influences with social media posts, blogs, and other social interactions. They rely on the power of their influence to endorse, recommend and easily point buyers to the seller’s products/services taking advantage of their large following. When sellers make sales through the efforts of influencers, the influencers earn commissions same as affiliates.

Bloggers

Blogging is the most popular form of content marketing among digital marketers. Most affiliate marketers use blog content to promote their affiliate links. The more their blogs attract traffic, the higher the chances that their affiliate links will be clicked and hopefully a purchase is made through such effort. Because blogs have the ability to rank organically in search engine queries, many good bloggers really excel at increasing a seller’s conversions through content marketing. Many good bloggers do sample a product/service and then write a comprehensive review that helps to promote the product/service in a compelling and convincing way. This ultimately helps to drive good traffic back to the seller’s website. Bloggers get rewarded with commissions as affiliates if their blogging efforts help sellers to make sales.

Responsive Email Lists

A responsive email list is a very valuable asset in digital marketing. Many affiliates who have diligently built such lists over time can generate substantial revenue through email marketing. Affiliates can segment their email lists for effective marketing purposes. They can thus use such email lists to spread specialized marketing messages directly to people on their lists who really need such messages. They can directly advertise products for a product vendor using email and earn commissions when sales are made from such efforts. Affiliates can also make use of email newsletters that contain links to a vendor’s products/services and earn commissions as well when purchases are made. 

7 Surefire Techniques to Get High-Quality Backlinks

One major challenge internet marketers keep grappling with is the continuous changes in search engine algorithms. If they are unable to cope with these changes, it becomes hugely difficult for them to remain competitive and relevant in their niche market. These changes usually affect backlinks as well since they are important ranking factors in their own rights. This is exactly why savvy content marketers are always on the lookout for how best they can use backlinks to enhance their ranking on the SERPs of search engines. Savvy marketers rely on effective marketing techniques to get high-quality backlinks that help their sites to rank well. These here seven marketing techniques can help you to get suchlike backlinks to boost your online marketing.

1. Prioritize Quality

Yes, backlinks are important for search engine optimization (SEO) ranking purposes but quality links are more important. With quality backlinks, most sites can climb the Google ladder and gain real authority. Quality backlinks are really important component of any SEO marketing campaign. These are links from other websites that Google considers to be authoritative and important. The more quality backlinks you have therefore, the more respect Google accords your website. That affects your website ranking as well if Google believes it is of high-quality and user-friendly.

2. Focus More on Long-tail Keywords

It is simply not enough to get backlinks for your website, the type of backlinks is important as well. If you focus more on using log-tail keywords on your content, the chances that you’ll get high-quality backlinks increases. One of the most effective ways to do this is to create some unique content that has long-tail keywords that people can’t really find anywhere else. Long-tail keywords are hugely important to attract quality backlinks. If you focus on using log-tail keywords on your content, you tend to attract more quality backlinks as well.

3. Take Advantage of Social Media Posts

Presently, social media is exactly where nearly everyone is at 24/7 around the world. This is why links from social media can be very good for your SEO strategy. To do well on Google, links need to be credible and from reputable sites and most social media sites and platforms are reputable and credible. So, if you habitually make posts on social media and add links with selected keyword phrases, you can get quality backlinks from the process. The more of such posts you make on social media, the higher your chances of getting backlinks.

4. Make Use of Influencers

Savvy marketers who can effectively utilize influencers tend to get more high-quality backlinks in the process. By endorsing and even recommending your content on social media, an influencer can provide a new angle for your blog post by making it much more interesting and applicable to their own audience. But first, you must have to make contact with influencers who are ready and willing to cooperate. Having something beneficial in the deal for them is one great way to get them to cooperate. You can directly source influencers from popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and others.

5. Focus on Link Building Trends

Search engine algorithms change from time to time, so you must keep up with the trends as related to backlinks. If you are not conversant with link building trends especially as dictated by the changes in the algorithms of search engines, it will be difficult if not impossible for you to build the right backlinks that can help your SEO ranking. These algorithms tend to change to be able to cope with new technologies, trends, and opportunities that savvy internet marketers might deploy to get quality backlinks in a highly competitive business environment.

6. Quality Guest Blogging

Guest blogging has been one of the most reliable ways to get backlinks in the past but not anymore. Article marketing, blog commenting and social media posts are now heavily contending for attention as well. Guest blogging has however not diminished in its usefulness to generate backlinks. It is still a great way to generate links that allow good websites to have more visibility on the internet. However, guest blogging is not without abuses though but search engines usually come down hard on the websites they trace these abuses to. So, if you’re looking for credible and legitimate ways to earn backlinks, it’s always better to focus more on quality rather than quantity even in guest blogging.

7. Diligently Track Your Results

Working on the internet without tracking your results is like working in the dark. Getting quality backlinks is multidimensional. There are online tools you can take advantage of to help you qualify backlinks. You can use your own website to create quality content for your target audience and get backlinks from your efforts. With Google analytics you can diligently track your results to see how well you are doing. Posting regularly on social media platforms can help you to link influencers and a wide variety of people on the platform. In-house tools peculiar to each platform can help you tract your engagement and backlinks.  Guest posting on other websites helps to increase the reach of your articles to a wider audience and you get backlinks from your efforts. These are backlinks you can accurately track to know how well you’re doing.

Best Ways to Generate Leads for your Online Business

The need for leads generation in your online business is to boost sales even though the process can be a bit tricky. It is usually a step-by-step process that requires resource planning and investments that you must decide upon at every stage. For best results, you must be able to leverage as many online digital channels as possible to generate good leads. No matter the size of your online business, these here lead generation tactics can help your business to grow. If you follow these tips, they’ll help you to generate the right leads to grow your online business.

 

Optimize your Digital Presence

Optimizing your digital presence is a perfect way to maintain and grow the virtual presence of a business and attract leads to the business. This is one of the best ways to get leads to your business. Optimization is a technical way of using selected keywords on your content to attract the attention of search engines. Through this SEO effort, search engines particularly Google will rank your website higher in its SERPs. That means more organic traffic and consequently leads. Therefore, one of the best techniques to generate leads online is to keep up with ever-evolving Google Algorithms. This you can do by applying the latest SEO techniques to the content published on your website.

Effective Email Marketing

If properly deployed with effective segmentation and automation, email marketing is a great way to generate leads online for free. As most digital marketers very well know, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to make people aware of your brand and services online. By deploying emails to drop customized newsletters, promotions, event notifications, and generally create awareness about a product/service, business owners easily generate leads extensively through these activities. If you craft your emails to be short and crisp, carrying the right intro and marketing purpose, having good aesthetics particularly good photos/graphics/images, making sure to include the right CTAs, and launched extensively in a well-planned and executed marketing campaign, they tend to generate more and better leads for a business. If you package your emails in regular newsletters to your email subscribers, it is a good way to grow your brand reputation and consequently generate more leads for the business. Widely sending cold emails is quite useful to help improve your chances of getting leads and converting them into sales/revenues.

Guest Blogging

Blogging is a fantastic content marketing activity business owners can always take advantage of online. That is exactly why guest blogging is one of the most creative ways to generate leads for a business. Guest blogs are done to promote the website content of a business with the help of other blog websites. Technically, guest blogging is the process of publishing your blogs by mutual arrangement and agreement on other websites besides yours. You must be generally good and recognized as a good blogger to effectively pull guest blogging off. If you are good at it, you can publish your blogs on third-party websites mostly for free to get traffic and leads and at times even through paid guest blogging services as well. Depending on the blogging conditions of the third party guest blogging website, you may be allowed CTAs on your blog posts. Such CTAs in combination with catchy blog titles and high quality and informative blog content, can be really great for leads generation and conversion rates. 

 
Build and Grow your Presence on Social Media

With about 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media has gradually become one huge market out there online. The most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and the likes are platforms business owners now take advantage of to generate leads and sales. These platforms also have unique in-house tools to help business owners market and grow their businesses through leads generation and effective sales pitches. How do business owners take advantage of social media? This they do by consistently posting highly informative content on the platforms and sharing it widely. Business owners who have a large following on social media platforms benefit from viral sharing of their content, higher engagement with the content, and increased feedback. These activities are great for leads generation.

Work with Social Media Influencers

Working with social media Influencers through Influencer collaborations is one of the most effective ways online businesses generate leads and convert them into sales/revenues. The rapid growth and wider popularity of social media platforms has thrown up social media Influencers. These are persons who have very large following on social media platforms. Their activities play a huge role in influencing the behaviors of their followers. Business owners who are able to collaborate and work with social media Influencers tend to benefit immensely from the activities of these Influencers. Influencer activities are a great way to get leads for a business. Business owners can arrange this collaboration based on their niche business and the type of content that suits their business. If you create content in form of how-to videos, Influencers can help endorse these videos, recommend your products to their huge following or craft content for them with links to your product. Through these activities, Influencer marketing is also considered one great way to generate leads.
 
Ask for Reviews and Customer Testimonials

If you have a bit of experience in Internet marketing, you’ll know how great customer reviews and testimonials can be in leads generation. This is why most business owners directly ask for customers’ reviews and testimonials. These testimonials play a very huge role in helping to create a positive image of your business on the minds of people who come across and read reviews about your business. Business reviews are the first things potential customers, financiers and potential business partners rely on to gauge the reputation of your business. In the Internet world, reputation matters a lot to build trust along the way. It is smart marketing therefore to ensure that good reviews are easily visible on your website and with more clarity to create positive images in the minds of whosoever gets to read them. This is why reviews and testimonials are also top creative ways to generate leads for your business. Reviews and customer testimonials are particularly very useful to build the trust factor for a business. This helps the business to attract a great percentage of leads.

Use Referrals to Attract Leads

Referrals are usually quite suitable for already existing customers and affiliate marketers to invite new customers. It is a highly effective lead generation technique. Referrals are also considered one of the most trustworthy and effective ways to attract engagements. Participating referrers and affiliate marketers are usually in it for a benefit. Such benefits range from commissions, discounts and exclusive coupons which the referrers earn when they generate sales, sign-ups and leads.

Organize Webinars and Seminars

When properly used, webinars and seminars are also very effective to pass important information or even educate a large group of people. Business owners effectively use them to market products/services. If they are advertised well advance and with attractive packages, webinars and seminars can be very effective to educate potential customers about the products/services on sale. They are thus helpful to attract potential customers who became leads courtesy of the webinar/seminar. Technically, social media platforms, video conferencing apps, and many more of suchlike tools are quite helpful in creating and organizing webinars/seminars. They’re very good lead generators as a result. Seminars and webinars are in a class of their own. They are very effective lead generation strategies that help make potential customers aware of brands and products in the market.

Summary

Generating leads for a business takes time and proper planning using the right techniques and marketing channels. The foregoing techniques are very handy to help your business generate leads. If you fail to use the right techniques to generate leads, you risk wasting your time and resources on a merry-go-round without tangible results. Lead generation is hugely important to help stimulate your business growth. Therefore, taking positive and deliberate steps to generate leads is good for your online business.

5 Robust Social Media Marketing Strategies That Get Results

Social media is daily increasing in popularity and digital marketers are taking real advantage of this popularity. They are devising strategies to increase their reach, get more traffic, leads, customers and sales by improving their social media marketing tactics. Right now, social media appears to be working for everyone but in various shades. These here five social media marketing strategies have been variously tested and have robustly proved to be useful to get desired online marketing results.

1. Skillfully Use Engagement Contests for Branding

For marketers who know how to use them, social media contests provide real opportunities for brands to grow their business. Most human beings usually like contests particularly when the rewards are great. So, if you can organize engagement contests, you can get the contestants involved and engaged with your brand for as long as the contest lasts. By using the right software, you can automate the process of collecting data about contestants in social networks using special programs. That way, you can actually collect the email addresses, phone numbers and more personal marketing data from all contestants. This data becomes useful down the road for branding, getting leads and customers and ultimately making more sales all because of the contests you are running. For best results, always make sure the prizes you offer match your target audience. If these prizes are good, they significantly help your business to increase brand awareness and generate more leads.

2. Reply Promptly to Facebook Messages

Brands are increasingly taking real advantage of promptly acting on messages via messenger or direct on Facebook. This is because most of the messages from subscribers involve asking a question, placing an order or leaving a review. These usually require very prompt and timely response from brands. Facebook for instance has pretty strict rules for sending messages between brands and customers. When a user contacts a brand via messenger, they only have 24 hours to respond to that message. If the brand responds promptly, a chat conversation can be established to quickly resolve a business problem. AI and Autoresponders come in very handy for brands to deal with business messages on social media. These can buy a bit of time for the business owner to personally respond to messages that may be too sophisticated for Autoresponders to handle. These are messages outside the FAQs which the responders are usually programmed to deal with. The bottom line is to always keep the customer positively engaged in conversation to see if a sale can be made through such efforts.

3. Promote High Organic Engagement Posts

Promoting high organic engagement posts is a great strategy marketers use to increase brand awareness and attract new users to their social media pages. Doing so is a very effective tactic to get new followers, clicks, and more of their website’s landing page visitors. It is for this reason Facebook has a “Promote Post” option among its in-house marketing tools. The feature encourages and allows brands to promote existing posts to new audiences. These are posts that have shown promise through analytics data relating to audience engagement. Such analytics data directly shows which posts are best performing in terms of likes, clicks, comments, and shares. Comments and re-posts are especially very valuable since they directly reveal the quality of a post and its relevance to the target audience. It is such posts that should be promoted more. Brands can thus effectively use such posts to promote ads and other valuable posts that are attractive to their target audience. Promoting existing high-performing posts on Facebook and Instagram has a distinct advantage for marketers. Such posts are great to preserve the social proof. All the likes and comments a valuable post manages to earn are usually visible to new users. Very likely therefore that more people will pay attention to content that is already appreciated by many other people. The direct effect of social proof at work!

4. Tag Relevant Brands and Influencers

It is an effective social media marketing strategy to tag other brands and influencers in your content. However, because of the spam rules in most social media platforms, you must make sure the tag action does not look like spam and does not annoy people. You can avoid this by making sure you do it only with relevant content that such people can relate with, that is, content that connects directly with them in some positive way. If other brands and influencers who have an audience-match with you accept to partner with you, the partnership directly benefits all parties. If you can help share their content by tagging them, chances are, they’ll be happy and willing to reciprocate. That makes a win-win situation for both parties.

5. Market with User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-generated content (UGC) is no doubt a very powerful social media marketing tool. But, before you share UGC on social media, always be sure you get permission to do so. Photos and testimonials created and shared by customers can help your brand with social proof if shared with permission. You can greatly increase your business reach if you manage to turn UGC into social proof. If your target audience is made to see the reviews of other customers, it is more likely to help them make a vital purchase decision. For this reason, it is hugely important to pay attention to campaigns that encourage the creation and dissemination of UGC on social media. 

To encourage social media users to share content with reviews or tags from your brand, you can do the following:

-    Use UGC in your stories or feed, and always tag the author.
-    Widely share with permission content from users frequently and enthusiastically.
-    Create your own content and tag other brands and influencers.
-    Add UGC asking you to share your favorite products from your brand.
-    Use a branded hashtag in the content they share.
-    Place a CTA in your bio on platforms like Twitter or Instagram, asking users to tag your brand.
-    If you quote others, mention their product or brand in your post.
-    If you quote an affiliate program or sponsored content, mention the product involved.

Last Line

Best way to get real marketing benefits from social media is to use robust social media marketing strategies that can help you to get results. The foregoing strategies are quite handy in that quest. Just give them a try, will you?

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.

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.

How to Profitably Engage Affiliate Marketing for Your Business

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy many business owners rely on to sell their products/services. It is an effective and low-risk method of building audience for your business by partnering with like-minded individuals and brands. This partnership is hinged on mutual benefits for product merchants as well as affiliates. Affiliates work on commission-based formats which the products merchants put in place. All the affiliate does is to promote unique affiliate links to products through their content/blog. Any time a purchase is made through this unique link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale. This process is easily adaptable and beneficial for most types of business models. Here are some proven ways you can profitably engage affiliate marketing for your business and be glad you did.

Establish a Clear Brand Identity

Affiliate marketing is most effective when you already have a clear brand identity. Therefore, before launching a wide-scale affiliate program, it is advisable to first build a solid brand identity. Since most affiliates will promote your products across multiple online platforms, your brand identity ensures uniformity and continuity across these platforms. This is why you must clearly establish a viable brand manual that denotes clear brand colors, fonts, and voice. That makes it possible for all your affiliates to properly present your brand identity to avoid confusing and or inaccurate promotion messages.
 
Collaborate With Complimentary Brands

Affiliate marketing is a versatile concept that is suitable for promoting most brands. It works with collaboration with other brands as well. This collaboration is a type of partnership that allows for cross-recruiting and premised on a wider audience base. It is mutually beneficial for brands when one brand promotes for the benefit of another brand in some kind of cross-selling. By this arrangement, both brands can benefit from the promotional activities as well as earn commissions both ways from referrals and purchases.

Launch an Affiliate Email Campaign

Email campaigns are still very effective in online marketing activities. More so when such emails are specially designed for affiliates. If you launch an affiliate email campaign, it serves as a form of internal communication for your existing affiliate network. This method allows for clear and concise brand collaboration. You can thus set up an email campaign to update affiliates about upcoming promotions and sales as well as provide up-to-date marketing materials to make their marketing activities more result oriented.

Work to Improve Conversion Rates

Without good conversions, it is pretty difficult for marketers to make sales. You can therefore make optimizing conversion rates the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy. If you do the right things, affiliate marketing has a high chance of success when it comes to improving conversion rates on your website. For effectiveness, you can handpick and choose your affiliates to ensure brand compatibility. Take a step further by offering enticing promotions such as incentive bonuses, free products, and enticing commissions to keep potential partners interested. If the affiliate team you have selected is well trained and works in efficient collaboration, it can create the right synergy to improve your conversions rates.

Partner With Podcast Hosts

It is difficult for marketers to ignore Podcasts these days because they are widely consumed by the population. Aside from being easily absorbed, Podcasts are effortlessly entertaining modems and therefore great as effective affiliate marketing tools. Online, Podcast hosts typically come with a loyal and trusting audience. What that means is that Podcast followers take brand partnerships seriously. So, if you partner with podcast hosts to entice them to plug your brand into their episodes, the results are great. For this reason, you can grant Podcast hosts an exclusive discount code for their listeners, as well as a set percentage of profits. Your business benefits a great deal from such arrangements.

Target Slow Selling Products

It is smart marketing for marketers to deliberately use less popular products to motivate higher commissions. Some products may be slow selling but once a sale is made, the commission volume can be huge. If you deliberately target such products, affiliate marketing may just be a great way to get your slow selling and less popular inventory off the shelves. At times what such products really need to sell is a little extra promotional attention and incentive. That means deliberate and specially targeted marketing efforts for such products. So, any which way you can use to push your slower-moving products unto the spotlight through affiliate marketing can be really great for your business.

Run Influencer Campaigns

If product merchants can effectively partner with Influencers, the results can be astounding. Marketers can thus use influencer campaigns as very effective form of affiliate marketing. By running a well-coordinated seasonal or long-term influencer campaigns, such collaboration allows your brand to utilize affiliate links as the right incentives. You can therefore start a profitable and mutually beneficial affiliate marketing campaign by simply partnering with one or more influencers to promote your products/services.

7 Quick Tips on How to Make Online Sales

Expert digital marketers like to say, you don’t have to be a marketing expert or even have experience to succeed in selling online. Once you are able to master the rudiments and follow the rules, you too can sell online. If you can craft your marketing message well and make your pitch widely, you’ll get positive responses in no time at all. With that, you get a feeling of optimism and reassurance to ginger you to make more pitching. Pulling in more sales naturally flows from there. Here is a list of 7 easy-to-implement tips most expert marketers never fail to offer to anyone who is desirous to make sales online.

1. Offer Affiliate Opportunities

Affiliate opportunities help to increase the reach of a marketer online by leveraging the audiences of both the marketer and the affiliates. So, marketers can rely on affiliate opportunities to effectively share the huge task of selling products/services online. Affiliate marketing is simply when marketers allow other people, (i.e. affiliates) to market their products/services and send them website traffic. As a benefit, these affiliates are paid a percentage of any sales that are made from their promotional efforts as commissions. This arrangement is completely risk-free and low-cost since affiliates get paid if and only when they generate sales.

2. Build up an Email List

Email marketing may be “old school” but it still manages to get attractive sales results. Its effectiveness hinges directly on an email list which is a major marketing asset the marketer has to build up over time. Creating an email list is essential to generating sales through email marketing and it costs next to nothing to build. With a credible and segmented email list, you do not have to wait for customers to find your products/services themselves. Through the list, you can deliver your marketing messages and even offers directly to their inboxes. Your segmented email list of subscribers enables you to accurately deliver well-tailored product/service information and content to specific time zones around the world 24/7. That helps your sales a great deal.

3. Make Your Checkout Process User-Friendly

Online shoppers are characteristically very impatient. If the check-out process in your business website is cumbersome and not user-friendly, you risk losing a lot of sales opportunities. For this reason, you need to make your checkout process as simple as possible. Avoid giving your customers too many questions to answer or long-winded forms to fill in. Each extra step in the checkout process is a chance for your customers to change their minds and pull out of the sale. What follows is a huge pile of abandoned carts. Most customers shop online because it’s quicker and more convenient than visiting a physical store. If however because of the complexity of your check-out process many customers decide to back out, you risk losing many sales as a result.

4. Make Your Product Descriptions Vivid

Making shoppers to like your product at the shortest possible time span helps your sales. You can only make a sale if your shoppers like your products. A vivid description of your products helps that process. The internet is usually bursting with products and the competition is very stiff. For this reason, you must always make sure your customers and potential customers understand how your products will benefit them through the vivid descriptions you provide. This is complemented with very high quality images and or graphics. The more relevant information you can provide, the more likely your customers and potential customers will stay on your site long enough to decide to make a purchase. 

5. Start a Blog

Blogging is a very popular way of content marketing on the internet. If you don’t have a blog yet, you must decide to start one if you want to make more sales online. Without a blog associated with your online store or product, you risk missing out on the endless possibilities that come with content marketing. Just blog about an industry niche related to the products you are marketing and provide valuable information to your readers that will help solve their problems. Creating a good blog allows you to produce free and valuable content that builds trust in your brand and keeps people well informed. Good quality blog posts will also give you valuable content to share on social media and help your website rank high in the SERPs of search engines. That translates to good traffic, leads and sales.

6. Spread Word about Your Business

Never hesitate to tell anyone about your business. The more the number of people that know about your business, the better for the business! Start spreading the word from your social media circle to your family and friends. Encourage them to pass the word to their own social media circle, family and friends. You can make your first tentative sales from this inner circle. Through them, the word gets out to others in a wider circle and your sales increase as a result. Once you are able to establish that your product solves a problem for anyone in your circle, sell them the benefits. If it helps them out, they pass the word on in favor of your business. You can easily take advantage of your personal network on social media where you’re likely to be connected to many more people than in the physical world to pass on the word about your business.

7. Give Away Free Stuff to Influencers

A mutually beneficial relationship with influencers on social media is also recommended because many industry influencers have loyal audiences and large followings on social media. Sending influencers a free complimentary sample of your product is a great way to potentially get a mention on one of their platforms. If this happens, you’re almost certainly going to see some kind of spike in your website traffic and social media followers. That can directly ignite a spike in your sales too. Any form of relationship or interaction with influencers can affect your sales positively. If for instance you sell sports wears, interviewing an influencer about the industry and even playing a game with an influencer while they’re wearing your sports attire is good PR for your sales. When influencers actively engage with their loyal followers and even endorse your products to them, you are likely to witness a remarkable spike in your sales from that endorsement alone.

How to Leverage Affiliate Marketing to Increase Conversions and Sales

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

 

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

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

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

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

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