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Effective Criteria for Selecting Viable Affiliate Programs

If you are a digital marketer and you want to venture into the realm of affiliate marketing, it is of absolute importance to have a clear se...

Showing posts with label leverage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label leverage. Show all posts

Friday, February 04, 2022

5 Business Reasons to Undertake Affiliate Marketing Campaigns

A laptop computer, a pen, a smarthone and a notepad screened by virtual affiliate network symbols.
Affiliate marketing has now become a difficult-to-ignore strategy to sell products/services online. It is not as complicated as it may sound. It is really quite a simple, low-cost and low risk way to sell more products/services online and with hugely beneficial returns. For sure, affiliate marketing has been around for quite a while and very popular with digital marketers but it must be done right to get the right results. It is not really a new strategy so to say, but it remains one of the most effective strategies to sell products/services and make money online. With affiliate marketing, marketers who have a product-based business can readily get more ROI, save time and open up more PR opportunities if they have an effective affiliate marketing strategy. The simplicity of affiliate marketing as a business model really lies in the ability of a brand/product merchant providing each affiliate with a unique URL or promotional code to use in their websites/blogs. When affiliates promote these links to their audience, all purchases made through the links entitle the affiliate to a commission. More affiliates campaigns usually translate to more sales and more commissions earned by affiliates. Simple!



Here are 5 reasons affiliate marketers cannot afford to ignore affiliate marketing campaigns in their overall marketing strategy.

1. Wider Reach: The more the number of affiliates you have in your network, the greater the potentials of your reach. The reason is simple. You leverage your own network and the individual networks of all your affiliates to put out your marketing messages to expand your reach. For this reason, if you are diligent and painstaking enough to choose your affiliates correctly, they can significantly expand your reach into new audiences and the results could be phenomenal. Through this scenario, affiliate marketing can easily give your business a global footprint within a relatively short while. This it does by putting your brand/product/service in front of thousands if not millions of your customers and potential customers for less effort.
 
2. Low Cost of Operation: Every reasonable business owner must always keep a keen eye on costs. Affiliate marketing campaigns are relatively cost-effective when compared to traditional marketing methods on TV and Radio where paid ads cost a fortune even without any guarantees that you’ll earn a dime in returns. With affiliate marketing, all you really need is an in-demand product/service, a carefully selected group of interested affiliates with an engaged audience and a decent commission to incentivize your affiliates. That’s it! You are obligated to pay your affiliates only when they make a sale. Quite simple really! You only pay commissions for sales made and nothing else. This arrangement has no chance of hurting your ads budget since your affiliates only take their commission right off the top of the sales you are making. No other marketing tactics come closer to this in terms of low operational costs.

3. Low Risk to Operate: Keeping risks low is also good for business just like keeping costs low. In affiliate marketing, it is easy for the brand/product merchant to push the hard work of marketing to affiliates. That helps to give the brand more time for product development. Since affiliates are expected to be paid only when they make a sale, it simply means the marketing campaigns are essentially self-funding. The harder affiliates work to promote products/services therefore, the more money they make. All affiliates know that if they don’t make sales, they don’t make money. They are therefore obligated to always up their game, take more risks, make more sales and make more money by way of commissions. Simple!

 
4. Easy to Track Metrics: Without the right metrics, it is always pretty difficult to adequately track marketing campaigns. Quite fortunately, affiliate marketing is one of the most easily trackable ways to market your business online. With every affiliate issued a unique code or URL, you can easily determine through these codes, exactly which affiliates are getting you which results. That makes it easy for the product merchant to compare results from his numerous affiliates. It is thus easy to know which of these affiliates are most profitable and how to reward them adequately. Through these efforts, some brands can even decide to give high-performing affiliates better terms or even more incentives like higher commissions in exchange for making a certain amount of predetermined level of sales.

5. Easily Scalable: In digital marketing, economics of scale can always be leveraged for better results. Since every affiliate gets paid depending on the sales they generate, you can at any time add more and unlimited number of affiliates to help generate sales. Therefore, any number of affiliates can always be added to your program as needed and at any time. Because brands are only required to pay affiliates a commission on every sale, affiliate marketing is easy to scale up without hurting the marketing budget of your business.

Monday, January 03, 2022

3 Justifications for Online Business Ideas in a Pandemic

Dollar bills on a brown table top partially covered by a surgical face mask.
Covid-19 pandemic may have been restrictive but it succeeded in making online merchants think outside the box. Instead of killing businesses outright, it ended up creating more opportunities for online business owners. Many new business owners discovered that it has become easier than ever for anyone to start a business online with or without prior experience in the business. For such people, the icing on the cake about starting a new business online is the freedom to make money from anywhere there is internet service around the globe 24/7. Now that the world is still being held down by variants of the pandemic, are you thinking of starting your own business online too? Great if you do. It may well be all worth it in the long run. Many experts agree that it a good idea and quite justifiable too to start an online business even now. Here is why.



You Can Leverage Advanced Technology

Without a doubt and because of the challenges of the pandemic, technology companies are becoming more advanced in supporting e-commerce and online businesses in general. The deepening of the internet and its versatility too are becoming more advanced as well. More than ever before, it has become much easier now to start an online store and take payments easily even with minimal setup all hassle-free. This alone makes this time such a great time to leverage many online tools and resources to open and operate a successful e-commerce business.

It is Increasingly Easier to Trade Online

The pandemic forced many merchants to adopt e-commerce business models while closing shop in their brick and mortar businesses. Many of them found it increasingly easier and convenient to do business online despite the restrictions of the pandemic. This is because many more people for same reasons now prefer to shop online. Millions of people are thus getting used to buying and selling online and it is a 24/7 global business. Really quite appealing to join up if you are not already in it. Anyone with a great business idea despite the pandemic restrictions can take their businesses online and reach a wide range of audiences with the help of different online platforms and tools all performing wonders on the internet.



You Have More Business Opportunities

This is quite so because of the versatility of the internet for business purposes. Without a doubt, the pandemic has made it evident that many things can work online. The opportunities are limitless and ironically, this appears to be about the best time to start a business online really and from within the comfort of your home to boot. Ranging from online fitness to online courses and home delivery, many opportunities emerged from the pandemic to cater to people’s changing needs and business owners are taking good advantage of them all. These business owners readily leverage online platforms to connect their businesses to the right customers. Anyone with the right business ideas can thus find and explore a lot of business opportunities as a result.

Final Thoughts

At the outbreak of the pandemic, because of the pervasive and panicky lockdowns, fears of business losses were quite high. Even now with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic variants still threatening humanity, people have learned to adapt their businesses to reality instead of caving in to frustration. That’s thanks to the internet and e-commerce. Aside the public health threat, the pandemic disrupted the activities of small businesses, large corporations, and even the world economy at large. It forced many people to work remotely, and brick and mortar businesses had to think of creative ways to meet consumers’ needs during the pandemic. Many found real justifications on the internet to avoid total business closures which was inevitable for those who couldn’t adapt quickly. Part of that adaptation was for business owners to move into e-commerce businesses in different industries and niches such as launching a podcast, becoming an app developer, and going into affiliate marketing, or launching any smart idea that can take real advantage of the internet to bloom into a successful online business. For that, the world of business moves on steadily regardless.

Friday, December 03, 2021

5 Effective Email Marketing Strategies for your Small Business

Email marketer at work station with a computer and a smartphone.
In this age and time, even though email marketing has been around for quite a while, it still remains one of the best online marketing strategies small business owners can use to grow their businesses. It is not just cost-effective to use, it still gets some of the best results when compared to other means of digital communications online. It characteristically gives very good returns on investment for small businesses. This is why many small business owners never fail to leverage on emails for their marketing campaigns.



Here are five effective email marketing strategies any small business owner who wants to quickly grow their small business needs to adopt.

1. Personalize Your Email Messages

For maximum effectiveness, it is advisable to personalize emails. That however does not mean sending a specific message to everyone on the email list of your subscriber base. Not at all! What it means is to creatively use customer data to create and send a personalized message to your customers. Such messages resonate better with customers and they tend to get the best results. Email personalization simply aims at creating an excellent customer experience by allowing customers to build good relationships and trust with your business.   When emails are personalized with customers’ names, subject lines, customer needs and location, they are usually very effective at conveying marketing messages. Consequently, such emails do help to enhance some increase in the email open rates, conversions and increase in sales.

2. Optimize Your Email Messages for Mobile

Some Google reports now attribute up to 60% of online traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s a very huge chunk of traffic. A very large chunk of marketing emails are now opened via mobile devices particularly smartphones. So, sending emails to subscribers who regularly use their phones to access messages is just not enough. You need to optimize these massages for mobile devices. When your messages are optimized for mobile, it helps to minimize the chances of trashing, unsubscribing or deleting such messages. Sending mobile-friendly messages that are optimized for the mobile devices can lead to increased conversions and sales. One great way to optimize your emails for mobile devices is by using a responsive email template. Such responsive templates are usually created to automatically work on users’ screens for ease of viewing. These templates will allow you the sender to have a preview of your messages exactly how they’ll appear to your recipients. You’ll see in advance how your emails will appear when viewed on a PC, tablet, or smartphone. As more and more people now do business out of mobile devices, optimizing your emails for mobile has become a very good email marketing strategy.

3. Segment Your Subscriber Base

If you segment your subscriber database, it helps to make your email marketing campaigns more targeted to your audience. Better targeting means better effectiveness of your emails. You can therefore use segmentation as a personalization approach to deliver relevant email messages to your subscribers. With segmentation, your messages will get to them according to their interests, buying history, geographic location, gender, age, and so on. With segmentation, a marketer can effectively address the specific needs of the subscribers and facilitate customer satisfaction. For this reason, it is not advisable for all your subscribers to receive the same email content. What works best is that by segmentation, they should receive only messages that are relevant to them and their needs. Doing otherwise helps to increase the chances of many of your emails ending up in trash bins.

For maximum effectiveness, below are some of the best ways to segment your email list:

Content-Specific Segmentation: This is segmentation based on data gathered regarding specific contacts. Such data may relate to the pages customers visited, the content they downloaded, tools used to download content, and so on.

Behavior-Specific Segmentation: This is segmentation relating to audience behavior on your website. Here you craft emails by taking into account how long the audience takes on a web page, the pages viewed, and the frequency of their visits.

B2B Email Segmentation: This is segmentation based on B2B integrated relationship. Most businesses typically are different entities and have their own unique requirements and expectations. For this reason, you must deliberately craft emails for each business category. Such emails should target, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, IT specialists, Administrative Assistants, and so on.

Localized Segmentation: Yes, most small businesses are local. The reason there is an imperative for local segmentation. This type of segmentation is fairly common among many small businesses because it allows them to target and directly market to the local market around their base of operation. If for instance as a small business owner you are organizing a seminar or doing sales promos, sending emails to people within your locality and its environs helps to increase your reach a great deal.



4. Routinely Test Your Emails

Email testing helps to provide the requisite data to guide you in making practical decisions to improve your email marketing campaigns. For practical purposes, it is best to routinely test your email templates, the home page and landing pages to see how they pan out with the right elements of email marketing campaigns. The elements you need to test in your emails are subject lines, call-to-action CTA, messaging, personalization, design, sender name, and the target audience. These are the elements that are instrumental as to whether or not your subscribers will even bother to open your emails or the mails end up in the trash bin. Routinely testing emails can help to better promote your brand image and create an exceptional subscriber experience for your business.
 
You can rely on automated tools to do your email testing. These tools allow you to easily check the appearance of your email for both desktop and mobile users. Automated tools are also handy to check for grammatical and spelling errors that could put off some recipients. Emails also need to be checked for the proper display of images, font sizes and graphics displays that may need adjustments.

5. Leverage User-Generated Content, UGC

Usually, online reviews are like product recommendations from friends and can influence the customers’ buying behaviors. One of the most effective ways of encouraging engagement in email marketing campaigns is asking for customer reviews. Reviews are a great user-generated content, UGC. You get quality UGC when you allow your customers unfettered interaction with your brand. It is one very effective way to influence prospects to buy from you. You can better use UGC to convince customers to buy than other forms of inducement such as the brand/products photos/graphics.

Positive reviews and testimonials are a valuable means of social proof in digital marketing.  Customer reviews can also help to greatly enhance your UGC email marketing campaigns since many customers tend to trust the reviews they access online more. This is why reviews can also be helpful to generate more leads. Some reviews may however not be positive. That’s ok. Even negative reviews and testimonials are also helpful UGC. Experienced marketers can use negative reviews positively by responding to them to demonstrate their commitment to meeting customer needs as needed. 

Wrapping Up

It is proof positive that email marketing can be a very effective way to generate leads and build customer loyalty. With the right strategies in your business as outlined above, you can increase your customer base and do better business. The effectiveness of these strategies is not in doubt even though marketing trends keep changing rapidly. A way around that is to continuously test the relevance of these email marketing strategies with a view to identifying the very best and most suitable for your business. The strategies that work best for your type of business should be used more.

Friday, November 26, 2021

How to Leverage Affiliate Marketing to Increase Conversions and Sales

Brown shopping bags, shopping cart and a computer screen at a checkout counter of eCommerce shop.
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.

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

How to Globalize Your E-Business

E-Business tools, a computer, brown paper bags and a smartphone in a metal cart.
To think global, you must act global. With increased restrictions in physical business transactions because of the current global pandemic, e-business owners must think outside the box to survive. They need to explore all ways to really globalize their e-businesses. Even with the increase in remote jobs that the current pandemic has engendered, earning a living online through e-businesses is not becoming any easier. Though e-business owners can now market to anyone anywhere in the world 24/7, they still face a very huge challenge of globalizing their operations for better results. These challenges cut across culture, time zones, language, business ethics and so no. Making conscious business efforts to globalize your e-business is one great way to take on these challenges. Going global? Here are some tips to help you.



Research Your Target Audience

To successfully operate a global business, you cannot afford to ignore peculiar characteristics of various countries and geographical regions of the world when designing your marketing strategy. These include legal issues, cultural issues, language issues and suchlike peculiarities. It calls for accurate information and research data to get things right in your marketing strategy. It is imperative therefore, to thoroughly research the countries and geographical regions you are targeting before you design your marketing strategy. From your research data, you can better design your website SEO to enable cost-effective targeted ads to any part of the globe. In addition, you can deliberately create and market through a multilingual website to help you target specific foreign markets. Since your e-business is online, it is one great way it can leverage the internet to give it a better global outlook if you tweak a few things on your website based on the information from your research efforts. If such tweaks help to remove such business barriers like time zones, borders, legal, customs and commercial obstacles, it earns a global outlook and your brand can emerge a global brand.

Leverage Online Translation Tools

You cannot successfully globalize your business without factoring language barriers in your marketing strategy. The language of business is not universal around the world. To connect emotionally with local markets, you’ve got to adapt your content according to the sensibilities of local audiences. That is the first major challenge your business must deal with in your globalizing efforts. There is no cause to worry too much though. With online tools like Google Translate, you can take advantage of fast translations from one language to another across web platforms and channels. Even though the most realistic translations are still done by humans who understand context and culture better than an application or set of algorithms, these tools are really helpful for fast and effective transactions across the globe. Worldwide, every language has its own set of diverse nuances based on region and other factors. You can get around this by studying your analytics to know where your website visitors are coming from. Next is to factor in their language and culture in your marketing messages to get better results. 



Give Your Website a Global Outlook

Good communication is great for business. The language of communication is greater still. If you aim to market to global audiences, your marketing strategy must factor language in. First is to consider offering your content in multiple languages if a language translation feature will not be adequate. However, if your own local language is one of the commonly spoken languages in the world such as English or French or Spanish or Chinese or Russian or Arabic, you can get by with just a language translation feature on your website. Be sure to stick to the generally accepted form of your chosen language while avoiding modern slang and colloquialisms. That makes it easier to translate for better understanding and will help your business to connect better with diverse peoples in other countries/regions of the world. If you offer more languages, you’ll gain a more competitive edge since it helps to make your business relatable to a wider global audience. That is one of the major benefits to making your website multilingual.
 
Make Your Content Global in Context

A great global content marketing strategy should be one that is effective on anyone who happens to stumble upon it anywhere in the world even if such persons are not in your target market. That calls for a flexible content that has global appeal. You can factor in various cultures and write blog content that consistently addresses a certain niche or field for a global audience and search engines. You can carefully use analytics to find out who, and from where your content is accessed. Write and target this audience with content that fits their search goals while remaining relevant to your products, brand and business values. Analytics data can help you to decide on where to target markets with ad campaigns and which content and context can be unique for different languages, cultures and countries. If you pay good attention to email and social media feedback, the insights can help you figure out which languages to optimize your messages with and to prioritize for translations.

Saturday, September 26, 2020

10 Online Marketing Tips to Make More Money Online

White calculator on top of spread dollar bills.
Increasingly, many people are daily moving their brands and businesses online ostensibly to make more money at lower costs. They are getting more involved in online marketing for same reasons. The internet now provides a very efficient online marketing environment for smart marketers to make money. However, it needs emphasizing that making money online requires the right skills, continuous practice and experience. Even though the internet has made online marketing easily accessible to everyone, you must have a good knowledge of the internet, changing trends, creative marketing skills and be able to leverage the internet and other digital services well enough to make money online.

These ten tips to enhance your digital media presence can help you to make more money online.
 
1. Make Your Website Flexible and Responsive

Your website is your business window to the virtual world of the internet. It must be fully representative of you and your business. It serves as your virtual store and front office from which you can reach out to your audience/customers online. Your website must be well designed and with the right aesthetics, user friendly and fast loading enough to handle and encourage your visitors to do business with you. Make sure it is compliant with mobile devices since very many shoppers now habitually shop online via mobile devices including cellphones. A functional website is the first thing you need to make money online.



2. Have a Good Content Marketing Strategy

In digital marketing, content is king. Your content must be informative, educational and entertaining enough to attract traffic to your website. You must be able to post such content fresh on very regular basis to command respectable online presence. The more traffic your website gets, the more business it does and the more money it makes for you. That is the real reason you must always have a good content marketing strategy in place. Such strategy must involve blogs, promo/marketing posts, how-to videos etc. When your content is good enough, it attracts better traffic and helps your digital marketing campaigns to be successful. Good content helps to create a very positive brand image for your brand online, thereby making it sufficiently attractive to customers to attract their patronage.

3. Precisely Identify Your Target Audience

If you market online, your main assignment is to satisfy customers. That is your target audience. If you can service and satisfy your target audience well enough, you get a boost in sales/revenue as a reward. This is why your brand must always have a specifically targeted audience for whom your products/services are aimed. It helps your business better if you take deliberate steps to first identify your audience, survey them, and understand their needs/preferences including their shopping habits and demographics. Armed with this information, you can then work through the market dynamics that will help you create specific content needed to transform many of your website visitors into buyers. You make more money because of increased business therefrom.

4. Set Achievable Targets

If you have some experience in digital marketing, you must be aware that the internet is a hugely crowded and highly competitive business environment. On the internet, there are all types of brands and businesses fiercely competing for customers’ attention and sales. You cannot afford to be roaming aimlessly all over this digital space expecting good results. You must set your sights on achievable goals then focus all your marketing resources on these goals. This is what enables you to get some traction and to make some sales revenue on the internet.

5. Don’t Ignore SEO

Yes, you already have a website. That is ok. But, if your website is not optimized to make it visible to search engines, it just sits out there in the huge internet void without anyone noticing what it is up to. That is why you cannot afford to ignore Search Engine Optimization, SEO techniques on your website. These techniques involve the tactical use of free online SEO tools to choose and place keywords for the on-page, and off-page optimization on your website. With a good onsite SEO, your website ranks better on the SERPs of search engines. That way, it turns up more and better in organic searches. What that means is more and better in-bound traffic to your website. Consequently, that helps to cut down on your marketing costs significantly, freeing up valuable resources and thus more money for your business.

6. Track Results with Google Analytics

Online marketing without measuring results is akin to shooting in the dark. This is where the all-important free online tool Google Analytics is hugely important. It is near impossible to make meaningful progress in your online marketing strategy and fresh content posts if you are unable to measure the results/performance of your marketing activities. Google Analytics helps to provide meaningful insights into these marketing activities. You can use the info from the insights to improve your website and rejig/refocus your marketing campaigns for better results. It is important to keep a constant check on the metrics from these insights. You need them to help you track your performance well and to analyze what works for your brand and what does not. That way, you can take more and better marketing decisions to improve your earnings.



7. Take Advantage of Social Media

If you want to make more money online, take my advice; get your brand on social media, particularly the very popular platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. These social media platforms provide a very wide range of tools/apps that can help you promote your brand very widely at little or no costs at all. These platforms are free to join and some have many professional tools/features helpful for promoting brands/businesses. If your business is active on social media and you post good and relatable content regularly, you can quickly build a very strong and authoritative social media presence for your brand. A strong social media presence with a very large following means good traffic and better sales revenues.
 
8. Automate

Marketing automation is imperative online to save costs and increase revenues. Free online tools abound to help you automate some of your marketing activities like blog posts and email scheduling and timing. By effectively utilizing free online marketing automation technology, you can streamline many of your marketing activities/campaigns to enable them run automatically online without your physical involvement after launching. That helps to save valuable time and money. With more time at your disposal, you can be more creative at writing marketing contents and blog posts. Better content means more traffic, more sales/revenues.

9. Leverage on Paid Advertising

Yeah, sometimes you have to pay for some form of advertising to get more traffic. That is where Pay-Per-Click, PPC ads become very handy. With PPC, your brand gets instant exposure on search engine results. That means more in-bound organic traffic. PPC is the type of marketing where marketers have to bid on the amount that they will pay for each click leading to their web pages. If your website is yet to have good search engine rankings for whatever reasons, PPC ads can help with quicker results. Your ads budget must be able to accommodate the expense though. That may be well worth it when the results start coming in with increased traffic flow. Paid advertising gives your brand a very good opportunity to attract even more potential customers through automated machine logistics of the social media channels as well as Google ads. If properly done, paid advertising is an effective way to generate more sales/revenues.

10. Leverage Social Media Business Features

Yes, many social media platforms keep innovating and improving their services to accommodate brands/businesses who want to market on their platforms. This is the reason you can now access Facebook Business Page and the new shopable post feature on Instagram among others. These, are very powerful tools which marketers can take good advantage of to promote their brands, websites and businesses in digital space. For instance, with the new shopable post feature on Instagram, you can make people directly visit your website or shop a product directly through Instagram. With these tools/features now helping to make online shopping easier and more convenient, a brand using them earns more patronage and more sales revenue mostly through impulsive buying.

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Why You Should Consider Trying Powerlining in SFI Business

A fan-spread of dollar bills held in both hands of a female over her blue jeans folded legs.
In SFI business, "Powerlining" is based on building lines straight down, one person after another. Typically, you'll go VERY deep. Indeed, you may want to build your Powerlines hundreds of people deep!

Why would you want to build a line so deep, especially when direct compensation is essentially limited to a maximum of 12 generations? Simply put, it's all about LEVERAGE...and the power that leverage can generate for the generations you are paid directly on.



 

Here are the real benefits:

1. Maximum leverage. Persons you sign up into a Powerline can experience a substantial amount of downline activity, all of which can result in them becoming active so as to maximize their position. This of course can have a big, upward "domino effect." That is, if people lower in the line are becoming active (i.e. becoming Executive Affiliates), it's going to naturally motivate and incentivize persons higher in the line (closer to you) to also become active. For example, a new EA that pops up 50 levels below you in your Powerline could generate numerous additional EAs above as this "activity momentum" grows exponentially with each new upgrade to EA in the line.

2. You are the "Originator" for all sign-ups you place in your Powerlines. And per our 10/1/19 change in Direct Commission rules, you'll be earning 25% Direct Commissions on every one of your sign-ups whose sponsor (the person in the Powerline immediately above them) is not an EA. Yes, you can earn the Originator 25% commissions regardless of the generation placed...50th, 500th, 5000th, whatever; there's no limit!

3. You'll put to work for you what will quite possibly be SFI's most powerful and dynamic follow-up system we've ever built. For example, provided you're signing up at least one new affiliate a day into your Powerline, your sign-ups are going to be alerted DAILY to new activity under them and more. And these notifications will take different forms for maximum impact (emails, special Affiliate Center alerts, and more). Just advertise and bring in new people and our system will go to work for you!

4. Accelerated roll-ups. We appreciate that you don't want to place people 500 generations below you and have to wait for many months before they roll up closer to you (into your pay range). Hence, for Powerline sign-ups, we'll be using a special roll-up process. In short, any of your Powerline sign-ups who fail to go EA in their first 60 days will automatically roll up to the first upline EA in the Powerline and become one of their PSAs. The result can be a rapid compression and repositioning of most or many of your Powerline sign-ups to within 12-generations. From there, the standard Active Sponsor Policy can generate further roll-ups and compression over time.

5. You'll be able to use our awesome new Powerline GATEWAY. You can use any SFI Gateway with a Powerline key code to build Powerlines. However, if you want your prospects to know in advance that they'll be joining your Powerline (or you want to promote Powerline benefits to entice your prospects to join SFI), you can use the new Powerline Gateway we've created. Note that you'll have to be an EA, AND you'll have to have started a Powerline and be actively adding new sign-ups (a minimum of 5 per week) to use this special new Gateway.


Article Source: SFI Blog Forum

Welcome to Powerline, a Major New Team-Building System in SFI Business

A black-clad female counting dollar bills.
NEW in SFI business! We're excited today to debut a new system/tool for building lines in your organization. It's called POWERLINE, and it's a new option for all SFI affiliates.

"Powerlining" is based on building lines straight down, one person after another. Typically, you'll go VERY deep. Indeed, you may want to build your Powerlines hundreds of people deep!

Why would you want to build a line so deep, especially when direct compensation is essentially limited to a maximum of 12 generations? Simply put, it's all about LEVERAGE...and the power that leverage can generate for the generations you are paid directly on.



 

Example:
In more traditional promotions, you might sign up 100 people and equally distribute them amongst, say, five of your PSAs. That would mean that only five people received new downline members.

With Powerline, however, because each sign-up is placed one person after another, it means that when you signed up that 100th person...99 people got notified of a new downline member! And the people closer to the top of that Powerline, they've been notified of 70, 80, 90, nearly 100, new downline members!

Might these notifications cause at least some of the persons in the Powerline to take notice and want to become active? It certainly could, and our past experience using Powerline systems bears this out. So it's absolutely something every builder in SFI should at least consider testing to see if it works for them.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR MEMBERS OF POWERLINES

1. As a Powerline member, they have an upline member essentially building their first leg in SFI for them! That's pretty powerful all by itself...but that's not all. That Powerline is also naturally "full of leverage," which means they can benefit from all the activity and commissions and overrides that that leverage creates as the line grows downward.

2. As a Powerline grows downward, it will naturally "sprout" numerous offshoots, both of the Powerline variety, and also when members simply start signing up their own PSAs. This of course creates additional opportunities for more sales and earnings.

3. A special rewards program! The new Powerline system is also going to test awarding Rewardicals for downline growth. In short, for their first 60 days, for every person added to the Powerline under them (by the upline Originator), all Powerline members will have the opportunity to earn Rewardicals, which they'll "bank" and be able to receive into their account on their 61st day--provided they've qualified as an Executive Affiliate within 60 days of joining. Tip: The new LaunchPack is a perfect fit here!

Article Source: SFI Blog Forum


Wednesday, December 18, 2019

How to Leverage Social Media to Grow Affiliate Programs

A smart phone and picture of pink flowers on social media.
Have you heard? Social media is where nearly everybody is at these days doing their own thing. It has mass appeal and mass following, the reason it has become an essential channel for online marketers to grow their affiliate programs. Today, mass adoption of social media by marketers has no doubt impacted every facet of marketing in many and immeasurable ways. The most beneficial way appears to be affiliate and partner marketing since this is carefully designed to leverage on the popularity of social media. Essentially, in the online marketing world of today, any type of partner, including influencers, can leverage the principles of affiliate marketing to reach a very wide range of consumers exactly where they tend to spend a very significant part of their time while online. Such channels include but not limited to where a majority of them may be found just scrolling around. Such places like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest where they are either following influencers, or they are influencers themselves. This established relationship hugely supports the idea that influencers and social media together can help bring an incredible monetization opportunity for affiliates involved in affiliate marketing programs.

 

Many online marketers now know that they can find a wealth of new opportunities for engaging with potential customers via social media channels. The good news is that it works! Just as consumers grow more and more comfortable using social media channels for brand and product discovery, and shopping, social media options continue to expand. Thus, if you are a marketer looking to deepen your relationships with customers, it is smart to consider leveraging social media in your affiliate marketing efforts. With the ease of use, popularity, mass appeal and easy tracking technology associated with social media, good marketers can easily take advantage of these offers to grow their revenues and affiliate businesses.
Here are some simple ways affiliates can leverage social media to grow their revenues and affiliate businesses.

Always Take Advantage of Social Media Innovations

 
Social media platforms are always trying to evolve new and practical ways to satisfy their numerous users. That is why many like to innovate based mostly on user preferences. These innovations bring with them, new social tactics more user-friendly platforms which are better at engaging the target audiences. As a marketer, it is smart to always seize the opportunities of these new innovations with a view to leveraging the newest ways to acquire new customers and build brand loyalists as a viable way to grow your affiliate marketing business.

Leverage Advanced Tracking Capabilities of Mobile Commerce

The world is increasingly in a hurry and mobile devices are becoming indispensable in world commerce. Most people are finding it increasingly easier to complete business transactions right from their mobile devices. These devices now come with advanced tracking capabilities which affiliate marketers can rely on to determine the direction and progress of their marketing efforts. Facebook alone as a very popular social media platform has over 1.3 billion active users and over 90% of these persons are accessing the platform by way of mobile devices. In combination with other social media platforms out there, we are looking at over 3.5 billion active users. That is a huge mobile market out there with advanced tracking capabilities affiliate marketers can leverage for their businesses. Marketers can now track nearly everything from what partner influenced an app download to what mobile tracking link led to a conversion. That makes it easy for them to incentivize their affiliate partners to ensure prompt and accurate payment of commissions. These advanced tracking capabilities of mobile devices now make it easier than ever before to optimize affiliate campaigns which marketers are running through social media platforms.

Target Your Audience from Their Favorite Platforms

 
Well, it is a marketing truism that every business person must try to take his business to where the right customers can be found. Daily, many social media users spend considerable time on the platforms and many are on multiple platforms. That is where they can be accurately targeted depending on which platforms they use more. Even if you are partnering with publishers, media brands, influencers, or other brands, distributing co-marketing content on the social networks exactly where your audience is active tends to make a very good marketing sense. That ensures a more even and much cheaper distribution among content marketers, bloggers/influencers, and social media channels. It engenders better results as well.



 

Align Your Content to All Stages of the Consumer’s Journey 

In today’s social media-obsessed world, many bloggers and other content marketing affiliates rely hugely on social media to creatively and effectively promote their brands. On social media, they rely heavily on good content to drive awareness, consideration, and eventual purchase. Therefore, social media tends to play a very huge role in the early stages of the consumer journey up to the final click to buy. Advanced tracking capabilities enables marketers to deploy better attribution and improved partner commissioning strategies. Thus, by including social media channels in your affiliate programs, you can easily enhance your ability to reach consumers in all stages of the purchase journey starting from product research to comparing prices to the actual buying of the product/service. With the ease of tracking transactions from anywhere associated with them, social media partnerships now help immensely to broaden affiliate marketing techniques and with better results in tow.

Work with Affiliates who have Commanding Influence on Social Media

 
This influence is determined by the number of followers the affiliate already has who trust him and rely in his judgement to make buying decisions. Working with such influencers as partners helps to get marketing traction faster online. If you choose to distribute promotions and offers through social media influencers, the purposes may be different. Maybe you are looking to elevate average order value, repeat purchases, or new product/service experimentation. The type of influencer you settle for on social media will largely determine how successful your quest can be. By setting very clear expectations up front with your social partners, it will therefore not cause future disputes to determine exactly what constitutes a desired action, and what doesn’t. That settled, it becomes easy for you to optimize high-performing programs and to drive incremental revenue through the social media channels that are working well and giving the desired results.


Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Effective Online Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business

Onlne marketing garden work station with working tools, IPAD, potten plants, folded eye glasses and pencil.
 Every business needs a good online marketing strategy to build a robust online presence. Effective online marketing strategy is all about keeping tabs on the latest trends in business marketing. It involves using the right tools at the right places ranging from SEO to social media platforms that have to be included in your business online marketing strategy. That makes it inevitable these days for online marketing to become a hugely important integral part of any serious business.


 

Most businesses now give very serious thoughts on how they can leverage the power of online marketing for increasing website traffic and boosting the growth of their businesses. But because online marketing landscapes keep changing regularly, it sometimes becomes quite challenging to keep a tab on what’s trending at any material time. Marketers have since recognized that there are different ways to build a strong presence for any business online. That is why using some tested and proven strategies to build a strong presence online has since become a very practical solution in online marketing.

Every marketer habitually sticks with what works best but here are some tested and proven effective online marketing strategies which can help you grow your own business no matter its size.

Make sure your Website is Responsive

As a business owner, I guess you already know that not every website is a marketing website. Every website is designed and deployed for specific purposes depending on the type of business you are in. Your website acts as your virtual shop and it is the most visible part of your online presence. That is where online visitors come to if they want to interact with you or your business. For that reason, it must be attractive and responsive enough to seamlessly guide visitors to the products/services you are marketing. If your website is not responsive enough, its bounce rate will increase and you lose the attention of many visitors who could’ve done business with you. To forestall that, it is imperative for you to regularly and routinely update your website particularly with new plug-ins and the use of trending SEO practices in line with regular changes in the algorithms of major search engines.

Adopt Simple and Seamless Payment Methods

Experienced marketers now recognize that many online shoppers actually cancel purchases just because of complicated and time wasting payment procedures. Cancelling purchases is bad enough because no business likes to lose valuable sales. So, what to do? It is imperative for every online business to adopt seamless, easy to understand and easy to use payment procedures. A variety of payment options is advisable because of individual online shopper preferences and differences in geographical locations. What matters most is that such options must be seamless and easy to use no matter where or how they are used. PayPal and a variety of Credit Card options are always preferable for many online shoppers. It is a very poor business practice to have your valuable customers regularly cancel purchases simply because of cumbersome payment procedures.

Use only Quality Images/Photos

Using only quality images/photos with your content has an excellent effect on your online presence. You may use free and not patented images/photos with your content but is best to use your own images/photos which are not very common because of search engines sensitivity and SEO advantages. No doubt, any image/photo you use on your website/blog and social media platforms plays a very significant role in the overall impression of your brand. The real reason you must go for uniqueness and quality!

Market by Email

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective online marketing strategy. It is highly cost-effective and has an impressive ROI. Online, emails presently count as one of the most popular communication channels for marketers and even ordinary folks. For that reason, it is smart for your business to include email marketing as one of your online marketing strategies. That is aside from the fact that emails are very simple to use for marketing purposes and they are cost-effective to boot. 



 

Optimize your Website for Mobiles

The world in increasingly becoming very busy and virtually everyone is always on the go. Welcome to mobile apps for business. These days, nearly everyone is carrying around some forms of mobile gadgets particularly mobile phones. This is why major search engines like Google have adjusted their algorithms to recognize mobile optimization thereby turning the internet into a mobile-friendly platform. Search engines now penalize websites if they are not optimized for mobile usage. These days, if you optimize your website for mobile, it has a great effect on your SEO and the overall ranking of the site.

Get your Business on Social Media

Social media has become hugely important for businesses in this age and time. From creating sponsored ads on Facebook to adding useful hashtags on Twitter, there are many and varied ways you can use social media to grow your business. Because of its immense popularity and ease of use, social media now appears as a complete world all by itself. For this reason, no serious business can afford to ignore or leave out of its online marketing strategy this gigantic and hugely powerful virtual world. Marketers now recognize social media as one of the easiest to use and cost-effective marketing channels online. That is why many businesses even the small and medium scale are getting their businesses on social media and doing good business with the use of several of the tools in its platforms. 


 

Monday, May 06, 2019

4 Ways Digital Marketing Can Help Your Businesses

Online marketing and graphics projected from a white IPAD.
 Most people out there on the internet either want to buy something or sell something. Internet provides unfettered interaction for everyone to do their own things the way they please. Because the world is rapidly moving from conventional methods of marketing to digitization, everyone out there tends to face real business competition from fellow marketers. Even at that, the internet has managed to unlock the door of endless opportunities for everyone out there. There is now a greater preference for digital marketing than other conventional or traditional marketing methods. With digital marketing, it is by far easier to quickly interact with your clients/customers thereby expanding your business visibility much more seamlessly. Here are some very valuable benefits your business can derive from digital marketing:

#1. Customer retention

Every business needs customers. Not just getting them but retaining them to sustain their patronage. Digital marketing is one way through which businesses can significantly increase their reach to get customers. Social media takes the fore front in this quest. If you want to acquire and retain customers for your businesses, customer engagement is very important. You need digital marketing to engage customers, promote your product/services virally to reach a very wide range of customers and potential customers. Because of the ease and simplicity of use, you can through interaction with customers easily assess their needs and reactions to your ads. That information if met with quick and timely responses helps to provide real time solutions in your business. Somehow, with quick and helpful solutions, you can manage to win more customer loyalty as well as attract more customers to your business.

#2. Increased Conversion Rate

Upgrading potential customers to customers is one very important desire of every marketer. Marketers have since discovered that most people now depend on search engines to look for information about anything and everything happening around the world. Search engines also come in very handy if anyone wants to buy or sell something on the internet. All these through digital online interactions! For that reason, businesses with online presence stand a better chance to promote their products/services more effectively and efficiently. Digital Marketing directly targets users and places the product/service at their reach thereby making it easier to move them from potential customers to actual customers at a very high rate of conversion.

#3. Cost-Effective

In every business, the bottom-line is often costs. Either by way of minimization or elimination of costs altogether, that is what often counts. The lower the costs, the higher the profits and vice versa! Who wouldn’t want to keep profits up at times like this? By far, digital marketing incurs much lower costs than traditional media marketing because of the leverage of internet technology. With digital marketing, even the costs incurred can be more easily amortized over time to deliver a better Return On Investment, ROI. Digital marketing allows businesses to remain competitive even with much smaller advertising budgets. For sure, that is good news for any business. Digital marketing makes it relatively cheaper for most businesses to increase business visibility and profitability because it is easy to target a desired market through an already receptive audience which has been primed over time by deliberate targeting to be interested in what you have to offer. That is like knowing where your potential customers are and taking your business there without dissipating energy and much valuable resources searching all over the place looking for them.

#4. Versatility

Digital marketing leverages on internet technology to do wonderful things in business marketing. It is extremely versatile and easy to deploy even by newbies in the business. When it comes to branding, image building, advertising, new business leads generation and general advancement of any business, digital marketing is handy and helpful with cost effective results. It can be adapted even with timing and location specificity to get any information out there in front of customers and potential customers anywhere in the world 24/7. That says something about its versatility. Now this tip!! If you want to have an advantage over marketers who are not using digital platforms for marketing, digital marketing holds the awesome power to turn your presence into a web sensation. Internet technology does the magic.