Resourceful Internet Marketing Quips

You heard that Internet marketers are making big bucks online? Well not quite. They make money alright but not every marketer gets to make really big bucks in the business. You know why? Internet marketing is not as easy as most people like to believe. It takes a lot of hard work and patience to even get noticed on the Internet not to talk of making huge sums of money. To make it in the business, you have a lot to learn if you are open to learning. There is usually a learning curve which is where most people get very frustrated and give up. By the time most people acquire the required skills to do what is needed, they are probably so frustrated when they are not seeing the money. When money is not coming as expected, many people eventually get so bored and fed up with the business that they give up at that point.

Yeah, you heard right. You cannot make money in internet marketing if you cannot attract good traffic to your business website. Traffic? How do you get that? Well, through various Internet marketing techniques such as affiliate marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, email marketing, content marketing, paid ads, SEO and much more. Sounds really technical at this point! Not really! If you want customers for your business, you need to attract traffic, get leads and conversions. This is simply what all this jargon is trying to say.

You must find a target market to market to if you want to really make sales. Beware! You don’t target customers with guns. You target them with marketing messages. Guns will scare customers while well-crafted marketing messages will attract them. Well, I really don’t know if Americans who love to carry guns around will agree with me on this but my experience in Internet marketing supports my claims.

Yes paid ads bring quick traffic to your website but try to be careful with paid ads. Be sure your marketing budget is robust enough to meet your paid ads expenses. This is because many Internet users like to click on your paid ads just for the fun of it. Many people will click on your ads just to pass the time away at your expense. Your only way around this obvious waste of the resources for your paid ads is to directly target who gets to look at your ads.

That brings us to the new Internet phenomenon, social media. With over 4.6 billion active users worldwide, no serious Internet marketer can presently afford not to be on the Internet. Not for fun anyway but for serious Internet marketing business. If you can combine fun with business on social media, that’s OK. But hear this, these days, many people are using social networking sites to get free traffic to their business websites. On popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, paid ads can even be a lot cheaper. I give you that info for free if you have a tight marketing budget.

In Internet marketing, you cannot ignore skills, real Internet marketing skills. Many of these skills you’ll get to learn as you market along. For instance, it takes quite some skills to persuade people to buy something from you. More so when these are people you can neither physical see nor touch in most cases. Without these skills, can you imagine how frustrating it can be to bring thousands of people to your website and nobody buys anything from you? That tells you that there is quite some difference between marketing and selling. Both require slightly different skill-sets.

If you want to get involved in Internet marketing, just pull out your computer and get started right away. The bulk of the skills you’ll acquire along the way are hands-on and you’ll do as nicely as others if you stick with it and be patient. Only very few highly skilled persons can simply jump into Internet marketing and take to it with ease. The vast majority others like me will struggle and take a bit more effort before they manage to get a hang on it. For them, it could take a long slug to acquire the right skills necessary to succeed in the business. Well, I guess you are smart and even smarter than most of us in the majority. So, you can quickly get your hang on the business and do very well if you are determined to. Just reach out and pull that computer up right away. Will you? Good luck while at it my friend.

Do Something to Grow Your SFI Business Every Day

Let me share with you, SFI's latest weekly time-tested tip. You will not create a successful business by thinking about it. You will create a successful business ONLY by DOING...by TAKING ACTION every day. Every day, no matter what, make sure you're doing SOMETHING to further your business. If you're not, you're not even in the game, you're kidding yourself. No business becomes successful without daily focus and action.

What can you do daily? Here are just a few ideas:
• Follow up with recent prospective members.
• Review your SFI Building Blocks every day (see your SFI homepage).
• Send out some E-Cards.
• Try out a new SFI Marketing Aid.
• Send out some postcards.
• Review the LaunchPad Lessons.
• Read the latest ecommerce articles at ECommergy.com.
• Send out a newsletter to your PSAs.
• Read an SFI training article you haven't read yet (or review one you have).

• Contact your sponsor, and let him or her know what you're doing.
• Go to Google and search for articles on how to become a better marketer.
• Browse the Zing Network for new products and services you can recommend to your customers.
• Review the latest posts on the SFI Forum.
• Review your Genealogy and Member List.
• Review the Hit Tracker page to maximize your marketing efforts.
• Start a co-op and invite your PSAs to join.
• Add some prospects to your Rewardical ECA database.
• Review your "My Movers" report (on your BUILD Building Block).

TIP: Don't forget to use your SFI Power Tools! Put the power of key codes, hit tracking, your own advertising co-op, the PSA Mailer, the CSA Mailer, reassignments, and more to work for your business. To not use these best-of-the-best tools is to operate your SFI business with two arms tied behind your back!

Article Source: SFI Weekly Forum Tips

Tips to Step Up Your Social Media and Content Marketing Efforts

Digital marketing strategy is as unique to digital marketers just as it gets results for them in their own unique ways. Therefore, no digital marketing strategy can be wrong really for as long as it gets good results for the marketer. It is all a matter of results. To get these results, marketers do depend on many platforms and tools that are most relevant to their needs. To step up your social media and content marketing efforts, you can learn from your own mistakes and experiences as well as those of other small business owners. That helps you to get started and you build from there. These here are useful tips from the experiences of members of the online small business community.

Be a More Productive Content Marketer

To step up your content marketing efforts, you must painstakingly write good quality content in the form of blog posts and even social media content for the benefit of your readers. Doing this diligently and consistently takes quality time and efforts, even though it helps to enhance your productivity. You get more productive in your content marketing efforts if you hone your skills and create an intentional schedule to help you get more done within manageable time frame.
 
Blog to Grow Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Blogging is the most popular form of content marketing. Good bloggers can indeed use blogs to profitably boost their affiliate marketing activities. The more good content you create as a blogger, the more traffic you attract and the better for your affiliate marketing business. If your blogging is good, you can leverage several marketing strategies to help you earn more affiliate income.

Promote Your Brand with Tweets

Getting your business on Twitter is good for your affiliate marketing. Once you grow an active twitter community, you can always find out which tweets have been most impactful in your marketing activities. You get to know this through some of your most liked tweets. That info provides you some insights into how to grow your brand and community on Twitter.

Leverage Your Social Media Skills

As the internet is deepening and technologies are advancing, social media continues to evolve. For your social media marketing to be effective for a long period of time, it is best to focus more on your social media skills instead of specific social media strategies. That is what gets the best results particularly if you are marketing content through blogging. It is more advisable then to leverage these skills adequately.

Increase Engagement with Social Media Polls

If you want good traffic, it is always better to explore all ways to increase your engagement. It a way to deliberately get people involved in what you are marketing. Social media polls are a way to go in that quest. Polls are a great way to get more people involved with your social media accounts. By doing so, they get to interact better with what you are marketing through the accounts.
 
Market with High Converting but Low Cost Ads

Most marketers are always operating very tight marketing budgets. Stretching what you have to get the most benefits is one great marketing skill on this issue. That is why you need to invest more in low cost but high converting ads. If you already have a mastery of the skills of organic content and social marketing, you can then go for paid ads. To get the best returns from your marketing investment, it is best to create high converting but low cost ads.

Get Expert Help

Expert help is always welcome in business decisions. In this case, if you want to better propagate your brand, it is best to consider working with a branding and communications agency. Agency help is useful because most small businesses don’t always have the resources to hire full time staff for their branding and marketing activities. By paying moderate agency fees, professional agencies can be hired to step up and fill that gap. You can work with some agencies to outsource some of your important branding and marketing tasks.

Leverage LinkedIn for Branding

Popular social media platform LinkedIn is quite suitable for serious business minded people to interact and network for business. Like minded business persons get to interact on the platform for mutual benefits. They do offer paid jobs, business partnerships and collaborations. Through these relationships, users can effectively leverage LinkedIn for small business branding and marketing.

Avoid SEO Mistakes

If you want organic traffic to your business, optimize your website for search engines. That is SEO which is an essential component of any blogging or content marketing strategy. It comes about by the deft use of keywords on your content. However, excessive use of these keywords is keywords stuffing which search engines do penalize. It is an SEO mistake to stuff your content with keywords. Such common mistakes can make your content marketing efforts less impactful. In extreme cases, search engines may even penalize your website by dropping it from their SERPs completely.

Take Advantage of Instagram Hashtags

Hashtags are unarguably very popular marketing tools for small businesses on social media, Instagram in particular. Through hashtags, businesses can directly popularize their brands on the internet. They help Instagram users to grow their following on the platform. If you want to grow your following on social media therefore, you can take advantage of Instagram hashtags to do so.

7 Proven Ways to Grow Your Service Business Online

Service businesses are now taking very prominent places online just like many other businesses. Many are still coming into the market daily thereby making the industry seriously competitive. Since everyone is struggling for space and attention to do profitable service business, businesses are always in search of viable ways to do better business. Online marketing is one of the best strategies service businesses can use to improve on their services and do better business. By engaging the best digital marketing tools and strategies, service businesses can better reach their clients/customers and be able to manage them better. That translates to more and better business.

Here are seven proven ways you can rely on to grow your service business online.

1. Know Your Target Clients/Customers

No doubt you know the service you are rendering. By knowing your clients/customers, you can serve them better. Knowing your clients/customers well enables you to draft and send the right marketing messages online. If you are able to define them well enough, know their needs through certain characteristics, features, and other salient facts about them, you then determine how your service business will fit them. The better you know them, the easier you’ll find it to reach out to them, with the right marketing messages, through the right channels and the right way.

2. Have a Well-Hosted Website

It may surprise you to know that these days, when people want to look for a service business to engage, their first point of call is usually the internet. They first search online for local service businesses near them or in their locality. That is the reason an authoritative website comes handy.  Such website helps to provide online, your detailed service business information which includes the types of service(s) you offer, how you offer them and any other useful content information. The website helps to support your brand, reinforce it and grow it online by providing a smooth and intuitive user experience to all visitors. That is good for business no doubt.

3. Build Your Brand

Most online marketers are always in the business of building their brands in perpetuity. Service businesses are no exceptions. Fact is, there are thousands of service businesses competing for attention online and your potential clients/customers know this. They know they always have lots of these businesses to choose from. That is why you must always stand ready to provide strong reasons why your brand is preferable to others. Doing so helps to secure good patronage for your brand if you position it well enough. So, you must consciously build your brand online. Building your brand simply means familiarizing your potential customers with your business as distinct from all others in its niche. If your service business is well branded, that will help to distinguish it from the other service businesses. Good branding helps to give your service business a friendlier, more recognizable and memorable outlook. Online, you can better help that by choosing unique brand colors, logos and fonts for your website displays and content. Somehow, these help to enhance your online presence by creating a consistent image for the consumers of your service to see and easily remember.
 
4. Create a Blog

Every service business needs a quality blog for the sole purpose of attracting more potential customers to its website. Marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the most important segments of a successful content marketing strategy. It helps to attract the much needed organic traffic to the website. So, if as a service business marketer you want to attract organic traffic to your website, all you need do is to create a quality blog. Regularly populating the blog with educational, informative and even entertaining content is one great way to grow its readership. You can through your blog answer trending and burning questions, become an authoritative resource for service delivery information to interest and excite your customers and potential customers. Marketers that are able to use their blogs to discuss versatile topics, share useful info about their business niche, publish tutorials, how-to posts, tips and tricks posts, case studies, statistics reports, and similar informative content tend to get a very good online attention and exposure. That helps with good organic traffic and increased business.

5. Get on Social Media

These days, the power of social media is no longer in dispute when it comes to promoting a business and reaching out to new clients/customers. Aside the huge popularity and ease of use of many social media platforms, they also offer different unique options to businesses. Your task as a service business marketer is to carefully search for and choose which social media platforms your target clients/customers are most likely to use. That is where you can successfully pitch for them to get the best results. For a growing service business, it is best to consider the most popular of these platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can easily use these platforms to promote your website, blog content, promote your services, introduce your team, personalize your business, communicate/interact with your clients/customers directly, and monitor their interest in your business. Smart marketers can use social media to have a direct link to potential clients/customers and an opportunity to show them why it is always a great idea to choose their service business.

6. Monitor Your Competitors

Whatever service you are rendering online, always have in mind that there are probably thousands of others out there doing about the same things. To get noticed from this crowd, you must invest in a strong online presence through a deliberate online marketing strategy. Even if most of your competitors may be doing the same things, if you do these same things differently, it can give an edge. You can only get that edge if you endeavor to monitor very well what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can design your own unique strategies to help stand your business out distinctly from the rest of them. That is what helps to give your service business an edge. You can easily monitor the activities of your known competitors from what they do on their websites, social media handles, their blog content, their types and channels of communication, their promos, pricing, guarantees/warranties and from any other online activities of theirs you can easily monitor.

7. Market with Email

Email marketing may be “old school” but, it is still a great strategy to promote a service business. Email marketing is particularly very effective to specially market to segmented audiences, creating and building brand awareness as well as increased customer engagement. Emails are great for breaking news, announcing new business additions, promos, sending newsletters, e-books, and price adjustments to specific audiences. Emails allow marketers to send personalized marketing messages that tend to make recipients of such messages feel like the marketer is writing to them specially. Many of such personalized messages usually get the desired results for the business.

Useful Marketing Tips to Launch Your Online Marketing Business

To launch a marketing business online, you must be fully aware of what you are going into. With over one billion sites presently doing business online, no doubt, there is some crowd out there in virtual space. If you are launching your own business online, this is the crowd in which your business will operate. This requires some deep strategic thinking because there is so much more to digital marketing than simply building a visually attractive website. The bottom line is to attract good traffic to your website and that requires a very good marketing strategy to achieve. The strategy which requires that you experiment and adapt well your marketing activities such as writing different types of content, trying out and sending different types of emails and having a strong presence on different social media platforms among other related activities. By this experimentation, you will no doubt make mistakes. That’s OK. Such mistakes will help you adapt and refine your marketing strategy for good results as you go along.

These marketing tips are handy to help you launch your own online marketing business.

Get a Good Domain Name

This is very important since it serves as your business identity in virtual space. The simpler your domain name, the better it is for your business. Online marketing experts always recommend a short and easy-to-remember domain name. A good domain name is what can actually make a big difference between getting lost in digital space and creating a successful online presence for your business. If you have a domain that matches your brand name, it can help reinforce your brand and make it easier for visitors to remember and to make repeat visits. Such a good domain name will not only add credibility to your business, it will also help to build your brand by way of increased brand awareness. A simple domain name also makes it much easier to get business through word-of-mouth. This is because a simple name that is easy to memorize/remember is also easy to pass on to others. With a bit of patience and search efforts, you can get a good domain name for your business from any Domain Registrars of your choice.

Clearly Identify Your Target Audience

Every online marketer must develop an ideal customer persona to target by deliberate marketing efforts. If you know who your target customers are, it is easy to market to them directly. You can tailor your content marketing strategies in such a way as to meet the wants and needs of your targeted customers. For marketing effectiveness, the demographics of your targeted customers must always be the centerpiece of your marketing goals. These demographics include but not limited to education, hobbies, housing, family, marital status, gender, age, career, salary, location, interests, buying behavior and so on, all information you need to create effective marketing content directed at your target audience.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy

You cannot effectively market online without a workable strategy, particularly content marketing strategy. The reason is obvious. Without an effective content marketing strategy, it is very difficult to achieve your online marketing goals. Blogging must be a very vital component of your content marketing strategy. If you blog on your website, make sure your strategy involves the writing of high-quality, entertaining, and valuable content only. The more blog posts you add to your website, the more visitors will be able to find you in search engines. For best results, your blog posts must be well thought-out, highly informative, clearly written, with good spellings/grammar, easy to understand/comprehend, with high-quality images/graphics and consistently published. Doing so is one great way to, quickly establish that you are an expert in your industry. That knowledge helps to motivate people to return to your website for more useful tips and opinions from time to time.

Market with a Marketing Calendar

Marketing with a calendar is one good way to assure and build trust with your customers. Make sure you stick with your content publishing calendar to avoid disappointing your readers. It may take some energy and focus to create a calendar at the beginning, but that’s OK. When your marketing calendar is good and reliable, you can easily stay on track with all your marketing efforts. Doing so helps to make sure that your marketing platforms are putting out a constant stream of content, information, and promotions that encourage readers to have the confidence to come back regularly for more.

Set Your Marketing Budget

Marketing effectively online involves some costs. Keeping marketing costs low is always a deliberate goal of smart marketers because they know too well that investing a large sum of money into your marketing efforts does not necessarily guarantee success. Even at that, you cannot just sit back and expect people to simply find and visit your website just like that. It doesn’t work out that way. You must incur some costs to promote your business. By setting your marketing budget within the limits you can afford, no matter how low, you get better results. What really matters is to set a budget that is practical and effective for the needs of your brand, making sure not to overspend or underspend. Your budgetary limitations help to take care of that.

Develop a Social Media Strategy

Your social media strategy simply involves taking your business to where your customers are by deliberate activities. These days, you’ll find most people on social media depending on their ages which are in tandem with the platforms they prefer using. For a social media marketer, what is paramount is maximum customer engagement. If you have that as one of your top marketing objectives, you must endeavor to be on several social media platforms because of their huge popularity and ease of use to share information. The reason they are a great place you can effectively leverage to reach your target customers and communicate with them easily. If you are looking for good traffic and leads, the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram and the like are a great place to market your brand. Make sure to consider these platforms in your overall social media strategy.

Establish an Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective online marketing method. You need an email marketing strategy since email remains one of the top marketing channels that marketers still depend on to get traffic and leads. When used correctly, email can be a very effective and affordable way to drive leads and sales, grow customer engagement, boost customer loyalty, and grow your customer base. First thing you must do as you launch your business is to take pains to build your own reliable email list. That list allows you to be in full control of when and how you communicate with your email subscribers. Aside from its main advantage of immediacy, you can use a pre-launch email to build awareness of your website. After launching, you need a post-launch email to keep your subscribers updated with a view to persuading them to keep coming back to check out your website. That easily translates to good traffic back to our website.

How to Make Your Lockdown Period Profitable

Well, covid-19 pandemic has forced a lockdown on you and millions of others around the world. Cheer up fellow! You can make the best out of the lockdown. If you can’t think outside the box and decide to simply waste profitable moments at home doing nothing, you’ll barely get nothing in return. Even if you’ve not done it before, have you considered starting an Online Business of your own while locked down at home? That is one business you can conveniently get involved with and make something good out of it even within the lockdown.

While on lockdown, the most profitable and easiest way to start an online business is by way of affiliate marketing. You can get any and every information you need about affiliate marketing business from the internet right inside the confines of your home. You can search the internet thoroughly and do your own due diligence before settling for affiliate networks to work with and even the business models to adopt. 


 
Even in normal times, most people may want to start an Affiliate Marketing business but many at times aren’t really too sure what to do and how to go about it. Lockdowns may even complicate such vital decisions but you can always find your way around these obstacles if you’re determined enough. If you’re just starting in internet marketing, there are very vital choices you must have to make.  These choices relate to the affiliate products you’ll be marketing, then how and where you’ll be doing your advertising. If you choose to go the popular way, you must consider:

1.Having Your Own Website/Blog: This will allow you to market with content produced by you. When fitted with a Lead Capture Page and maybe auto-responder, it is easy to advertise your product(s), attract buyers and maintain a mutually beneficial relationship with your customers. To make sales and earn good commissions, you must have good and consistent organic traffic to your website/blog. Without good traffic, there is no way your affiliate marketing business can make it.  

2.Offering Freebees/Incentives: The average person always likes to have something for efforts made. When offering incentives on your website/blog, you easily arrest the attention of visitors who may become buyers/customers.

3.Marketing Credible Products with High Demand: In affiliate marketing, the commissions you earn are directly dependent on the volume of sales you can generate. Just make sure there is a need for the chosen product and it is in high demand and with good pricing to boot. So, when you choose to market popular products with high demand, there is a tendency to make more sales with a proportionate increase in commission volume.

Conclusion:

If you are currently on lockdown, choosing affiliate marketing as a business model is a very profitable thing to do. It is readily one of the easiest and most convenient ways to earn money online. All it entails is to simply find effective ways to make popular any merchant’s products of your choice, generate sales and you earn commissions for your efforts. Because internet users usually go online not only to chat or find information but also to sell or buy specific products, it is easy to market your products online where the buyers can be found. Typically at lockdown, millions of people now rely solely on the internet to do business. This huge audience is what you’ve got to market to from your home via the internet. Your duty as an affiliate is to help popularize a merchant’s products. As the merchant’s products gain more popularity, sales increase in like proportions. For every product sale directly attributable to your marketing efforts, as an affiliate, you get paid commissions. No doubt a smart and profitable business working from home in a forced lockdown!


 

Essential Tips to Become a Successful Affiliate Marketer

These days, one of the most popular ways for marketers to earn money online is by way of affiliate marketing.  If well established, it can easily become a very reliable passive income source. If you are desirable to get involved in affiliate marketing, all you need do is to reach out and become a partner with any business of your choice whose products/services you’ll like to help market. Preferred choices for marketers are mostly ecommerce websites. When you link up with your preferred ecommerce website, you can then start referring your blog readers and visitors from your website to any of their products/services. By doing so, Product Merchants arrange to pay you a commission by way of pre-determined percentages if an individual uses your affiliate link to visit the ecommerce site to make a purchase.

It is recommended you really understand these here tips before you decide to join any affiliate program. They will help you to take the best possible decision about the most suitable affiliate program to help you succeed as an affiliate marketer. To enhance that, you’ll do best to keep a close eye on your website’s analytics and SERP’s because of regular policy changes by major Search Engines.


 
Here are some time-tested business tips to help you become a successful affiliate marketer.

#1. Select the Right Niche

A product/service niche stands distinct from others because of its unique style, profession, lifestyle, culture, behaviour or geographic need. If you get your niche selection right, it allows you to appear as an authority on products connected to that niche. That authority deeply resonates with a distinct group of customers interested in that niche. It allows you to build a strong connection with an ideal audience of potential customers.

#2. Use Only the Right Content

Blogging is all about content marketing. Good content remains key if you want your blog to be successful. Without good content, you can also not succeed in affiliate marketing. Content is considered good when it is educative and informative enough to attract readers. If it is relevant to the needs of your audience, that is when the audience will be sufficiently interested in it to want to follow your affiliate link to the product/service site. It is only when that happens a sale is likely to take place warranting the payment of commissions to the marketer.

#3. Be Authentic

Buying decisions are easily taken when buyers have cause to believe in the authenticity of their sources. That is why buyers always look out for and rely hugely on the recommendation of an authentic source before buying a product they are not too familiar with. Being authentic therefore always counts heavily in favour of influence marketers. Smart marketers build authenticity and authority by creating content around products they know and have actually used in the past. That makes it easy for them to convince others to try the product as well.

#4. Manage Timing Well

Affiliate marketing because of the diversity of the world and the uniqueness of the internet is a 24/7, 365 days a year business if you really want to succeed in it. For that reason, if you are not online, be sure some automated strategies like AI and auto-responders are helping you out to get things going. That is the only way you can hope to work all the time in reality. With good web analytics tools, you can find out what times of the day/nite and in which parts of the world your visitors and sales are coming from. For that reason, the better you manage your timing, the more sales you make. 


 
#5. Stay Up to Date

This is a given. With rapid changes in technology and the internet, if you are unable to stay up to date, you quickly get left behind. For instance, to stay on top of SERP, you must endeavour to keep a close eye on any changes in policy or in the algorithms of major Search Engines like Google. Your business can get hurt on the internet real bad and pretty quickly if you are negligent about keeping an eye on changes impacting directly on the SEO of your business website.

#6. Learn to Use Tracking

If you are in content marketing, you must learn how to track, collect, analyse and use data to your business advantage. The more and better data you can gather about your website, the better and easier for you to keep giving your audience the right content. If you have your business on social media, it is easy for you to use social media tracking and analytics to gain a very significant understanding of the behaviour and demographics of your audience. That information is very vital to determine the right content to produce for your audience.  It also allows you to know which of your marketing strategies works well and which social media channels are best suited for your type of product and promotion.

#7. Make Things Easy

Keeping it strictly simple and easy is always a good marketing advice. The reason most people like to shop online these days is because of its relative convenience. That is why you must ensure your website is well designed and user-friendly to attract more visitors, leads and sales. If for instance your audience routinely encounters avoidable difficulties in interacting with your website particularly opening your affiliate links, chances are, you’ll be losing a great deal on conversions and sales.

#8. Avoid Overpitching

Yeah, nearly everyone out there on the internet wants to sell but not everyone wants to buy. Many online surfers are at times just having fun and not interested in buying anything. As a marketer, it must be your content first before any product you are selling. When you get people to be interested in your content, it is possible to lure them to buy, but if all you are doing is just pushing affiliate links without good content, you are overpitching. That sends negative signals to potential buyers and your sales efforts may be stagnating as a result. You must endeavour to have a balance in your content which not only positively highlights the product but manages as well to keep your audience interested in what you have to say. If you habitually put all your focus in highlighting the product that you are marketing, chances are, you will frustrate your audience and they may stop following you on your affiliate marketing programs. To avoid overpitching, your focus must remain on producing useful and informative content related to the product/service you are marketing. That helps faster in arresting the attention of your audience to want to make some purchases without being necessarily “harassed” into doing so.


 

How to Promote Your Website like a Pro

If you have a website, and you greatly need to have one if you are a serious marketer, you must devise ways to promote it with a view to attracting traffic to it. You need very clear strategies to do so if you want your efforts to yield good results. What requires the most attention is how to use these strategies not just to increase the visibility of your site but most importantly to increase the quality and standing of the site. To promote your site like a Pro, you must do what the Pros like to do. Here are some of the strategies real Pros recommend particularly about design, layout, aesthetics, presentation, hosting and actual operation of any website meant for online business marketing purposes.

Make it simple to use and navigate

Depending on your type of business, simple sites always give better results than complex and complicated sites. The Pros always advise that such sites must be clean, simple, sleek, and very fast in loading time. If can avoid excessively large images and too many fancy features on the site, that can help a great deal on its navigation since large images and fanciful features tend to slow down navigation on any site. The easier you make it for someone to browse through your site, the better their chances of staying longer on the site or even winding up subscribing or making a purchase.


 
Have on it many channels of feedback and Interaction

In any business, a 2-way communication is very vital. The more and easier ways visitors can interact with your site, the better chances of your site becoming more and better known. The more you allow users to interact on your site, the more they will do so. The more they interact with your site, the more likely they are to become interested in it. How do you better enhance this interaction? Install on the site, email contact button, allow users to comment and even engage in conversations with some token moderation. Allow users to rank the site and vote on comments with likes and dislikes. Even sharing and live chat features on the site are helpful as well.

Foster an onsite community

Community is where group interaction and communication really takes place and works well. As you design and build your site, you must factor in and think of the type of community that you want to foster. By allowing interaction, responding quickly, and moderating the discussions onsite, you are, in essence, creating a community. It is not good for business to always push your product/service on everyone you come across. Pros advise that it is best to always create awareness first before you make your product/service available. Fostering and working in an onsite community of like-minded fellows enables you to do that fairly easily.

Be very liberal with visitors’ participation
 
If you want to sell and sell well, you must be ready to deal with people at all times taking into account the complex nature of every human being. In our complex world of today, most people not only want to be seen, they want to be heard as well. Everyone thus always has an opinion to express about any and every issue. You must therefore device ways on your site to allow visitors to interact freely with your site and with others. People always like to bring their knowledge and wisdom into any conversion. By allowing them to freely do so, a bit of moderation directly by you is of essence. Set and maintain boundaries by monitoring and moderating your site yourself. This type of check should not in any way be seen or construed as akin to command and control. Real freedom particularly of expression and choices is very good for business. So, you must allow liberal freedom to visitors to your website.

Respond to feedback very quickly

Quick response to inquiries is very good for business. Your site must be known by others as a quick response site. That notion helps to promote it a great deal. No matter the type of inquiry, even if it is mere commenting, filling out a form or sending an email, online visitors always want a quick response from a responsive site. The real reason you must make your website responsive and quickly too. Timely responses always manage to help move relationships forward while the interest therein is still keen and fresh.

Personally monitor and moderate your website 

Freedom of choice and decisions is very good for business. Allowing real time interaction onsite is crucial to a successful website operation. But, too much uncontrolled freedom is a danger to it as well. As the site owner, you must set boundaries for all your visitors to stay within. Adequate allowances must be made so as not to allow these boundaries to be unduly restrictive. If they are too restrictive, you may end up scaring away visitors you are keen on retaining. People tend to abuse excessive liberty online by spamming and being abusive. Both must be checked directly by the site owner who may need to invest a bit of time and energy to delete or moderate spammy and offensive comments. That is what the Pros do.


 
Integrate your site into larger online communities
 
To integrate your site into larger online communities, you inevitably must turn to social media. Because of their huge popularity and ease of sharing messages by millions and millions of users, social media is the best place to integrate your site and latch into the activities of a huge and very active online community. Social media sites are best used not only to draw traffic to your site, but to demonstrate how your site and eventually the community you desire to create on your site manages to fit into larger communities which online platforms represent. A very fitting and productive goal is to design your site with the social media features that allow for easy integration with these larger communities. That is what the Pros do and they highly recommend.

Last Line!

Aside from having interesting and entertaining content on your website, deploying the foregoing strategies will make it more attractive to others. Websites give better results if you use a format that works well on different types of media. For flexibility and versatility, your website should be readable and attractive to read on different devices like smart phones, tablets, TVs and desktops, irrespective of whatever operating system or browser used to view them. That is how the Pros get it done and they highly recommend too.

How to Use Freebies to Promote Your Website

 These days nearly everyone wants something of value and wherever possible, get it for free. As a marketer, even if the content of your Website is very interesting, highly informative, and entertaining, you still need more promotional strategies to make it successful. So, what do smart marketers do in the circumstance? They go for a bit of perks on the side to lure and keep visitors focused on their websites. They carefully choose a distinct promotion strategy to isolate and focus on one particular thing of value and place it on their websites. The main selling point of such thing of value is usually that it is offered for free. That offer acts as a very good bait to keep visitors coming and staying on the site. Most people really love freebies no doubt.

Every marketer always has a very wide range of freebies they can choose to offer. Everything depends on the marketer, his/her expertise on digital items of value and the nature of the businesses they are offering. If you need help, you can access many examples of promotional freebies many others are using on the Web. Everything depends on what you are offering. Some theme designers offer some themes free. Some photographers usually offer some of their images for your use royalty free. If you are a Graphic artist, you can offer free clip-arts. If you are a musician or a music distributor, you can offer free downloads of certain types of songs. Many Programmers do offer certain programs as freeware to attract buyers. E-books and “how to” wares are very popular freebies on the web and they are fairly easy to write and distribute.

Every experienced marketer knows that the attention span of most Internet surfers is always very fleet and notoriously limited. A freebie offer always manages to “arrest” the attention of some of these surfers. That helps to attract and keep good traffic on your website. That no doubt is very good for your online business. Millions of people are on the Internet offering one thing or the other. Many of these huge numbers compete rigorously daily for the limited attention of Internet surfers. They all want to attract people to their websites and for them to keep coming back. Many smart marketers know too well that it is virtually impracticable and I dare say impossible for any one person to look at every site to which they are invited. In such a bleak scenario, what to do to make a real difference is to offer something of value free. By actively offering something which people really need, something for which they may be actively seeking, for free, chances are, you could grab their attention better. Offering freebies is thus one great way to get visitors to actually come and even stay a bit longer on your Website. That directly translates to more and better traffic to your website and a potent booster for your business.
 
 

Why Offline and Online Marketing are Effective in SFI Business

Offline marketing can be as effective as online marketing but the effectiveness depends on how good the marketer is. Whether online or offline, your expertise and experience play a major role in how effective your marketing is and can be in SFI business. There is something very good and encouraging about what many experts call “personal touch.” That is the marketing purposes for offline marketing. With it, you do have very ample opportunities of not only being able to explain anything person-to-person; you can also demonstrate your dexterity at persuading others to see things your way. Whereas, people who are very shy to meet or speak with other people one-on-one could resort to offline marketing methods with near or similar results.

I can say with all amounts of seriousness that online and offline marketing methods can be as effective as how good the marketer is at using any of the methods. Some persons who are very good at meeting people can be very effective at using offline marketing methods whereas many others who are very good at using the computer and they know how to use the Internet for marketing purposes can be very effective using online marketing methods. For best results, I do recommend the use of both online and offline marketing methods because each has its own strengths and weaknesses depending on who the marketer is.

Best wishes and happy marketing.