5 Tips to Monetize Your Social Media Presence

With presently over 4.5 billion people active on social media, many habitually spend a lot of time out there merely whiling away their time. Most of these people are not aware that they can monetize their social media accounts and make money out of their social media presence. Even if people merely see their social presence as a hobby, that’s cool. It is easy to make money out of a favorite hobby anyway. Now that you know, here are some tips to monetize your social media accounts and make money out of your social media presence.

 

#1: Just Get Started

First step is to get started by having an account on some of the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. Next is to put in the work necessary to grow your accounts on social media. It may be tempting to try to monetize your accounts right away but it is always advisable to tarry awhile until you are able to boost the numbers of your followers significantly. Depending on the platform, the audience size you really need before monetization varies a great deal. Some micro-influencers do real good if they have 1,500 followers or even less and still make money all the same. What counts the most is your ability to consistently create highly engaging content and offerings on the platforms. Good quality content is what helps to grow your audience quickly. As your audience grows, you can then build genuine connections with your target market. That is where the money is.

#2: Launch Affiliate Marketing

Even if you have your own product/service to sell on social media, you can in addition market products for product merchants and earn commissions for your efforts. This you can do by way of affiliate relationship. If you work with an affiliate marketing partner, that relationship can help you to grow your income by referring potential customers to their businesses. When you partner with a brand as an affiliate marketer, your duty is to promote their products on your social media handles. By doing so, you can earn a commission each time someone clicks on your affiliate link and purchases the products you are promoting.

#3: Create Exclusive Content Course

Many social media users always want exclusive content. Such specialized how-to content that vividly teaches people how to get things done is hugely popular on social media. If you have special knowledge or skills that can benefit others, you can create a course that teaches your social media followers about the craft. Such courses can attract people who are willing to pay for what you have to offer. Even if the courses are free, you still benefit from the traffic you attract with the courses. Such traffic can help you to make money from a sponsored content. That’s how many social media influencers get to make money by offering short, free teaser courses to their followers.

 
#4: Generate Traffic to Your eCommerce Shop

If you have an eCommerce store where you sell goods/services online, you can use your social media accounts to direct potential buyers to your online shop to boost your sales. On social media, your store can greatly benefit from the huge market out there. The ease of sharing information and communication is also great for online marketing. Marketing your products directly out of your website may not give your marketing enough exposure. Doing so on social media adequately fills such marketing gap. You can thus take advantage of social media to showcase your products/services in action real time. That helps your potential customers to quickly and fully understand how you can solve their problems. You get more patronage as a result.

#5: Become a Paid Influencer

On social media, influencers use their popularity and large following to make money. If you have a large following on your social media accounts, you too can become a paid influencer. All you need do is to explore many ways to reach out to brands in your niche and offer to promote and share their products in exchange for commission payment or a grant of free products. Many brands will respond by first sizing up your social media accounts to see if they will be worth their while. If they discover that you regularly post high-quality content that shows a high follower engagement, it will increase your appeal to them that you are really some influencer. They may then be persuaded to take you up on your offer albeit tentatively at the beginning. It is at this point a smart influencer can negotiate higher levels of commission payment and even modes of payment. This is when the money will keep rolling in as your influencer capacity continues to grow by the day.

Practical Strategies to Retain Online Store Customers

Online stores like any other stores need to retain customers if they want to remain in business. These stores must in addition keep up with the latest trends or risk going out of business.  No matter the sizes of these stores or in whatever niche they are operating, they need to invest in online tools to provide the best customer experience and earn customers’ continued trust. This is hugely essential to their continued operation because even a minor improvement in customer retention in any online business can lead to significant gains in overall revenue and profits. So, retaining customers is much more profitable than acquiring new ones as every smart small business owner very well knows. Customer retention is therefore a key to growing your small business online. 

Hereunder are some of the most practical methods to making your online store good enough to attract repeat customers and also to attract new ones.

Make a Strong Presence on Social Media

In practical marketing experience, most customers are more trustful of brands they are familiar with. The task before business owners therefore is to do those things that can significantly help their brands to be better trusted by customers. Doing these things on social media takes time and efforts. Such activities that can be of help are, sending personalized emails to customers, promptly responding to customer inquiries/concerns, having a highly visual, catchy social media presence, all crucial to helping you to educate customers about your brand, promote your products and generally build familiarity with your customers. Sending personalized messages to your customers directly and staying connected with them on a personal level on social media helps to cement this relationship.

Nurture Customers with Personal Letters

Be sure to have good online tools on your website to enhance easy two-way communication. These tools are very handy to help open communication with customers many of who more often than not need just a little nudge to come back to your store again and again, and eventually to form a habit of shopping repeatedly from your online store. One great way to encourage your customers to return to your website and order again is to write them optimized and personalized emails. Whatever it takes to nurture customers well enough on your website is welcome. Through a combination of Artificial Intelligence, AI, personalized one-on-one communication and optimized emails, you can maximize the likelihood of customers coming back to your website for their repeated business.

Make your Emails Stand Out

These days, customers are bombarded with marketing messages from all over the internet. The reason many can be wary of email messages. Emails that are unique, optimized and targeted tend to make the most impact. Your emails must therefore be crafted to stand out and provide customers with real valuable information. You can give these emails some personal and emotional touch by timing them to coincide with anniversaries and special occasions. At these times, you can offer your customers free products to commemorate and appreciate them on their anniversaries. Great for customer retention no doubt!

Prevent Common Shopping Problems

From experience, delays and mistakes in your product delivery process can hurt your chances of getting repeat business. For this reason, your website must not only be user-friendly, your order and payment system must be smooth and easy to use. Make sure your order fulfillment process is in perfect order, practical and adaptable. Always be sure your customers receive products that satisfy the quality standards they’ve come to expect from your brand. This together with a great order fulfillment process can help to encourage them to keep coming back to do business with you.

Offer Personalized Service

Every human being likes to be appreciated and valued. Offering personalized service to customers helps to fulfill this ideal. If you understand your customers’ needs well enough, you can always make recommendations to help them fulfill these needs. Most customers appreciate this by showing a clear preference for your business. You can take deliberate steps to personalize the homepage of your business website to include products and promotions that could be of interest to your customers. Your online store therefore needs to use CRM solutions to create different categories for customers depending on their needs, pain points and interests. By doing this perfectly, you can better address your customers’ needs, keep them satisfied and retain them.

Reach out to Customers with Abandoned Carts

In online business, an abandoned cart simply means a certain customer was interested enough to go through most of the purchase process without finishing it. That cannot be good for business. Abandoning carts may be as result of cumbersome checkout system, difficult payment system, or even some other distraction. Whatever the reason may be, reaching out to such customers may encourage them to finish the process by placing an order. Anyone who liked your online store enough to add items to a cart can easily be persuaded to complete the process. It is possible too to turn such persons into paying customers and even to retain their long-term loyalty.

Focus More on Customer Retention

To retain customers, you must first be able to acquire customers through any cost-effective digital marketing activities you are good at. It is by far cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new customers. Good advertising will make customers discover your business. That will mean spending a little extra money on marketing to potential customers though. Once customers discover your online store through your ads, their experience with your website and your product will entice them to keep coming back even without the advertisements. That is when you take steps to focus your attention on customer retention activities. At this stage, having a highly effective customer retention strategy can help you to turn regular customers into excited brand ambassadors. These in turn bring you even more business.

8 Website Ideas to Earn Extra Income Online

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

1. Start an Affiliate Blog Website

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

2. Create a Recipe Website

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

3. Establish a Travel Website

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

4. Create an eCommerce Store

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

5. Start a Personal Blog

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

6. Build a Job Website

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

7. Build a Humor Website

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

8. Develop a Review Platform

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

Wrapping Up

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