Top 5 Tips You Need to Consider When Starting a Business Blog

Blogging is the commonest form of content marketing among online marketers. You can blog about anything under the sun provided you have good information that others will like to know about. You can blog for business, for entertainment and even for fun. Anyone can start a blog if they so decide. Following are some valuable tips you should consider if you want to start your own blog and be successful at it.

1. Choose the Right Hosting Platform

Your host platform matters a great deal if you want to manage a profitable blog. You can choose to blog on an independent website and pay for hosting it or you choose popular free website hosts like Blogger, Wix or WordPress. If you are just launching a blog, you must make hosting your top concern because aside the hosting fees you’ll have to pay if you are not using a free blogging platform, the blogging tools each host website makes available for your blogging activities are of immense importance for the success of your blog. They provide web security as well. This is hugely important because using insecure web host can seriously harm your blog. It is best therefore to use a web host that places a high priority on security particularly with servers that have security precautions like firewalls and routine website backups.

2. Set up Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs act like the “eyes” of search engines. They basically tell search engine algorithms which of your content pieces are most important and exactly what your post is about. Since you are likely to be blogging on the same niche, chances that you’ll be writing comparable content is very high. Because such content will be aiming for the same tagline, it is best to have a canonical URL for each piece. Therefore, setting up various URL types from scratch can be very useful for your blog. If however you are using a free-blogging platform like Blogger or WordPress, their in-house blogging tools will take care of most of your blogging requirements.

3. Use Visuals with Great Care

The use of visuals in a blog can be advantageous as well as disadvantageous. If you’re new to blogging, you need to take adequate care when using visuals in your content. It is not advisable to use just any images you come across online. If you do, you run the risk of infringing on copyrighted images. What is best to do is to strive to find websites that offer free photos and visuals. There, you’ll have unfettered access to high-quality images that you can use for free. Shutterstock or Pixabay are great places you can get free high-quality images you can safely use on your blog content. However, if you have the expertise and the right equipment, it is safer still to create your own images.

 

4. Closely Monitor the Performance of your Website

No matter how good your blog content is, if your blog website is not performing to par, your blog is not likely to get any traction. This is why you must monitor the performance of your website routinely. By thoroughly understanding how and where people access and use your website, it is easier for you to figure out whatever needs to be done on the site to enhance its performance. You’ll also be able to know what elements you need to add to the website for it to perform better. Try to avoid any guess work when taking vital decisions on your website. By using some great analytics tools like Google Analytics, you can find out exactly which are your most popular content and where your website visitors are coming from and much more. This tool also helps you to monitor visitor activity across your website, track customers and leads. The data generated by this tool enables you to determine what works well on your website and what needs fixing. Overall, you can always be in a better position to improve the general performance of your website if you monitor its performance well enough and with the right tools.

5. Invest in a Good Plagiarism Checker Tool

Plagiarism checker is one fine tool no serious blogger can afford to do without. With it, you can easily ascertain the originality of your content before posting it. This is hugely important because you can get penalized by search engines for posting duplicate content. Your blog content must be unique and original if you want to achieve great results with your blog. Most versions of plagiarism checkers operate quickly. That is one great advantage bloggers have if they use these checkers to quickly search the entire internet before posting content. If the checker Okays your content, you don’t have to worry about whether you plagiarized it or not even if per chance. All you need do as a blogger is, when you finish crafting your content, just upload the work to the software, and it will immediately run a complete plagiarism check on the material. This way, instead of re-reading your work and manually checking for plagiarism, you can save your precious time and effort by using plagiarism checker tool like Copyscape to help you out in a matter of seconds.
 
Wrapping Up

If you are new to blogging, use the foregoing tips faithfully. As you blog along, you’ll be able learn some more tactics/techniques along the way. Even if the niche you are blogging on is a bit saturated, you can get along fine and hold your own if you allow these tips to guide you. Make sure you post great content regularly and consistently when you get off your launch pad. With patience and determination, you too can become a blogging success with time.

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.

How to Speed Up Your Business Growth with Digital Marketing

Right now, advancement in technology and the internet have managed to give business owners a plethora of online business options particularly in digital marketing. With or without prior experience many more people can now start their own online business and effectively grow it with digital marketing. Even at that, people still need to have some fundamental understanding of how the internet works and how to deploy digital strategy in it to grow a business. With this understanding, everything other thing about digital marketing can be learned with practice over time. That means, even if you aren’t exceptionally gifted in internet technology, you can still achieve some measure of success in the growth of your business. Here is how you can rely on digital marketing to expand your business online.

Understand Your Audience

It is difficult to succeed as a digital entrepreneur if you cannot market directly to a well identified target audience. The more you understand your target audience, the better your ability to effectively market to them. For this reason, many online entrepreneurs and marketers always make very deliberate efforts to understand the behaviors and preferences of their audience. Basic info from this understanding helps business owners to target the right buyer persona. It allows them to know exactly who their internet business is aimed at. This is how marketers discover what their audience likes or dislikes or even prefers and to develop unique and effective tactics to market to them. Doing this correctly is good for business growth.

Concentrate on Content Marketing

In digital marketing, content is king. Through good content creation, your business can continuously grow in prominence. Online entrepreneurs require exceptionally good content marketing abilities to grow their businesses online. High-quality content together with effective digital marketing strategy is great for your business to gain online authority and improvement in its digital footprints. High-quality content even with minimal commitment tends to yield enormous returns on investment.

Increase Your Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the most effective digital strategies there are. With good videos deployed in your marketing efforts, you can successfully expand your internet business. Visual ads as in videos are quite attention-grabbing and thus more effective for marketing purposes. Customers respond by far faster to video ads than to any other type of marketing. In fact, video ads help businesses expand nearly 50% quicker than non-video ads. Video marketing is thus very efficient and effective digital marketing technique particularly when deployed through the right internet channels like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Build a Unique Brand

Your brand if sufficiently unique can serve as your business identity online. The more specialized this uniqueness is to a micro-niche, the better for your business. For your brand to be unique, it must have a clear mission, value proposition and with novel solutions to problems. If the brand is distinct and unique enough, it gives your business a great advantage in the market place. If this advantage manages to guarantee that there is sufficient demand in brand’s specialized market so much the better. The ability to distinguish itself in the internet market is also critical and the uniqueness of a brand helps out there. The uniqueness of your brand combined with a strong online presence helps your online business to thrive well.

Increase Collaborations

You can increase collaborations with other businesses to distribute content. By marketing that way businesses can basically ride on the success of one another to make use of their consumer base. This is a win-win situation that is mutually beneficial to all parties. Collaborations can also help businesses to increase their reach at minimal marketing efforts. Depending on your type of business and digital expertise, you can explore many forms of collaborations, such as collaborative content, co-marketing, joint webinars, and staging events. If you know what you are doing, collaborative options available to you are limitless. That depends on your creativity though. The more creative you are in your approach to distributing content marketing, the better it is for the growth of your business.

Make Your Business Scalable with Online Solutions

Online entrepreneurs can rely on online tools and solutions to make their content marketing scalable as a viable way to grow their business at lower costs. Advancement in technology and online tools help out with automation and Artificial Intelligence, AI. These tools and software can ease up things and still be helpful at no extra cost even if you are scaling up through other online business platforms. They readily provide low-cost options to get things done through automation. If you for instance operate a small business, you must know how to prepare an invoice. But through automation, you can use a free online invoice generator to help you get paid faster.

Use Paid Media to Increase Reach

If you want to significantly increase media presence for your business, you can complement free media with paid media ads. Paid media is a very effective marketing technique for expanding the web presence of your business. It is so effective that with even a little investment, you will notice a significant number of people learning about your business. Paid media, particularly on very popular social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and the likes can easily be used to target your ideal market and customer persona. For best results, the ads you run on social media platforms must be catchy, of high quality and informative enough to easily attract attention. So, if you must spend money on paid media marketing, there is the need for you to pay good attention to the sort of material you’re putting out. Such material must always be the type that significantly helps your business to increase its reach and enhance its growth.

Tips to Boost the ROI of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns are readily one of the most affordable and cost-effective online marketing strategies for most marketers. Marketers resort to email marketing to save costs, widely each out to customers and potential customers, drive sales/revenues, nurture leads, and gain more customers. Marketers rely hugely on emails to maintain a strong relationship with customers and to build their brands. You can easily measure the effectiveness of your emails. That makes emails ready marketing tools to drive Returns-On-Investment, ROI for your business. Emails allow you to optimize and fine-tune your marketing campaigns to drive ROI that outperforms many other marketing channels. For this reason, smart marketers are always in search of better ways to use emails in their marketing campaigns to make the campaigns more effective and profitable. One of such ways is to use emails effectively well to boost ROI. These here tips can be of help to you in your own email marketing campaigns.

 
 
Include Call-To-Action, CTA in Your Emails

If you’ve ever opened a marketing email and you find it difficult to understand what the marketer is really up to, you’ll realize the importance of CTAs in emails. A huge percentage of emails without CTAs usually end up in trash bins. I doubt if you can afford such huge waste in your own marketing efforts. Emails without CTAs don’t convert. If your marketing efforts are not converting, you are simply wasting your precious time and resources. For your emails to convert at a higher rate, you must include a conspicuous CTA to tell your recipients what action you want them to take. That action if taken helps your conversions. Simple CTAs marketers like to use are: “Click here for more info”, “Click here for Discount Coupon”, “Pre-Order Now” and suchlike messages.

Diligently Track Your Email Deliverability

Diligently tracking emails helps to measure their effectiveness and there are useful online tools to get it done in a fairly accurate manner. Metrics like emails opening rates, click-through rates, deliverability rates and revenue generated are all important metrics marketers need to measure to help drive ROI. When your emails are not reaching their targets, they are not even opened and they don’t help generate revenue for your marketing efforts, they’re as good as useless. Therefore, you must always make sure your emails are optimized and well-crafted with simple marketing language and with a dash of good aesthetics to make them attractive to recipients. That is the best way to get them to escape sperm filters and to reach their targets. These days, with more advanced sperm filters now in use, they can easily detect and filter out what they consider “junk” based on some spam-trigger words included in the subject line and body of email messages. It gets that technical so adequate care must be taken to always draft emails that are deliverable and can be tracked for effectiveness. Only such emails manage to help ROI better.

Segment Your Email List

If you want your email campaigns to help boost ROI for your business, you must divide and break down your email list into as many different segments as possible. Doing so makes marketing segmentation easy and effective. Find out what works best for your marketing campaigns and do your segmentation based on it. It is a marketing reality that not all your email recipients want the same things or are influenced by the same messages. Segmentation allows you to send different types of emails to different groups depending on what each group needs. The most effective emails are the mails specially created to cater to these needs. These are the emails that greatly help to boost ROI.

Humor Your Email Recipients to Action

For email effectiveness, you can tactically deploy humor and shock value in your subject lines. What you want is for your subject email line to easily command attention and trigger the recipient to click on it. You can achieve that if your emails manage to stand out from the dozens of other emails competing for attention in your recipients’ inboxes. Humor and shock value can at times help pull the tricks to earn your emails desirable attention even amidst strong competition from several other emails dropping in your recipients’ inboxes. For your offer to be noticed, your emails must first be opened. If not opened, you are simply marketing in vain. If humor helps to get your mails opened and not quickly trashed, so much the better for your email marketing campaigns. Trashed emails stand no chance at all of generating any kind of returns and therefore cannot be of any help to ROI.

Optimize Your Emails for Mobile

With increasing use of mobile devices worldwide, it is safe to assume that a high percentage of your marketing emails will be read on mobile devices. That has very significant marketing implications. Mobile emailing is growing so rapidly that it has become imperative for marketers to optimize their emails for mobile devices. You can do this by having a custom responsive email template design or by using a branded template which is essentially a very low-cost way to make your emails stand out in attractiveness and in aesthetics. What this means is that for your emails to be effective, your subject lines must easily grab the attention of recipients, your messages must be direct and to the point, and your design must be eye-catching and must flow seamlessly on small screens typical of most mobile devices. Optimizing your emails for mobile devices takes care of all suchlike marketing essentials that somehow help to boost ROI.

7 Free Tools for Online Presence Management of Your Business

If you market online, you must the concerned about the online presence management of your business. With so many online channels out there, building and maintaining your online presence is a very huge undertaking. It is always worthwhile though because the returns from the efforts can be very big. That is why it is worth undertaking. Doing it physically is usually very daunting. So, you need online tools and some form of automation to help you out with the online presence management of your business. Below are some free tools which are popular with marketers you can try out yourself to help you with the online presence management of your business. 

 

1. WordStream Tool

This is an effective GMB, Google-My-Business grader tool you can rely on. WordStream’s free GMB grader helps you to identify what is missing in your profile and exactly what you need to do to improve it. The better your profile is on GMB, the more visible it is and the more clicks it gets. WordStream Tool helps to make your profile look better on GMB.

2. Google and Facebook Ads Graders Tool

Marketers effectively use this free tool to perform a thorough audit of their ads accounts. The tool usually provides a detailed report on optimizations which can be undertaken to increase the visibility of the ads. That way, you can prevent wasted spend, and get more conversions in the process.

3. LOCALiQ Tool
 
This is a very effective digital marketing health check tool. To use LOCALiQ’s free presence checker, just enter your business name and address and get a report showing which of your business listings are complete, which ones are missing information, and which ones are missing entirely. You can then supply the missing/incomplete information to make your ads more captivating.

4. Google Search Tool

Anytime you Google your business-name yourself, you can easily see what shows up on the SERPs of Google. It is Google search tool that gets out this report. You will see exactly what others see when they search your business name on this tool. If what you see is not satisfactory for your marketing efforts, you can do some tweaking on your listings until you are satisfied with the search results.

5. Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool

If you plug your website into the Page Speed Insights tool of Google, you’ll get a score for both mobile and desktop devices as well as recommendations to improve page speed. You can do some tweaking thereafter until you are satisfied with the results.

6. Google Alerts Tool

You can get periodic reports free of cost from Google alerts depending on the information you want Google to alert you on periodically. These reports could be daily, weekly or monthly depending on your choice. You can set up these alerts to enable Google notify you when new results for any topic of your choice about your business shows up in Google Search. This is one very useful tool you can effectively use to stay on top of trends in your business niche and even to spy on your competition.

7. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

Google now reports that that over 60% of search results is at times attributable to mobile devices. So, marketers must now optimize their websites to be mobile-friendly to take advantage of this huge search data. For your own website, you can simply Google “mobile friendly test” and enter your website into the search result. The report will show you how mobile-friendly your website is.

Why Having an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy is Important for Your Small Business

How effective your digital marketing strategy is, is directly related to how well your small business can succeed online. Every small business needs a marketing strategy, an effective digital marketing strategy to make any impact online. Without it, you may end up struggling in vain to do business online. Good digital marketing strategies require that every business sets up business goals and initiates the right campaigns to meet these goals. Some of such goals can be anything from gaining more customers, raising brand awareness, lead generation, or boosting sales. If your business strategies are effective, they will ensure that the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly goals of your business are being reached as planned. If not, the business has ample opportunities to make adjustments to ensure the goals are reached as planned. This is made possible by having in place a digital marketing strategy that encompasses the following.

Budgeting

For your business to succeed online, it needs a digital strategy plan that can specifically analyze your set budget and deploy it judiciously. Budgeting and implementing a good budget makes planning for the future of your business easier and more practicable. That helps the businesses to grow and to produce more sales revenue.

Addressing the Basics

An effective digital marketing strategy is not just about crafting blog content and making a few posts here and there particularly on social media. It is much more than that and understanding the basics is a basic necessity. These basics help you to put all the necessary activities together to form part of a much wider plan that evolves into a working strategy. By doing this, your business stands a very good chance to start reaping the benefits right away.

The Right Tools

You cannot have an effective strategy without deploying the right online tools. For your digital marketing to be effective, it must encompass the use of the internet, mobile devices, social media and search engines to effectively reach consumers. As a remarkable contrast from common traditional marketing methods, such as print, billboards and TV, digital marketing is essentially data-driven. It relies on online technology/tools to measure and track what consumers are searching for or generally doing online. This data can be collected, collated, analyzed and used to understand how each strategy contributes to sales and conversions.

The Right Techniques

A digital marketing strategy requires the right techniques to be effective. Some of such techniques encompass anything from Search Engine Optimization, SEO, social media marketing, Email marketing, Pay-Per-Click, PPC, Google Analytics and video marketing. The aim is to always get the message across to the right consumers and in the right form. When these techniques are deployed in a goal-driven approach, they help to reach more consumers. That helps the business to get more leads and customers with a corresponding increase in sales revenues.

Reaching Customers

Customers keep every business in business. Strategies that help businesses to reach customers easily are good for business. When a digital marketing strategy is well crafted, it helps to pinpoint the behavioral patterns of customers/potential customers. Through it, you can get to find out how they prefer to interact online, whether it is by way of smart mobile devices or through desktop computers. You can gather demographics data such as their ages and their consuming preferences. With a concise analysis of this data, businesses can plan effective methods to market to their audiences by taking advantage of the ways they prefer and ways that fit their demographics. That way, businesses can effectively deploy marketing messages that can better hold customers’ attention to get the desired results.

Performance Metrics

With online metrics, you can measure how well your marketing campaigns are doing. Online, you can take advantage of performance measuring platforms that provide tools that can be used to study the success of your marketing campaigns. The data provided by metrics helps businesses to optimize their marketing messages, track the target audience and make any improvements/adjustments in ongoing campaigns. Such metrics allow for more opportunities to reach targets/goals and are of huge benefits to future campaign plans/designs.

Business Transformation

If your priority is to completely transform your business, a well-designed digital marketing strategy will give you the means, platforms and ways in which to grow your desired business model. Overall, whatever you aspire to do in your online business, with the right digital marketing strategy deployed effectively, you can accomplish it.

How to Grow Your Business with Outbound Sales Strategies

If you run your business online, you need a good outbound sales strategy if you want your business to grow. You may face huge challenges figuring out what works and what doesn’t in your marketing activities. That is expected. But, experienced marketers like to advise “using and testing” to determine what strategy works best. Many do recommend a delicate mix between inbound and outbound sales strategies to get the best results.

These here are some tested outbound sales strategies that could have a positive impact on the growth of your own business.

Create Your Ideal Customer Persona

Before developing any marketing strategy, first you must create an ideal customer persona right from the outset. A good customer persona allows you to understand your existing customers and prospects better. With it, you can better curate your content, services, product development and messaging to meet your target audiences' specific demands, behaviors and issues. To create a reliable customer persona, you may choose to directly interview your existing and prospective customers to uncover what they like most about your brand, services and or products. That is in addition to researching your customers’ database to discover trends related to your leads and the customers' behavior towards your content. The info and insights you glean from these exercises will help you to create and ideal customer persona to market to.

Market on Social Media

By way of definition, social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms to promote your brand's product/service. These days, social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at doing their own things around the world 24/7. It is the versatility of social media that business owners leverage on to communicate and engage with customers and reach new audiences. When properly nurtured, it is this audience that can potentially become paying customers. If effectively used, popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram can help business owners to establish great business relationships by helping them to widely share content of value to potential customers.

Generate Quality Leads

Without a doubt, lead generation is by far one of the most effective ways to succeed in outbound sales marketing. For this reason, business owners always need to consciously generate quality leads for their businesses. Lead generation may be a very technical and hugely challenging activity for most marketers but it is worth the while in the long term. Business owners can however reliably use reputable lead generation tools like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to help them out. If you have already created an ideal customer persona, you can leverage these tools to help look for qualified prospects that could be a great match for your product/service. In addition to this, you can generate quality leads by way of deliberate referral programs technique. These are programs that encourage other people to promote your brand in exchange for some token value for every converted lead.

Be Active in Online Communities

Marketers are gradually discovering that participating and being very active in online communities actually delivers a number of advantages to businesses. Online communities such as forums, internet communities and Facebook groups can be great networks for you to get an overview of your product/service and to evaluate how your customers are relating with your brand. The insights from these communities really help brands to improve their offerings, create better products and build better and stronger brands. In addition, you can take advantage of these online communities to create strong partnerships by taking advantage of networking opportunities with fellow business owners in your industry/business niche. That helps to grow and strengthen your brand. As a direct marketing effort, you can directly promote your product/service by providing quality content to the community and reaching out directly to members that may be interested in what you are selling.

Use Cold Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective marketing strategy if spamming is eliminated. Cold email marketing works best if you can create great quality, and attention-grabbing emails, that are optimized and targeted at a segmented audience. If such mails have attention-grabbing headlines, they entice people into opening the emails and possibly acting on them as well. If you send cold emails, make sure to follow up with your prospects and to track the “open-rate” of the mails using online tools. From your analytics/metrics, you can get insights about prospects that opened your emails and actually visited your website. If such persons did not make any purchase, you can then directly promote your brand to them again through re-targeting ads.

How to Develop a Good Content Marketing Strategy for a Service Business

Many service businesses have since discovered that content marketing on the internet is one of the most powerful lead generation tools they can depend on to grow their businesses. This is because through the internet they can publish thought-provoking content, market their services, follow up with clients/customers, get leads and make sales. Service businesses are hugely dependent on good content to market their businesses online across multi-channel. To do this successfully, they rely on their content marketing strategy to reach the right audience at the right time with their marketing messages. A good content marketing strategy can assist service businesses to reach more customers through high-quality, informative, valuable, relevant, and engaging content.

These here tips can help you to create an effective, customer-attracting content plan to get more leads and customers to grow your service business.

What’s Your Primary Marketing Objective?

If you run a service business, this question must be answered right from the outset of your marketing strategy. Exactly what do you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts? That is, your primary marketing objective? Content usually serves a variety of purposes for marketers. Some of these purposes include, improving SEO, getting more leads, attracting more backlinks, attracting more website visitors, increasing engagement on social media, growing your email list and so on. Before creating content, these factors must come into play to decide on a primary marketing objective since different types of content usually work to generate different results.

Tap Ideas from Your Audience

What keeps a service business in business is its client/customer base. That is the main audience it serves. Without this audience you cannot remain in the business. So, what is good for your audience is what is good for your business. For this reason, sourcing ideas and suggestions from your audience is good marketing. You can find out from your audience what topics they’re interested in and what questions they have about the services you offer even if by way of email questionnaire, social media posts or through anonymous surveys. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can turn some of the questions/topics into blog posts. Better still, you can create a Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ page on your website from this information.

Create a Content Marketing Schedule

This is one effective way to plan and distribute your content. In matters of content marketing, quality comes first but consistency tends to make the real difference. If you have a credible content marketing strategy in place, it is made more effective when you are writing, publishing, posting, distributing and marketing your content on a regular and reliable schedule. You can engage project management tools like Asana and Monday.com to help you stay on schedule, organize your content details, and ensure that you’re distributing your content regularly across multi-channel.

Diligently Research Keywords for SEO

You cannot have a good SEO for your service business if you do not have searchable keywords to use in your content. That makes it imperative for you to thoroughly research keywords, using online keyword research tools like SEMRush.com or Ahrefs.com to find keywords to use on your web pages or in your blog posts. It involves identifying keywords your target audience is searching for to find the type of service your business is rendering. SEO is a bit technical in implementation. You can hire the services of professional webmasters to help you with SEO on your website if you are unable to do it yourself.

Spy on Your Competition

It is smart digital marketing to always keep an eye on what your competition is doing. By doing so, you can get to find out what they are doing better than you and how they are doing it. It is ok to spy on their content strategies to see what keywords they are targeting and what content they’re posting on social media and even in other web channels. You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to search for your competitors’ domain names and see what keywords they are ranking for. This can be a credible and effective way to find keywords you should be targeting on your own site. What your competition is posting on their blogs or social media channels, can give you some very helpful insights on the type of content you can create to increase engagement, boost your brand authority, and even attract more leads and customers to your own website.

Create Linkable Assets

There are many types of linkable assets content marketers like to create and use. These range from research findings to eBooks to guest articles to industry leaders’ interviews to webinars and so on. A linkable asset is a type of content that works to attract backlinks to your website. If such links are from high-quality and reputable sites, they can help to improve your own website’s SEO. An improved SEO helps to increase your website’s rankings, increase traffic and draw in more website visitors. If you are smart enough to share content that services many purposes, you can have just one SEO-friendly blog post that generates traffic, attracts backlinks, boosts engagement on social media, and converts your blog readers into leads/customers. Now, that’s great!

Have Content Distribution Plan

After planning your topics, writing your content, and publishing it, the next thing is to be sure it is widely distributed. That calls for a content distribution plan. The plan allows you to explore all viable ways to widely distribute your content multi-channel to reach as many eyes as possible. You may choose to distribute your content manually if you have the time and the patience. On the alternative, you can use content distribution tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to share your content on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and some other web channels like email, Google ads, Blogs, GMB and the likes.

Generate Leads

If you have leads generation as one of your content marketing objectives, you must give your readers ample opportunities to make contact with you. Make sure your website has a CTA feature to invite/direct your visitors to take desired steps. Include contact forms and be sure they are easily noticeable on the service pages of your website. Offer value, by way of downloadable eBooks or infographics on your website posts in exchange for users to provide their email addresses. Have an easily noticeable “contact me” feature on your website to include email address, telephone, chat bot, office address for physical visits. It helps to make it easy for prospects to easily make contact with you. When a contact is made, that is some kind of lead when qualified.
 
Maintain Contact with Prospects

It is just not enough to have leads, the leads must be nurtured. A lead is of no use without a diligent follow up. The contacts information you generate in your business must be used to keep communications open with prospects. Either by regular emails or even occasional telephone calls, if you maintain contact with your prospects, you can turn them to customers. With online Customer Relationship Management, CRM tools, you can keep your lead information organized, check follow-up status, send customers business information, and much more. These tools are great to help you follow up with every lead to be sure you are not missing out on any new customer opportunities.

Final Thoughts

From the foregoing, you can easily deduce that with good writing skills, the right planning, tools, and great scheduling/distribution, you can create amazing content that helps to grow your service business. The more content you create, the more beneficial experience you’ll have, the more your skills will improve and the better you’ll become at using content to turn prospective visitors into new leads/customers.

How to Get Email Marketing Right to Create Brand Awareness

Do you still want to get introduced to email marketing? Pay attention to the following. Email marketing is a digital marketing method that lets you personalize communication for customers. It allows you to promote your products and services as well as keep in regular touch with customers, both new and existing. It is a mass-appeal, digital communications method that is very popular with marketers. It always gets very impressive results even at minimal costs outlay if properly used.

For effective marketing purposes, email lets you segment your email contacts and personalize content per the needs of your target audience. Personalization can be via any way that delights your customers. Such as, catchy headlines, clear calls to action, personalized recommendations, discount coupons, exclusive mobile-only offers, and lots more.

Even if you’re new to email marketing or you are a veteran in the business, it pays to follow these simple tips to run a successful email campaign to get good results.

1. Never bombard your customers with emails. Too many unsolicited emails can make your subscribers to unsubscribe or many of the mails even ending up as spam. Always choose a frequency that neither overwhelms your subscribers nor hurts engagement for your business.

2. Track the results of your email campaigns diligently with online tools. With these tools, you can get to know how many subscribers opened your email, how many clicked on the hyperlinks and so on.

3. You must study, research and understand the needs of your customers before sending mails to them. If you do, you can then customize your email content to match their needs. That is what gets the best results.

4. Be sure to always obtain your customers’ consent before sending them any email. Make the right provisions for them to sign up themselves. Do not fail or neglect to provide a subscription form on your website where customers can voluntarily submit their email addresses to add in your very vital email list.

5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Local Business

The essence of a good digital marketing strategy is to attract traffic to your business using new and evolving digital technology. These technologies help your business to have a robust online presence, and help to attract traffic to your business. Growing your local business online takes effect from there, particularly as your digital footprints become firmer. If your digital footprints become effective, your business attracts more and more customers. By consistently sustaining your digital marketing strategy, you can effectively target the right audience and turn them into lifelong customers. Growing your online business takes a firm root from there, manifesting in more and better leads, more customers and better sales.
 
These five digital marketing strategies are tested and handy to help grow your local business online.

1. Optimize Your Business for Local Searches

For Google searches and good traffic, most small businesses benefit more from local advantages. If you optimize your business for local searches, and you use the right marketing tools to communicate with your customers, the results are great. The success and growth of your business hinges strongly on this. Many online searchers have a preference for, a “near me” search on Google to do business than any other. This is mostly because of convenience and ease of doing business.

2. Market Only With High Quality and Engaging Content

In digital marketing, content is king. Either by way of blogging or some other types of content, what matters is to ensure the content is authoritative, informative, educating and of very high quality. It must be regular and consistent too to attract readers’ attention better. Good quality content can help to boost organic traffic on your business website. You may choose to publish as content, a wide variety of infographics, videos, and images to enhance your audience’s connection but the qualities must be very good to be useful. You can use highly informative audio-visual tools and fact-rich blogs to capture the attention of customers. That translates to traffic, good organic traffic back to your business. If you keep posting such content regularly and using the right keywords to enhance your search engine rankings, you get more traffic, more leads, more customers and ultimately better sales.

3. Don’t Ignore Periodic Analytical Reviews
 
Having a good digital marketing strategy is not enough to measure results unless you have good analytics reviews in place. Free Google online tools can help you out with analytics data if you link Google Analytics with your business website. You can only get valuable insights into the performance of your business through these analytics tools. From the data generated, you can have reliable information to enable you to review your strategy and content periodically and as needed. With advanced analytics, you can get to know and understand what is working well in your campaigns and what is not. Armed with that information, you can make necessary adjustments, tweaks and even changes for better results.

4. Engage with Your Customers Meaningfully

The average human being craves recognition. Your customers are not different. If you factor in that no matter which industry you are currently operating, the competition is always very high, you cannot afford to ignore your customers. For that reason, you cannot afford not to meaningfully engage with your customers at all times. You must always do things to keep your business in the hearts and minds of your customers. Such things may seem small and little but the recognition and appreciation matter most. Periodically, you may choose to engage with your customers through discount sales, coupons and giveaways to boost your online visibility, enhance brand awareness and customer loyalty.  

5. Maintain Healthy Communication with Your Customers

In digital marketing, effective communication is very important and it must be a two-way type. It is not enough to just market to your customers. You must explore all ways to give them updated information regularly and encourage feedback from them. You can use effective online tools like emails and social media chats to communicate the latest updates in your business including discounts, new launches, promotions, and offers to your customers. By collecting and working on your customer feedback promptly and diligently, you can inspire more confidence in your business. That confidence gets a boost if you are always promptly responsive to their queries through good support services. You can somehow maintain long-term customer relationships based on good experience and trust arising from how you communicate with them. What you do easily gets passed around to others by word-of-mouth of your satisfied customers. That is one great way to use your existing customer base to gain new customers via a referral system.

How A2A Helps Build Your SFI Business

Affiliate to Affiliate (aka a2a) is a great tool in SFI which if used correctly can help build any affiliate’s business. Here are some of the ways you can use a2a to build your own business.

Through a2a, you can search, browse, and exchange messages with ANY SFI affiliate! Just click the "Add to Friends List" link on affiliate’s a2a pages with whom you wish to interact. Messages are sent through SFI's internal mail servers and are accessed at the SFI Affiliate Center when you log in. 


 
A2A allows you to identify SFI affiliates in your own country, state/province, or city; or search by gender, age, join date, common goals, and more...or any combination!

You can also create "buddy lists," brainstorm, share tips, discuss SFI news, and more.
One of the most valuable attributes of a2a is what it provides in LOCALIZED assistance. For example, by contacting other SFI affiliates in your area, you can learn about the best marketing methods and strategies for your region of the world. 

Here's another great way to use a2a. You can use it to contact local affiliates in your area and form local SFI support groups and organize local get-togethers.

But don't stop there. With a2a's powerful search capabilities, you can find affiliates just like you to interact with. For example, let's say you're a 35-year-old female who lives in London, England. Let's also say you joined SFIthree months ago. With a few clicks and a quick search, you can locate other SFI affiliates of your same age, gender, and location who started in SFI the same time as you did! Very cool!

Can you now see how useful a2a is in building your SFI business? 

Best Affiliates to Sponsor in SFI Business

It is best and worthwhile to sponsor any affiliate irrespective of their English language and Computer/Internet limitations. What matters is the seriousness of the affiliate and his/her ability to cope in SFI as a business. Language and Computer/Internet limitations therefore count for very little.

It appears SFI earlier envisaged these limitations hence the incorporation of language translation tools in the business. As for Computer/Internet limitations, all you need is just a working knowledge of both and SFI has taken steps to make everything else simple for all comers. For these reasons, anyone can do the business and make good at it irrespective of whether such persons have English language and Computer/Internet limitations.

 

 

5 Ways Collaboration Helps Your Small Business

Every small business owner always wants results, good results. That is why there is always an endless struggle to make the businesses more efficient, reputable and profitable. From experience, going it alone is at times very difficult but there is always a way around that which is simply by “collaboration.” Any small business owner who manages to engender a collaborative environment can drive better bottom line results. That is great! Here are 5 direct benefits small businesses can derive from collaborative efforts.

01. Access to More and Better Workers

Business collaboration makes available a wider potential pool of employees. You have available for use, outsourced workers, remote workers who may prefer their home environments to work for you and even part-time workers depending on your own business model. That arrangement gives you the flexibility to hire only persons who are best for the job, regardless of their locations. 

02. More Effective Communication

You may be aware that information is only valuable if it’s available to the right people at the right times. And, these are the people who can make use of that information for the sake of your business. Without a true collaboration system for your team, what happens is that your team gets to rely on regular communication methods like phone systems, text chat or email which could fragment such information. Fragmented information hurts your business real time but with systems collaboration, that problem can be resolved.

03. More Efficient Processes

Collaboration in the use of processes engenders efficiency by eliminating duplication of efforts. Duplication of efforts brews avoidable crisis and dissipation of energies resolving crises which would have been avoided in the first place. With crises, projects take longer to finish thereby making customers unhappy. But with better collaboration, employees and systems roles are better clarified leading to reduced crises and increased efficiency.

04. Better Customer Satisfaction

When systems work efficiently and employees stick with their roles, there is always better customer satisfaction. When friction is eliminated, your employees are happier and do give a better account of themselves in getting the work done. Naturally, that translates to better service for the satisfaction of customers. Employees’ collaboration engenders that and many small businesses can now take advantage of online collaboration tools to get things done in a better way.

05. Using Employee Strengths More Efficiently

No small business which is unable to tap into her employee strengths can ever be sufficiently productive. When project managers encourage their employees to work together on projects, they get the benefit of each person being able to work on activities that are most suited to their specific skills/strengths. That way, projects can be divided up more effectively based on proven skills. That is one great way to tap into employee strengths, a consequence of which a better and more effective job gets done. End result is improved productivity.