12 Most Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

The main aim of blogging online is to attract readership. Through this readership, bloggers attract traffic back to their websites. Every blog post attracts varied reaction from different readers. It is this reaction that directly determines the amount of traffic the blog post attracts. Therefore, if you make blogging mistakes, you will not only be lessening your blog’s potential to reach your target audience, it can severely damage your online reputation as well. This should be avoided at all cost. Understanding, avoiding or rectifying these here 12 common blogging mistakes is one great way to enhance your online presence and to reach a wider audience with your blog posts.

1. Ignoring the Power of Headlines in a Blog Post: If they don’t grab attention easily, blog headlines are no helpful headlines at all. A compelling headline is really crucial for grabbing readers’ attention. But, if your headlines are weak or uninteresting, people may not readily click on your posts. That goes a long way to reduce your click-through rate and overall blog traffic.

2. Neglecting Content Quality: Your blog cannot easily attract traffic if the content is of low quality. A poorly written, uninformative, or low-quality content can damage your blog’s credibility and reputation. When your blog content is of low quality, it will attract fewer backlinks and shares from other websites.

3. Choosing the Wrong Blogging Platforms: If you make the mistake of selecting an unsuitable blogging platform, it can limit your blog’s capabilities and customization options. Such mistake may also impact your ability to monetize and grow your blog effectively.

4. Not Optimizing Blog Posts for Sharing on Social Media: Most bloggers have found social media to be a valuable channel for promoting their blogs. So, if your blog content is not optimized to make it easily shareable, that mistake alone is sufficient to hinder the reach and growth potential of the blog.

5. Ignoring Mobile Optimization: Google now reports that a huge percentage of internet users do so via mobile devices and many of these users browse blogs on mobile devices. That makes it imperative for you to optimize your blog website for mobile. If your blog isn’t mobile-friendly, it can lead to a poor user experience, higher bounce rates, and lower search engine rankings. That ultimately results in severely lowering the amount of traffic it can attract.

6. Failing to Directly Engage with your Audience: When your blog posts lack engagement, such as comments and social shares, it is a direct indication of a lack of interest from your audience. This development can harm your blog’s reputation and make it less appealing to potential readers.

7. Inconsistent Blog Posting Schedules: If you want your blog to have a strong online presence, you must be consistent in your blog posting. Irregular blog posting is capable of confusing your audience and this can lead to a decline in readership. In blogging, consistency is key to building a loyal readership and maintaining a strong online presence.

 

8. Not Using Multimedia Blog Posts: If you want your blog to appeal to most internet users, you must consider using multimedia blog posts. Experience has shown that text-only blog content can become monotonous fairly quickly. So, if you fail or neglect to incorporate images, videos, infographics, and other multimedia elements in your blog posts, it can make the blog less engaging and less shareable. That directly affects the traffic the blog is likely to attract.

9. Failing to Use Data-Driven Analytics Insights: You need blog analytics to gauge the performance of your blog at any point in time. If you ignore analytics and user data, it simply means you may not understand what works and what doesn’t in your blog. Not knowing what works and what doesn’t in your blog can lead to a lack of improvement and stagnation in your blog’s performance.

10. Inconsistent Blog Writing Style: Consistency is hugely important in blog writing. If you are inconsistent is your writing, you risk confusing readers and it can make your blog appear less professional. So, if you endeavor to maintain a consistent style in your blog writing, it helps you to build brand identity and trust with your audience.

11. Overlooking the SEO Potential of Blog Images: If you want your blog images to be found and indexed by search engines, you must make deliberate efforts to optimize them. Optimizing your blog images for SEO can help to enhance your content. But, if you neglect or overlook image optimization, it can mean missing out on potential traffic from image searches.

12. Neglecting SEO in your Blog Content: Just like images, your content needs to be found and indexed by search engines. That helps to enhance the content for organic traffic. If you fail or neglect to optimize your blog posts for search engines, you miss out on potential valuable organic traffic. Such mistake can lead to lower visibility and fewer visitors to your blog. Technically, neglecting SEO in your blog content is a significant error in blogging. 

Top SEO Techniques to Drive More Affiliate Traffic

Are you are in affiliate marketing? Do you intend to increase organic traffic to your affiliate products? Yes! Search Engine Optimization, SEO techniques can help you out. If these techniques are properly deployed, any small change the techniques can engender in your marketing efforts can result in a major shift in traffic. It does not require rocket science to make that happen. Even if you are not an expert in coding or web development, you can quickly get the hang of it if you deploy the right techniques as will be discussed shortly. There may be numerous other strategies out there online that can help to get more traffic to your affiliate website but SEO techniques are great for organic traffic. If you adopt the following SEO techniques, it can quickly make a significant change in the traffic flow to your affiliate products.

Diversify Your Content: Content is the main sauce for affiliate marketing. The higher the quality of the content, the more traffic it attracts to your affiliate products. This is more so when you package your content in form of blog posts, infographics, podcasts, how-to videos, and others. Doing this helps the content to appeal to a wider audience. If the content is easily shareable, it helps to attract good traffic as well as increasing the chances of valuable backlinks.

Optimize Your Content for Search Intent: You can optimize your content for search intent by strategically using carefully selected keywords on the content to increase its visibility to search engines. The primary goal of using these keywords on your content should be to satisfy the search intent of users. If you think and research well, you’ll find out the keywords searchers are using to find your type of affiliate products. If you deploy such keywords in your content, when users type these keywords in their search intent, your affiliate products get thrown up in their search results.
 
Improve Your Website Speed: Website loading speed is a major ranking factor for SEO. The faster your website loads (about 2-5 seconds really), the more user-friendly it is. Most internet users are notoriously always in a hurry. So, nobody has the time to wait for a slow site to load. If you want to improve the load speed of your website, you can use online tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to periodically check your website’s speed. If your website is slow loading, you can consider optimizing images, leveraging browser caching, and optimizing CSS.

Source High-Quality Backlinks: Technically, backlinks are the backbone of SEO. Not all backlinks though but quality backlinks from reputable websites preferably. To get quality backlinks, you must aim for reputable and authoritative websites in your niche to link back to your site.
 
Link Your Content Internally: If you link your content internally, it is good for SEO. If you made any post on a related topic in the past, you can link back to it. Search Engines like it and they can use it to rank your content higher in their SERPs. Search engines recognize that internal linkage of content not only helps to keep the user engaged, but also spreads the link juice. 

Optimize for Mobile Devices: Google reports currently indicate that 60-70% of internet users now do so through mobile devices particularly smartphones and Tablets. Now, that’s a huge traffic out there you cannot afford to ignore. With such a huge number of people using smartphones for browsing, if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, definitely you're losing out. Optimizing your website to be mobile-friendly is your best bet to get a good slice out of that traffic. You can use online tools like Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to help you determine if your website meets the mark. If not, you should consider redesigning the website with a more mobile-user responsive design.

Stay Updated: Technically, SEO is not static. It is quite dynamic because of changes in internet technology and marketing techniques. Because SEO is always evolving with trends, you must make sure to stay updated with the latest trends at all times. This way, you can always quickly adjust your marketing strategies accordingly in tandem with trends.

Last Line

With the right SEO techniques, you can increase your affiliate traffic for the overall benefit of your business. With a little bit of patience and continuous learning, using the foregoing techniques, you can drive more targeted traffic to your affiliate website. That ultimately translates to more leads and sales as direct results of your marketing efforts.

A Concise Guide to Internet Marketing

Marketing something on the internet is still a bit strange to most people. It is usually strange to them too when you tell them they can actually do some selling on the internet and make good money. Fact is, anyone can get involved in internet marketing and make money if they are keen on following the rules and learning the ropes as they move along. If you are keen to make money on the internet yourself, these here tips can give you a concise guide on how to go about it.

Have a Reliable Internet Address

Your internet address is another name for your own website. You must have your website to market out of. That is your web office where you first make contact with internet users. If anyone is seeking to do business with you on the internet, your website is where they’ll have to come to find you and your wares. So, you must have a well-designed and well-hosted website that is user-friendly and mobile optimized to do business from. That is the type of website that can adequately serve as your reliable web address on the internet. When internet users search for your type of business using the right keywords on the website, search engines direct them to your website just as similar businesses.

Keep an Eye on Analytics

Analytics is all about capturing and measuring marketing data on the internet. The first in the series of analytics you must pay attention to is Google Analytics. This tool captures data that helps you to understand your website’s critical elements and how visitors are coming over to the website. With the insights you get from analytics data, you will know how and where traffic is coming from and what exactly they are looking for on your website. If you are marketing on social media, most of the popular social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest etc, have their own in-house analytics that can give you the right insights how your marketing is faring on each platform. You need these insights to tweak, redesign or redirect your marketing from time to time.

Invest in Digital Advertising

Aside organic traffic which you get from search engines, you can directly advertise online to get traffic if your marketing budget can accommodate the investment. You must take adequate care to be sure you spend your money doing the right things in the right places online. If not, you end up spending your money without getting good return on your investment. Paid digital advertising you can consider includes resources such as Google Ads, YouTube Ads, and social media advertising. These ads locations can help your marketing succeed if combined with the free organic traffic you get from search engines.
 
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

Recent Google reports indicate that over 60% of online data is attributable to mobile devices. That and with the fact that almost everyone is now having a smartphone in their hands, optimizing your website for mobile devices is now inevitable if you want to succeed in internet marketing. Since most consumers now do business online with these mobile devices, it is smart therefore to make sure your website is easily accessible by these devices. This you can do by making it mobile-friendly through optimization. Having a mobile-friendly website will make it possible for the users of these devices to easily access your website and do business with you.

 
Hone Your Designing Skills

To effectively market on the internet, your designing skills are going to come in handy at some point. So, you must learn these skills if you don’t have them or polish them up if you already have the skills. Yes, you may not be a natural artist but with the help of online tools, your designing skills can be easy for you. With these tools, you can design and present your products on your website in such a way as to make them very attractive to consumers. Tools like Photoshop and Canva are particularly very handy to create social media image posts, design beautiful banners and flyers for your internet advertising. These tools can even assist you with the right recommendations that can help boost your digital marketing.

Use Infographics Adequately

Images and photos are always very effective in internet advertising. This is because photos are usually more attractive and help us humans to retain information better. That’s the way the human brain is designed. For advertising purposes, it is not for nothing when marketers say, a picture is worth a thousand words. For this reason, in internet marketing, many people usually prefer to share images which people can easily see and understand than sharing text messages that people may not even bother to read. So if you use infographics adequately on your website, you can pull more traffic to the website as a result.

Be Visible on Social Media

With over 4.55 billion active users worldwide, social media has become one huge market out there on the internet. Therefore, getting your business on as many social media platforms as you can handle is one very smart move for marketing on the internet. Doing so helps to create valuable visibility for your business online. Depending on the products you are marketing and the market you are targeting, social media can help with the differentials exactly where to market to get the best results. Getting your business on social media is very easy through several social media apps out there if you want to pull more traffic and customers to your business. Once you have a reliable internet connection, staying relevant and having a strong social media presence requires real visibility on the platforms.

Summary

These tips are by no means exhaustive. If you are just venturing into the world of Internet Marketing, the foregoing tips will suffice for you to get started until you get a real hang on it. Navigating the deep world of the Internet is no tea party but you can get by with these concise tips. Just get started and you’ll learn vital techniques and tactics as you go along. 

Blog Smarter and Make Money Online

Many digital marketers are presently into blogging for the sole purpose of making money online. A huge percentage of them are trying real hard but not many bloggers are actually making good money online. Many of these bloggers keep wondering why this is and exactly what they need to do or do better to start making money too. The real difference between bloggers who are making money and those who aren’t is simply style. With over 600 million blogs active on the internet, less than 10% are really making good money. Now, that sounds a bit depressing but not to worry. You can make money too if you learn to blog smarter than most others. Most bloggers do about the same things with their blogs online, but those bloggers who manage to do these things a bit differently tend to have an edge over others. They tend to work smarter than others that is and they make more money too. Here are a few things you do better than others to enable you blog smarter and earn better.

Setting Up a User-Friendly Website

A user-friendly blog website is usually one of the very basic requirements for smart blogging. The site can also effectively serve as a credible business window in the internet world. If you aim to attract web visitors to your blog, the site must be well designed and friendly enough to welcome them. It is through this site you can deploy the right marketing techniques to advertise your business and attract customers. Through it, you must have the right information readily available to help the website visitors make their buy decisions on your e-commerce store. If your blog website is good enough, it should directly reflect your brand’s character personality and answer queries/questions or concerns visitors or even customers may have as they hit the site.

Deciding Your Business Niche
 
Blogging experts always advise that you must carefully choose the business niche you are passionate about for your blog. Doing so together with the demand for the product/service you are marketing hugely determine how much passive income you can make from your blogging efforts. That is smart blogging. It is why you must carefully decide on a niche you are passionate about to blog in. By doing so, you are more likely to blog with unlimited enthusiasm because of the passion you have for it. If for instance you are passionate about sports, you can settle for sportswear or sports equipment as your niche business. You can blog passionately about sports wears for instance with unlimited enthusiasm. This together with good products sales help you to make good income from blogging about such products.
   
High Quality Value-Filled Content

Smart bloggers don’t just write content for writing sake. Good blog content is always written for a specific purpose and must be full of value. It is the valuable content that helps to drive engagement, leads, customers and sales. Online, if your business consistently puts out quality content through your blog, your brand manages to gain some reputation for providing unique and quality content. That helps to attract more followers and a bigger audience. Your content can serve this purpose well if you optimize everything in the content. What smart bloggers do about that is somehow comprehensive but ranges from the keywords to the length of each blog post, web page or blog articles. Smart bloggers habitually use blog posts that contain a minimum of 300 words to about 2500 words in order to rank well in search engines. Good ranking in search engines translates to good organic traffic.

Optimizing Blogs for Search Engines

Without good traffic, it is virtually impossible to make money from your blog. Organic traffic with is attributable to search engines is about the best quality traffic you can get on your blog. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, makes that possible. With a good SEO on your blog, search engines will rank your content high on their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic. Many bloggers who are struggling to make money from their blogs either choose to ignore or neglect SEO on their blogs. That is not smart. To make SEO easy to implement even by bloggers, expert marketers recommend the following tools.

•    Google Trends: This tool helps to check the level of interest in a keyword and determine which keywords are becoming more popular is Google Trends.
•    SEMrush: This tool helps to provide information about website traffic, backlinks, keyword positions and ideas for search engine optimized content, among other things.
•    Moz: This tool helps to check the positioning of your website in search results. It is some kind of ranking based on link authority and importance of your website when compared to others. A website’s Moz ranking is determined by the number of backlinks it has, the value of those links, and the authority of the website’s domain. Moz ranking range is usually from 0-100. The nearer the score is to 100, the better the SEO of the website.

Website Marketing

The greatness of a website is in its design and user-friendliness. To blog out of your business website, it must be designed and hosted for that purpose. Professional webmasters are always handy here to give you a good website design you can blog out of. That is one very smart thing to do if you want to blog for money. A good blogging website must be user-friendly and fast loading. It must come with a full complement of social media buttons for easy sharing of your content as well as a Call-To-Action, CTA button. The wider you share your content, the more traffic your blog gets. Widely sharing your content is smart blogging no doubt.

Social Media Marketing

Sharing your blog content on social media is one very smart blogging strategy. Presently, social media is where over 3 billion people are active 24/7 around the world doing one thing or another. Now, that’s one very huge audience to get your blog content into to attract traffic. Social media is very popular and simple to use. It is highly effective too for content marketing. Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are about the most popular of these platforms. Sharing your blog content on these platforms helps to give it a very wide exposure. That is good for traffic and smart for blogging. Because of the ease of sharing content on social media, making your content go viral is fairly easy to do. Social media platforms in addition help to provide an easy-to-use two-way communication and inquiry channel making it easy to connect with your readers and to establish business relationships fairly smoothly.

Email Marketing

It is smart blogging to effectively share your blog content by email. But, first you must build your email list. As your blog audience grows, your followers grow too. Your followers list directly complements your email list as vital assets. Your followers automatically get email notifications if and when you post new content. Your email list is one very vital marketing asset you can diligently build over time and segment as well to receive your blog content. That is smart blogging too. Email marketing serves efficiently as a direct communication with your blog readers. Most people because of their busy schedules prefer blog content delivered by email which they can read at their own time and convenience. It is smart blogging to ensure everyone in your email/followers list gets notified every time you make a new blog post.

Diligent Keywords Research

Smart bloggers do not go into real blogging without diligent keywords research. Keywords research is hugely important for SEO because keywords are the real foundation of SEO.  You can take advantage of free online tools for your keywords research. Doing so will help you to discover the right keywords searchers are using online to find your type of business. Once you get the right keywords, you can deliberately use them in your blog content for the benefit of search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Relevant online keyword tools can help you to find the best keywords related to your demographic. If you deploy these keywords in your blog content correctly, it helps your SEO.

Smart bloggers always crave a robust online presence for their blogs. Working out of their blog websites in digital space, bloggers want to be noticed by people who are actively searching for goods and services online. Smart bloggers are aware that a very large percentage of searchers habitually turn to Google for every search query and question. As a very active search engine, Google works with keywords to decide exactly what to serve to people in direct response to their search queries.  When people enter a “keyword or phrase” on the search engine box and hit the search button, Google displays millions of webpages offering similar products/services relating to the keywords or phrases. These keywords and phrases tend to work like connectors, connecting brands to their curious audiences online. Smart bloggers deliberately optimize their blog content to position their blogs for organic traffic. It is the clever placement of these keywords and phrases on their content that helps these bloggers to get this much-needed traffic.

Every search query on Google has an intention. The reason smart bloggers classify search intent into three categories. These are navigational, transformational, and transactional search intent. Bloggers depend on keywords to help them understand user search intent. That is what smart bloggers use to design quality and effective content. Once you understand search intent and how it works, you will find it easier to deploy and display more relevant information to correctly target your audiences. For instance, a searcher with transactional intent will use a brand name or location in the keyword to target a “product categories” page. Such keywords help search engines to direct the searchers towards the right blog content. That helps to save time for searchers by eliminating the hassle of surfing websites aimlessly in search of what blog content they need to read.

Earning Quality Backlinks

Google algorithms take backlinks into consideration when ranking blog content.  Smart bloggers know this and they take maximum advantage of it. For bloggers, links can thus make a considerable difference in the search rankings and SEO of their blog content. Smart bloggers earn backlinks by interacting with high-quality blog platforms and institutions by way of blog commenting and guest blogging. If these links are from reputable, high-authority institutions like universities and research institutions, good blog websites and reputable publications, so much the better. Strong and high quality backlinks do not only increase credibility for your blog content, they also help it to rank high in Google SERPs.

Optimizing for Local Searches

Smart bloggers know that every small business is local. They know that most searchers first search for businesses “near me” on Google when they get online. The reason they usually optimize their blog websites for local searches. Such blogs get to benefit from the huge local search results out there. If you blog for business and your business location is part of your local SEO, major search engines like Google take note. That helps to increase the visibility of your blog particularly to local searchers which is the target audience of the business you blog for. On social media, if you set up your business as a location on Facebook for instance, it can ensure that users tag you on account of that location. That again helps to amplify the visibility of your blog/business.

Smart bloggers carefully place geographically-related keywords as often as possible in the titles, headers, image tags, body, and meta descriptions of their blog websites to increase local visibility. Even when describing the products/services you are blogging about, you must ensure that you are optimizing your location. Make sure your location is in the blog/business listings as in GMB, social media profiles, and your blog website pages. That helps your blog/business visibility in your locality a great deal because more local traffic finds your blog as a result.

Wrapping Up

Blogging for business online is a hugely competitive one because most digital marketers are currently blogging as part of their marketing strategy. These bloggers do most of the foregoing things and much more to project their blogs within the huge competition out there on the internet. However, it is only smart bloggers who get to make good money from their blogs. That comes down to as low as 10% of all bloggers on the internet. Not to worry though. If you blog smart yourself, you too can quietly join that somewhat elite group and make money from blogging. Just get your hands on it and commence smart blogging now. Good luck!

5 Effective Email Marketing Strategies for your Small Business

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

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

1. Personalize Your Email Messages

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

2. Optimize Your Email Messages for Mobile

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

3. Segment Your Subscriber Base

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Routinely Test Your Emails

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

5. Leverage User-Generated Content, UGC

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

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

Wrapping Up

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

5 Digitized Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Increase ROI

These days, both direct and indirect marketing techniques are evolving rapidly. The main targets of the marketers are good Return on Investment, ROI and lead generations. To get appreciable results, business owners have largely targeted influencers and individuals who can divert customers and online users to products offered by product merchants and e-commerce websites. Many depend on affiliate marketing to set things in motion with a view to getting increased ROI. That is achievable because affiliate marketing is largely cost-effective in design and approach. Through it, business owners target customers through various third-party platforms and influencers. Affiliate marketers and data tracking tools also assist brands/products, and online ventures to optimize their marketing approach and targeted strategies. This too is great for ROI. This is more so when affiliate marketers work only for a commission or on percentage basis so costs can be tightly controlled. Even at that, affiliates can still earn good money by promoting products/services mostly out of free and very popular social media platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok.

 

These here five digitized affiliate marketing strategies can help to increase the ROI for your online business if diligently used.

1. Diversified Marketing

Online marketers tend to get the best results when they target the right audience. That is, an audience with common needs, perspectives, ideas and even thinking, anywhere it is around the globe. In that wise, Influencers and data management tools can greatly assist brand managers to align their user-centered content and advertising streams for best results. This requires some well enhanced marketing techniques to produce substantial results and ultimately a solid online presence. So, by producing user-friendly and globally accepted content, you will attract more audiences and more online visitors. That is diversified marketing. A diversified online market tends to generate more revenue, traffic, and potential leads.

2. Seasonal and Trends Marketing

Affiliate marketers habitually stick with products that sell well. Some of these products may be seasonal and trending at the time. The reason is simple. They want to earn commissions. That is why their marketing approach is always customer-oriented advertisements, products, and online activities. It is much easier for them that way to generate substantial online traffic and revenue. It is for same reasons online marketers and social media Influencers do not stick with just one brand/product permanently. The trend is to constantly search for new opportunities, products and brands with greater customer interaction and commission earning probabilities.
 
3. Indirect and Traditional Marketing

For good ROI, marketers now explore many ways to replace traditional marketing with affiliate marketing in digital space. It is now more cost-effective to promote products by way of affiliate marketing than traditional marketing techniques. With the help of AI-based automation, marketing messages can be more widely sent out through emails and social media platforms. Such messages are better targeted and better tracked too with the help of online smart tools when compared to newspapers and TV ads. These days, not many people search out for ads and products in local newspapers and contemporary markets. With a computer and even a smartphone, buyers and sellers get better connected on the Internet than in traditional marketing channels. The Internet is a well-diversified online market. Through it, many buyers easily connect and interact with genuine sellers from across the globe. With influencers, social media, data tracking and ads management tools coming into the mix, brands/businesses are better able to align their marketing campaigns for good results. That is good for ROI.

 

4. Video Content Marketing

In digital marketing, video content usually attracts more than 60% of the online visitors. Now that’s one huge market chunk serious marketers cannot afford to ignore. What to do? Device marketing strategies that will send people to your product page when they go through the product description after watching the product video. This is why highly effective Influencers and affiliate marketing platforms usually record and shoot videos of products and publish them online to engage a greater audience. Influencers and social media marketers rely heavily on the use of videos on YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook live stories to attract potential leads towards their products. Video content because of its captivating visuals appeals more to the user’s interest, making him more inclined towards buying a product while checking it out. This is why digitized marketing techniques backed by video content significantly help to increase interaction rate. That ultimately leads to more sales and increased ROI.

5. Business-To-Business, B2B Marketing

B2B is one credible way Influencers and affiliates can align their sales and marketing strategies to generate greater ROI and in turn create a solid online presence. Through B2B marketing strategy, online digital space has enabled online brands and businesses to collaborate well with Influencers and affiliate marketing techniques. The end result of this collaboration is higher ROI for all parties. This happens because, with the all-important optimization strategy, affiliate marketers are no longer limited in scope on who to market to. Through B2B strategy, they are able to effectively divert the right traffic from the websites and landing pages of one business to another. That greatly helps affiliate marketers to increase their commissions earning potentials. It plays out nicely and more beneficially for ROI when businesses and enterprises outsource their services to expose themselves to greater audiences on various platforms particularly social media.

3 Smart Ways Online Marketers Can Boost Their Personal Productivity

Most online marketers usually face huge challenges in their daily activities and it affects their productivity a great deal. These challenges range from SEO, website optimization, internet access device optimization, managing traffic and rankings, PPC campaigns, social media marketing, Search Engine marketing, Email marketing, online reputation management and so on. By taking on these many marketing activities, (even if necessary for your overall marketing success), productivity at times takes a dip. That is more so if you have no viable and workable plan in place to take on the numerous marketing tasks. Then what to do? Simple! Just put a little planning in place to help curb the challenges. That helps your online productivity a great deal. If you take my tips, follow the simple measures below and even make them routine practices, they can help boost your online marketing productivity a great deal.

  

1. Break Up Your Marketing Tasks Into Smaller Bits

Breaking your marketing tasks into smaller bits/milestones creates simplicity and easy achievability. That helps your online productivity. Just spare quality time to create, daily, weekly and monthly tasks you need to take on for your marketing. Follow this plan diligently by accomplishing one task before moving on to the next. That helps to provide direction and the impetus to accomplish more tasks. When tasks are in smaller bits, they become more realistic and easily achievable. By the time you chalk off one task after another on completion, it makes you feel good. That provides the right motivation to keep things going smoothly till you achieve your targets.  Once you achieve your targets as planned, your productivity goes up naturally.

2. Avoid Distractions with Good Planning

Online marketers can do well to always avoid distractions. With distractions, marketers tend to dissipate energy and resources unnecessarily. Inevitably, online marketers have to daily browse other websites and visit many social media platforms. That is where many of the distractions are unless you are strictly guided by what takes you to each site and to exit the site as soon as you are through with it. That requires prior planning. Good planning helps online marketers to manage their to-do lists effectively and efficiently. With it, they can check procrastination and missing out on tasks, spending too long a time a one site and getting attracted to other issues on these sites outside what they planned for. Good planning allows online marketers to focus on real work and steering clear of accessing websites that have nothing to do with the work at hand. If as a marketer you are unable to make conscious efforts to avoid these distractions, you can engage a time-tracking tool to help manage your time well online. Doing so can be great for productivity.

 

3. Always Optimize Your Internet Access Device

Clutter naturally slows down internet access devices particularly computers. Since online marketers usually have a resource-intensive job that requires that they access countless sites and toggle between multiple sites simultaneously on regular basis, picking up a lot of clutter is a given. Without removing this clutter regularly, you inadvertently slow down the performance and efficiency of such devices. Therefore, you must routinely take deliberate steps to optimize the device you are using to access the internet with a view to maintaining its high performance and on memory fronts. Fortunately, there are very handy remedies to turn to if you want to boost your productivity with a super fast computer. You can easily use the right software among the many available online to clean up your computer systems and get rid of the redundant files and apps slowing it down. It is that simple. 

Proven Marketing Strategies for Conversion Rate Optimization

If you run your small business online, conversion rate optimization ensures you get the highest conversion rate possible by marketing effectively and managing your sales process efficiently. This warrants that you focus on all types of conversions to help the steady growth of your sales revenues. This also means a better focus on all marketing actions and activities that lead to conversion rate optimization. Many of these activities revolve around content marketing which greatly underpins conversion rate optimization. Your website content must be of high quality, educational and informative enough to be of any help to the conversion rate optimization of the site.

Here are some tested and proven content marketing strategies helpful for conversion rate optimization.

Leverage Social Media

Presently, social media because of its huge popularity appears to be one of the greatest tools for boosting business conversions available to business owners. You can leverage your marketing activities on this popularity to get good results. First thing is to get your business on social media and build a steady following for it. Next is to share your marketing messages and even promos widely on the platforms. That will help your business to better elicit engagement and interactions with its social media audience. With an engaged social media following, leads, conversions, customers and sales follow in logical sequence from your efforts.

Improve Your Website Content

The most effective marketing window for your business online is your website. By steadily populating your website with high quality content, you increase its ability to attract traffic. You must therefore endeavor to fill your website with the right content that is well aligned with your business niche. This you can do with effective and creative blogging on the site to address your website visitors’ needs for useful information. Blog posts that provide real value to readers are the most helpful as against those that overtly promote products/services which may be boring in the main.

Market with Captivating Videos

Having a captivating explainer or how-to video on the homepage of your website can be very effective to engage and convert customers. You can explore a range of different tactics to ensure that your video content greatly helps your conversions. If for instance, as with explainer videos you are able to provide value to show customers how your products help them to solve problems, it can be great for your conversions. Videos showing customers how to use your products can help to ensure buyer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction helps to increase recommendations and improves reviews in no small measure.

Personalize Your Content

As most online marketers very well know, personalized content is always a very effective content to market with. Therefore, you need to explore all ways to make things personal for your business customers. In this quest, you need reliable data and metrics which you can obtain through Google Analytics and Email marketing automation tools. You can effectively use this data to optimize your content to meet the needs of individual consumers. Doing so can result in higher sales figures for your business.

Improve Your Website Loading Speed

Online surfers are always in notorious haste. The reason smart marketers like to capture their attention as quickly as possible. To do this effectively, aside from improving on the content of your website, you also need to improve the loading speed of the website. Ideally, you should ensure every page on your website loads in just 2-3 seconds since many visitors have little patience with slow loading websites. A fast loading website helps to decrease the bounce rate on the site, while slow loading increases it. A decrease in bounce rate keeps visitors longer on the site and helps conversions better.

Use Strong Calls-To-Action, CTAs

It is not good marketing to leave it to chance that your website visitors know how to convert. Visitors must be “lured” to do something for them to do what is expected when they hit your business website. That is where the right call-to-action, CTA becomes imperative in effective marketing. With the right CTA, marketers can effectively lead buyers where they want them to go and to take the right actions they want them to take. Some of such actions include helping to commit your website visitors to a purchase by showing them exactly what they need to do. When your CTAs are strong and effective, they engender more conversions and sales.

10 Tips to Nurture your Business’s Digital Marketing Authority

The virtual internet world is a very wide world where digital marketers do their thing. It is very difficult to succeed out there unless you can maintain your digital marketing authority. To enhance that, it is crucial to understand how to nurture and optimize your digital marketing authority. These here, 10 marketing tips can be of help in that quest.  

1. Regularly Update Your Website

Updating your website regularly is to keep up with the changes that may inevitable occur in the course of running a business. Because consumers are always looking for authentic information on how to do business with you, be sure your website is current and up-to-date at all times. Changes in hours of business, products on offer, ongoing promos, sales promos, and new discounts and coupons on offer, must always be fully updated to reflect what is current on your website. Doing so makes it easy for your customers to get any relevant information they are looking for.

2. Measure Your Progress with Google Analytics Tools

Without analytics, it is difficult to gauge how well your business is doing in the digital space. If you have a credible and reliable way of finding out how you are doing, it helps you to better utilize and optimize the time you spend on your digital marketing efforts. Google Analytics free online tools are very good to use for these measurements. If your business is on social media (i don’t see why it shouldn’t be there), you also have access to their free tools as well. You can access such free tools on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and others that give easy Insights about the progress of your business.  These tools help you to accurately measure the digital marketing progress of your business on social media and they are free to use. 

3. Work Your Marketing Plan

In digital marketing, it helps to have a marketing plan and to work this plan. Make sure your marketing plan is always up-to-date and workable as well. Your marketing plan is a good plan if it reflects your target market, the mission and vision of your business. If your online and offline marketing efforts fit well into your plan, you can better connect with your current and new customers by endeavoring to work the plan diligently. A good marketing plan helps provide a reliable guide to ensure you use your valuable time wisely and profitably.

4. Focus on Your Customers

Customers are the main reason you are in business. Your business focus must always be on them and for them. If you have some good insights into what their needs are and what they are searching for online, you can better channel your marketing efforts to those areas. If you want to have a better understanding of your audience, and what their needs are, you can use free online analytics and data tools. The most popular of these free tools are Google Analytics, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Insights. For the success of your digital marketing efforts, the more and better you understand your customers, the more the likelihood of your success in marketing to them. Information from your key customers’ feedback if well utilized can also help your digital marketing efforts.

5. Market with Engaging Content 

In digital marketing, content is king. It must be informative, educating and even entertaining to be useful. For this reason, you must take adequate care and time to create visual content that easily captures your consumers’ attention. Good content must adequately highlight a combination of the vision and mission of your business with the products/services you are promoting, promos, business updates, CTAs and such like business building/promoting activities. A healthy mix of good aesthetics, graphics, photos and video content help make an appealing and engaging content.

6. Optimize Your Website

Your website is your online business window. It serves that purpose better if it is visible to search engines. It is only visible to search engines if it is optimized for that purpose. Search Engine Optimization, SEO helps your customers to find your business easily online. Website optimization is an extremely vital element in determining the relevance and authority of your website on the web. If you claim and regularly update your “Google My Business” business profile, it helps your online presence and authority. By optimizing each page on your website with unique meta-tag descriptions and keywords, it is easy for your customers and even potential customers to find your business. Your business online authority is also better enhanced if you can link the site to other websites, social media pages, blogs, etc. Alt titles and descriptions to each image/video on your website further reinforce the authority of the site.

7. Take Advantage of Your Social Media Presence 

Your social media presence is a very credible way to connect easily with customers. You must take full advantage of that. Your social media efforts should reflect your goals as part of your marketing plan. Taking your business on social media is an effective way of marketing to your customers where they are. By optimizing your presence on social media and properly tailoring your messages to suit each platform and effectively using good content with graphics and videos, you can easily catch customers’ attention. A direct consequence of that is more business exposure and customer engagement. Ultimately, your online presence and authority is better enhanced and in no small measure.

8. Stay Connected with Reviews/Feedback

It is smart business to always ask your customers for feedback. That helps you to stay connected with them. The feedback and testimonials from your customers most times is the easiest and most effective way to gauge how valuable your products/services are to them. Responding professionally and encouraging them to keep sending feedback helps in no small measure to nurture your online authority and to grow your business.   

9. Engage Customers with Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing methods to stay in touch with your customers and to nurture your online authority. If you choose to use the services of MailChimp or Constant Contact to assist you, you can automatically send frequent emails to your customers as a very effective way of keeping them fully informed on what your business is up to at any point in time. Your online authority is better enhanced as a result.  

10. Use Paid Advertising as Needed

Most small businesses are always on shoestring budget for advertising. The reason they depend more on free online advertising. If however you want to market to many more people and free advertising is not helpful enough, you can decide to supplement that with some paid advertising as needed within the limits of your ads budget. In paid advertising, the higher your budget, the higher your reach. If however your ads budget is severely restrictive, you can in addition use social media advertising. Characteristically, social media advertising offers a fairly inexpensive way to reach more potential customers and customers. Social media makes it possible for you to target easily, different locations, audiences, interests and behavior patterns around the globe 24/7.