5 Proven Ways to Earn with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an excellent option if you want to earn some extra income online. It is largely performance-based and it allows you to create your own income depending on the efforts you put in. These efforts depend hugely on your affiliate marketing skills/techniques. As affiliate marketing business keeps developing, there are many strategies, techniques and methods many marketers choose to use but it is always best to stick with what works for you. These here 5 proven ways can help you to earn some extra income online through affiliate marketing.

 

1. Market the Right Products

Firstly you must choose and market the type of product people want to buy. That is the right product. Marketing every product that you come across is wasteful and unproductive. It is best to focus on the product you love, have used and you know how to promote. That way, you’ll know the exact type of product that is relevant to your audience and they’re more likely to purchase. That is the best product to promote.

2. Blog for Traffic

Attracting traffic to your website where your affiliate links are can help you to get good traffic, leads and actual sales. That is where a good blog becomes hugely relevant. For traffic purposes, a blog is quite an excellent idea to help drive your affiliate marketing activities. If done correctly, a good blog can help generate decent income from your affiliate marketing activities. The more traffic the blog attracts to your website, the higher your chances of making sales. By regularly updating your blogs and content, you can build up traffic and your audience with time. But, be sure you only blog about what people want to read, understand and learn from. That is what helps to keep them coming back to your website for more.

3. Optimize Your Content

Optimizing your website content is one great way to position your website to benefit from organic traffic. That is the type of traffic that comes through search engines. The reason it is called Search Engine Optimization, SEO technique. Online, SEO optimizes your content so that it ranks high when people search it on search engines. There is usually a significant increase in product review search results if SEO is in place. Your chances of earning a good commission are greatly enhanced if your affiliate marketing product appears in these searches.

4. Market on Social Media

For your affiliate marketing activities on social media, it is advisable to target the very popular platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. Some of these platforms have in-house free tools that are hugely effective for affiliate marketing activities. Facebook for instance is the most popular social media platform and has well over 2.5 billion active users. Now that’s one huge audience to market to 24/7 if you know what you’re doing. Just set up a free account on any of these hugely popular platforms and boom, your affiliate marketing business kick-starts in earnest.

5. Do Video Promotions

Live videos are highly recommended because of their effectiveness. With videos, online buyers tend to trust your marketing information more. For this reason, you must make your video promotions as authentic as feasible. You can for instance make how-to videos of yourself using a product and reviewing it live for the benefit of your audience. Doing so is one great and effective way to promote the product through affiliate marketing because audience response is usually quite great.

6 Ways Social Media can Benefit your Small Business

For most small business owners, social media clearly presents countless opportunities for potential and existing customers to engage with their businesses. It is a veritable environment for these customers to read blog and marketing content, ask questions, make suggestions, share content of their own and much more. In fact, some surveys suggest that over 70% of small businesses greatly depend on social media as part of their overall marketing strategy. If your small business is presently not on social media, you are missing a lot. Take quick steps to invest in social media marketing if you want to reach more customers and boost online authority for your small business.

These here are 6 ways your small business can greatly benefit from social media marketing.

1. Build Brand Authority

When your business has brand authority, it enhances its online visibility. That translates to good traffic, more leads, customers and sales. If you market your business on social media, you can quickly establish thought leadership through showcasing your expertise, sharing valuable content, and constantly engaging and interacting with your followers. Doing so effectively helps to stand your business out among its peers. It confers the business with brand leadership and authority which help it to win the trust of potential customers and customers alike.

2. Attract New Customers

For many small businesses more customers simply means more business. If you market your business on social media, it greatly increases your chances of acquiring new customers. When your social media marketing strategy is right and effective, the business easily attracts new customers organically and/or through paid efforts. That translates to more customers, more business, more sales and more revenues.

3. Boost Brand Awareness

If you are desirous to quickly build brand awareness for your business, just get it on social media. These days, nearly everyone is on social media doing one thing or another. That is what makes social media one great place to boost your brand awareness. Social media presents an array of business opportunities and tools business owners can take advantage of to reach a wider audience and build brand awareness. Many social media platforms help businesses to get in front of a wide array of potential customers through brand awareness.

4. Regularly Engage Your Followers

With social media, businesses can easily engage their new and existing followers for marketing purposes. Through these regular engagements, businesses can build brand loyalty and grow their referral networks exponentially. These engagements are also great to attract new customers and grow your business. You can further boost these engagements by answering business questions directly and regularly providing valuable content to your followers on social media.

5. Improve Your Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Some online marketing studies indicate that there is a significant correlation between improved social media signals and increased search engine rankings. Every business owner wants traffic to their business websites right? A good SEO helps to enhance that, particularly the highly valuable organic traffic. If you implement a good SEO in your social media marketing, it impacts your marketing activities particularly in terms of improving your Search Engine rankings and organic traffic.

6. Retain Existing Customers

Smart business owners do not just seek new customers only. They also take deliberate steps to retain existing customers. With deliberate efforts at regularly engaging your existing customers on social media, it enhances their continued loyalty to your brand. Enhanced customer loyalty usually translates to better business and more sales. It also helps to grow your referral networks for the benefit of the business. Your existing customers must have had some good reasons for becoming your customers in the first instance. You can continue to nurture these reasons with more engagements through direct answers to their business inquiries and concerns, providing them valuable marketing content and much more on social media.

6 Essential Digital Marketing Tips for New Marketers

As a result of the forced restrictions occasioned by Covid-19 global pandemic, many more people are taking to digital marketing. These people may be new in the world of digital marketing but they do find it essentially rewarding though. New marketers into the digital marketing world easily discover how digital marketing can help to grow their businesses online. They find that they can promote their products better and at lower costs, increase the search rankings of their websites and build their brands much faster. Being new in the business may be intimidating, but new marketers quickly discover that there is room for everyone to do business successfully on the internet provided they know what they are doing.

If you are a new online marketer and you are desirous to start off on the right foot and to quickly get some traction online, do not ignore these six tips.

Tip #1. Establish Your Online Presence

Even if you are new in digital marketing and no matter the type of business you are involved in, having an online presence is crucial to generating new leads and building your brand. Digital marketing is not only essential to growing your business, it is the real key to unlocking its potential. If you launch your business website, you can establish your online presence very strongly by exploring everything that website development and SEO have to offer to your business. Doing these things consistently online with some digital marketing strategies helps to quickly establish a very strong presence for your business online. Strong online presence usually translates to more and better traffic and business.
 
Tip #2. Create Quality Content

In online marketing, content is king. The better the quality of your content, the more useful it becomes. For this reason, when are you are building a website, social media presence, or any other digital campaigns, do not ignore content marketing. Without it, building your brand and attracting organic traffic to your business are usually uphill tasks. Other visuals are hugely important on your business website but quality and relevant content are almost indispensable in your web advertising schemes and strategies. That is what helps to get the much needed traffic to your website. Even with experienced marketers, from crafting blog posts to infographics, finding the right kind of content that speaks to your audience is at times a matter of trial and error. Even at that, marketers tend to do better as they try their hands on a combination of efforts. To get what works and gets results, a combination of quality content types, like text and video, text and photos, text and graphics usually provide a rich experience for your audience to appreciate and respond to. New marketers cannot afford to ignore this.

Tip #3. Target the Right Audience

Yes, marketing the right product to the right people at the right time is hugely beneficial to marketers. This is why new marketers must always endeavor to target specific audiences with their marketing campaigns. For instance, depending on the product you are selling, you need local SEO on your website to find your targeted demographics. With local SEO, you can directly target customers from your street, county, city, state and your country. The advantage of local SEO lies is its ability to help marketers focus on and to get customers from their local environments. Local SEO helps your business to build a stronger ranking in the towns or geographical areas where your customers are most likely to come from. With that, your business will thrive better by directly reaching those who need your products the most. That is direct audience targeting.

Tip #4. Set Long-Term Goals

Marketing without set targets and goals is not helpful to new marketers. Digital marketing is most effective when you set out with clear goals and how you intend to achieve the goals. If you are new in marketing, having a specific goal in place helps to kick start your journey. You can for instance set targets for the marketing tools and channels you are using, set your expected inbound traffic volume, leads volume, sales volume and so on. As you market along, with the help of online analytics tools, you can measure the results you are getting, take decisions and redirect or rejig your marketing campaigns to improve on your results.

 

Tip #5. Create Brand Awareness

The biggest challenge you may face as a new marketer is how to effectively get your brand out there in front of customers. Technically, that means how to effectively create brand awareness for your brand. Here, you need the right strategies to build your brand online. To do it effectively, you need to pay attention to the basics of online marketing. First you need a user-friendly business website that is optimized for search engines. That means it will have its own unique SEO. On the website, pay particular attention to the right text fonts, colors and logos and exactly what you offer and what makes you different from your competitors. This info helps to distinguish your business, giving it a good online presence. Having a distinguished online presence usually opens multiple pathways for connecting your brand with users. That helps to improve your website's online authority which brings in more traffic to the website. Marketing online is a matter of building a credible online image for your business and you can use an array of digital marketing tools to do so efficiently. That helps to build your brand through the resultant brand awareness from these efforts.

Tip #6. Make SEO a Priority

These days, it is inevitable that every digital marketing website must be optimized for search engines. Search Engine Optimization, SEO is what search engines rely on to send organic traffic to websites. SEO involves a wide range of tactics, techniques and tools that help you monitor and improve your position in search results. If you have the knowledge, you can do SEO for your website yourself, but if not, hiring a webmaster or any other technical expert to help you out is a good idea. SEO gives you an objective glimpse into what your consumers want and what grabs people's attention. For that reason, SEO doesn't just increase traffic to your website, it also helps to improve the quality of your leads. With a good SEO, your website benefits from direct organic traffic, meaning you get visitors from organic web searches free of costs. That, no doubt helps to enhance your web presence and visibility a great deal.

How to Use Digital Marketing to Effectively Engage Local Consumers

With digital marketing, it is much easier to build and nurture mutually beneficial marketing relationships with local consumers than traditional marketing methods. With it, you can more easily create new partnerships, nurture leads and establish long-term business relationships with local consumers. The reasons for this are simple. Digital marketing allows business owners to segment consumers and specifically direct marketing messages to the segmented groups where ever they are locally.
 
These are few digital marketing tips to help businesses win new customers and build better relationships with local consumers.

 

Market with Local SEO

As a business owner, if you optimize your website for local searches, you will get more local customers. What your website needs is local Search Engine Optimization SEO. Every business in any case is local and if you make it easy for consumers to locate your business easily online, you get more of local consumers as customers. If your website is optimized for local searches, it helps major search engines particularly Google to direct searchers looking for local businesses to your website. Local SEO helps your website to stay high in the search results and get better local traffic. To enhance this, you must spend time to carefully embed the right keywords on your website. Be sure to use these keywords naturally within the texts throughout your content pages. You get good local traffic if these keywords hone in with what local consumers are searching for “near me.”

Engage with Local Online Business Directories

Yes indeed because these directories consider your business location in their listings. When searchers use these directories, they can locate businesses near them that they can easily do business with. This is how Business Directories help you to increase your business reach. Many of these directories allow free listings on their platforms. Below are some free listing platforms many expert marketers recommend.
1.    Google My Business, GMB
2.    Apple Maps
3.    Bing
4.    Yelp
5.    MapQuest
6.    Super Pages
7.    Yellow Book
8.    Facebook
9.    LinkedIn Company Directory
10.    Instagram
If your business manages to increase the number of citations in these directories, it helps to increase the number of backlinks to your website. This is why it is good to sign up and list your business in all these directories. Doing so helps your business with local SEO. This directly boosts your website in search results, and helps local consumers to easily find you.

Partner with Local Businesses

Partnering with other local businesses helps to cut operational costs and increases efficiency. These are very clear and very tangible benefits. If you review how other businesses are presenting their businesses to local consumers and you use the information for your own marketing strategy, you get better results. You can even arrange mutually beneficial partnerships with other businesses to create better digital sales. Even though every digital marketing strategy may work a little differently for each business, businesses can exchange links and help direct searchers to find items elsewhere similar to what they are marketing themselves. Digital marketing makes that possible.

Leverage Your Contact Us Page

The “Contract Us” and “About Us” pages of any website are usually very powerful marketing tools online. These pages showcase multiple ways to get in touch with the business owner or marketer. The pages make it convenient for potential buyers to easily reach out to the business. Marketers must endeavor to leverage on these pages by optimizing their websites to include detailed location information. Major search engines like Google determine local ranking by relevance, distance, and prominence. This simply translates to how well your location content matches what someone is searching for, how far away their location is to you, and how strong your overall online presence is. This is why it is extremely important to be consistent and accurate with your location information on relevant pages particularly the “Contact Us” and “About Us” pages. If you regularly update your website with accurate information, when local consumers search online for the products you are offering, your business will receive favorable search positioning in search engine results. That translates to more and better organic traffic to your website.

Effective Content SEO Strategy in Brief

Developing a content SEO strategy by marketers is not always a very easy task. Marketers need it for good marketing results though. It is thus inevitable that marketers must have a good content SEO strategy if they want their marketing businesses to survive competition. A good content SEO strategy requires good planning, skillful and deft deployment of carefully selected keywords in your content. Despite the difficulties involved, it is doable and worthwhile. Expert marketers recommend that for a good content SEO strategy, deliberate efforts must be made to properly place and site targeted keywords in your content. Doing so helps to provide the ideal content that appeals to a very broad audience. That is what helps a business website to get valuable organic traffic.

To have an effective content strategy, marketers must first search for and settle for the keywords suitable to their business niche. You can do this by using comprehensive SEO toolset like Ahrefs.com. This tool helps marketers to identify keywords not only based on their search volume, but also with information about how difficult it might be to rank your business within the keywords. Now, that is very valuable insight that smart marketers cannot afford to ignore. With such insights marketers have access to very valuable information to enable them work smarter not harder, by getting the most out of their own individual efforts.

Marketers can also use software that utilizes data and online search results to analyze briefs for search volume, SEO difficulties, and the length of content to help content writers compose very valuable drafts. Automation can help these processes even better to save valuable time and resources, by streamlining the content pipeline to add consistency and stability to it. The bottom line is a good SEO strategy and these efforts come in very handy in that quest.
 
It is imperative for marketers to attempt to provide at all times, content that Google can insert into its “People Always Ask” results. For organic traffic purposes, this must also be an important element of your content SEO strategy. Marketers now know that these types of Google-featured results aim to predict what else a user might want to know. That is why Google inserts a trustworthy source amongst its search results and even clips out a section of your article source to embed in the page. When marketers work to build outlines on their content pages that are detailed and thorough enough, Google may surface these pages and offer keyword rankings based on the natural value of the information the content serves.

In matters of using links in content SEO strategy, you can hardly have anything as helpful as building links even though experts recommend that links be used very sparingly and intelligently. If not, they could backfire on the marketer through punitive actions from search engines. About four to five internal links per article is ideal and recommended. If a major search engine like Google for instance detects that your backlinks are, stuffed densely and haphazardly into the body of your content, it will reject them and punish your website for it. Additionally, these links must be to credible and verifiable sources. When backlinks cite properly to credible sources, they help to increase your own credibility through offering accurate information.

It is good for your content SEO strategy if you endeavor to streamline your articles with Google requirements. If you write for Articles Directories for instance, it is a requirement that you include an “Author Box” or “Resource Box” on your articles. This box must include the author’s name, photo/Avatar, a bit of information about the author’s background, qualifications, experience and in some cases a link to his website. This works to help the author meet Google’s standards as a source of credible and authoritative information. Google is very particular about providing its users with the highest quality information. If you have built your own online identity/reputation as a trusted source, Google is glad to share your information with its users. That helps your content SEO strategy a great deal.

Effective Digital Marketing Techniques in a Pandemic

Even within a pandemic and restrictions on movements, every digital marketer wants to remain in business. Effective digital marketing techniques come in very handy in that quest.  With social networking, digital marketers do quite a lot of amazing things in their businesses at these times as well. However, there is much more to digital marketing than just networking on social media. Other techniques are also effective and allow you to have more and better control over your marketing activities. If you are a digital marketer who feels like your business is restricted due to the pandemic, here are some other forms of digital marketing techniques you should be paying attention to right now.

Leads Generation

You can directly create leads generation on your website through its landing page. If you provide something of value on the landing page of your website to your potential customers, some will be willing to sign up for your newsletter. By asking your website visitors to sign up and get some tokens, eBooks, discount coupons and suchlike enticing giveaways, you can be collecting signups to build up your email list. This list, over time, becomes a very valuable asset for your email marketing activities.
 
Incorporate SEO

You may do better in digital marketing if you blog for business. Doing so is to attract traffic back to your website. If you are regularly creating blog content on your website, you need to optimize the content to make it visible to search engines. The reason you must incorporate Search Engine Optimization, SEO. By this, you can deliberately work some well-chosen and specific keywords into your content creation to help drive more traffic to your website from people searching the web. That is organic traffic that search engines are in the best position to send your way.

Use Email More Productively

You can use email marketing productively by using it to keep your customers and potential customers updated on your latest promotions, new products/services, behind the scenes activities, and upcoming events. You can use emails to follow up sales and to get feedback from your customers on how satisfied they are with your product(s). If productive, such emails can help you to get more repeat business with less prospecting efforts on your side. If you need to ask your customers business-boosting questions, conduct surveys, and have fun creating good content for your email newsletters, emails are handy. To keep your audience interested and engaged with you, emails come in very handy as well.

Top 5 Ways to Develop Attractive Web Content

Digital marketers always want traffic, real organic traffic to help them with leads and sales. Good content is what marketers depend on to attract the much-needed traffic. Most marketers worry about how to develop attractive web content to get traffic. Developing and marketing with an attractive content is what helps marketers to get good traffic and to sell well in global cyberspace.  A good content is always deliberately planned, and developed, for it to be attractive to web users. Here is what to do.

1. Have a Plan

It is not just how your website looks but the content you put in it that helps it to attract traffic. You need a good plan to develop such content, not just about your website. You must expand the content and keep it fresh and relevant at all times. It must always be up-to-date as well to enable it stay in the rankings. For this to happen, your plan must include posting good blogs daily, weekly or at least once a month depending on the business niche you are blogging about. That way, you can easily stay in touch with your readers, educate and provide very useful information to your customers on what they need to know about your business. That helps your website to gain more traffic. 

2. Work with Professionals

No matter how experienced you are as a digital marketer, you may not know everything. You may need assistance from professionals occasionally. No matter how intelligent and educated you are, if you are not trained and experienced enough in writing for the online audience you need to work with professionals. Writing for the online audience requires specialized skills that many marketers do not have. To be attractive and readable, a good web content needs the services of professional web designers, content creators and or graphic artists to help create attractive web pages. With experience, many marketers are able to do most of these services on their own and may not need hiring professionals any more.
 
3. Adopt Relevant Keywords

For your content to be attractive to search engines and be found online, it must be embedded with relevant keywords/phrases. You must first find out using online tools, which words relate to people searching for your type of business. Use these keywords generously but cleverly on your website and throughout your content. That is what will make the content attractive to search engines. Search engines will in turn send organic traffic to your website. The better your website ranks in terms of keyword density proportions, the better it will score in ranks of search results of SERPs. The better organic traffic it receives.

4. Market with Influencers

Influencers are a delight to know in cyberspace. Many have some kind of cult-like following online. Their followers rely on their endorsements and even say-so to make their buy decisions. That is what marketers rely on to push their products using influencers. Procuring the services of an influencer to sponsor your products in a few posts has the potential to reach thousands of potential customers particularly on social media where influencers command tremendous following. If you know favorite influencers who can help promote your content, you can approach them through influencer agencies if you are unable to approach them directly.

5. Target Your Locations

You can deliberately create blog posts or you dedicate a web page to each location that your business wishes to service. This may be a bit tricky to do but it gets very attractive results because the wider a spread you have of service areas, the greater the number of people your web content will “arrest.” The more searchers your business attracts, the better it is for your inbound traffic. It is smart marketing therefore to, purposely dedicate a webpage of your blog to a town, city, or region, in order to catch the attention of people actively searching for your product in that area.

How Blogging on Your Website Helps to Attract More Traffic

It now appears most digital marketers are deliberately taking to blogging mostly for traffic reasons. Blogs have become the single most important elements on a website that can generate the most traffic. Most digital marketers tend to blog about any topic of their choice in which they have something useful to say that readers are willing to read and learn from. Blogs prey on the curiosity of such readers to attract traffic back to the blog in return.

Here is what your website stands to gain if you have an active blog on the site.

Opportunities to Gain Traffic Organically

Most online surfers are always fired by unlimited curiosity. This is what an authoritative and informative blog tends to satisfy online. Adding more and more authoritative information to your blog is akin to weaving a very elaborate web of information online. Search engines never fail to notice this. As you add more pages to your blog, search engines note the keywords you are using. They send searchers using similar keywords to your website as a way of helping to satisfy their curiosity. That translates to very useful organic traffic.

Better Search Engines Indexing

Google reports that websites with good blogs tend to rank better in its SERPs than websites without a blog. The reason is simple. Search engines “deal” on information to remain relevant and useful. Blogging on a website supplies this information in form of content continuously. Search engines love that, the reason they send more readers who are looking for information to such sites. Therefore, running a blog on your website gives you more chances to have your site indexed by search engines. Better indexing translates to better ranking and better organic traffic.

Better Use of Organic Keywords and Phrases

Keywords and phrases embedded in the content of blogs help search engines in indexing such blogs. Once indexed, search engines send people searching online using the keywords and phrases to the blogs. That means more and more people will start coming to your blog to read your content and in the process they discover and explore the rest of your website. As you add more content on your blog, you populate it with more keywords and phrases. These keywords and phrases impress search engines and help to attract more readers. When you add a blog to your website, and you add more and more content to it regularly, it gets populated more and more with keywords and phrases. These keywords and phrases lead back to your web properties and serve as a big bonus in terms of inbound traffic.

Opportunities for More Links and Mentions
 
Blogging on your website with interesting content that inevitably attracts some citations and mentions culminate in some super valuable links trove. If your blog manages to assert industry authority online, other bloggers refer to it and like to link with it. That helps to grow its positive association and reputation online. Commenting on your blogs gives your readers a great opportunity to interact with you and delve deeper into the thoughts that you share. It gives them the chance to share theirs as well. Guest-posting and even contests are other things that you can do with your blog to help keep your content fresh. Doing so helps to generate more links, comments and mentions that inevitably help to increase your inbound traffic.

Provides Reasons for Returning Visitors

Even if you are selling products on your website or you just want to keep seeing your visitor count go up, a blog is one of the best tools that you can use to get repeat and new visitors to your website. As you write new posts to grow your content, you will have more and more people who enjoy your content come over to your website. For as long as you endeavor to create content that is visually beautiful, functionally impressive, or informatively sound on your blog, readers will be coming over to it. When visitors come to a blog they enjoy, most will want to come back. Looking back at archive posts on the blog, most visitors can have an idea when to expect the next post. That entices them to return to your blog repeatedly. That translates to valuable traffic.  

Top Digital Marketing Strategies for a Restrained Market

 

Year in year out, digital marketing strategies tend to change because of new trends and innovations that emerge, as customer needs, behaviors and demands change. That is further complicated when the market is restrained by both predictable and unpredictable factors such like the covid-19 restrictions the world is now experiencing. In such a complex situation, better planning and more effective marketing strategies tend to be the right recourse for smart marketers. Find below some of the strategies expert marketers like to employ to help their businesses survive in a severely restrained market.

Content Marketing

In digital marketing, content remains king. When your content is good, your business tends to receive good organic traffic as a result. Good content is vital for promoting your brand/product and for creating awareness and brand authority. In today’s digital marketing world it is not only written content that is important and can serve as good content. That is the category good blogs belong. Video content and infographics are also very effective content now most commonly used formats in content marketing. However, what matters most is the quality of the content. Once the quality is good, it helps to attract more traffic, improve customer engagement and user experience. With increased traffic to your business website, your business benefits directly from more leads and increased sales.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO remains indispensable to digital marketing and it is still as important as ever. In a severely restrained environment, what makes the real difference in how your business is found among millions of others online, is how good your SEO is. With the correct use of keywords in written content, photos, graphics and videos, you get your business optimized for better search results. That can make the real difference between success and failure in digital marketing. Even if the market is restrained, when more users discover they are able to easily make searches with images and videos, optimizing these items for that purpose is good for business.

Social Media Marketing

When people encounter any form of restrictions, they tend to spend more time at home and online. That automatically means spending more time on social media and engagement with businesses online. Smart digital marketers always cash in on that. Such scenario gives marketers very good opportunities to market to, engage with new audiences and re-engage with existing customers particularly on social media. That ultimately results in good customer retention and better sales.

Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising

PPC advertising in digital marketing involves a better and more effective use of ads budgets. Of course, when the business environment is restrained, demand goes down and many businesses struggle. It becomes imperative therefore to use and manage ads budgets better for business survival. With PPC ads, you do not necessarily have to scale down your ads efforts. Such ads help you to manage resources better since you only pay for clicks your business receives thereby helping to prevent wasteful dissipation of scarce resources chasing elusive traffic. That helps the bottom line of your business.
 
Email Marketing

If you consider costs and effectiveness side by side, email is very useful in digital marketing even in restrained circumstances. That is why email is hugely popular with digital marketers. It gets good results even with very limited resources outlay. Email remains one of the mainstays of effective digital marketing strategies and it promises to remain so into the foreseeable future. Among the many strategies expert marketers prefer, email tends to deliver about the highest return on investment. That is aside its immense popularity among digital marketers. In the customer-centrist market marketers now find themselves operating in, the best areas of investment tend to be on personalization strategies. These strategies are most effective to engage and nurture both new customers and existing customers even in restrained circumstances. Email marketing automation helps to make personalized campaigns easier to implement and manage at considerably reduced costs. That is good for business.

Effective Tactics to Nurture Your Digital Marketing Customers

 

Are you still thinking of the best ways to engage and nurture your digital marketing customers? First, you must build a great relationship with your customers using digital marketing strategies. These efforts must be deliberately geared towards nurturing your one-time customers as well as your repeat customers. Both sets of customers are hugely valuable to your business and they deserve nurturing hand in hand. For this reason, if you are looking for credible and effective ways to acquire, nurture, grow and retain customers, you must improve your digital marketing efforts. These here tested and proven tactics are very handy to help you nurture and retain the loyalty of your customers over the long term.

Update Your Customers Routinely

By giving your digital customers undated information promptly, you can quickly build trust with them. It pays to notify customers very promptly about important product information like price adjustments, promos, discounts, giveaways, sales and the like. If for instance you have customers that have been viewing your products for a while, price drops and sales promos can help them to make a timely buy decision as soon as they get the information. Giving out vital information promptly does not only help to boost business opportunities for sales, such information can also help to boost customer loyalty and better business relationships.

Predict Customer Spend

If you can predict customer spending particularly at periods of festivities, anniversaries and celebrations, you can make better sales from your efforts. Marketers can make use of online AI software to make fairly accurate predictions about customer spending. With this software, it is possible to assess trends and anticipate how much your customers will spend over a given period, say within the next week, month or some future time frame depending on the season. Armed with this somewhat intelligence information, you can fine-tune and specifically target your messaging across multichannel to make more sales from both your high and low-value customers.

Ask for Product Reviews/Feedback

Asking customers to review products they have purchased from you is one great way to show that you care about how they feel. As soon as you make a sale, you can follow up by email to ask customers how helpful the product is to them, and what they have to say about the product by way of product review. Such customer feedback allows marketers to get some very vital insight into how to improve on the user experience of their products. It helps to demonstrate how much marketers value their customers’ thoughts and opinions. You can effectively turn customer reviews and ratings into marketing messages to entice more customers if you highlight them as authentic endorsements for your products.

Always Send Re-order Reminders

You build a hugely beneficial customer relationship if you do not fail to send re-order reminders to customers who purchased quick consumables or perishable products from you. Better still, you can encourage your customers to set up “Auto-Delivery orders” by which the products are delivered to them at a given interval without any fresh re-order formalities. Armed with authentic information about any product’s lifespan, you can design re-order messages to prompt your customers for a repeat purchase. This is one very effective technique to retain their patronage and prevent them from turning to your competitors for same product or an alternative.

Promote with Your Milestone Anniversaries

Either for your business or for your customers, you can use key milestones to effectively promote your products. Anniversaries of product launch, customers’ birthdays and other important celebrations in the lives of your customers, when recalled and marked with product promos can be very effective for sales. These dates are always very good moments to send personalized emails to customers congratulating them and reminding them that you value their business with you. Such well-crafted and well-timed massages can generate good click-through rates and more incentivized purchases.

Track Customer Journeys

If you have been in digital marketing for a while, you can understand how essential your customers’ journey is to your business. By using analytics tools, you can effectively track how customers generally interact with your website. From the information, you can have very good insights into what they do and the steps they take to complete certain online transaction actions like choosing a product, making a purchase or taking part in a competition. That allows you to be able to visualize their pathways to spotting opportunities on your website and the user-experience obstacles they encounter with the site that do slow down or obstruct customer engagement.

Target Ads from Analytics/Metrics Reports

With good Analytics/Metrics report, you can better understand the role such vital information plays in the customer journey on your website. That is the information that allows you to easily see the decreasing effect out-of-stock products have on your customer experience. You can also see the increasing effects of reduction in prices, sales and giveaway promos on customer engagement. If you aim to prevent your customers from taking their business to your competitors, you can use information from these analytics to implement better strategies aimed at customer retention. Using the data they generate, you can design better and more effective ads and target them specifically to your customers based on their demographic information gleaned from the data. That way, you can attract a very significant amount of organic traffic back to your website, with more and better conversions to boot.

Share Specially Targeted Content

In digital marketing, specially targeted content tends to drive better organic traffic. This is more so when such content is shared multichannel. Such content if well targeted is one great way to recognize the customers who stay loyal to your product and how much you value their business. Many customers usually appreciate by staying local to your business. As they say in the business world, one good turn deserves another. Special content can engender vital information and exclusive early access to a sales promo or price reduction. Many customers do appreciate such gestures and they usually reciprocate with repeat purchases. 

Digital Marketing Best Practices for Innovative Brands

Digital marketing is increasingly becoming a business refuge for innovative brands. This is because digital marketing allows brands to reach large audiences at a much lower cost than the traditional marketing methods many marketers use. No matter what marketing methods you choose to use to promote your brand, the bottom line is to keep a keen eye on marketing costs. Limited marketing budgets available to most innovative brands largely recommend digital marketing as an integral part of their marketing strategy.

 

Hereunder are some best practices, recommended for innovative brands that want to get the best results from their digital marketing activities.

Working with the Right Marketing Channels

Drafting a good marketing message is most times not enough. Such message must go out via the right channels for it to get good results. Even though there are many such channels online available to marketers, finding the right channels is crucial for meeting your business goals. Expert marketers recommend a multichannel approach for best results. Such marketing mix can include two, three or more of the following channels all of which have their unique advantages depending on your type of business.

* Content marketing
* Affiliate marketing
* Influencer marketing
* Pay-per-click, PPC
* Social media marketing
* Email marketing
* Search Engine Optimization, SEO

In practice, the selection of channels depends largely upon your target audience, your location and your business goals. These days, because your audience is inevitably scattered across many different digital channels, what works best is multichannel approach to grow your brand if you are innovative enough. There are so many channels out there available to marketers. You can always test them out to see what works best for your business.

Optimizing Your Website for Mobile

Google reports indicate that about 60% of searches are now attributable to mobile devices particularly smartphones. Most of the world is now doing online business on the go and smartphone usage is on the rise. Businesses are now getting a lot of traffic from mobile devices, and most consumers' journeys often start there. As a result, Google now uses mobile versions of websites for indexing and ranking. This is what makes it a good business decision to optimize your website to make it mobile friendly in this age and time.

Optimizing Your Website for Local Searches

Every business is local and most loyal customers always come from the local community. Optimizing your business for local searches considers this business reality. Your local customers are not only good customers; they are the ones who can help promote your business free and even by very effective word-of-mouth. For instance, if you sell lawn mowers and a person is looking to buy a good lawn mower, if he makes a local search on Google, he can easily hit on your business if your website is optimized for local searches.

Not Ignoring Search Engine Optimization, SEO

If you choose to do business online, the reality is that your customers' journey often starts from search results. Search engines are responsible for sending very valuable organic traffic to your website. If your website is well-optimized for search results, you can get relevant traffic (i.e., people with the matching intent) to your website organically. That is the reason you cannot afford to ignore SEO techniques on your website. Once search engines rank your website high on their SERPs, it is easily visible to web searchers. If you know how to, you can do some SEO techniques on your website yourself. However, if you don’t know how to, it is best to hire the services of professional webmasters to do it for you. These SEO techniques involve the careful use of well-selected keywords, meta-tags on title and description, and backlinks on your content and website. They help to make your website visible to search engines and for them to index and rank it well.
 
Last Line!

These best practices help to increase visibility for your brand. They are largely responsible for bringing a lot of organic traffic to your business. If properly used, they do engender a better exponential reach for your business. This reach manifests through:

* Better traffic tracking
* The ability to generate sales/leads at a lower cost
* Access to real-time data
* Precise targeting
* The ability to establish brand awareness across many channels
* Greater visibility
And lots more…!!!

5 SEO Strategies to Boost Your Website

No matter what business you are in, so long as you are marketing on the internet, the success of your business depends on its ability to be found online. That ability is enhanced by the SEO strategies you are using on your website. If your SEO strategies are of high quality and strong enough, they are highly beneficial to your brand and its marketing efforts. In addition, your SEO strategies are critical to the web presence and visibility of your website, especially within hugely competitive markets as found on the internet.

Good SEO strategies are a sure way to boost your website visibility and rankings. These SEO strategies help to tinker with the lot of ranking factors that determine your website’s position in the SERPs of search engines. These ranking factors are at times compounded by the ever-changing algorithms of major search engines particularly Google. These technicalities do make SEO tough to execute effectively on websites but it is always worth the bother on the long run.



As a marketer, if you focus more in these here 5 SEO strategies for your website, you can boost its visibility on search engines and its overall performance.

1. Top-Quality Content

Top quality content is very vital to the success of your website. Without it, your marketing message easily gets swallowed up and lost in the vast labyrinth of the digital market space. You need top quality and powerful compelling content to get noticed by search engines. It is what helps you to stand out in their SERPs. Because search engines need to be guided to understand the context of your content, you need to incorporate some content SEO practices on your website to facilitate that. Some of these practices include, making sure your web pages have at least 300 words worth of content so they can be crawled by search engines, using ALT Text on images and including H1, H2 and H3 Headers in your content. You can also incorporate long-tail keywords, internal and external hyperlinks into the text of the content and making sure to always write a descriptive title and Meta description as well into the content. Doing all these tends to make your content top quality that is usually attractive to search engines.

2. On-Page SEO

Professional webmasters always like to tell marketers that on-page SEO is important because it helps search engines better understand websites and their content. For search purposes, on-page SEO is what helps to easily identify whether your content is relevant to a searcher’s query or not. On-page SEO typically includes optimizing your headlines, HTML tags on Title, Meta and Header as well as on Images. It also involves making sure your website has such a high level of authority, expertise, and trustworthiness to make it easily noticeable by search engines.

3. Website Loading Speed

There are literally hundreds of factors which can have direct impact on your website loading speed. Website loading speed is very vital for your website SEO. This is because, the slower your webpages load, the less likely they are to be indexed by major search engines like Google. And, of course, page speed has a direct impact on both traffic and conversions. Fast loading web pages help to promote good user experience. Web crawlers who are habitually pressed for time cannot stand web pages that take an awful lot of time to load. To increase the loading speed of your web pages, you can use specially adapted Google tools to help analyze the content of your web pages. These tools also help to generate suggestions/actions which you need to help you improve on the loading speed of your web pages.



4. Mobile Optimization

The world is increasingly in a hurry and permanently on the move. This is why many people now rely on mobile devices to do many things online and on the go. From Google apps reports, about 60% of Google searches are now attributable to mobile devices. Now, that is a very huge chunk of search information if you ask me. Therefore, optimizing your website for mobile searches is a very smart idea if you’re looking to attract organic search engine traffic to your website. You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to analyze your site and determine whether or not it is mobile-friendly. The tool also provides you with some suggestions/actions needed to help optimize your website for mobile devices users.

5. Link Building

Ever since Google included links as part of its ranking algorithm, link building has become vital SEO requirement for websites. Links help to provide the all-important signal to Google that a website is a quality resource worthy of citation. So when Google discovers a website with more high quality backlinks, it tends to give it higher search rankings than others with less. Adequate care must however be taken in your website optimization efforts to make sure the website is only attracting links from other websites with high domain authority, a decent amount of backlinks, and a significant amount of traffic. That is how to attract quality links which are good for your website SEO. You can easily access Google tools to help you identify such great sites which you need to attract backlinks from.

6 Ways to Improve Your Business’s Online Reputation

In the digital world of the internet, every business is struggling to get noticed. Your own business cannot be the different. The level of success your online business gets is directly proportional to its online reputation. With millions of players out there in the digital marketing world, it is really very important for the success of your business if you can deliberately do some things online to enhance its reputation. These things are not just related to your website alone but also to review sites and directories as well. Online, any site that has some basic information about your business no matter how little has some kind of influence on your online reputation. This is why when it comes to the internet, business details are key to your reputation. Your business cannot afford to have even one bad review or inconsistent/inaccurate directory information which can negatively influence customers’ impression about the business.



These here 6 ways are highly recommended by expert marketers as potent ways to enhance your business reputation online.

1. Identify and Fix Major Errors

If you’ve been in business for a while, because of human frailties and activities, it is fairly common to have a few changes here and there leading to some information inaccuracies. You can periodically go over your website to fix errors relating to changes in contact addresses, emails, phone numbers or any obvious misspelling of any vital information you provided earlier. This is necessary to avoid hurting your Google Local listing. In addition, you can take a bit of time to check all links to your website with a view to confirming if they’re all functional and directing visitors to the right pages as expected. This is very important because broken or lost links automatically translates to lost traffic, lost opportunities and lost revenue.

2. Periodically Audit Your Online Business Info

Time changes, so are things particularly information relating to your business. Nothing in the digital marketing world remains static for too long. Things change with time and circumstances and your business must be fully prepared for it. To test if your business is visible online, you can on your own search your business name on Google. The results you get can be highly informative for you to know what to rejig, correct, redirect or place better to enhance better search results. From this internal audit, it is easy for you to discern how easily your potential customers can find information about you and your business online. The easier it is to find your business online, the higher its online reputation and visibility.

3. Get Your Business Listed on Directories

Getting your business listed in online business directories is one great way to improve visibility for the business. These directories are very effective ways/places to spread the word and to connect with prospective customers who habitually use these directories to find what they want online. For many customers seeking to do business online, directories are favorite spots where they commence their searches. Having your business listed on these directories helps to confirm your professionalism in online business. That helps your business reputation in no small measure.

4. Create a Unique Digital Brand

A unique digital brand online is not just about your business name, address and contact information. It is much more than that. It involves everything that tends to stand your business out among the whole lot to make it easily recognizable by your customers and potential customers. It takes very deliberate efforts to design your website to make it unique and easily recognizable. With the use of your web designer Style Guide, you can on your own tinker with font sizes, colors, background and general appearance which help its uniqueness. Your business online reputation is greatly enhanced when it manages to stand out uniquely online for easy identification and recognition. Make sure your brand logo and brand colors match your website design and are used consistently anywhere your business is listed or merely mentioned in all industry directories and social media. All ads banners must be carefully selected to match the design and styling of your website with the same branding colors. Any changes you make after this unique design must be well aligned with the design you’ve chosen for the business and this must be done across all boards/platforms where your business information can be found.



5. Encourage Customers’ Online Reviews

Experienced marketers never cease to emphasize the huge importance of customer feedback in online business. Apart from the huge influence of reviews on referrals, they also help to influence search ratings. Online marketers have since discovered that reviews on Google can directly improve your SEO listings. In addition, responding to customers’ reviews help to boost your trust factor and online reputation. Asking for reviews from customers is about the best way to get them. Making it seamlessly easy for customers to provide reviews is one great way to enhance the process.

6. Promote your Business on Social Media

These days, social media is practically where everyone is at 24/7 around the world. Because of the huge popularity of social media, getting your business on the platforms greatly helps its online reputation. It is easy and free to create accounts in the most popular social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram and you start to immediately promote your business to a very huge audience around the world. With the ease of use and sharing of information on social media, important business information can easily go viral. That helps to quickly build brand awareness for your business. It is also one very good and dependable way to drive organic traffic to your business. In fact, anything you manage to get social media to do for your business is a win-win situation for attracting inbound traffic to the business.

 

14 Tips to Reinvent Your Affiliate Marketing Business

Even if you are experienced in affiliate marketing, there are times you get stuck in a rot. That is the time your business needs reinventing. The quickest way out is to expand your knowledge about the business and to review your routine practices. By expanding your knowledge about affiliate marketing, you stand to benefit immensely from expert tips. Whatsoever tips/information you learn from experts, no matter how little can be applied to reinvent your affiliate marketing business for better results.

These here tips are strongly recommended by many expert marketers if you want to reinvent your affiliate marketing business.

1. Sell More Big Ticket Products

Characteristically, affiliate marketers invest the same amount of efforts to sell all products no matter how small. It thus makes good marketing sense to sell more of big ticket products that bring in bigger commissions and revenues. If you target the right audience with big ticket products, your business tends to make more money as a result.


 
2. Never Pay to Join Affiliate Programs

Most high-commissions-paying and rewarding affiliate programs are free to join. Many train you free and provide free tools for you to do the business. It is mostly scam affiliate programs that demand money from affiliates. The reason you must be weary of affiliate programs that demand fees to join. It is thus advisable never to pay to join any affiliate marketing program. When any affiliate program demands that you pay a “membership fee” or “training costs”, it is more than likely just a scam. What they are mainly after is to simply take your money and that is it. Good and reputable affiliate marketing programs are free because the product merchant companies earn most of their revenues from the traffic and sales their partner affiliates manage to send their way.

3. Market Only Products Related to Your Website Niche
 
If you have managed to build some good audience/followers over time, it shows the audience shares same interest in the business niche you have identified with. It is thus easy for you to promote special products of mutual interest to such audience. It pays therefore to simply pick affiliate programs that are related to the general topic/niche of your website. When readers visit your website, it is only because they like and identify with the content. They generally see your subject matter as helping to solve problems related to their needs. As a marketer, if you choose the right ads targeted at such audience, you can succeed better at marketing to them and making more sales as a result.

4. Use long-tail keywords

With the help of Google’s free keyword tool, you can search for relevant long-tail keywords to help promote your affiliate marketing products. Such keywords tend to lend some form of uniqueness to the product you are marketing which is what tends to make it stand out on Search Engines. They help to give it some bit of advantage over its competitors thereby enhancing its ranking on Search Engines. When the product manages to get higher Search Engine rankings, it gets searched better and more frequently. The product attracts more inbound traffic and better patronage as a result.

5. Be Open and Honest With Your Readers

Online business marketing thrives on trust and honesty engenders trust. No good marketer ever wants to be caught in the web of dishonesty. By being open and honest with your readers, you can build trust more quickly. Many affiliate marketers have since discovered that it doesn’t really pay to be dishonest. Your readers are more likely to believe and click on your ads if they have a very good cause to believe you as an honest affiliate marketer.

6. Borrow Ideas from Other Affiliate Marketers

It helps in affiliate marketing to always study and even follow the activities of other affiliate marketers. That is with a view to knowing what to do well and how they do it. Doing so enables you to borrow and adopt good and workable ideas from other affiliate marketers particularly those in the same business niche you are. You can easily get useful ideas and information if you visit your competitor’s website/blog and subscribe to their newsletters. Doing so can help you to regularly analyze how and what they do best that enables them to get good traffic, leads and sales. That is how to get good information on which marketing techniques work best for others and how you can best use same and even improve on the techniques to make more sales. 


 
7. Use Free Shipping to Deliver Products

Free shipping remains a very attractive advertising gimmick which works wonders for marketers. This is because it touches on reducing costs for buyers, the reason buyers like it. As a marketer, you can use free shipping/delivery as a major incentive to entice your customers. If however your own business lacks adequate financial resources to ship products free of charge, you can consider offering combined shipping to save your customers’ money and positively drive sales. For this reason, if you are designing an internet marketing campaign or mailer, you must remember to include the very important phrase “Free Shipping” in the subject line of the e-mail message. That phrase alone at times may be all it takes to get your message recipient to open the message and the message reaches and impacts its target as expected.

8. Research Products Vendors Thoroughly
 
A good research study always helps marketers to gather very useful information and data about product merchants and vendors. It is about the most reliable way to detect and avoid vendors who may be running some scams in the name of business. Such scams may include cheating affiliates out of commissions, underpaying commissions, dodging commissions payment altogether and even promoting non available or fake products. There are quite a few vendors out there online running disreputable businesses and many unsuspecting persons sometimes fall victims. You cannot be too careful in thoroughly checking out the persons you want to do business with online if you want to avoid scammers.

9. Learn From Evergreen Blog Posts

In blogging business, evergreen blogs are immensely valuable to any affiliate marketing business. You can look back to detect the content you’ve posted in the past that continues to attract good traffic. Next is to identify and keep track of the keywords you used in the content. When making new posts, you can insert affiliate links which are appropriate for the topic then reuse the keywords from the earlier popular post to help drive more traffic to your website/blog. That is one great way to get more traffic and even clickthroughs.

10. Create and Use Marketing Videos Generously

Visual content marketing materials like videos are often very good for inbound traffic and even clickthroughs. If you can create a series of videos showing expert demonstrations or how-to’s, or some other content which people will want to watch, it helps to attract traffic. It is easy to embed these videos with your affiliate links and you get hits through reviews and referrals. That is good for inbound traffic.

11. Promote More Products with High Demand
 
Of course, in marketing parlance, the more popular a product is, the more it is in demand. There are literally hundreds of thousands of affiliate products out there which affiliates can freely promote. It is advisable however to choose and promote only products that resonate with your readers. These are the kinds of products that usually get your site’s readers to come back over and over because there is something about your site that resonates with them. That shows popularity about what you are promoting from your site. Your personal and genuine recommendation of products easily gets the attention of your readers because of the trust they already have in you. Converting them to buyers becomes a natural consequence of such efforts. 


 
12. Promote Only Links of High Quality Products

Yes indeed! High quality products are almost always in very high demand. It therefore makes good marketing sense to only add your promotional links to products you know are high quality if you want to make better sales. Because your readers already have some trust in you, they will rely on your judgement if you let them know you’ve done the legwork for them by vetting inferior products and only bringing them the very best. For more credibility, be sure you check sales pages before adding your promotional link to products. The essence is to be sure these sales pages are also attesting to the high quality of such products. Similar effects too as choosing to promote only those products and companies that have built good and solid reputations which are well known!

13. Build a Credible E-Mail List

A credible e-mail list may take some time to build but the effort is well worth it since the list serves as a very valuable marketing asset that is lasting and durable.  When readers stop by your site and visit your affiliate link, you only get one chance to make a sale. But by adding readers consistently to your e-mail list, you get unlimited chances to send follow-up broadcasts and e-mails telling your readers/customers about your products. You also get the chance to send specific ads about specific products to specific e-mail recipients. You get better chances of making multiple and repeated sales as a result.

14. Choose and Use Only a Unique Domain Name

Because of the vastness, depth and peculiarity of the internet, uniqueness is a very good asset. Uniqueness means identity which if good has unlimited rewards for your business. Therefore, when you are developing your affiliate marketing website, you must remember to register a relative and unique domain name with a reliable hosting service. Your domain name should reflect on the products/services you will be offering and the business niche of the site. When Search Engines highlight and pick on this information, it helps to get readers looking for information on such products to your website. By registering such unique domain name with a reliable hosting service, it stands the chance of getting picked up easily by all the major Search Engines. That is good for unlimited inbound organic traffic.