6 Useful Tips to Run Your Small Business Profitably Online

Do you run a small business online? Great if you do. The pandemic restrictions have forced many more people to take their businesses online. So, you are not alone. But, are you satisfied with the way things are with the business? Are you running it to your satisfaction? If not, there are some useful tips to help make your business successful if only you’ll pay the right attention. Running your own small business online can be hugely challenging, but it's not impossible. What you really need to do is to put in the necessary time and effort to get the right results. No matter how good your strategy is, make sure to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong. You’ve got to be able to stay adaptable to the situation at hand at all times. So, no matter how challenging running your own small business online becomes, you can still get very good results if you pay good attention to these here tips.

1. Update Your Website Regularly

If you are running your own small business online, your website is your business window to the world on the internet. This makes it hugely important for you to keep your website well optimized and up-to-date at all times. To attract more customers, make sure that you're offering new products/services as a matter of routine. Your website attracts leads and eventual customers if people who come to it find solutions to their problems. More and more people will return to your website if they find it informative and easy to navigate. Such people are more likely to do business with you if they always find what they are looking for on your website. The reason your website must always be up to date with information about the products/services you are offering.
 
2. Use Affiliate Marketing to Boost Income

You can boost your income with affiliate marketing right out of your business website. All you need do is simply to promote affiliate links from other product merchants on your website. Once a sale is made through these links, you earn a commission. Affiliate marketing is thus one of the best ways for small businesses to make extra income online. It is quite simple to set up and implement right out of your business website. All you need do is to try and locate other small businesses whose products/services complement yours and you agree to promote their links on your website. You earn commissions from their sales for referring customers over to their websites.
 
3. Engage a Virtual Receptionist

To free yourself from mundane and routine tasks like phone calls on your website you need the services of a virtual receptionist. That helps you to cut back on costs and save time for more important tasks of managing your business. You can simply scout around to get a service that acts as virtual receptionists to handle routine tasks for you. A good virtual receptionist is someone who's willing to work on their own time and handle tasks like answering phone calls as if they were your personal receptionist. With this service in place, you can cut down on your expenses and still be able give your customers all the service they deserve in a more efficient manner.

4. Take Marketing Advantage of Social Media

Most digital marketers now realize that social media is one great marketing tool no small business can afford to ignore. On social media, small business owners can interact and hear directly from their customers and learn first-hand what they want. You can share your own content directly with them to meet their needs. This stimulates the much needed interaction with your customers and potential customers to boost your sales. To reach a very wide and easily segmented audience, you need to have accounts on the most popular social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and the likes. These sites have around 2 billion active users and that’s one very huge market out there if you ask me. Small business owners can thus take full advantage of this huge popularity to reach a wider audience, market to and engage more customers and prospective customers effectively on social media.

5. Be Prepared to Make Necessary Sacrifices

If you want to succeed in running a small business online, be ready to put in the work needed and to make the necessary sacrifices to earn success. You must be proactive and be ready to devote the required time and effort to surmount any roadblocks that may stand between your small business and success. You must for instance be ready forgo other activities to have enough time and attention to handle your phone calls, attend to customers, market the business on social media sites, and deliver your products to customers and such suchlike business activities. Even if these activities tend to disrupt your kind of lifestyle, the sacrifice is worth it to grow your business. However, it is important to always have a backup plan in case things don’t pan out according to your plans. This is to avoid frustration which can drive you off the business altogether. The reason you must always be willing to adapt to any situation at hand to keep the business going. If it becomes inevitable that something untoward happens in the business, you can quickly make changes to remain on course.

6. Be Ready to Put in Quality Work

At the outset, you need to really work hard to successfully run your own small business online. That’s when you’ve got to roll up your sleeves, work hard and keep your eyes firmly on your goals. Sometimes, things could really be tough going though. You don’t quit even if that happens. You can simply adapt and keep going forward with your eyes firmly on your end goals. Experience has shown that small business owners that are willing and able to put in the adequate time and efforts needed to succeed in their businesses tend to succeed better in the short and long term.

Best Affiliate Programs that Made Waves in 2021

Despite the pandemic challenges, affiliate programs did quite well in 2021. As a marketing strategy/advertising model, affiliate marketing shone through as a handy way to promote and sell products/services to earn commissions. Even though affiliate marketing has been around for quite a while, some brands of the business did real good in 2021. Below are some of the programs that really made waves in 2021.

Crypto Affiliate Programs

Yeah, welcome to the world of crypto currency particularly Bitcoin. Bitcoin introduced the world to blockchain technology, but it hardly works alone. The world witnessed other coins, known as alt-coins that really proved as immense as Bitcoin for use cases and applications. Crypto companies needed to vastly promote these virtual currencies by way of affiliate marketing. These companies offered very attractive and mouth-watering commissions for affiliates who can promote their products and boom many affiliate marketers moved in. There was as a result increased activities in 2021 by way of launching a new coin, providing crypto services, or sharing online materials for crypto learners. Irrespective of the product or activity, affiliates who could drive traffic or leads, did good business and made money in 2021.

Dating Affiliate Programs

Yes dating sites/programs have been around for a while but they did well too in 2021. Clearly we humans cannot ignore the importance of love. Millions of people are always out there looking for love and one of the commonest places they go to is a dating site. In 2021, there was a real surge in the number of people registering for online dating and many websites were still looking for more. Affiliate marketers cashed in to promote their brands by sharing with their networks. Many affiliates earned good commissions for their efforts in helping dating brands to grow.

E-Commerce Affiliate Programs

In 2021, because of the restrictions necessitated by covid pandemic, the growth of electronic commerce was unprecedented. All through 2021, consumers’ habits continued to shift from traditional shopping to online shopping. That necessitated a boom in e-commerce business opportunities. Affiliate marketing opportunities also grew because of the growth in e-commerce stores. For this reason, 2021 witnessed hundreds if not thousands of online brands with unique affiliate opportunities for making more money through e-commerce.

Web Hosting Affiliate Programs

A boost in online businesses in 2021 inevitably led to a boost in web hosting activities. Even with the hundreds of millions of functional websites on the Internet, many more people still wanted to own their own websites as a credible way of improving digital visibility for their brands. This was the trend in 2021 and it was business wisdom to join this trend. Firstly, these people needed to own a website and to have it hosted on the Internet. Affiliate marketers latched in on that because hundreds of web hosting platforms needed to pay commissions to affiliates for recommending their products/services to others. What most of these affiliates really needed to do was to sign up for the programs, get referral codes, share these codes with and convince their social media audience to deal and commissions start rolling in.

Gaming Affiliate Programs

Yeah, as always gaming sites did really great in 2021. In a virtual technological world, there are a few real friends, but many virtual companions and everyone is looking for one thing or another. Some may be looking for chatmates on social media while others may be befriending gaming avatars. A huge chunk of people tend to play video games online to escape the jarring realities of life. This consideration clearly explains the reason for the rise of online gamers in 2021 and the number keeps growing by the day. This growth is proof positive that there’s the demand. So, affiliate marketers really latched in on that to promote many brand’s video game products such as controllers, keyboard mouses, gaming headsets, and gaming mats to their audience. Earned commissions generally followed from successful sales.

 

Online Marketing Tools Programs

The marketing challenge of every brand is to reach new customers and improve lead conversions. This trend was in evidence in 2021. There are many online marketing tools marketers can choose from to meet this challenge. This characteristically leads to the increasing number of online stores selling these tools and affiliate marketers to market these tools. Even though many online marketing tools are usually B2B services, the demand is high and they come with enriching affiliate programs with various reward benefits. Some programs reward affiliates for sales, while others compensate for traffic and leads. Affiliates earn commissions from marketing these tools by simply persuading online businesses to buy them or to just check out the products.

Educational Affiliate Programs

In 2021, there was a growing need for online learning primarily because of the pandemic restrictions. Even though the gap has always been there, but the pandemic restrictions made things more explicit. The year witnessed more and more students preferring the ease and convenience of learning from home to traditional settings. This arrangement somehow helped them to save on transportation costs and to keep their environments clean. Affiliate marketers took advantage of that to market online courses, webinars and other remote learning programs. These affiliates earned commissions by simply recommending a course, tutor, department, faculty, or institution to satisfy the market demand.

Last Line

In year 2021, affiliate marketing proved conclusively that it is one of the most rewarding online programs for anyone interested in driving sales and traffic for a brand. More and more of these affiliates earned considerable volume of commissions during the year for their marketing efforts. Affiliate marketing may have been around over the past several years but it was really spotlighted in 2021 as a result of the outbreak of the covid virus so much so that as of today, there are a huge lot of opportunities in the field to leverage and earn commissions. Most of these opportunities ranged from e-commerce, to crypto, to educational, to gaming, to web hosting, to marketing tools where affiliate opportunities really flourished in 2021.

3 Justifications for Online Business Ideas in a Pandemic

Covid-19 pandemic may have been restrictive but it succeeded in making online merchants think outside the box. Instead of killing businesses outright, it ended up creating more opportunities for online business owners. Many new business owners discovered that it has become easier than ever for anyone to start a business online with or without prior experience in the business. For such people, the icing on the cake about starting a new business online is the freedom to make money from anywhere there is internet service around the globe 24/7. Now that the world is still being held down by variants of the pandemic, are you thinking of starting your own business online too? Great if you do. It may well be all worth it in the long run. Many experts agree that it a good idea and quite justifiable too to start an online business even now. Here is why.

You Can Leverage Advanced Technology

Without a doubt and because of the challenges of the pandemic, technology companies are becoming more advanced in supporting e-commerce and online businesses in general. The deepening of the internet and its versatility too are becoming more advanced as well. More than ever before, it has become much easier now to start an online store and take payments easily even with minimal setup all hassle-free. This alone makes this time such a great time to leverage many online tools and resources to open and operate a successful e-commerce business.

It is Increasingly Easier to Trade Online

The pandemic forced many merchants to adopt e-commerce business models while closing shop in their brick and mortar businesses. Many of them found it increasingly easier and convenient to do business online despite the restrictions of the pandemic. This is because many more people for same reasons now prefer to shop online. Millions of people are thus getting used to buying and selling online and it is a 24/7 global business. Really quite appealing to join up if you are not already in it. Anyone with a great business idea despite the pandemic restrictions can take their businesses online and reach a wide range of audiences with the help of different online platforms and tools all performing wonders on the internet.

You Have More Business Opportunities

This is quite so because of the versatility of the internet for business purposes. Without a doubt, the pandemic has made it evident that many things can work online. The opportunities are limitless and ironically, this appears to be about the best time to start a business online really and from within the comfort of your home to boot. Ranging from online fitness to online courses and home delivery, many opportunities emerged from the pandemic to cater to people’s changing needs and business owners are taking good advantage of them all. These business owners readily leverage online platforms to connect their businesses to the right customers. Anyone with the right business ideas can thus find and explore a lot of business opportunities as a result.

Final Thoughts

At the outbreak of the pandemic, because of the pervasive and panicky lockdowns, fears of business losses were quite high. Even now with the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic variants still threatening humanity, people have learned to adapt their businesses to reality instead of caving in to frustration. That’s thanks to the internet and e-commerce. Aside the public health threat, the pandemic disrupted the activities of small businesses, large corporations, and even the world economy at large. It forced many people to work remotely, and brick and mortar businesses had to think of creative ways to meet consumers’ needs during the pandemic. Many found real justifications on the internet to avoid total business closures which was inevitable for those who couldn’t adapt quickly. Part of that adaptation was for business owners to move into e-commerce businesses in different industries and niches such as launching a podcast, becoming an app developer, and going into affiliate marketing, or launching any smart idea that can take real advantage of the internet to bloom into a successful online business. For that, the world of business moves on steadily regardless.

Salient Online Marketing Tips for Pandemic Restrictions

Online marketing is a very effective way to keep your business moving even amid pandemic restrictions. It is online marketing that provides the convenience and effectiveness to remain in business even when free and unfettered human interaction is severely restricted. That is made possible if the proper strategy is in place to market a business through successful online marketing campaigns. Restrictions no doubt pose huge challenges for many businesses particularly small and still struggling businesses. The most viable way around these challenges is online marketing. Without it, many small businesses do face very tough times getting their marketing messages out and to sell their products/services. Online marketing lends itself to marketers as an effective way to promote products/services even in the midst of pandemic restrictions.

Here are a few tips that can help make that possible and result-oriented.

Build Your Online Visibility

If your business is not visible online, it is virtually impossible for it to make sales. So, you must take very conscious steps to systematically build your online presence. Because of the restrictions, many more people are going online to search for products, shop, and generally do business. Your business can take advantage of this increased online consumption if it has a strong and robust online presence. Increased online presence helps the visibility of your business. This visibility is made possible by way of robust SEO strategy that helps your website to appear within Google’s top search engine results pages, SERPs. That visibility makes it possible for people searching online to easily find your business.
 
Optimize Your Website for Local Searches

Yes, most businesses particularly small businesses are local.  Because most people are forced to stay at home during the pandemic restrictions, it is just natural and more convenient for such people to patronize local businesses more and more. To take advantage of this, small business owners must make sure to implement local SEO strategies to optimize their websites for “near me” searches. With these local SEO strategies, customers and prospective customers can easily find your website, thereby increasing the likelihood of your business getting more purchases from local people.

Connect with Customers on Social Media

Even with pandemic restrictions or do we say because of it, many people get on social media daily either for entertainment, news or even mere socializing. Most people are spending most of their time in their homes and some take to social media to fight boredom. Marketers can latch on such opportunities to push their products and their brands on social media. Some other people could even be on social media, looking for updates and deliberately interacting with their favorite brands. Business owners can take advantage of this to strengthen their brands through deliberate promotional efforts to connect customers and prospective customers.

Make Special and Attractive Offers

Making special offers to customers at times like this tends to get good attention. You must be able to think outside the box to serve your customers better in the unfortunate situations they now find themselves. For effectiveness, business owners can highlight special offers through PPC ads and social media. If you offer customers special and attractive offers, you are being proactive in your marketing efforts. These efforts are likely to prompt your customers to positively respond to your offers by making more purchases from your business. For such offers, you can consider special discounts, price adjustments, bonus offers and even giveaways. These offers can positively help to keep your customers engaged and your revenue streams flowing steadily.
 
Market with Pay-Per-Click, PPC Ads

Business owners can effectively use PPC ads to gain competitive advantage at times like this when more and more people are staying in their homes and spending more time on the internet. With PPC ads, business owners have great opportunities to promote their products/services directly to their target consumers. That makes competitive advantage easily possible for their businesses and the results can be very encouraging.

Optimize to Effectively Compete

In online marketing, everyone is out there on the internet doing about the same things to promote their businesses. Business owners who tend do these same things slightly differently tend to have some advantage in the market place. These are business owners who can leverage better the power of SEO. A good SEO helps to increase organic traffic to websites. The ultimate aim of a good SEO strategy is to stay on top of the SERPs of major search engines particularly Google. That way, people easily easily find your website when they do search with specific keywords with which your website is optimized. That means if you endeavor to optimize your website and content regularly, it is difficult for it to lose out to your competitors in the SERPs rankings. A loss in ranking ultimately translates to a loss in organic traffic, leads, customers and even sales revenue.

Have a Long-Term SEO Strategy

Like the Boys Scouts motto says, if you are a business owner, “Be Prepared.” There is no way the current pandemic restrictions will last forever. Things are bound to change with time. Be sure you are fully prepared for that eventuality. This is because when normalcy returns as it is bound to, people’s shopping and buying habits will also change. So, you must take steps now to formulate your SEO strategy with a long-term perspective. What you do today for your SEO campaign will inevitably impact your future organic search traffic. If you halt your SEO campaign now, it will be a great setback for future campaigns. Therefore, you must continue your SEO campaign with the post-restriction business environment fully in perspective. It will help you to remain competitive even in the post-restriction era.

How to Globalize Your E-Business

To think global, you must act global. With increased restrictions in physical business transactions because of the current global pandemic, e-business owners must think outside the box to survive. They need to explore all ways to really globalize their e-businesses. Even with the increase in remote jobs that the current pandemic has engendered, earning a living online through e-businesses is not becoming any easier. Though e-business owners can now market to anyone anywhere in the world 24/7, they still face a very huge challenge of globalizing their operations for better results. These challenges cut across culture, time zones, language, business ethics and so no. Making conscious business efforts to globalize your e-business is one great way to take on these challenges. Going global? Here are some tips to help you.

Research Your Target Audience

To successfully operate a global business, you cannot afford to ignore peculiar characteristics of various countries and geographical regions of the world when designing your marketing strategy. These include legal issues, cultural issues, language issues and suchlike peculiarities. It calls for accurate information and research data to get things right in your marketing strategy. It is imperative therefore, to thoroughly research the countries and geographical regions you are targeting before you design your marketing strategy. From your research data, you can better design your website SEO to enable cost-effective targeted ads to any part of the globe. In addition, you can deliberately create and market through a multilingual website to help you target specific foreign markets. Since your e-business is online, it is one great way it can leverage the internet to give it a better global outlook if you tweak a few things on your website based on the information from your research efforts. If such tweaks help to remove such business barriers like time zones, borders, legal, customs and commercial obstacles, it earns a global outlook and your brand can emerge a global brand.

Leverage Online Translation Tools

You cannot successfully globalize your business without factoring language barriers in your marketing strategy. The language of business is not universal around the world. To connect emotionally with local markets, you’ve got to adapt your content according to the sensibilities of local audiences. That is the first major challenge your business must deal with in your globalizing efforts. There is no cause to worry too much though. With online tools like Google Translate, you can take advantage of fast translations from one language to another across web platforms and channels. Even though the most realistic translations are still done by humans who understand context and culture better than an application or set of algorithms, these tools are really helpful for fast and effective transactions across the globe. Worldwide, every language has its own set of diverse nuances based on region and other factors. You can get around this by studying your analytics to know where your website visitors are coming from. Next is to factor in their language and culture in your marketing messages to get better results. 

Give Your Website a Global Outlook

Good communication is great for business. The language of communication is greater still. If you aim to market to global audiences, your marketing strategy must factor language in. First is to consider offering your content in multiple languages if a language translation feature will not be adequate. However, if your own local language is one of the commonly spoken languages in the world such as English or French or Spanish or Chinese or Russian or Arabic, you can get by with just a language translation feature on your website. Be sure to stick to the generally accepted form of your chosen language while avoiding modern slang and colloquialisms. That makes it easier to translate for better understanding and will help your business to connect better with diverse peoples in other countries/regions of the world. If you offer more languages, you’ll gain a more competitive edge since it helps to make your business relatable to a wider global audience. That is one of the major benefits to making your website multilingual.
 
Make Your Content Global in Context

A great global content marketing strategy should be one that is effective on anyone who happens to stumble upon it anywhere in the world even if such persons are not in your target market. That calls for a flexible content that has global appeal. You can factor in various cultures and write blog content that consistently addresses a certain niche or field for a global audience and search engines. You can carefully use analytics to find out who, and from where your content is accessed. Write and target this audience with content that fits their search goals while remaining relevant to your products, brand and business values. Analytics data can help you to decide on where to target markets with ad campaigns and which content and context can be unique for different languages, cultures and countries. If you pay good attention to email and social media feedback, the insights can help you figure out which languages to optimize your messages with and to prioritize for translations.

5 Ways to Monetize Your Business Website

Due to the prevailing pandemic, millions of people now appear to have lost their businesses and means of livelihoods. Many people now face grossly reduced incomes or no incomes at all. It is simply natural to expect such people to look for alternative ways of survival. Many now think rightly of website monetization and making money online. As a result, the internet seems increasingly very attractive at the moment. It is now common to find people searching the internet for ways they can make money online during these challenging times. Taking your small business online and exploring all avenues to have the site monetized has become a very attractive prospect. If you are thinking that way as well here is what works. If you are able to create a good website, offer for sale an excellent product or service from the site, you too can make money online. Next step is how to promote your website successfully online to attract good traffic. This website traffic is what you really need to earn money by way of monetization. The following are very popular ways to monetize your website for that purpose.

1. Selling a Product/Service

Having a great product or service to sell online is one very positive way to earn money online. If you are selling your own product or service, all the sales revenue accrue to you. At minimal investment of cash, the ROI is usually very attractive if you are selling your own product or service online. Just think out of the box, create a product or service that easily solves problems for many people and wham, you are in business. Draw inspiration from your passion and talent to create a solution by way of a product or a service, and make things simple, you’ll get customers in no time.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model of linking merchants to consumers and you get paid commissions for your efforts. If you promote affiliate links from your website and purchases are made via those links, you get paid. That simply means earning commissions from promoting and selling merchants’ products to your website visitors. This becomes simpler and better paying if you sign up for the programs of large e-commerce affiliate sites like SFI, Amazon and Alibaba. When you sign-up for their programs, you will then have access to products’ links to promote on your website. Include these links in the content you write to recommend various e-commerce products you feel like promoting on your website. When people click on these links and purchase any products, you earn a percentage commission from the sales. It is as simple as that.

3. Membership Fees

Charging membership fees is one sure way to earn from your website. To qualify for such fees, the info you put out from your website must be highly informative, authoritative, exclusive and in very high demand. Good content suitable for membership on websites include market research findings, webinars, or podcasts. If you create such content, you can then ask your website visitors who desperately need the info to pay a fee before having access to the content. That way, you make money steadily for as long as your content is in demand. 

4. Sponsored Posts

After you launch your website, you must promote it vigorously to grow traffic and audience. When the audience is big enough, you can reach out to bigger marketing businesses that operate in the same niche you are to find out if they are interested in your website traffic. If they show interest, you can offer to publish an authoritative blog or video about their product or service and link to them. You can offer to include them in your regular newsletter, or place their ads on your site. If they realize that they are getting traffic from your efforts, you can then cut a sponsorship deal with them. That simply means steady money and income.

5. Website Traffic Reselling

As a successful marketer, you can actually resell your website traffic if it is huge and steady. If your website traffic gets to such high level, say in the thousands, you can then decide to join platforms like Google Ads or Ezoic by applying to them to place advertisements on your website. Google Adsense is particularly very popular at this and the code they give you to insert on your website is very efficient in calculating the “views” and “hits” on the ads they run on your website. That is what determines what they pay you as a publisher of these ads. It is only when your website traffic sees or clicks on the ads that you are entitled to be paid. Alternatively, you can reach out to marketers, merchants and other advertisers directly. By displaying their banners and links on your website, you are helping them to advertise their products or services. You earn money from these efforts through the clicks that emanate from your website.

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.

Dependable Online Passive Income Avenues

Passive income is income you earn even without making any additional efforts. It is about the most convenient income avenue even amidst restrictions as occasioned by the current covid-19 pandemic worldwide. Most online passive income avenues require at least some initial investment if not regular management in order to be truly successful. The following are proven online passive income avenues you can earn good revenue from even within restrictions of the pandemic.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of helping a merchant to sell a product/service and you earn a commission for your efforts. Online, what affiliates do is to help direct traffic from their personal pages to a merchant’s brand by way of links. They are often paid commissions for the clicks that turned into purchases via those links from their web pages. Once in place, it keeps earning commissions once buyers click the links to make purchases. That is passive income which affiliates can earn indefinitely even within pandemic restrictions. Some affiliate marketers can earn up to $100,000 per year from passive income alone.

Intellectual Property Rights

Just as it happens offline, you can also earn passive income from intellectual property online, if you can sell something of value digitally. You can earn passive income from intellectual property rights on specialized downloadable contents such eBooks, music and songs, graphics and photographs, how-to videos, aerobics, hobbies, languages, games, cooking and such like activities other persons are interested in.

Content Creation Across Social Platforms
 
If you blog for business as most digital marketers are doing, you are already creating content. What you really need is to get better at it to turn it into a passive income earner. The reason is because, content creation is now one of the most rapidly growing and dominant forms of online incomes nearly every marketer can tap into. Nevertheless, be sure your content is of high quality. It must be informative, educating and even entertaining enough to gain readership and followership. If your blog content is of high quality, it will better project you as an established creator, some kind of expert or leader in a specific niche. That is especially true in an area where you already know there is a high demand for advice or special interest. When you are good in what you do as a good content creator, you set yourself up for passive income for as long as your content is in demand. Duplicating yourself and your content across multi-channels is one great way to get you and your brand known. Therefore, you can scale your content across multiple social media channels to increase exposure, traffic and income. To grow followership exponentially, you need more than just creating good content. You must stand out and be different, consistent, and dependable and the content you create must be especially unique. That is what attracts the numbers and the income. 

8 Proven Ways to Earn Money Online

Right now, more and more people are looking for credible ways to earn money online to increase their financial inflows by way of secondary income streams. Restrictions occasioned by covid-19 pandemic are really piling up the pressure to explore some more convenient ways to earn money online. Many people are now facing the challenges of trying to earn money online right from the confines of their homes. The internet really comes quite handy for such people. By relying on the internet, many legitimate and credible ways are available to earn money online if you know how. However, you should not expect to earn huge amounts quickly when using online avenues to earn money. It takes a gradual process and it builds up with time if you manage to avoid the many fake and get-rich-quick schemes prevalent out there online.

Here are some eight tried and tested ways anyone can use to earn money online.

1. Launching Your Own Website

Your website is your business window out there in cyber world. If you have the know-how, you can design and launch a website yourself. If not, professional webmasters can do it for you and help you to arrange the hosting. You have absolute discretion to choose a domain name, templates, layout and the overall design for your website. Once launched, the next step will be how to attract traffic to the website. Putting out fresh and regular good content on the site attracts readers. That means traffic! Webmasters can help you with SEO techniques to make the site visible and better ranked on Search Engines. That is what helps it to attract organic traffic. The more traffic your website gets, the better its earnings potentials. These earnings come about if you take steps to monetize the website. This you do by signing up for Google Adsense to send ads to the site. When visitors view these ads or click on them, you earn money from Google as a publisher.

2. Selling Your Products/Services Online

Remember your business window to the cyber world is your website. From it, you can display, advertise and sell your products/services. Even if you do not have a website to sell out of, you can sell out of popular and reputable affiliate platforms and such other platforms like Amazon. The essence is to ensure you have increased visibility for what you are selling and these reputable and popular platforms help with that visibility. The more visible your products are online, the more sales you make.

3. Skills Freelancing

If you have marketable skills, freelancing is one very popular way to earn money online. The Internet offers several options and websites for freelancing skills tasks. If you any of such marketable skills, all you need to do is to create an account with websites like Outfiverr.com, Upwork.com, or freelancer.com, browse through the listings, and apply for the task that suits you and your skills. Some of these websites may even require you to create a personal listing with the details of your skillset. Doing so allows interested clients to make contact with you directly. What you are paid and how you get paid are subject to the available options open to you to make your choices.
 
4. Virtual Assistantship

A Virtual Assistant is exactly what it sounds like. They are skilled, home-based professionals that offer their services to very busy Executives to help handle routine administrative duties. Such duties include but not limited to making/taking phone calls, email correspondence, Internet research, data entry, scheduling appointments, editing, writing, bookkeeping, marketing, blog management, proofreading, project management, graphic design, tech support, customer service, event planning, and social media management. As a Virtual Assistant, you can choose to work as an employee or you can set up your own Virtual Assistant business in form of consultancy services. You get paid depending on the volume and nature of services you are rendering.

 
5. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is some kind of symbolic partnership. What you do is to help producers market their products and you get paid agreed commissions for your efforts. If you own your own website, you can insert web links on the site from companies/businesses having products to sell. When visitors to your website buy products/services through a click on such links, you earn commissions from such sales.

6. Language Translating

For people who have language-translating skills, this is a very good opportunity to earn money online. If you have a working knowledge of and you are fluent in some major languages of the world, this is a plus for language translators. Doing it skillfully can help you to earn some extra cash. Online, many websites such as Freelancer.in, Fiverr.com, Worknhire.com or Upwork.com do offer translation projects that require translating a document from one language into another. This may include Russian, Spanish, Chinese, French, Arabic, German, or any other language to or from English. Just sign up on these sites and get to work on any offers you are comfortable with. You get paid for your work.

7. Paid-To-Click, PTC Sites

You get paid on some PTC sites such as ClixSense.com, BuxP, NeoBux and others just to click on ads. Once you sign-up with such sites, the project begins with a bit of variances here and there depending on the sites you are signed-up with. You can also earn commissions through referrals.

8. Tutoring Online

Tutoring online requires some proven knowledge and expertise that you can impart to others skillfully. Thus, once you are knowledgeable as an expert in any particular subject on demand, you can earn by teaching it to people online. You may have some expert knowledge of some sporting activities, music, dancing, hunting, skiing, mountain climbing, swimming, language skills and so on. You may choose to sign up on websites like Vedantu.com, MyPrivateTutor.com, BharatTutors.com, as an online tutor. First is to create a profile, then list the subjects or classes you want to teach, how much experience you have, what your qualifications are and so on to enable the sites properly rate your expertise. If you get selected, documentation and profile-creation will be done next. Some training and an induction webinar as an intro will follow. Once you go through the intro from the webinar, you may thereafter get a listing as a tutor and be assigned your online sessions to conduct. Your earnings begin from there depending on how well you discharge your responsibilities.

Tactical Ways to Earn Money Online

Restrictions occasioned by covid-19 pandemic have caused many people to take to trying to earn money online right from the confines of their homes. By taking to the internet, many more people are exploring more ways to earn money online as additional means of income streams. Experience shows there are numerous ways to earn money online that are legitimate and profitable. Marketing experts however advise a tactical approach to avoid fake and get-rich-quick schemes that are numerous online. Here are some of the legit ways they recommend.

Web Designing

If you have the knowledge and you are a bit tech savvy, you can earn money online as a web designer. Now that nearly everyone is taking his or her businesses online because of the pandemic restrictions, a good web designer is always on high demand. With a good knowledge of coding and web designing, you already have the essential ingredients in setting up websites for others and you get paid handsomely for your efforts. Even if the demand for new websites is not very high, you can still do good business by helping others out whose websites need maintenance, modernization, sprucing up and updating. 

Writing eBooks

If you have the knack for writing eBooks to showcase your expert knowledge, you can work with Kindle Direct Publishing to self-publish eBooks and paperbacks. Publishing.com is another reputable place to get your book published to earn money. On Kindle Direct Publishing, you can reach millions of readers worldwide on Amazon. Publishing takes less than 5 minutes and your book appears on Kindle stores worldwide within 24-48 hours. What you earn on royalties varies from country to country depending on what rights you hold and control over your intellectual property.

Content Writing

Many businesses are always on the lookout for good content writers. Even if you don’t have a website of your own, you can use some online platforms to showcase your writing talents. What you are paid depends hugely on the quality of the articles you write and the business niche you are writing about. You can thus, focus on any niche in your area of expertise and build strength in that domain to increase your revenue stream. Better still, some company’s may hire you and give you some specific niches and guidelines to help you develop your articles for their specific needs.

Taking Surveys, Searches and Reviews

Online, there are many websites offering money to undergo online surveys, carry out online searches, and write reviews on products. This may however require some tactical approach as a bit of confidentiality may be required particularly when it involves individuals and financial transactions. Many companies do surveys regularly particularly when they want to launch new products or they have some old products they plan to spruce up and re-launch. These companies pay to have these surveys undertaken the way they want them. Exact same way some financial institutions pay to have background searches/checks and confidential information on their prospective customers.

Blogging

These days, nearly everyone in online marketing tries to blog to get inbound traffic. Many others take to blogging as some hobby, interest, and a passion. Such people may with time become professional bloggers and earn money from their efforts. Blogging is all about content marketing online. To earn money from your blog, it is best to go for a self-hosted blog website where you can have unrestricted control over your content. You can customize all the elements and functionality of your website and you can easily monetize it with Google Adsense to earn money from it.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Many expert marketers have discovered ways to make money from popular social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. That is in addition to doing what everyone else does on social media such as building an audience of followers by interacting with friends and strangers on the platforms. Companies and brands pay social media strategists and influencers to help boost the popularity of their products. Influencers do this by regularly writing and posting content about the products and even endorsing such products. Many buyers rely hugely on the opinions of influencers to make their buy decisions. Creative posts by social media influencers can easily go viral and help boost brand value. Thus, by sharing posts regularly and interacting with their followers on a regular basis, social media influencers help boost brand value and companies like to pay for that.

5 Quick Ways to Make Money Online

With covid-19 pandemic still ravaging the world and restrictions are still very rampart, making money online is becoming increasingly attractive by the day. Many people have learned to be innovative and creative to survive in today’s tough world. Many are looking for how to quickly make money online as part of their own survival strategies. Doing so via the internet is hugely attractive. The Internet through its own versatility has managed to make things easy for those who dare to try. The Internet has thus become one of the greatest resources available to the human race in this age and time. It provides you with unlimited quick and easy opportunities to make money 24/7 and from your home/office in your own little corner of the woods to boot. However, first you must be creative and innovative enough to survive making money on the Internet.

Here are 5 tried and tested quick ways anyone who is Internet savvy can use to make money online.

1. Paid Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is exactly an assistant helping very busy executives carry out routine administrative duties for a fee. If you are educated, diligent and smart, you can start making money today by becoming a virtual assistant to busy executives. Virtual assistant jobs require most of the skills you need to be effective in many other businesses and jobs as well. The demand for virtual assistants is high as they help to free some good quality time for very busy executives to tackle other tasks that are more demanding. The pay is good and virtual assistants are in very high demand to perform suchlike administrative assistant tasks as bookkeeping, scheduling, setting up and managing virtual meetings, setting up business appointments, all these through computer networking.

2. Websites and Apps Testing

Webmasters and apps developers like to test new websites and apps for effectiveness, functionality and efficiency. They pay to have their newly designed websites and apps tested fully to avoid disappointing and even alienating their customers with poor products. If you are internet savvy and you have the requisite skills to test out new websites for webmasters and apps developers, you can make quick money as a website or apps tester. You can look online at various websites for available options, opportunities and pay packages.

3. Taking Online Surveys

Do you know you can get paid and earn quick money by simply sharing your opinion on brands and products online? There and many survey sites online that will pay you simply for giving honest feedback about products and items they are interested in. These sites make available to marketers customers answers and feedback to enable them know what their customers really want. Marketers need such important information to help them design better campaign strategies and fine-tune their marketing campaigns with a view to serving consumers better. If you want to make money from taking surveys, all you need do is to sign up and fill out a profile questionnaire in any survey websites that are willing to pay you for taking surveys. Once you complete your profile, you can take surveys the sites send your way, earn valuable points, and cash out down the road.

4. Talent Freelancing

It is generally true that most humans have at least one natural talent they are endowed with. Others can acquire very valuable skills as well which they can depend on to make money online. Such people can sell their services and talents as freelancers. Freelancers are private businesspersons who work for themselves by contracting out their services/talents. Many teachers, educators, linguists, food and drinks connoisseurs, writers, programmers, and musicians do freelance their work to make some extra money. You can earn quick money by starting your own freelancing career by looking out on online job sites or signing up for freelance sites.
 
5. Transcribing

To earn money as a transcriber, you must have practical shorthand and typing skills. Transcribing is simply when you type or write out what is being said in an audio recording or video. Some websites offer transcribing services as a package to virtual assistant services. Skillful and talented transcribers are on demand and many make quick money online. If you have transcribing skills particularly if you type very fast, you can make quick money online even if you work out of your home or office.

Final Thoughts and Tips

You can find hiring and matching agencies online to help link you to these jobs on a token agency fees. If you can directly advertise your talents online yourself and get patronage, that is fine. You can work on that and add agency services as well if you want to make a quick start. Just get on with it right now that the pandemic is still severely restricting nearly everyone.

Business Survival Tips During Lock-down

 

Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lock-downs appear to have forced many small business owners to think outside the box. Business survival has become the buzzword and many small business owners are scared and hugely challenged. Not to worry though, the pandemic will pass away at some point and life will return to normal. In the interim, people must think about how to remain in profitable business to keep body and soul together. Here are a few things you can do to remain in business against all odds.  
 
Take Your Business Online

If you factor in that people are not at liberty to freely leave their homes as they like these days, anyone who wants to do good business must focus more on creating a strong digital presence with online shopping options. Taking your business online is the smartest thing to do when human interaction is severely restricted as characterized by lock-downs. How do you do that? Firstly, you need a professionally designed, functional and flexible website for your business. Host it with a credible web host to allow it to do good business online. If you are in product sales, you must decide at the outset what should be your sales channels and how you can through these channels target your customers. Work out reliable delivery methods for your products and the payment methods available to customers for these products. Be sure your website is optimized with SEO techniques for local searches. The bulk of your customers are more likely to be local because of the lock-down. Optimizing your website for local searches is what helps people in your locality searching for business to locate you easily.

Don’t Ignore Security

You must think deeply about how to handle physical and cyber security for your business. Safety is generally of major concern to most people in times of lock-down. You do not have to panic as most people are. Just calm down and think more constructively as against desperate thinking. If you take your business online, your website must guarantee adequate cyber security, especially when it comes to protecting personal data and payment options/information. If your customers are confident that you are offering proper security and safety, they become more confident shopping with you even amidst huge challenges occasioned by severe restrictions.

Have a Workable Plan in Place

In times of huge business challenges as in the case of a lock-down, a new business plan becomes inevitable.  This is justified by the necessity of the lock-down. You just have to get things done better in some other ways, isn’t it? You can decide on a flexible business plan incorporating your operational model, financial plan, promotional and sales goals. Determine well in advance, your competitive advantage and challenges. Identify your top competitors and potential suppliers/ business partners in addition to situating your target market correctly. Most importantly, your plan must have clear goals, targets and priorities that are in tandem with your planned budget.

Explore Market Opportunities

Even with the lock-down, the opportunities for good business are still there. Research the market well to determine what is hugely in demand even with the lock-down. Taking your business to customers and serving them where they are is good. You must explore ways to do this profitably. There are many business lessons to learn because of the lock-down. How you use these lessons to work out survival strategies for your own business depends on how well you understand the market opportunities available to your business. The more you understand these opportunities, the better the chances of your business surviving the lock-down difficulties.  

Promote and Sell More Online

If you are a marketer, you are not in business if you are not marketing 24/7. The lock-down has forced many more people to resort to shopping online. This is why you must have a credible and authoritative digital marketing presence to serve customers better. Experience from the lock-down has shown clearly that you can promote your business and sell more online even under severe restrictions occasioned by the lock-down. If your business has sufficient flexibility, you can continue to serve customers, promote your business better and sell more products despite the inclement business environment occasioned by the lock-down.

How Digital Marketing can Help Small Businesses During a Pandemic

In an unexpected period of a pandemic as is currently being experienced around the world, forced restriction tends to cripple many small businesses. Many will eventually go out of business altogether if they don’t learn to think outside the box. The time to think digital marketing is now because many small business owners are undergoing pains physically, emotionally, and most importantly financially. Now, without a reliable source of income and to avoid going out of business altogether, the way to go is the use of technology. Smart small business owners are increasingly moving towards digital platforms and using digital marketing techniques to sustain their small businesses.



These here are credible ways to use digital marketing techniques to keep small businesses afloat during the pandemic.

Embracing Change in Business Strategy

If your business must survive during the pandemic, you must be able to think outside the box and embrace change. Even if you you’ve not been using digital platforms effectively, the time to embrace such platforms is now. Yes, it may require some risk to do but taking such risks and remaining in business is much better that going out of business on account of the forced restriction. If you embrace digital marketing, it can help you to stay in business and even to grow the business while the pandemic lasts.
 
Exploring Online Marketing

Online marketing by nature has many incredible opportunities for business. Depending on the nature of your business and your own capabilities, you can think deeply to find ways to stay in business even with the pandemic. Because of the severe restrictions on the free movement of persons and goods, you need effective strategies to overcome the challenges posed by these restrictions in our daily lives. Keenly exploring online marketing possibilities helps out to address many of these challenges. If you need to promote your products extensively and very widely, online marketing is the best and only platform most suitable for increasing awareness and reaching the right kind of audience without hassles. You can rely on online marketing to open doors to a very large audience beyond the physical reach of the offline business to target which the pandemic has severely restricted.

Reaching More Customers

Characteristically, digital platforms have no restrictive boundaries. Because of this lack of restrictions, there is no limit to the number of customers you can reach and how far and wide you can expand your business if you so decide. During this pandemic, many smart small business owners are making use of the opportunity of using digital platforms to expand their businesses and to reach more customers. With the use of a simple well-designed website, small businesses can reach out to customers anywhere in this world 24/7. Now, isn’t that wonderful even with the restrictions of the pandemic? Digital marketing makes that possible with hugely beneficial results for small businesses.

Better Customer Reach at Lower Costs

During this pandemic, many small businesses have grown tremendously through digital platforms and at a rapid pace. By using digital marketing platforms they easily reach thousands of customers around the world even within a limited marketing budget. That is possible because the comparative cost of reaching a wide audience online is much lower than doing same offline. Unlike traditional methods of reaching customers, digital marketing allows you to directly reach a large number of customers and potential customers who are interested in your type of products. All these at comparative lower costs to boot since traditional advertising methods involve spending larger amounts. Even with a higher cost, traditional ads do not guarantee that your ads are reaching the right audience with the right message.

Better Time Usage

With the advantage of digital technology, small businesses can better manage their time and resources during a pandemic. Digital marketing platforms involve very smart and effective decision making which tends to guarantee better returns on the money and time invested in the business. This comes about when these small businesses are able to use their time wisely by implementing the best and most effective digital marketing strategies to create more awareness and attract even more customers to their businesses.

Using More Effective Small Business Strategies

Earlier, with the restrictive nature of the pandemic, many had thought small businesses were completely done for. Digital marketing changed that narrative for good because it brought with it, a new way of thinking by testing and tasking the creativity of small business owners. Free and easy-to-use digital marketing tools such as Google analytics help small business owners to know what people are looking for on the internet and how they interact with what any business is offering. These tools are highly effective in helping to find the right audience and targeting them accurately. With digital marketing tools, it is easy to formulate good strategies to help track ads campaigns and effectively evaluate every move and to make changes as necessary to target customers effectively. Thus, with correct strategies in place, it is fairly easy to get whosoever searches or visits a business website to actually do business with the website.


 
Paying More Attention to Digital Marketing

The forced restriction as result of the ongoing global pandemic has actually induced many small business owners to think about and pay more attention to digital marketing. They now have more time on their hands to effectively plan for and engage more digital marketing strategies for their businesses. Digital marketing being a combination of full-fledged marketing strategies that include brands' awareness now becomes very handy to target potential audiences to convert them into loyal customers just like doing business in the physical world. Paying more attention to that now helps small businesses to easily generate trust among the customers by creating user-friendly interfaces and strategies that help to build faith in the shopping audience. With more and better time at their disposal, small businesses can now effectively set their business goals for online marketing while growing their businesses seamlessly with the aid of digital technology.

Stimulating Employment

Quite surprising! While other businesses may be shrinking during the pandemic, small businesses can indeed grow and even generate more employment with the use of digital technology.  Small business owners actually have lots of business growth opportunities because of the peculiarities of digital marketing. Since more businesses are going online, services of web developers are increasing in demand. Webmasters, bloggers, content marketers, advertisers and in fact most businesses that can be done easily online are increasing in demand. With small businesses now better able to engage with the right audience and showing their unique products and services to potential customers, demand increases. This is coupled with the fact that they can with the use of digital technology better target potential customers and generate more leads and sales because of the unique services they provide at comparatively lower costs.

5 Simple and Creative Home Business Ideas

The forced lock-down of people at home because of covid-19 pandemic has made many people to have another look at businesses they can do in the interim. Many are just realizing that you don’t really need to commute and be in formal office environment to do something profitable to better your life. Necessity they say is the mother of invention. What you really need is to be a bit creative and to think out of the box to get something going for you.

Here are some 5 creative home business ideas you can consider.

1. Affiliate Marketing

With access to a computer and the internet, you can easily become an affiliate marketer working from home. Selling appears to be the biggest problem of product merchants. Affiliate marketers help to mitigate that problem. The relationship is simple. All an Affiliate marketer needs to do is to simply partner with product merchants to help market their products. Once a sale is made, the affiliate marketer gets paid a commission if that sale is directly attributable to his marketing efforts. It is as simple as that and anyone can thus get to be an affiliate marketer working directly from home. Affiliate marketing is one of the best small business ideas you can easily start and do from home even with limited skills and experience. Just get yourself a computer/laptop, a good internet connection and a marketable product; you are in business working out of your home.



2. Handmade Products

Handmade products are very suitable business ideas especially for women still raising a family. Many women can decide to bake cakes, make chocolates, biscuits, scented candles, knitted apparels, face masks, hand crafts, etc. etc. and sell out of their homes. They only need a very small capital outlay to buy materials and inputs. With their skills and creativity, they go to work to make good marketable products in high demand. These they can make and sell out of their homes to satisfy customer demands and even through a specially designed website for a wider reach.

3. Teaching Online Classes

As they say in human relations, everyone knows something better than someone else. That “something” can be taught to others as an income-earning activity. There is no doubt you are aware that teaching is a very noble activity even as a business. You get satisfaction from helping others to gain some knowledge while others get satisfaction from being able to learn something from you. If you get to make some money from this relationship, it is all well and good. It thus becomes a good and respectable business for you to make some money from. If you have a teachable knowledge about something, there are good platforms on the internet where you can complete your profile and get paid for tutoring and creating online courses. Teaching a good course on demand online is one of the best ways to earn some money from home. If you have a smart computer, stable internet connection, and a deep passion to teach and learn, you can be in some teaching business working out of your home.

4. Skills Coaching

This is a bit similar to teaching online courses but instead of just the information, you need to teach specialized skills here. Most of these skills relate to extracurricular activities like sports, playing musical instruments, music, singing, dancing, gymnastics, body building, painting, sculpting, molding, carving, carpentry, etc. etc. It is a great small business idea to teach any of these skills on demand if you have the knowledge and skills. It makes some business sense too to think of getting together with some other skillful persons and pool your skills together to establish an academy for such skills. That done, it is possible to get good patronage and make money as well!

5. Social Events Planning

This is one great business idea which helps to take pressure off most celebrants. No matter how depressed the world has become as a result of the ravaging pandemic, life still goes on. Anniversaries, birthdays, marriages and other important social events are still taking place even at reduced scales. Despite the effects of the pandemic, there is still money to be made from social events planning. Some people may appear poor but many still like to spend some good money to once in a while celebrate events which are very important in their lives. That is where the business of helping to plan and organize such events becomes very handy. Anyone with some experience no matter how little in organizing mere picnics or even birthday parties can do this business. If you have the right connections, it is possible to be in high demand to render this service to many and diverse people, families and even corporate organizations. Total and comprehensive packaging of every activity that is required for each event can be scaled to be one of the best profit generating small business ideas anyone can think of in any community.