5 Tips to Market your E-commerce Website

It is not enough to just set up your e-commerce website. You must effectively market it to attract business online. If you market your website well enough, you can significantly grow your business online. These days, more and more people are increasingly taking to online shopping, but if your e-commerce store is not easily accessible on the internet, clearly you are losing significant online business. If your e-commerce store is properly registered on the web, it must have a domain name and reputable web host. It is through this domain name that internet users can use to reach your website. That means, it is your online business address. This is the address together with its link you must market online to enable internet users find your business and possibly do business with you online. Following are some excellent tips you can effectively use to market your website.

1. Social Media Marketing

With over 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media has become one huge market and an effective way to promote businesses online. Promoting your website on social media is fairly easy. Just explore all ways to create visibility for your business website on some of the most popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the likes. If your marketing budget can accommodate it, you can promote your website by way of social media ads. Creating good quality content consistently and sharing it on the platforms is one great way to grow your website traffic. As your website traffic grows, so is the popularity of the website.

2. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

If you want your website to be noticed, indexed and ranked by search engines, explore all ways to make it SEO-friendly. This you can do by making sure the content you share on the site, all the existing pages and info on the web pages all carry select keywords to make the website SEO-friendly. To remain in this condition, you must check out your SEO regularly with online SEO tools to be sure it is doing what you expect it to do in terms of website performance. This ultimately helps your website to rank high on the SERPs of search engines. If your website ranks high on these pages, it benefits from higher organic traffic. This means it is increasingly popular and reaching wider audiences online.

3. Offer Educational Services

One other great way to market your website is to offer free educational courses out of the site. Depending on your skills and inclinations, you can offer quality webinars and podcasts to promote your website. Blogging out of the website by sharing high quality educational and informative content is another effective way to market your website. You can select any topic you blog about and get an expert to teach how-to techniques through free podcasts. This can help you to market your website and grow your business.

4. Write Email Newsletter

If you already have a responsive email list built up, writing and sending a valuable newsletter to this email list is a great way to market your website and business. You may decide to send this newsletter weekly, bi- monthly or monthly. If it manages to get to your email list audience, your customers and even visitors to your website, it can help promote the website.

5. Guest Blogging

Aside blogging out of your own website, guest blogging is also a good way to market your website. Through these efforts, you can write regular guest posts for well-known relevant and reputable websites with a link back to your website on the content or in your author bio section depending on what the guest blogging website permits. By this arrangement, finding a quality website to write quality content for as a guest blogger is no doubt a great way to market your website.
 
Wrapping Up

Content marketing is generally acceptable to most online marketers and business owners as crucial to growing and promoting their businesses online. Either in combination or used singly, digital marketing techniques like search engine marketing, social media marketing, guest blogging, email marketing, teaching free webinars and podcasts come in very handy in this quest to effectively market your website and grow your business online.

6 Most Common Digital Marketing Strategies You Should Know

Digital marketing covers a vast area of marketing particularly on the internet. Online marketers rely on digital marketing to get traffic, connect with their audience, capture leads, and make sales.  Marketers without an impressive digital presence are less likely to outperform those with active digital presence online. Smart marketers depend heavily on digital marketing to outperform their competition and gain a competitive edge on the internet. The field in quite vast and it encompasses diverse marketing strategies. These strategies directly leverage computer and internet technology to effectively promote products/services online. If you are interested in digital marketing, it is best to familiarize yourself with the most common strategies that successful marketers like to recommend. Following are six of such digital marketing strategies you too can effectively use to get results.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing strategy where affiliates help product merchants market their products and earn commissions for their efforts. It is some kind of mutually beneficial partnership between product merchants, affiliates and consumers. Affiliates directly help product merchants to boost their business and increase their engagement with consumers. Affiliates help make available to consumers, products/services that help solve problems for them. In this partnership, product merchants sell more products/services while consumers easily find products/services that meet their needs. Affiliates who facilitate this earn more commissions from the process.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a process of connecting with your audience through relevant information sharing. Content is hugely important for marketers to cater to the concerns of their target audience and help them seek solutions to their needs. It is one digital strategy that is very popular with marketers. If the content is qualitative and well packaged, it helps marketers to effectively reach out to their target audience and gain their trust. For digital marketing purposes, an effective content is usually packaged in the form of blogs, research data, videos, infographics, guides, podcasts, bulletins and more. These are the common techniques that help the marketer to build a following/audience over time. When the content you consistently produce builds trust with this audience, it impacts your traffic, leads and sales. It ultimately helps to boost your affiliate marketing business.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is another effective digital marketing strategy which enables marketers to easily interact with their audience by way of emails. It is essentially used by marketers for targeting new, retaining existing, and nurturing leads and customers. To have an effective email marketing campaign, you must first build a responsive email list. This you do by diligently collecting the email addresses of your target audience over time through op-in and sign-up marketing techniques. You can also grow your email list using lead magnets, pop-ups, exit-intent messages, and more. Marketers love to use emails to market because it is cost-effective and the ROI is usually quite impressive. Experienced marketers can segment their email list for more personalized marketing messages and campaigns.

4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

With more than 4.6 billion active users around the globe, social media has become hugely popular with digital marketers. Social media marketing SMM is a digital marketing strategy which allows marketers to promote content via social media platforms of choice. Marketers use social media platforms to market their brands organically or through paid advertising. SMM as a marketing strategy is a very effective way to connect with your target audience no matter where that audience is on the globe. It makes easy two-way interaction between marketers and their respective target audience. Aside its huge popularity, sharing messages on social media is quite easy and smooth. The reason social media easily facilitates engagement as your audience reacts at will and/or leaves comments on your posts. This user content helps marketers to assess the performance of their content. Many consumers use social media to research preferred solutions and make informed buying decisions. This makes social media platforms ideal for capturing quality leads and even to make sales.

Influencer marketing is ancillary to SMM. This is because most influencers ply their trade in social media as social media influencers. Influencer marketing as a viable SMM strategy is quite effective to reach out to a huge audience which can be in the millions. Influencers can even influence the buy decisions of this huge audience through endorsements and recommendations. Because a significant percentage of consumers really trust influencer recommendations, partnering with influencers can actually become a big business boost for marketers.
 
5. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a digital marketing strategy where marketers are required to pay for the ads they run on online platforms. If they have the right marketing budget, it is possible for marketers to run ads on different search engines and social media platforms. For search engine marketing, marketers generally prefer Google which is a lead search engine for running paid ad campaigns. You can also run paid ads on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes. Because ranking well on search engines can be a very slow process, most marketers prefer using a fair mix of organic and paid marketing strategies to reach out to their respective target audiences. Paid ads can give you much faster results if you have the right marketing budget. You can always use paid ads marketing strategy if you’re looking for a quick boost in traffic or sales.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In digital marketing, it is not enough to create content no matter how good the content is. You must explore all reliable avenues to make this content accessible to your audience. That is where SEO comes in as a reliable marketing strategy. SEO is a bit technical and tricky especially for marketers that are not too experienced. For such marketers who cannot use DIY approach, they can hire the services of professional webmasters to have SEO done on their websites. SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps to make your content visible to search engines. If the search engines rank the content high in their SERPs, it increases its visibility to searchers. That means more organic traffic to your website.

Online, a search engine is usually a go-to platform for most people to find suitable solutions. When people simple tap in their search queries on major search engines like Google, it shows recommendations that cater to the respective search queries in detail. If these search queries resonate with your niche, Google throws up your content thereby making it accessible to the searchers. The more search engines throw up your content in search results, the more organic traffic it receives. This is why SEO should be your go-to strategy for more organic traffic.

Wrapping Up

The foregoing are digital marketing strategies that are popular among marketers and they get results. The reason you should know them well and be prepared to deploy them in your marketing efforts. Marketers worldwide use a mix of these strategies to achieve their set marketing objectives. They rely on them for the success of their respective marketing campaigns. You too can try them out and see which ones work best for you.

How to Profitably Engage Affiliate Marketing for Your Business

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy many business owners rely on to sell their products/services. It is an effective and low-risk method of building audience for your business by partnering with like-minded individuals and brands. This partnership is hinged on mutual benefits for product merchants as well as affiliates. Affiliates work on commission-based formats which the products merchants put in place. All the affiliate does is to promote unique affiliate links to products through their content/blog. Any time a purchase is made through this unique link, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale. This process is easily adaptable and beneficial for most types of business models. Here are some proven ways you can profitably engage affiliate marketing for your business and be glad you did.

Establish a Clear Brand Identity

Affiliate marketing is most effective when you already have a clear brand identity. Therefore, before launching a wide-scale affiliate program, it is advisable to first build a solid brand identity. Since most affiliates will promote your products across multiple online platforms, your brand identity ensures uniformity and continuity across these platforms. This is why you must clearly establish a viable brand manual that denotes clear brand colors, fonts, and voice. That makes it possible for all your affiliates to properly present your brand identity to avoid confusing and or inaccurate promotion messages.
 
Collaborate With Complimentary Brands

Affiliate marketing is a versatile concept that is suitable for promoting most brands. It works with collaboration with other brands as well. This collaboration is a type of partnership that allows for cross-recruiting and premised on a wider audience base. It is mutually beneficial for brands when one brand promotes for the benefit of another brand in some kind of cross-selling. By this arrangement, both brands can benefit from the promotional activities as well as earn commissions both ways from referrals and purchases.

Launch an Affiliate Email Campaign

Email campaigns are still very effective in online marketing activities. More so when such emails are specially designed for affiliates. If you launch an affiliate email campaign, it serves as a form of internal communication for your existing affiliate network. This method allows for clear and concise brand collaboration. You can thus set up an email campaign to update affiliates about upcoming promotions and sales as well as provide up-to-date marketing materials to make their marketing activities more result oriented.

Work to Improve Conversion Rates

Without good conversions, it is pretty difficult for marketers to make sales. You can therefore make optimizing conversion rates the ultimate goal of your marketing strategy. If you do the right things, affiliate marketing has a high chance of success when it comes to improving conversion rates on your website. For effectiveness, you can handpick and choose your affiliates to ensure brand compatibility. Take a step further by offering enticing promotions such as incentive bonuses, free products, and enticing commissions to keep potential partners interested. If the affiliate team you have selected is well trained and works in efficient collaboration, it can create the right synergy to improve your conversions rates.

Partner With Podcast Hosts

It is difficult for marketers to ignore Podcasts these days because they are widely consumed by the population. Aside from being easily absorbed, Podcasts are effortlessly entertaining modems and therefore great as effective affiliate marketing tools. Online, Podcast hosts typically come with a loyal and trusting audience. What that means is that Podcast followers take brand partnerships seriously. So, if you partner with podcast hosts to entice them to plug your brand into their episodes, the results are great. For this reason, you can grant Podcast hosts an exclusive discount code for their listeners, as well as a set percentage of profits. Your business benefits a great deal from such arrangements.

Target Slow Selling Products

It is smart marketing for marketers to deliberately use less popular products to motivate higher commissions. Some products may be slow selling but once a sale is made, the commission volume can be huge. If you deliberately target such products, affiliate marketing may just be a great way to get your slow selling and less popular inventory off the shelves. At times what such products really need to sell is a little extra promotional attention and incentive. That means deliberate and specially targeted marketing efforts for such products. So, any which way you can use to push your slower-moving products unto the spotlight through affiliate marketing can be really great for your business.

Run Influencer Campaigns

If product merchants can effectively partner with Influencers, the results can be astounding. Marketers can thus use influencer campaigns as very effective form of affiliate marketing. By running a well-coordinated seasonal or long-term influencer campaigns, such collaboration allows your brand to utilize affiliate links as the right incentives. You can therefore start a profitable and mutually beneficial affiliate marketing campaign by simply partnering with one or more influencers to promote your products/services.

How to Improve Your Online Reputation with Content Marketing

For many small business owners, online reputation matters a lot. If your online reputation is good, you stand a good chance of doing better business with prospective customers and customers. For this reason, managing your online reputation is hugely essential to your business success. Then what to do? You must explore all ways to market across multi-channel using content marketing. These here tips from experienced marketers can help improve your online reputation.

Sell Digital Products and Courses Online

As a digital marketer, you do not necessarily have to create free content all the time. In addition to free content, you create and sell good content as well. If you have the skills, you can create and sell digital products and online courses. Such content which is largely informative and educational can be sold to improve your revenue stream.

Use Social Media Tools to Streamline Your Marketing

Social media marketing is one great way to sell content on the internet. There are very many social platforms with peculiar tools that help the marketing process and many of these tools are free. Some of the platforms have in-house analytics tools which marketers depend on for great insights into their marketing activities. If you want to market through the various platforms, it can be quite time consuming. Therefore, you can take advantage of special online tools to help manage your platforms to save time and other resources.

Manage Reviews with New GMB Tools

As most marketers very well know, online reviews can always make a great difference in the online reputation of their businesses. If you want to quickly build a great reputation for your business online, just sign up on Google-My-Business, GMB, and take advantage of its tools. With continuous release of new options/tools for businesses, GMB has become one of the most important online platforms businesses can depend on to build their online reputation through reviews.

Be Dominant in Local Search Results

If you optimize your website for local searches it will help with your search results. A huge number of potential customers now habitually search Google for businesses “near me” in their search activities. “Near me” searches usually turn up local businesses. For many local businesses therefore, online search is often where new customers first interact with their brands. Therefore, your ability to get found through local searches can make a major impact on your reputation and the bottom line of your business.
 
Improve Your Live-streams

Video content marketing is hugely important to digital marketers because of the great results it gets when compared to other types of content. It is even better still if the video is live. So, live-streaming videos can be incredibly powerful ways to reach an audience real time. The results are great for your business reputation, lead generation and sales.

Market Differently with Testimonials, Reviews, and Recommendations

Testimonials, reviews and recommendations tend to help your marketing business in many different ways. They are very important because they serve as very sincere, genuine and useful insights that come directly from your customers. As such, they can provide valuable social proof to potential new buyers. But because they represent different types of feedback in content and context, it is helpful to marketers if they really understand and appreciate these differences. If they do and they market with them differently, it can greatly help to improve on their online reputation in addition to many other ancillary marketing benefits.

 

Build an Effective Instagram Presence

Instagram is becoming one social media platform that is quite business-friendly because you can open a business account on Instagram. This is why it is now one of the top social media platforms for today’s businesses. Instagram will not only help you to build an effective presence by having your content on its Feed and Stories, it will also help you to better and more effectively communicate with your customers.

Use the Best WordPress Plugins for Podcasting

Marketers who market with podcasts usually need multiple ways to share content. For these marketers, plugins are indispensable in their marketing activities. That is why many usually seek out and use web-hosts like WordPress to have access to the best plugins. WordPress provides many free and hugely versatile plugins to help the marketing activities of the websites they host. If your website is hosted by WordPress, you’ll find their plugins as very valuable assets for your podcasts.