10 Practical Steps to Set Up a Viable E-commerce Store

As most digital marketing experts will readily agree, it’s important to have a comprehensive e-commerce solution if you want to sell everywhere with ease. You’ll need to be able to sell online, in person and across multiple channels, if you want your e-commerce business to succeed. What matters the most however is to ensure your customers always have a seamless experience with your e-commerce website. Here’s how you can set up a website to achieve this business goal.

1. Design and Create your Online Storefront

For a good website design, you can rely on reputable website builders like Shopify, WordPress or Wix. Since your website design is expected to play a crucial role in attracting and retaining customers, you’ll need to work with a website builder that’ll make it easy for you to design, publish, manage your shop and handle all the in-between tasks on one platform without the need to integrate other services. Luckily, many website builders always offer a variety of e-commerce templates to choose from if you want to build your own website. If however you do not have the expertise to build a website all by yourself, you can always hire the services of professional webmasters to help you out. These professionals will build for you a perfect e-commerce website that meets your business needs.

2. Create Products and Product Options

Once your website design is in place, you can then launch your storefront. Next is to start adding the products you are selling to the store. At this point, the choice is yours whether to sell physical products (assorted goods) or digital products (e-books, software or image files). Make sure your website is flexible enough to allow customers navigate and search for whatever products they want without undue hindrances.

3. Use Categories to Organize

If you decide to sell multiple products, do not ignore grouping them by categories as a way of organizing them. Always group similar products into categories to make things easy for your customers. Doing so allows your customers to browse related items together. It allows them to easily search and filter through what they are looking for before making their choices. It is advisable however to always display categories on separate pages making sure to link to other related categories elsewhere on your website.

4. Optimize Product Pages

After deciding which products to sell and categorizing the products, the next thing you need to do is to take technical steps to make it easy for your audience to find, read about and see your products online. That’s optimization. You get it done by using high-quality images and or videos that vividly showcase your products. Make very clear and compelling descriptions that highlight the benefits of the products. Suggest related products that buyers can add to their cart to increase sales before they check out. For social proof, try to display customer reviews and testimonials that attest to the quality of your products. Do not fail to provide general and contact information on the page. Such vital info as your email address, location, language and your acceptable currency is very important. It's also a good idea to have a contact page and/or phone number, social media handles any other relevant contact information on your website for additional questions or customer concerns.

5. Enable Site Settings

You must enable site settings on your website to ensure the site functions smoothly to expectations. Set up clear roles and permissions, privacy setting, disclaimer notices and security SSL certificate to encrypt data transmitted between your site and its visitors. All these are necessary to protect and safeguard your business and secure your customers transactions. SSL certification ensures sensitive information such as credit card details are protected. This helps to boost customer confidence and significantly improves your site's SEO ranking.

6. Products Shipping and Delivery Options

You cannot run a successful e-commerce shop without having in place reliable ways to get your products to customers in a timely and cost-effective manner. You must therefore decide on your shipping and delivery methods very quickly. If you cannot safely deliver products to customers, it means you are not selling. You can decide to deliver your products by hand, through local and international shipping, courier services or even have the customers pick up the products themselves from your shop.

7. Determine Online Payment Option

To make money, your products must be paid for by shoppers. You must therefore clearly determine how they’ll pay for your products in the payment methods and preferred currency of your choice. It is advisable to set up secure payment gateways so that customers can pay seamlessly and with multiple payment options. Many platforms support various payment methods, including credit cards, PayPal and more. You can even set up info for acceptable bank wire transfers on your website.

8. Optimize for Search Engines

For your products to be easily found online by way of searches, you must take quality time to optimize your product pages and even other pages on your online shop. This is for Search Engine Optimization, SEO purposes. With a good SEO on your pages, when someone searches for a specific product or type of store on a search engine, your site/product pages will be the ones that search engines come up with. This means your website ranks high in the SERPs of search engines and it thus benefits from good organic traffic. You can always take advantage of the in-house SEO tools in your website hosting platform or social media platforms to have a good SEO in place in your shop. If you are unable to do it yourself, you can hire the services of an SEO specialist directly through your site to get it done.

9. Vigorously Promote Your Store

Even though SEO may organically lead customers to your store, you must still explore all other avenues to vigorously promote the store online. Explore every available means to raise awareness online for your shop. These include email marketing, social media marketing, and car stickers, branded apparels, token gift items and so on.  What really matters however is to have an idea where your audience is and to get your marketing messages to them where they are. If you choose to use social media marketing, try to leverage the platforms to widely share product updates, promotions and behind-the-scenes content. It is a great idea as well if you insert social icons onto your site to help visitors share your products with their own networks. If you have the resources, you can consider paid advertising by way Google Ads or social media paid ads to give your products and website a very wide boost.

10. Monitor and Improve

The only way to gauge how well your online shop is doing is by way of regular analytics data and monitoring. You can take advantage of many online tools to gauge the performance of your online store. If you use analytics tools, you can easily track visitor behavior, conversion rates and popular products. Insights from such data can help you to determine whether you need to add, improve or remove any products from your website that aren’t selling well. In addition, if you listen to customer feedback, you can also rely on the info to make necessary improvements on your website. It is a great marketing idea therefore to encourage visitors to your website to write reviews on your products at will. You may even choose to induce such reviews by offering a discount if customers submit a testimonial on a product they purchased, used and liked.

10 Proven Strategies to Unlock Your Affiliate Marketing Potential

If you are in affiliate marketing to earn a second paycheck or passive income, don’t ignore the right strategies that can help you to your goal. If you don’t want to get stuck without progress, these strategies come in handy. They’re proven strategies that can help you to unlock your affiliate marketing potentials and to earn good income from your efforts.

Without these strategies, it will be pretty difficult for you to choose the right products to promote, drive traffic, leads and conversions. No matter how saturated the market is, if you are willing to work at them, these strategies can help you to carve out your own slice of the affiliate marketing pie. You can therefore take these here strategies as your secret weapons, your roadmap to success in the wild world of affiliate marketing. All you need do is to make sure you:

1. Consistently Create Compelling Content: In digital marketing, content is king. You must consistently create quality content to attract traffic. Irrespective of whether you package your content in blog posts, videos, or social media updates, what matters most is the quality of the content. This is so because quality content is the real key to attracting and engaging your audience. An engaged audience translates to good traffic.

2. Know Your Audience: You can hardly make meaningful impact in affiliate marketing if you don’t know who you are marketing to. You must therefore endeavor to understand who you're trying to reach and how to reach them. It helps to dive deep into your niche and get to know your audience very well before you can successfully market to them.

3. Choose the Right Products/Services: No two products or services are ever the same, so is their market demand. The right strategy is to ensure you fully focus on promoting products/services that align with your audience's needs and interests. These are the kinds of products/services that attract good sales.

4. Optimize for Conversions: If you want good conversions, ensure you optimize your content with the right keywords. You must pay good attention to compelling CTAs, call-to-actions and strategic placement of affiliate links. Do not neglect to optimize every aspect of your marketing funnel for maximum conversions.

5. Embark on Extensive Networking: You must network extensively particularly with your peers. It helps therefore to always surround yourself with like-minded individuals who can support, inspire, and challenge you on your affiliate marketing journey. Your peers help you with tips and new trends in the business that you can take advantage of.

6. Never Stop Learning: Knowledge they say is power. The more knowledgeable you are in affiliate marketing, the more powerful you become in the business. Never lose focus. You must stay sufficiently curious, more eager and determined to learn every aspect of the business. Your learning should never stop if you want to remain relevant in the business.

7. Diversify Your Traffic Sources: Do not rely on just one traffic source. The more traffic sources you have, the better for your affiliate marketing business. Always try to explore different channels to get traffic. Traffic sources from SEO, social media and email marketing are desirable. When you diversify your traffic sources, you significantly reduce your marketing risks.

8. Stay Updated: Yes indeed! Your eyes must always be on marketing trends, new techs/tools and so on to help move your affiliate marketing business. No doubt you are aware the world of online marketing is constantly evolving. This is why you must always endeavor to stay ahead of the curve by staying updated on the latest trends, tools, and techniques.

9. Diligently Build Trust: As most digital marketers very well know, trust is the currency of affiliate marketing. You can therefore build significant trust with your audience through your relationship with them. You can nurture relationships with your audience by providing value, being transparent, reliable, dependable, and always putting their needs first in your marketing activities.

10. Measure, Test and Iterate: If you want to succeed in affiliate marketing, you should never be afraid to continuously experiment. By employing analytics tools, you must deliberately test different strategies, track your results, and iterate based on what works best for your audience. Doing more of what works best in your marketing activities is a sure route to success.

Wrapping Up

Yes indeed! If you deploy the foregoing strategies well enough, it is possible for you to unlock your affiliate marketing potential and set your business up for explosive growth. Remember however that success in the business is not a sudden thing. It can take quite a while to come about. So, with some patience, perseverance, and a solid game plan powered by these strategies, your affiliate marketing business can get a significant boost that will translate to more conversions, sales and increased revenues.

10 Easy Steps to Profitable Affiliate Marketing

In digital marketing parlance, affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where individuals/businesses actively promote products/services for product merchants in exchange for commissions. In the business arrangement, affiliates are only entitled to a commission on each sale they generate through the referrals attributable to their unique affiliate links. The more sales affiliates generate therefore, the more commissions they earn. If you want to make money from affiliate marketing, you must begin by learning the basics of the business.

 
Make sure you clearly understand the distinct roles of the 3 key players in the partnership arrangement. These 3 key players are: the merchant who is selling a product, the affiliate who is helping to promote the product, and the customer who buys the product. The affiliate helps to make a product from the product merchant available to a consumer/customer and the merchant pays him a commission for each sale he helps generate. That in a nutshell is affiliate marketing.

To start your own affiliate marketing business, the following steps will help to make the business profitable.

1. Carefully Choose a Niche: Factor in your knowledge, your likes, and your passion and carefully select a niche/industry you want to identify with. Your success in affiliate marketing largely depends on your understanding of the niche you want to do business in and your ability to connect with the target audience.

2. Build a Suitable Website/Blog: Yes, this is the base of your business online. Having an online presence is crucial to your affiliate marketing success. You can thus build a suitable website/blog where you can consistently publish valuable and impactful content related to your niche. This website/blog will serve as a reliable platform for you to promote affiliate products/services.

3. Consistently Create Quality Content: You need content, good quality content if you want to attract good traffic to your website/blog. So, if you consistently create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that resonates with your target audience, you attract them to your website/blog. That is valuable traffic. This content can be packaged in form of blog posts, articles, videos, reviews, and tutorials. Be sure to carefully incorporate your affiliate links naturally within the content to bring users to the products you are marketing.

4. Diligently Research and Join Affiliate Programs: You can succeed faster in affiliate marketing if you join a reputable affiliate program. Be sure you carefully research the numerous programs out there particularly those related to your chosen niche. This you can do by searching affiliate networks like Amazon Associates, ClickBank, ShareASale, and CJ Affiliate and Strong Future International, SFI before you make your decision which to sign up with. The right affiliate program to join is the one that aligns with your niche and goals making sure you thoroughly understand their commission structures, payment methods, and other terms and conditions. In many of the programs like Strong Future International, SFI, sign-up is FREE without any obligations whatsoever.

5. Use Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools: You need effective and efficient online tools to aid your affiliate marketing. Suchlike tools as affiliate link management plugins, tracking software, and analytics tools to monitor your performance, track conversions, and optimize your marketing efforts are very crucial tools to your affiliate marketing success.

6. Vigorously Drive Traffic to Your Website: Without good traffic, you cannot make good affiliate sales. To succeed in affiliate marketing, you need consistent traffic to your website/blog. You must therefore be prepared to deploy various traffic generation methods to get this traffic. Such proven methods as search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, and even paid advertising are essential to your affiliate marketing success.

7. Disclose Your Affiliate Relationships: Transparency and integrity matter a lot in affiliate marketing success. So, you must always endeavor to be transparent with your audience by clearly disclosing your affiliate relationships to them. By doing this, it helps you to build trust with your audience. It is also essential to strictly comply with legal regulations, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines and suchlike regulations around the world.

8. Regularly Test and Optimize: Without regular testing, it is difficult to know how well you are doing in your affiliate marketing efforts. So, it is essential for you to continuously test different affiliate products, promotional strategies, and content formats to see what works best for your audience. The data and information you get from your testing efforts will guide you to optimize your marketing campaigns for better results.

9. Stay Informed and on Top of Trends: As the internet is changing so are affiliate marketing techniques. Since affiliate marketing landscape is constantly evolving, you need to stay on top of the trends to remain relevant. You must endeavor to stay updated with industry trends, changes in affiliate programs, and new marketing techniques. You can effectively do this by reading blogs, attending webinars, and joining affiliate marketing forums and communities.

10. Regularly Monitor and Track Performance: Without diligent tracking, it is difficult to know how well you are doing in affiliate marketing. This is why you must constantly monitor your affiliate marketing performance with the right tools and analytics to get the right metrics. The data you collect will help you to correctly analyze key performance metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, sales and earnings. You can then use this vital data to make informed decisions and adjustments to your marketing campaigns as needed.

Last Line

Affiliate marketing is a unique and interesting online business. To succeed in it however, you need patience, dedication, consistency, and a deep understanding of your audience and niche. The foregoing 10 steps can help your journey towards affiliate marketing success. As you gain more and more experience in the business, you can build a solid and effective affiliate marketing strategy. This helps you to potentially generate steady passive income to achieve your financial goals.

8 Techniques to Make Money Online Selling Other People’s Products

Increasingly, many people now want to make money conveniently from the comfort of their homes.  Making money online is increasingly popular with such people. There are several methods to make money online but one of the most profitable of such methods is selling other people’s products and earning commissions from the sales you generate. Technically, this strategy is known as affiliate marketing. Through affiliate marketing strategy, you can earn unlimited commissions by promoting and selling products/services created by others. If you also want to earn money this way, following are some steps you can take to help you out.

1. Choose a Niche: First step is to carefully select a niche that interests you and has a good market demand. If you choose products in this niche to promote, you are likely to make good money from earned commissions. But, it is important to be passionate and knowledgeable about the products as a condition before you can effectively market them.

2. Research Affiliate Programs: It is important to look for reputable affiliate programs related to your niche to join. This you can do through diligent research. Reputation counts a lot before making this decision. This is what recommends affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI. This program exposes you to hundreds of thousands of quality products to market and earn commissions. This it does by providing you with unique affiliate links to promote in your content. These links help to track your sales and earnings correctly.

3. Build a Platform: You cannot successfully market online without the right platform. You must therefore create a platform to promote the products you are marketing. This platform can be in form of a unique website, a blog, social media account, or even a YouTube channel if your content will be in videos form. What is most important however is to be sure you consistently create high-quality, engaging and valuable content that resonates with and attracts your target audience.

4. Drive Traffic: Driving traffic to your website/blog is a must if you want to make any sales online. To do this effectively, you can utilize various marketing techniques to drive traffic to your platform. Some of these techniques can include but not limited to SEO, search engine optimization techniques, social media marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising. Doing this is hugely important because in digital marketing, the more targeted traffic you generate, the higher your chances of making sales.

5. Consistently Create Compelling Content: In digital marketing, content is king. The more good content you create, the more traffic it attracts to your website/blog. So, you must endeavor to consistently create the right content that showcases the benefits and features of the products you are marketing. In this content, you can include personal experiences, customer feedback and reviews to build trust with your audience. The more valuable content you provide your readers, the more likely they’ll be convinced to make purchase decisions through the affiliate links in your content.

6. Utilize Online Marketing Tools: Online, there are many marketing tools you can take advantage of to promote your products. Suchlike marketing tools as landing pages, lead magnets, and email marketing software are very handy to help you out. If well deployed, these tools can help you to capture leads, nurture these leads, and ultimately help to increase your chances of making sales.

7. Track and Analyze Your Marketing Data: This is the best way to know how well you are doing in your marketing efforts. So, you must regularly monitor your affiliate marketing efforts and diligently track your sales and conversions. You can carefully analyze data from your tracking efforts to identify what is working and what needs improvement. Next is to take data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing strategies. This helps to maximize your earnings.

8. Stay Up-To-Date: As the internet is rapidly developing, so are digital marketing methods. For this reason, you must endeavor to keep up with industry trends and changes in your niche. Try to continuously educate yourself on new products, marketing techniques, and strategies. This will help you to stay competitive and ultimately help you to maximize your earning potentials in the business.

10 Steps to Optimize your eCommerce Strategy for Maximum Results

You need a combination of a whole lot of tactics to optimize your eCommerce strategy to get maximum results. These results include but not limited to increased conversions and a boost in sales. Your first focus should be how best to create an engaging and seamless customer shopping experience. This includes getting people to visit your website and turning clicks and visits into paying customers. Optimizing your eCommerce strategy is the best way to go if you want to get maximum results.
The following key steps are really handy if you want to optimize your eCommerce strategy.

1. Drive Sales and Revenue: The ultimate aim of having an eCommerce store is to make sales. You can make these sales by focusing on conversion optimization techniques. Do things that can help you to get traffic, get leads and conversions from this traffic. This helps to drive sales and revenues.

2. Enhance Product Presentation: The internet is a hugely competitive market space. Out there, the products you are marketing must stand out uniquely to attract buyers’ attention. You can enhance this attraction with clear, concise and compelling product descriptions, high-quality visuals, and engaging videos.

3. Streamline the Checkout Process: Seamless checkout process on your website is one great way to make the website user-friendly. A user-friendly website attracts and retains customers and potential customers longer on the site for them to do business on the site. This is because such website makes for easy and efficient transactions. Something that really excites buyers!

4. Build trust: The backbone of any business is trust. The more the trust customers have on your business, the more business they do with you. You can enhance this trust through strong security/admin policies and clear transparent business measures.

5. Optimize for Mobile Users: Some reports indicate that 60-70% of internet users now do so through mobile devices particularly smartphones. You’ll be losing out on this huge traffic if your website is not optimized for mobile devices. You must therefore make sure your website has a responsive design and fast loading times.

6. Personalize Experiences: One other great way to optimize your eCommerce website to personalize customer experiences when marketing to them. You can deploy the services of recommendation engines to get this done effectively.

7. Recover Abandoned Carts: Sales are best on an eCommerce website when there are minimal abandoned carts. When your website is user-friendly and has seamless checkout process, fewer and fewer carts get abandoned. You can effectively deploy targeted emails to recover abandoned carts. This helps to boost sales.

8. Conduct A/B Testing: You can never know how well your ads are doing without regular testing. Conducting A/B testing can help you determine better CTAs and pricing.

9. Prioritize Performance Optimization: User experience plays a key role in getting visitors to deal on your website. This is why you must always prioritize the performance of your website for smooth user experiences. If your website is user-friendly, it helps you to do good business on the site.

10. Utilize Analytics Data: Google analytics tools are handy to help you get valuable data particularly about the KFIs of your website. Such data is always handy for you to make vital data-driven decisions on the site. This is with a view to getting more clicks, leads and conversions.

Final Words

If you diligently implement the foregoing strategies, it is possible for you to maximize conversions and boost sales in your eCommerce store

5 Effective Marketing Strategies to Attract High-Value Customers

Habitually, every marketer strives to acquire high-value customers for their business. These are people who are loyal and always willing to spend their money to buy products/services from the business. Marketers value customers who like to make large purchases from time to time and with some regularity. The reason smart marketers like to attract such customers to their business. Many marketers know and appreciate that such customers are great assets to the growth and sustenance of their business. The reason they like to deploy special marketing strategies to attract them. From experience, creating a great customer experience is essential in attracting and retaining the right customers. If well utilized, these here 5 effective strategies can be really handy to attract, retain and grow a high-value customers’ base for your business.

 
1. Create a Seamless Shopping Experience: No doubt, convenience matters a lot in online shopping. A high percentage of the inconveniences shoppers experience in their online shopping is always attributable to the check-out process. Marketers can therefore aim to create a seamless shopping experience by allowing their customers have an integrated shopping experience across online channels. They can do this through digital solutions such as e-commerce, mobile apps and social media platforms in order to give shoppers the seamless experiences they crave. Modern retailers are presently making use of point-of-sale (POS) systems that make shoppers’ experience relatively smooth and easy. These systems allow customers to view product information, check availability, redeem rewards points, and complete the checkout process quickly and easily with just a few clicks or taps here and there. This makes for a much more enjoyable and convenient shopping experience that most shoppers really appreciate, an experience that can make most shoppers wanting to return for repeat purchases. Making repeat purchases can with time turn many shoppers to high-value customers.

2. Offer High Quality Products/Services: Many customers are typically always looking for discounts or bargains. But high-value customers usually look for much more. These customers always look for how best they can invest their money in products that offer good quality and useful features. Such products that provide them with real value for their money they always prefer. Most marketers know that only high-quality products fit this bill. To meet the needs of high-value customers therefore, marketers must not only provide high-quality products, they must always endeavor to live up to their promises by delivering on expectations of performance, reliability, customer service and trustworthiness. Marketers who are able to do these manage to foster long-term mutually beneficial relationships with their customers. These customers who become high-value customers usually do not hesitate to recommend their products and or services to others. That translates to business growth in real terms.

3. Build Credibility and Trust: Loyal customers are always the backbone of every successful business. The reason customers must be specially cultivated to become high-value customers. Marketers must therefore take very deliberate steps to build and maintain customer loyalty and trust. This they can do through every interaction with customers. They must aim to prioritize building customer trust by providing secure and reliable services, creating engaging marketing, and advertising content that resonates with their customers. This must however be on a continuous process basis that will ultimately engender a strong relationship with the customers. Doing this can make the business credible enough to secure customer trust. Customers usually reciprocate this by way of continued patronage. This ultimately makes them loyal and high-value customers that are crucial to sustained business growth.

4. Create a Credible Referral Program: If you want your marketing business to grow rapidly, take this advice, create a referral program specifically for high-value customers. In retail business, retaining an existing customer is by far cheaper than creating a new customer. Of course, keeping costs low can be great for the bottom line of any business. Existing customers help to keep your marketing costs low. They are more likely to spread the word about your business farther and better than new customers. You can retain your existing customers better by giving them incentives like discounts or loyalty points for each referral they make. There could be other positive rewards for any customer that helps to create a new business. These rewards can induce more customers to keep referring new business that can help to grow your customer base. By having a strong referral network among loyal high-value customers, it helps marketers to firmly tap into one of the most powerful forms of marketing: word-of-mouth.

5. Habitually Provide Excellent Customer Service: A positive customer experience can make your business stand out among its competition. Most customers are likely to recommend your business based on their own experience with the business. If you provide excellent customer service, you will not only be able to retain high-value existing customers, you’ll be able to successfully acquire new customers down the road. Conversely however, poor customer experiences can spread very quickly and potentially damage your reputation online. This damage can come primarily through social media and or review sites like Yelp. Without customers, your business cannot grow. You must do everything practicable therefore to give your customers unforgettable experience and make them happy at all times. Habitually providing excellent customer service is one great way to stay ahead of your competition. It usually translates to better business and more sales.

Summing Up

From the foregoing, it is easy to see that there are effective strategies you can easily deploy to gain loyal high-value customers in your business. These strategies directly touch on your credibility as a marketer and the techniques you choose to deploy in the service of your customers. Retaining high-value customers depends on these and lots more. If you are able to retain these customers, it can help you to maximize ROI by attracting more repeat business from the customers.

How Best To Use Affiliate Links in Your Digital Marketing

In digital marketing parlance, an affiliate link is a unique URL given as a referral to affiliates for tracking traffic movement from the affiliate website to the merchant website. Digital marketers rely on these links to help them track the traffic and conversions generated by each affiliate. The commissions due to affiliates are determined on the basis on these conversions. What this means is that without unique affiliate links, it is practically impossible to attribute conversions correctly and accurately to affiliates. This is because the links help affiliates to track their performance. Data from the tracking helps affiliates to refine and improve their strategies to attract more traffic, get more leads and conversions. To get these results, an affiliate must promote these unique links in the right places and via the right channels that can help enhance their visibility. It is not really the affiliate links per se but the ways the links are promoted that greatly help to enhance their effectiveness.

 
Following are tested and effective ways to efficiently promote your affiliate links in your digital marketing to get the most benefits from the links.

Use Affiliate Links in Your Product Reviews

Affiliate marketers use product reviews to attract engagement from their audience by building interest and curiosity. So when affiliates promote affiliate links to the products they are marketing in the content of these reviews, they help to generate traffic and even conversions. For better results, you can also create affiliate review videos to promote your affiliate products and links. Reviews may be directly responsible for driving traffic to your content but the affiliate links you promote along the content help to generate leads, conversions and sales from the traffic.

Use As Affiliate Banners on Your Website

Banners as ads tools on your website are highly visual. They directly appeal to your audience thereby increasing the chances of clicks. If this happens, the affiliate links on the banners will direct the visitors to the products you are marketing. That increases the chances of conversions and sales. But, the locations you place these banners on your webpage is of paramount importance. For best results however, you can best place banners on the top of your web pages and on the sidebars and footers of the pages. On these locations, banners tend to be more visible and as such generate more clicks.
 
Use Links on Repurposed Video Content

Marketing videos are highly visual and naturally help to increase traffic to websites. Therefore, adding video content to your website is highly beneficial to the website. If the videos carry affiliate links, they help direct traffic to your affiliate products. It is smart marketing therefore to add affiliate links to your video content by simply mentioning the link in your video or in the description. If your video is of high quality and impactful enough, it will attract a significant number of clicks on your affiliate links. That can be great for conversions and sales.

Add Links on Your Landing Page

Your landing page is a webpage on your website where every visitor first makes contact with. It usually has details of the merchant tools, applications, software and apps you use and the products/services you are marketing. You can add your affiliate links to these products’ descriptions for maximum exposure to visitors who land on your website. When your visitors understand these descriptions, they may be tempted to click on the links. That gives you the ultimate benefit of getting conversions and sales.

Add Affiliate Links to Your Email Newsletters

In digital marketing, emails Newsletters are a very effective way to build great relationships with your audiences. This is more so when you already have in place a responsive email list which you can segment for more effective marketing. With such list of subscribers, you already have a very valuable marketing asset in place to handle your promotions. It contains a list of persons who already subscribe to what you are up to and as such well positioned to read your newsletters. Newsletters to such a list usually serve as veritable channels to promote affiliate links. They help you to build the much needed trust with your recipients and that helps to enhance more clicks on your affiliate links.

Run Links on Pay-Per-Click Ads

Running ads particularly on Google is one great way to promote your affiliate links to attract clicks. In digital marketing, this is about the most direct and straightforward way to promote affiliate links. Characteristically, it manages to bring in the most clicks and conversions. It is a very efficient way too because you are only required to pay for clicks successfully delivered and nothing more.
 
Add Links to Your Posts on Content Publishing Platforms

If you are a blogger, aside adding links on the blog content of your blog, you can also add links on the content you publish as a guest blogger on other platforms or on the content you publish on content publishing platforms like Medium. Such platforms allow you to do link promotions in your posts directly. That means you are allowed to add your affiliate links to your posts on such content publishing platforms to generate traffic and clicks.

Use Affiliate Links on Your Own Products

If you run your own e-commerce store, it means you have your own products to sell. You can add affiliate links to the descriptions of these products. Be careful though to ensure you naturally add affiliate links to your products in relevant places. If your audience already trusts you enough to come over to your store, they will also trust the affiliate products that you market with the affiliate links in your products. That translates to more clicks and a rise in affiliate sales.

Use Links on your Content on Social Media and Forums

Social media is one hugely popular hangout for most people these days. Smart marketers target their audiences there as well with affiliate products. To leverage marketing on social media effectively, a marketer must have a sizeable following and a good online presence particularly on the very popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. Once you’ve created this online presence, you can tactically promote your affiliate links leveraging the in-house marketing tools of the various platforms. Some of the platforms allow you to add affiliate links to your social media bio and descriptions. You can also create posts tactically promoting these links on the platforms. You can in addition promote affiliate links on popular forums with like-minded discussants and with good results as well.

Last Line

If you are able to promote your affiliate links well enough, it is possible for you to earn more in affiliate marketing. No doubt affiliate marketing is one great way to earn money online. But, you need to know the right strategies/techniques to promote your affiliate links online to make this happen. All the foregoing strategies/ways/techniques as discussed come in very handy in that quest. 

Lead Generation Strategies to Boost Your Sales Revenue

In digital marketing parlance, a lead is any person/entity expressing interest in the product/service you are marketing. Obtaining such persons/entities by deliberate marketing efforts is lead generation. Marketers acquire leads to grow their customer base by way of leads, conversions and sales. More sales in your business directly translate to a boost in your sales revenue. So, to generate more sales, you must deploy effective strategies to get more leads and eventual conversions. Following are some of the best lead marketing strategies you can deploy to get more leads for your business.

 

Compile a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is like profiling the individuals you want to target with your marketing messages who may be interested in buying your products/services. If you use the right parameters and segmentation, you can have the right insight into the prospective buyer's needs and wants. You can have an insight into their specific purchasing attitudes and the criteria that can drive them to purchase your products/services. If you have these vital insights of your products/services buyers' persona, it becomes easier for you to create actionable and efficient lead generation strategies. With this persona in mind, you can easily fine-tune all your marketing efforts/strategies to resonate well with the buyer who wants and needs the products/services you are offering. That way, you can get more leads, conversions and sales.
 
Enable Sales Chat Feature on Your Website

Communication is really key to successful marketing efforts in this age and time. If this communication is instant and two-way, so much the better! When visitors take advantage of the chart feature on your website, it is easier for you to deal with them real time, address their concerns instantly and eventually convert them to leads. The presence of a sales chat feature on your website can easily turn ordinary visitors into leads because they can talk to you to know more details about the products/services you are marketing. With chat features like Skype for instance, visitors are easily at ease knowing they are talking to “someone.” With AI like Chatbots, you can have a 24/7 chat feature that helps you to maintain a great customer experience no matter what time of the day or night customers are on your website. These chat features are inevitably handy to help you to nurture your website visitors and convert them into leads and customers. The more leads and conversions you get this way, the more sales you make.

Rev Up Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content remains king in digital marketing particularly for ecommerce business owners. When links to products are embedded in content and promoted widely online, they help to get traffic and clicks back to products on the ecommerce website. The best content is content that is highly informative and impactful. If such content is optimized with the right keywords, it attracts the attention of search engines. Search engines like to go for optimized content, rank it higher in their SERPs and send organic traffic to it. Without good content, your website cannot reach the top search results whenever an Internet user keys in a search. The more good content you create on your website therefore, the more traffic it attracts and the more leads it gets. When your web visitors like your content, they stay with it, read it and may eventually subscribe to your products/services. When the traffic to your website leads to sales, it helps to boost your sales revenue. That is what good content helps to enhance.

Collaborate with Influencers

The advent of social media has really made influencer marketing popular. Influencers are celebrities in the online world particularly social media with huge audience and at times fanatical following. If you partner with and collaborate with influencers, they can help talk about your products, try them out, endorse them and even recommend them to their huge audiences. They can even serve as affiliate marketers to your products and earn commissions on the sales they generate or earn discount codes on your products. That way, influencers can help to promote your products/services, bring in more leads and eventual sales. Most influencers are known for constantly creating a buzz and hype in the online world. This can have a very positive effect on the products/services they are helping to market. This celebrity buzz can help to drive interest to your products/services. That translates to leads and sales for your website.
 
Task Your Current Customers for Referrals

If you want to task your current customers for referrals, there are some marketing strategies you can deploy to help turn them into a good source of leads. This is because there's no one better to ask for referrals than your current customers. Your customers already know your brand, they are delighted with it and are thus in the best position to refer others to the brand. For this reason, you can directly reach out to your customers tasking them on referrals. This you can induce with incentives like discount codes, coupons, or thank you gifts for each referral they send to you. You can also encourage your current customers to send new referrals to your business by giving them a warm follow-up and thank you message after each purchase. Doing this routinely can help you to generate more leads through customer referrals.  

Effective Techniques to Capture Sales Leads Using WhatsApp

Most digital marketers are increasingly becoming highly innovative. Presently, if they need to pass information quickly, many easily turn to WhatsApp which is now one of the most popular messenger Apps in the world. The App is deliberately designed for business and it makes an excellent and efficient sales leads generation tool. It is one App that is very easy to use for marketing purposes and you can post marketing messages including excellent pictures to individuals and in groups making your messages available to hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp users in a matter of seconds. Now, that’s a great marketing tool no doubt! You can set up a WhatsApp account in minutes and take advantage of instant two-way communication that is great for leads generation. If you create a WhatsApp business account, it comes packaged with a wide range of in-house marketing tools and products that provide excellent support for your businesses. On WhatsApp, marketers can easily share marketing messages and even photos and videos of their latest products demonstrating how the products work.

 
Because of the design and peculiarity of WhatsApp, it can be great for these here lead generation techniques.
 
Easily and Widely Sharing Stories
 
Every business that wants to generate leads must as a matter of course share stories and very widely too. That is where the stories feature or WhatsApp status becomes quite handy and relevant for sharing stories on WhatsApp. This feature allows marketers to connect directly with their followers by sharing the relevant content they may be interested in. Such relevant content can be in form of new products, product launches, product promos and salient customer testimonials. Smart marketers also share user-generated content to entice and hook their followers using some powerful social proof to pique their followers’ interest. Such content helps to entice quick response to enable the marketer take their queries and direct them to the answers.
 
Leveraging Data-Driven Marketing Campaigns

WhatsApp messaging allows you to prioritize data-driven decisions. This allows marketers to speed up their marketing processes and get better and faster results. Marketers can therefore leverage on it to improve predictability, speed, and adaptability to change in their marketing campaigns. Through it, you can quickly determine what works and what isn’t working as you expect in your marketing campaigns particularly as it affects your lead generation and sales strategy. You can extract the right data at any stage in your marketing. This allows you to come up with rapid iterations that can help you to increase your conversions.
 
Providing Better and more Effective Customer Service
 
Serving customers is always a business priority. In fact, customers always expect to be served and served well without which you cannot expect to have them as customers for much too long. WhatsApp comes in handy here because it is always on 24/7. With it, marketers can directly interact with customers and even prospects round the clock. Prospects and customers can ask questions at any time and get instant and direct responses. That can be great for customer support, leads generation and conversions. For this reason, WhatsApp is not only a great app for building trust and relationships; it can also be effectively used to nudge prospects further down the sales funnel and towards a conversion.

Leveraging Consultative Selling
 
Marketers understand consultative selling to be when they prioritize the customer-business relationship. It simply means putting the customer’s interest first in your marketing calculations at all times. With WhatsApp, you can easily explore all ways to understand your customers’ problems before attempting to sell them anything. It is like needs assessment really. It is only when you know what your customers really want that you can effectively sell them anything. So, instead of focusing on the product you are selling, you can focus more on the customer and his needs through direct WhatsApp messaging. This is possible because you can easily use WhatsApp to extract relevant information from your customers. Through this App, you can spend quality time building and nourishing a great business relationship with customers. This enables you to get to know them much better. If you do, you’ll then be able to deliver an awesome brand experience to them. In most cases, doing so usually results in improved sales. 

Easily Eliminating Junk Leads

Most online businesses usually find it difficult to know which leads are good and which are simply junk. WhatsApp is a perfect tool that comes really handy for marketers to attract quality leads and easily eliminating junk leads. This is because of its easy two-way interaction feature. This feature allows marketers to rely on WhatsApp to classify leads faster and drastically cut down on the time needed to do so. The App can come in handy for customers at any stage they are in the sales funnel. No matter the stage customers are in the sales funnel, marketers through WhatsApp can still target prospects with the right marketing messages/strategy. This is because marketers can easily match these messages to wherever the buyers are in their buying journey.

Wrapping Up

If you are an ambitious marketer and you want to get and retain customers, WhatsApp is the right social media App your business needs. This is why the App has quickly grown to become one of the most-used social media platforms in the world. It is not enough to simply set up a WhatsApp account. If you cannot use it to implement the foregoing strategies, your business cannot benefit from it. Many marketers now effectively use this App to connect with businesses as well as being social. You too can tap into the huge potentials of this fantastic marketing App to acquire more leads and expand sales in your business.

Simple Small Business Customer Research Strategies

As individuals are different, so are their needs and products appeal to them based on these needs. This is why as a small business owner, if you really want to grow your business, you must know who you’re selling to, what to sell them, and exactly how and where to reach them. Getting such basic marketing information requires some research without which, it will be extremely difficult for you to effectively market to your target customers.

The best way to get to know your customers is through customer research. If you know your customers well enough, you can effectively market to them using the right marketing channels, and the type of content and products they want. By doing this effectively, you can generate interest in your products/services and boost conversions as a result. Information from customer research helps small business owners to do better customer targeting through the use of the right ads, right channels and more effective optimization strategies. Doing all these helps small business owners to improve on their branding, create the right content, and use the right marketing language and tone, and the right SEO keywords to enhance their marketing and to grow their business.

So, if as a small business owner you want to do some research to get the right data to grow your small business, here are simple ways you can do customer research.

Use Simple Surveys

The best way to gauge customer satisfaction is through surveys. You can directly ask questions and get information from your customers. Through this customer feedback, you can identify potential problems that need solving. Customer survey strategy can help you to identify how well a new product into the marketing is accepted and how the products you are already marketing are faring in the market. You can even directly find out from your customers what they want that you are not even selling yet. Simple survey questions to get the basic customer information you want can be delivered through your website landing page offers, email list subscriptions, pop-ups, and social media posts. You can entice customers to take surveys by offering them token gifts and rewards, making sure the time needed to take the surveys is not really too long.

Checkout Demographic Data

For vital marketing information, you can diligently checkout the average customer characteristics as they relate to the demographics of your target customers. You can find out what products people in certain age brackets want, same for educational backgrounds, hobbies, gender, income level, employment status, home ownership and so on. Once you identify your target demographic, you can do some research on them to identify what they want and what their common needs are even without collecting elaborate data. You can simply get the information you want by checking out articles, research statistics, studies, and trend reports which are widely available online.

Check Sales Data

It is not possible to run a business successfully without keeping concise records. Such records particularly as they involve sales can help you with customer research at a later date. You can always compare your current sales figures with previous sales figures over same period of time to get valuable information. Through these figures, you can determine which products your customers really prefer. If you are selling many products, such comparative sales figures can help you to determine which products to rest and which to sell more of. If however you’re only selling only one product, you can still take previous sales data and use it to identify trends. You can easily determine what made sales of the product to go up and what made sales drop and over what period of time. This information will help you to determine if and when to run ads for your product or not and what type of ads and through what channels. You can even cross-reference sales data with customer support data, reviews, surveys, and demographic studies if you want to get a much better picture.

Review Customer Feedback

In reacting to a product in the market, customers usually have questions, concerns, and complaints. Even without a customer care team serving your business, you can on your own handle most of the inquiries and gather vital data from this feedback. Through such data, you’ll be able to clearly identify common service problems, questions, and product complaints. When it comes to finding solutions, you can address common inquiries with FAQ, rectify product and marketing defects, improve production, handling, delivery shortcomings an so on. More importantly, feedback data helps you to identify how customers accept your product, what they feel about it, and what they want improved about it. Even though everyone can complain or give suggestions about your products/services, it is your customers’ opinions and experiences that are the most crucial for the growth and development of your business.

Last line

Through customer research, you can get to know your customers well enough. That knowledge is vital if you want to optimize your marketing strategies. If you research well and get to know your customers well, you can write better marketing content for them, market to them with the right ads and through the right channels. This way, you can better plan more effective marketing campaigns, create better products and increase sales.

How to Choose a Profitable Affiliate Marketing Niche

It is at times a huge challenge for affiliate marketers to settle for a niche to work in. The reason is because selecting the best niche has a bearing on how profitable your affiliate marketing business can be. Success in affiliate marketing is more about selecting the most profitable niches. By way of careful selection process, this article will take you through the right steps you need to settle for good and highly profitable niches. You may need to combine one, two or more of these tips to get things right. What matters most however is to be able to select a niche that has many customers and quality products for sale. That is the type of niche that is most likely to make your affiliate marketing business profitable. These here tips and techniques can always help you out in making the right choice. 

Research Your Competitors

This is the best way to know what is trending and what is selling well. By researching your competitors, you’ll discover what they sell, how they sell it, through what channels and some of the unique practices that help to sustain them in business and to make profits. Your research attention must be specially focused on your brand competitors. By doing so, chances are high that you can increase conversions if you provide your customers with similar categories of products.

What Fits Within Your Niche
                                                      
As a marketer, you stand a better chance of making profit in your affiliate marketing business if you choose a niche you like, passionate about and enjoy promoting. What fits into your niche is what helps you to make money. That is the kind of niche that can help you to make profits. Your passion for the niche helps to determine how much effort you can put into marketing your affiliate products. So, if you choose products that fit into your niche, you can promote them better, make better sales within the niche and earn more commissions.
 
Commission Earning Frequency and Percentage

After settling for great products that sell well, your next consideration should be what level of commissions you can earn from the sales. The range is usually between 5%-50% depending on the type of product and the affiliate program you are working with. It is therefore prudent to always search for and choose programs like Strong Future International, SFI that are likely to earn you good returns in commissions. Affiliate marketing is all about earning some money online. This money is earned mostly through commissions. The more commissions you earn therefore, the more money you make.

Consider Program Reputation

Reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI are reputed simple because they have good track records and are known for marketing quality products with good commissions on sales made through affiliates. You may choose to work with individual product merchants but working with reputable affiliate programs has huge advantages. These advantages always help to make a great difference in the market.

Consider the Upsells

Upselling helps affiliate marketers to earn more commissions on sales. With upsells, a consumer is offered other packages only available upon purchasing a particular product. Like accessories to a car for instance! When a customer chooses to buy a car, the affiliate earns a commission from the sale of the car as well as a commission on the sale of the upsell accessories. Affiliate programs that offer upselling opportunities help with profits.

Factor in Vendor Support

Affiliate programs with strong support help to reduce marketing costs for affiliates and to make marketing easier for them. Affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI with great in-house marketing tools, training and customer support usually help to make a great difference in affiliate marketing experience and success. Affiliate marketing just like any other business has its own unique challenges. When affiliates have the assurance of great vendor support, it helps them to do business better and to make more profits. 

How to Create Website Landing Pages that Convert

If you market online, getting traffic to your website is always a priority. Without good traffic, you cannot expect to make good sales. This is more so when you are involved in affiliate marketing. Strategies and techniques you can set up on your website are hugely vital to getting good traffic. This is because it is only when potential customers hit your website you can expect to have any conversions. Therefore, if you want to be a smart marketer, your primary goal should always be how to convert your website visitors to buyers. To be able to do so, you need to create a landing page that is effective to close deals.

 

The landing page is mostly where online marketers close deals. When marketers say a landing page is good, it simply means it coverts well. There is however no generally accepted formula for creating a high-converting landing page. What most marketers do is to simply try various techniques to find out what works and what doesn’t. Following are some tricks/techniques that can be very handy to create an effective landing page that converts well.

Write a Convincing Copy

If you must market to people, your content must interest them and capable of convincing them. Writing an interesting copy falls into that category. The secret to writing a convincing copy is to keep it loaded with information, simple but yet engaging. For it to be effective and convincing it must clearly highlight what your product offers and how it can directly benefit your target audience. That info on your landing page helps your conversions a great deal.

Use Catchy Designs and Quality Images

The attention span of most internet users is always very short. What quickly catches their attention is what helps conversions. Landing page design, color combinations, general aesthetics and good graphics/images help the attraction of a landing page. It is however advisable to be mindful of visual simplicity at all times. The CTAs on the landing page must be well isolated and clearly distinct from other elements on the landing page to attract potential customers and customers' attention. This can be further accentuated if you place other elements on the landing page that can attract and direct your prospects to keep reading and to take positive steps towards conversion on the page.

Include Social Proof

Social proof on your landing page shows authenticity and authority. You can thus highlight various forms of social proof on your landing page to enhance its conversion. Among content marketers, the most popular social proof are case studies, achievements, awards, testimonials, customer success stories, breakthroughs, reviews, milestones and celebrity/influencer endorsements. All these help to enhance conversions.

Create a Great Value Proposition

When used correctly, value propositions generally help conversions. What marketers generally mean by value proposition is what they refer to as a clear statement describing the unique advantages of what they're offering on their landing pages. It represents what is available for prospects to help solve their problems and why what is available is uniquely so different from others in its class. The unique features of an effective value proposition are mainly the relevancy and differentiation. If these glaring advantages are conspicuous and easily noticeable on the landing page, they quickly help to catch the attention of prospects. That helps conversions a great deal.