Essential Online Marketing Tips for Ambitious Small Business Owners

Are you running a small business online? If you do, how about having a proven online marketing strategy that can help you generate more sales? That’s one essential strategy you need right now because as more and more people are shopping online, so more small business owners are moving their businesses online and doing more business. If you are an ambitious small business owner and you are desirous to make more sales online, you need essential and effective online marketing strategies that can work according to your needs. Below are some online marketing tips to enhance your small businesses marketing strategy.

Directly Target the Right Customers

Without customers, you cannot expect to be in business. The Internet is a deep and fiercely competitive digital market. If your small business is online, that is where it is expected to source customers from. Hugely challenging no doubt! Because the Internet has many users and the competition out there is stiff, advertising your brand without a good target market can be time wasting and fruitless. If you directly target your customers with your marketing messages, it makes it easier for your potential customers to find your business online and interact with you. If you use distinct buyer personas to identify your target market, your marketing messages return better results and you make more sales as a result.

Optimize Your Business Website for Mobile

Many more people now depend on mobile devices to do business online. As a result, mobile marketing has gained in popularity in recent times. Google now attributes over 70% of its data traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s one huge market any smart business owner cannot afford to miss out of. So, small business owners can easily take advantage of this traffic and expose their businesses to the global arena. What to do? Just optimize your business website for mobile searches.  Mobile-specific marketing may need a considerable investment, which can be challenging, especially for small business owners. But, the cheapest and most practical way around that is to optimize your business website for mobile devices and you get to do more business out of these devices.

Market with Affiliate Programs

If you want your small business to do well in online marketing, just launch an affiliate marketing program for it. That way, more affiliates/vendors help you to market your products through their own online channels in anticipation of earning commissions. These affiliates are people who believe in your products and are willing to help you sell to earn commissions. They share links to your products and even your marketing messages on different online platforms to reach a massive audience. If you make sales that are directly attributable to the efforts of these affiliates, you'll need to pay them an agreed commission. However, affiliate programs may not be suitable for all kinds businesses online. For this reason, you’ll need to evaluate what your own business needs and take appropriate steps to market your products for best results through affiliate programs.

Take Advantage of Online Customer Reviews

Because many online reviews rank well in search engines, they can help boost your small business. Through these reviews, your brand can gain more recognition online and you make more sales as a consequence. Through reviews, previous customers always sincerely give their experiences with a particular product. Reviews can also be a great way to encourage internet users to take particular actions like making a purchase for instance. Because potential customers tend to believe in reviews, many online shoppers rely on reviews to make their buy decisions. Even if some reviews are negative, you can respond in such a way as to keep the customer satisfied and your business better positioned to meet such challenges.

Market on Social Media

Every small business needs proper marketing to do well online. In today's business world, nearly everyone is on social media around the globe doing one thing or another. Getting your small business in social media environment is one great way to put your brand in front of billions of social media users. If you want potential customers to see and associate with your brand online, just get it on social media. Doing so is one great way to stand out from your peers and become a reputable brand worldwide. The hugely popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and others have in-house tools that can help small businesses market their products to a very wide global audience. Depending on your type of business, you can do your own evaluation and use only platforms that are really beneficial for your marketing activities. Once you have your business on any of the platforms you choose, your main focus should be on engaging with social media users and sharing informational posts about your business and products consistently. This is one great way to establish your unique brand voice online, and it helps your business a great deal.

7 Quick Tips on How to Make Online Sales

Expert digital marketers like to say, you don’t have to be a marketing expert or even have experience to succeed in selling online. Once you are able to master the rudiments and follow the rules, you too can sell online. If you can craft your marketing message well and make your pitch widely, you’ll get positive responses in no time at all. With that, you get a feeling of optimism and reassurance to ginger you to make more pitching. Pulling in more sales naturally flows from there. Here is a list of 7 easy-to-implement tips most expert marketers never fail to offer to anyone who is desirous to make sales online.

1. Offer Affiliate Opportunities

Affiliate opportunities help to increase the reach of a marketer online by leveraging the audiences of both the marketer and the affiliates. So, marketers can rely on affiliate opportunities to effectively share the huge task of selling products/services online. Affiliate marketing is simply when marketers allow other people, (i.e. affiliates) to market their products/services and send them website traffic. As a benefit, these affiliates are paid a percentage of any sales that are made from their promotional efforts as commissions. This arrangement is completely risk-free and low-cost since affiliates get paid if and only when they generate sales.

2. Build up an Email List

Email marketing may be “old school” but it still manages to get attractive sales results. Its effectiveness hinges directly on an email list which is a major marketing asset the marketer has to build up over time. Creating an email list is essential to generating sales through email marketing and it costs next to nothing to build. With a credible and segmented email list, you do not have to wait for customers to find your products/services themselves. Through the list, you can deliver your marketing messages and even offers directly to their inboxes. Your segmented email list of subscribers enables you to accurately deliver well-tailored product/service information and content to specific time zones around the world 24/7. That helps your sales a great deal.

3. Make Your Checkout Process User-Friendly

Online shoppers are characteristically very impatient. If the check-out process in your business website is cumbersome and not user-friendly, you risk losing a lot of sales opportunities. For this reason, you need to make your checkout process as simple as possible. Avoid giving your customers too many questions to answer or long-winded forms to fill in. Each extra step in the checkout process is a chance for your customers to change their minds and pull out of the sale. What follows is a huge pile of abandoned carts. Most customers shop online because it’s quicker and more convenient than visiting a physical store. If however because of the complexity of your check-out process many customers decide to back out, you risk losing many sales as a result.

4. Make Your Product Descriptions Vivid

Making shoppers to like your product at the shortest possible time span helps your sales. You can only make a sale if your shoppers like your products. A vivid description of your products helps that process. The internet is usually bursting with products and the competition is very stiff. For this reason, you must always make sure your customers and potential customers understand how your products will benefit them through the vivid descriptions you provide. This is complemented with very high quality images and or graphics. The more relevant information you can provide, the more likely your customers and potential customers will stay on your site long enough to decide to make a purchase. 

5. Start a Blog

Blogging is a very popular way of content marketing on the internet. If you don’t have a blog yet, you must decide to start one if you want to make more sales online. Without a blog associated with your online store or product, you risk missing out on the endless possibilities that come with content marketing. Just blog about an industry niche related to the products you are marketing and provide valuable information to your readers that will help solve their problems. Creating a good blog allows you to produce free and valuable content that builds trust in your brand and keeps people well informed. Good quality blog posts will also give you valuable content to share on social media and help your website rank high in the SERPs of search engines. That translates to good traffic, leads and sales.

6. Spread Word about Your Business

Never hesitate to tell anyone about your business. The more the number of people that know about your business, the better for the business! Start spreading the word from your social media circle to your family and friends. Encourage them to pass the word to their own social media circle, family and friends. You can make your first tentative sales from this inner circle. Through them, the word gets out to others in a wider circle and your sales increase as a result. Once you are able to establish that your product solves a problem for anyone in your circle, sell them the benefits. If it helps them out, they pass the word on in favor of your business. You can easily take advantage of your personal network on social media where you’re likely to be connected to many more people than in the physical world to pass on the word about your business.

7. Give Away Free Stuff to Influencers

A mutually beneficial relationship with influencers on social media is also recommended because many industry influencers have loyal audiences and large followings on social media. Sending influencers a free complimentary sample of your product is a great way to potentially get a mention on one of their platforms. If this happens, you’re almost certainly going to see some kind of spike in your website traffic and social media followers. That can directly ignite a spike in your sales too. Any form of relationship or interaction with influencers can affect your sales positively. If for instance you sell sports wears, interviewing an influencer about the industry and even playing a game with an influencer while they’re wearing your sports attire is good PR for your sales. When influencers actively engage with their loyal followers and even endorse your products to them, you are likely to witness a remarkable spike in your sales from that endorsement alone.

How to Leverage Affiliate Marketing to Increase Conversions and Sales

If you run an eCommerce store, there is no doubt you contend with many issues daily trying to satisfy the increasing number of people who now find it more convenient to shop online. Now, that can be a very huge challenge at times trying to surmount the many obstacles relating to how to effectively position your products in the market to make sales. How exactly do you tackle real obstacles relating to how to position a given product before the precise audience? This is where affiliate marketing becomes very handy to help remove some marketing barriers and effectively grow customer reach. By being conversant with how affiliate marketing and advertising networks work, you can leverage this knowledge to increase conversions and sales for your eCommerce business.

 

Ecommerce store owners effectively leverage affiliate marketing to promote their products better and to a wider audience. They consequently make more conversions and sales as a result. From experience and because of the peculiarities of the Internet, what works most, however, is localized and personalized product promotion. This is exactly where a partnership between eCommerce store owners and affiliate marketers becomes highly profitable. Because of the tremendous influence most affiliates have on their audience, affiliates are the real drivers of campaign optimization and local targeting.

You may wish to ask, how does that relationship work? Just factor in that influencers, bloggers, content marketers and website owners as credible and effective affiliates. The main function of the affiliate is to promote products to consumers and to entice them to buy. Affiliates get paid commissions each time a consumer takes a desired action or buys products via the direct promo action of the affiliate. The more of affiliate efforts, the more products are sold and the more products sellers/eCommerce store owners make sales. The more products sellers leverage on this relationship therefore, the more sales they make.

When eCommerce store owners leverage effectively on this relationship, below are some of the direct benefits that accrue to their business.

1.    They can widen their brand awareness and business reputation.
2.    They can effectively drive repeat sales.
3.    They can generate the right leads to their websites.
4.    It helps them to keep track, control and measure their marketing progress/success.
5.    It is cost-effective and gives them real value for money since it is performance-based.

However, as a rule of thumb, as an eCommerce store owner, before you decide on which affiliates to work with, you must first decide which products you are going to promote and what results you expect. This will serve as your offer. It is what is on offer that will attract individual marketers/affiliates depending on their niche/products preferences.

How Affiliate Marketing Generates Revenue

Affiliate marketing is a quick, inexpensive and very effective way to make money online. It quickly helps marketers to be their own bosses. With affiliate marketing you can stave off many business hassles associated with working for someone else, actually selling a product, worrying about customer feedback, or customer service. Every marketer works to earn money and affiliate marketing is no exception from that rule. An affiliate earns a commission if he helps to sell products from products merchants. There are multiple ways in which this affiliate commission can be calculated. It can be fixed or a percentage of the profit made by the product merchant on pre-agreed terms. It is all about commissions, commissions and more commissions. That’s where the revenue is. Generally, affiliate marketing generates revenue in the following ways. 

1. Pay-Per-Click, PPC: With PPC, what an affiliate does is to redirect buyers to a merchant’s website. The affiliate simply needs to perform deliberate actions that can lead a buyer from the affiliate’s platform to the merchant’s website. It is all about redirecting traffic from the affiliate’s website/platform to the product merchant’s website. Once a click is made on the merchant’s website, the affiliate earns a commission. That means the merchant pays the affiliate to simply help increase traffic to the merchant’s website.

2. Pay-Per-Sale, PPS: With PPS, a commission is earned only when an actual sale is made. It entails paying a commission to the affiliate by the product merchant in terms of a percentage of the sale price of the product/service being promoted. In actual fact, a buyer must actually buy a product for an affiliate to get paid a commission. Characteristically, this appears to be the standard mode of payment in most affiliate marketing arrangements.

3. Pay-Per-Lead, PPL: With PPL method of compensation, what an affiliate needs to do is to drive the conversion of leads. The main job of the affiliate is to lead consumers to the merchant’s website to make them complete a desired action. Such actions could include but not limited to signing up for a trial, subscribing to a newsletter, filling a contact form, downloading some software or a combination of several other desirable marketing actions.

 

Generally, Affiliates can only make money if they are running a good blog or they are influencers with a large following/audience. Many affiliates are known to market specifically to a niche audience that they command a lot of influence over. If they promote products based on the interests of their target audience, they get better conversions. An affiliate or a publisher can be an individual, a group of people, or a company that markets the product/service of a merchant to prospective customers. The affiliate simply plays a role in helping consumers to make their buy decisions and he earns a commission from these efforts. An affiliate helps in persuading and influencing the decision-making process of the consumers, appealingly. Affiliates earn commissions as sales are being made through these efforts.

How Small Businesses Can Use Social Media for Business Growth

With an estimated user population of over 4 billion, small business owners who genuinely want to grow their businesses can no longer afford to ignore social media. This is more so for the hugely popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram. These platforms now account for billions of active users around the world 24/7. Now that’s one huge market out there which smart small business owners now take good advantage of to grow their businesses. They latch on to the vast opportunities social media provides to connect with customers, allowing them to do more business and to maximize their earnings therefrom. As an aside, small business owners can also use social media platforms to make some money even without having to sell anything.

The hugely popular social media platforms are really great at helping small businesses build brand awareness, increase customer base, increase sales, get more leads and connect with current and potential customers. This is largely because of the ease of interaction and information sharing on the platforms. With a good SMM strategy in place, small businesses can take good advantage of social media to interact easily with customers and grow their businesses. Specifically, here is how social media directly helps small businesses with business growth.

Create real connections with your brand: Small business owners can effectively create real human connections with their brands through social media. Through social media platforms, you can introduce your customers to your brand story as well as showcasing the benefits of your products/services with ease.

Expand your business reach: Yeah social media with billions of active users represents one very huge market out there. Small business owners can take advantage of this market to expand their business reach exponentially. They can take advantage of in-house marketing tools on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest to showcase products or even directly advertise products and services.

Do more business: Available marketing data indicate that more and more people are buying on social media. Small businesses can take advantage of this by adding CTA ‘buy now’ buttons on their social platforms to generate more sales. This allows social media users to buy directly without ever having to leave the social media platform they are on.

Generate more leads: With the help of social media platforms, you can increase lead generation by increasing interest among potential customers in your audience. The more leads you generate, the more conversions you get and consequently more sales.

Drive traffic to your website/online eCommerce store: If you habitually create and post high quality content on social media, it helps to grow your audience and traffic generation. Through social media posts and ads, you can drive traffic to your website or your online eCommerce store. If you continuously share great content from your website to your social channels, it encourages more click-throughs to your website. That is good traffic.

How to Get the Best Out of Affiliate Marketing

As a small business owner, you must no doubt be thinking of how to increase your sales and revenues by way of cost effective and efficient marketing strategies. Have you given affiliate marketing a good thought? Affiliate marketing is an excellent revenue-generating tactic used by many small online businesses to promote sales and traffic. What it involves is to simply use creative ways to link products merchants with buyers and you earn a commission for your efforts. It is as simple as that. Among the many options and tools available to small business owners today, affiliate marketing remains one of the best proven ways to market your brand and grow your business. It is hugely cost-effective to boot. Find below some of the many benefits your small business can derive online from affiliate marketing.

Cost-Effectiveness

If you get involved in affiliate marketing, you can effectively promote your brand, products/services without worrying about huge promotional expenses. If you need a low risk way to gain new customers, try affiliate marketing. Unlike most other online marketing strategies, affiliate marketing costs relatively less. This is because affiliate programs are based entirely on payment for performance. For this reason, an affiliate is only entitled to be paid a commission once a customer completes a desired action. This is a payment that is due only on the basis of conversions. It ensures that you do not waste your time and money on things that seem to have no value and are irrelevant to your making money.

Increased Brand Awareness

All affiliates are required to promote brands on their own with a view to attracting buyers. By doing this, there appears to be no better and faster way to be recognized by many potential buyers than by affiliate marketing. Through the diligent work of affiliates, it can help to significantly increase brand awareness and reach. Since affiliates get paid as per their efforts, they automatically become loyal brand advocates and promoters. Their efforts help to introduce brands to countless prospects, generate leads, and build trust among a target audience.

Increased Website Traffic and Sales

Because affiliates actively promote products links, their efforts can significantly help to increase traffic to a website much faster. The more websites that link to your pages, the more likely your target audience is to visit your website and get to know your products and services. With greater referral traffic, your organic traffic usually gets a boost. Every business owner hugely relies on website traffic to gain potential customers and to increase quantifiable clues. The more the numbers of people who visit your site, the more opportunities you have to address your target audience and eventually get them to buy from your business. It may however pose a few challenges for you to get the right traffic to your website. Affiliate marketing comes handy to meet these challenges. 

 
Better Target Audience Reach

As many online marketers very well know, it may be fairly easy to identify a target audience, but figuring out how to market to it, poses its own challenges. One of these challenges is figuring out how best to convey your marketing message to the right people, in the right frame, at the right time and in the right place. It is not enough for you to simply understand your audience well enough. If you are unable to develop a strategy based on effective marketing information to promote your brand to this audience, you cannot get the desired results. Affiliate marketing helps to get around these challenges. What you need do is to explore all ways to work with affiliates who have the right audience and their businesses resonate with your brand. That way, you can be sure that your marketing efforts will easily and widely reach people who are likely to be interested in your products/services.

Final Thoughts

Your small business can greatly benefit from affiliate marketing if you follow the right steps in your affiliate marketing campaigns. As the internet deepens and small business owners become more reliant on it to promote their businesses, they need affiliate marketing more than ever before to build their brands and to reach a wider and bigger audience at minimal costs in terms of time and money.

5 Digital Marketing Tips to Get More Customers

Changes in habits and lifestyles usually force changes in digital marketing techniques. With more and more people taking their businesses online because of the global pandemic restrictions, the scramble for customers and patronage is forcing more changes in digital marketing. Many marketers are aware that over 80% of people looking to purchase a product/service resorts to online searches to get what they want. These are prospective customers whose attention digital marketers scramble 24/7 online to get. If you’re looking to reach out to new customers, nurture existing ones and grow your business, you need an effective digital marketing strategy. 

 

Try these here five tips and see how they’ll help your marketing strategy to get more customers.

1. Responsive Website

Customers are not likely to be attracted to a website that is neither attractive to them nor responsive to their needs. Your website is essentially the face of your business in the digital world. It is where you can effectively promote your products/services, attract customers and grow your brand. To do this efficiently, you need a website that is simple, modern, and comprehensive enough to attract customers. It must be secure, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, loads fast and with great aesthetic appeal to respond well to customers. It is advisable to use the services of professional webmasters who know what they are doing to help you create and host a responsive business website you can use to attract customers. DIY is not advisable unless you are a professional in your own right.

2. Effective Marketing Strategy

You cannot have an effective digital marketing strategy without good content. In fact, your content is the most important element you can use to build an effective digital marketing strategy. What this means is that if you want your business to be effective at getting more customers, your content must be in the forefront to help you attract prospective customers. Therefore, you need to continuously create high quality, informative and educational content if you want to have a powerful and effective digital marketing strategy that helps to get customers. To create an engaging content for your business, you must pay good attention to the images, graphics, videos, and written texts on the content. If such content is easily readable, understandable, informative, educational and engaging enough, it helps to get the attention of more and more readers. Getting leads and customers flows from there.

3. Video Ads

People love to watch videos. So, videos are proving to be very effective digital marketing tools.  With popular social media sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok streaming billions of videos by the hour, marketers hugely favor videos to run ads and the results are great. When digital marketers add video content to their posts and their marketing strategy, there is usually a significant increase in interactions, website traffic, and sales. That means marketing with video ads is a great idea to get more customers to do business with you.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy to get more customers. Emails allow marketers to market with precise messages to segmented audiences and the results are usually amazing. Nearly everyone around the world has an email address through which most receive digital information and correspondences regularly. This makes email a very powerful and reliable tool that marketers can depend on to easily connect with prospective customers and customers. If you already have a mailing list, you can easily share a variety of marketing info with your prospective customers and customers on that list. You can share your business updates, special promos/offers, price slashes, hot discounts, giveaways and suchlike info that will attract the attention of your audience to your website. If you optimize your emails to include images along with your text, it makes them visually attractive, easily understandable and more able to market your products/services. When effectively done, email marketing can be a very reliable way to get more customers and make more sales.

5. Strong Social Media Presence

Social media is not only hugely popular it also thrives on its influencing capabilities. The reason it is so attractive to digital marketers. For your social media marketing strategy to be effective, you must first figure out exactly which social media platforms you want to use, why you want to use them, and what they can do for your business. This is because all the social media platforms have their own individual peculiarities which may or may not be suitable for your type of business. Once you get your business on social media, it is guaranteed to be widely seen if your marketing is right. That makes it easy to succeed out there to influence others correctly if you market your business correctly. Building a strong social media presence can be a crucial part of the development of your business and can make most of the difference in the long term in your quest to get more customers. A strong social media presence means a strong influencing capability. Aside from paid ads, social media marketing is essentially free. Even with paid ads, marketing on social media is hugely cost-effective and marketers like to take advantage of that as well to get more customers and make more sales.

How to Grow Your Business with Outbound Sales Strategies

If you run your business online, you need a good outbound sales strategy if you want your business to grow. You may face huge challenges figuring out what works and what doesn’t in your marketing activities. That is expected. But, experienced marketers like to advise “using and testing” to determine what strategy works best. Many do recommend a delicate mix between inbound and outbound sales strategies to get the best results.

These here are some tested outbound sales strategies that could have a positive impact on the growth of your own business.

Create Your Ideal Customer Persona

Before developing any marketing strategy, first you must create an ideal customer persona right from the outset. A good customer persona allows you to understand your existing customers and prospects better. With it, you can better curate your content, services, product development and messaging to meet your target audiences' specific demands, behaviors and issues. To create a reliable customer persona, you may choose to directly interview your existing and prospective customers to uncover what they like most about your brand, services and or products. That is in addition to researching your customers’ database to discover trends related to your leads and the customers' behavior towards your content. The info and insights you glean from these exercises will help you to create and ideal customer persona to market to.

Market on Social Media

By way of definition, social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms to promote your brand's product/service. These days, social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at doing their own things around the world 24/7. It is the versatility of social media that business owners leverage on to communicate and engage with customers and reach new audiences. When properly nurtured, it is this audience that can potentially become paying customers. If effectively used, popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram can help business owners to establish great business relationships by helping them to widely share content of value to potential customers.

Generate Quality Leads

Without a doubt, lead generation is by far one of the most effective ways to succeed in outbound sales marketing. For this reason, business owners always need to consciously generate quality leads for their businesses. Lead generation may be a very technical and hugely challenging activity for most marketers but it is worth the while in the long term. Business owners can however reliably use reputable lead generation tools like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to help them out. If you have already created an ideal customer persona, you can leverage these tools to help look for qualified prospects that could be a great match for your product/service. In addition to this, you can generate quality leads by way of deliberate referral programs technique. These are programs that encourage other people to promote your brand in exchange for some token value for every converted lead.

Be Active in Online Communities

Marketers are gradually discovering that participating and being very active in online communities actually delivers a number of advantages to businesses. Online communities such as forums, internet communities and Facebook groups can be great networks for you to get an overview of your product/service and to evaluate how your customers are relating with your brand. The insights from these communities really help brands to improve their offerings, create better products and build better and stronger brands. In addition, you can take advantage of these online communities to create strong partnerships by taking advantage of networking opportunities with fellow business owners in your industry/business niche. That helps to grow and strengthen your brand. As a direct marketing effort, you can directly promote your product/service by providing quality content to the community and reaching out directly to members that may be interested in what you are selling.

Use Cold Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective marketing strategy if spamming is eliminated. Cold email marketing works best if you can create great quality, and attention-grabbing emails, that are optimized and targeted at a segmented audience. If such mails have attention-grabbing headlines, they entice people into opening the emails and possibly acting on them as well. If you send cold emails, make sure to follow up with your prospects and to track the “open-rate” of the mails using online tools. From your analytics/metrics, you can get insights about prospects that opened your emails and actually visited your website. If such persons did not make any purchase, you can then directly promote your brand to them again through re-targeting ads.

Digital Marketing Tips for Boosting Small Business Sales

The most viable way small businesses can manage to stay ahead competition and make good sales is through effective digital marketing. With digital marketing, it is easier for them to reach more customers and potential customers where they are and pitch for business. Digital marketing channels provide the best opportunities for small businesses to leverage on, get leads, customers and make better sales.

These here digital marketing ideas and tips can help small businesses boost sales.

Prioritize Video Marketing: Consumers respond better to video content than text content. Creating marketing videos these days is not a very complicated enterprise. Marketers don’t really need heavy equipment or professionals to shoot a marketing video footage. If they want to make authentic “how-to” videos, marketers can even use their smartphones with quality cameras to shoot and share marketing videos instantly. These videos can be effective enough to make consumers take desirable actions. Such actions can help boost sales for your business. With more than 5 billion videos being watched daily on YouTube alone, video marketing can be an effective marketing strategy to boost small business sales. Just make your own short marketing video and get it out there on YouTube and elsewhere and your business will be better for it.

Market with Live Videos: Marketers can now make live videos showing them directly speaking to their customers and potential customers. These videos help to promote products by showing how to use products and what the products can do for consumers. They invite consumers to try out the products sometimes for free. Doing this is one great way to reach and maintain personal contact with consumers and to build trust. Live videos are increasingly becoming popular on social platforms where they are shared easily and very widely. Popular social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and TikTok report that live videos have higher engagement rates when compared to non-live videos. For this reason, if marketers add live videos to their digital marketing strategies, it leads to more positive engagement. That is good for business.
 
Build a Solid Social Media Presence: These days, social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at doing their own things. Making a solid presence on social media is therefore a very smart business idea. With in-person and physical communication opportunities now becoming severely limited because of global pandemic restrictions, it is a very smart for small businesses to take to using social media platforms to reach prospects and customers. That calls for building a strong social media presence for your business. Over time, you can grow your audience and directly market to it through segmentation. Very popular social platforms, such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, provide in-house analytics and many other opportunities for effective business marketing and connecting with new audiences.

Have a Social Media Strategy: Social media is for everyone, but with a majority just out there seeking fun. To market effectively in such scenario, you need a well-thought out social media strategy. Aside from taking advantage of the in-house analytics of some social media platforms, small businesses can leverage some of the platforms particularly LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to showcase customer testimonials. They can also take advantage of some of the business apps they can find on the platforms. Doing so efficiently requires a workable social media strategy since the demographics of audiences on the platforms are not the same. It is only with such strategy you can get your business to effectively use the platforms for customer engagement, communication and promote brand exposure.

Include a Live Chat Feature on your Website: In business, any business, communication is key. The more effective your business communication, the better the business you can do. Quick and timely communications too is an advantage. Good communication helps to maintain good online presence for your business. You can communicate with emails, Skype, telephone and social media communication apps as well as live chats. However, a live chat app on a website is one of the best ways that small businesses can maintain their online presence. Why? Because, many customers have varying schedules, with some working part-time or full-time, while engaging in their day-to-day activities. Therefore, customers can only have varying shopping times depending on their own schedules. That’s where live chats become handy. Live chats are efficient because they can be timed and scheduled for the convenience of all parties. Aside from providing business support, live chats are also very effective sales tools for prospects that otherwise would simply just leave your website without engaging.

Leverage Email Marketing: Make no mistake about it, no matter what others are saying, email marketing is still a very effective marketing tool because it still manages to help businesses to get significant engagement. For that reason, small businesses can still leverage the power of email marketing to boost personal connections with customers. It is indeed effective in amplifying customer retention and can influence customers’ purchase behavior. However, the most effective emails are optimized emails. For good results therefore, be sure your emails are optimized.

To optimize your emails for better results, here is what to do.
• Personalize your email content as much as practicable.
• Use “send-time” optimization to make sure your readers receive your emails at the most appropriate time.
• Segment your contacts so your emails only go to the contacts who will find the specific piece of content most valuable.
• Shorten your subject lines and be clear about the email content's value proposition to encourage open rates.
• Ensure your emails are concise and include a Call-to-Action, CTA, to take the reader to the next stage in your sales funnel.
• Ensure your photos, graphics and videos are sharp and aesthetically appealing.

Email marketing helps in customer retention primarily because emails provide space to enable marketers customize and personalize their marketing messages. As an effective digital marketing strategy therefore, emails help marketers to significantly boost their businesses and grow sales.

Final Thoughts

Every small business needs good marketing strategy just as well as quality products/services to boost business and grow sales. Digital marketing strategies are cost-effective and hugely beneficial to small businesses.  The reason they are especially beneficial for small businesses with limited marketing budgets. Small businesses can significantly boost their businesses and grow sales with these ideas/tips, in addition to improving their Google listings, improving their local SEO, and expanding their website marketing activities. 

6 Ways to Make Money Online

It now appears many more people like to work online and from home. The opportunities to make money online are also increasing in tandem. Working online means freedom to work when you like without any time restrictions. As people become more and more comfortable with working online, the workplace is adjusting as well. Working online can be especially nice for independent spirits or introverts who want to make money. By taking advantage of the internet, you can explore any possibilities based on your talents and passion to make money. The opportunities are indeed limitless but here is what most experts recommend.

1. Blogging

You can blog about practically any topic under the sun provided you have real information about the subject matter that can be of help to other persons. Through blogging, you can share your experiences and special knowledge with others to build up a good audience of followers who are interested in your information. That audience brings the traffic to your blog page that marketers can take advantage of to sell their products or services. That is where the money comes from for the blogger by way of sponsorships and products promos. 

2. Freelancing

You can earn money by freelancing your talents, skills and knowledge on the internet. Through freelancing sites like Upwork, you can market yourself and earn money by charging hourly rates or charging by the project. Freelancing jobs on demand are: writing, editing, web designing, translating, transcribing, illustration and logo designing, photography, graphic artists, videography, code writing, virtual assistants etc, etc.

3. Educational Services

If you have the qualifications and teaching skills, you can earn money by rendering virtual educational services to pupils and students from the comfort of your home or office. These services include, tutoring, teaching, academic writing, lifestyle coaching, webinars and educational videos. You can charge hourly fees or by subject matter if you register with popular educational services sites online.

4. Recipe Writing
 
If you are a good cook, sharing your expertise in the kitchen can help you make money online. You can make practical demonstration videos or write recipes to publish on popular recipe sites online. On the alternative, you can locate people on freelancing sites seeking recipe and cookbook writers to work with and earn money.

5. Remote Jobs

These days, people earn money doing outsourced or remote jobs. There are many online companies outsourcing jobs around the world to save costs on personnel maintenance. This they do by hiring remote workers. Many companies have found out that remote workers are actually more productive aside from the fact that they are cheaper to maintain. You can earn money from remote jobs like medical billings, customer service, coding, software engineering, content writing, journalism and many other jobs, all from the comfort of your home or office. Because of the huge constraints in traditional office settings now, aside other cost elements, opportunities for remote jobs are becoming limitless.

6. Online Retail

Opportunities for retail business online are many and varied but you earn money all the same. You can sell your own product/service directly through your e-shop or you create your own dropshipping business and sell products online. You can sell products for very popular and big e-commerce companies like SFI, eBay and Amazon and earn good commissions from your sales efforts. You can consider using Shopify or Etsy if you want to sell handmade or vintage products, while SFI, eBay and Amazon are great for many other types of products.

Why Digital Marketing is Right Even in a Pandemic

In times of severe restrictions in business, particularly in times of a pandemic as we are currently experiencing, digital marketers may choose to take part in virtual events. Even at that, talking to and marketing directly to customers and leads is still imperative. Fortunately, with the right digital marketing tactics/techniques, marketers can still connect to potential customers and amplify their marketing messages across many platforms. With digital marketing, marketers can still improve communications and online interactions despite the pandemic restrictions.

 

Here is why digital marketing is the best way to market, generate leads and sales even in times of a pandemic.

Cost-Effective Techniques

Digital marketing allows you to make contacts with customers seamlessly and to follow up leads without excessive cost implications. With it, you can communicate with prospects without any prohibitive travel and communications costs. That allows your business to have a consistent return on your investment, ROI. Most marketers are satisfied with the ROI from social media marketing, video content marketing, email marketing and other digital marketing techniques. In addition, they have different marketing options available to them depending on the sizes of the ads budgets they are operating. By combining a robust marketing strategy with automation tools, digital marketers can choose when, where, and how to reach their audiences to get the most out of every ads penny they spend.

Better Audience Targeting

Digital marketing allows marketers to use a clear digital strategy specially designed to deliver personalized messages tailored to suit different categories of consumers and their buying/engagement journeys. These online strategies help to make it easy for marketers to link up with the right target market and for the consumers to link up with the marketer. This is more so when marketers can easily seize the opportunity of using the right marketing tools to qualify leads in digital space. With digital marketing, marketers can also add fields to forms or use ads to target the decision-makers of a business and qualify leads well in advance. That helps sales and revenues returns.

Continuous Delivery of Results

Once a digital marketing strategy is well designed and launched, the effort generates leads continuously and almost in perpetuity. That is good for business no doubt. Such strategy allows marketers to have many opportunities to boost brand awareness and share their stories in cyberspace. In digital marketing, whatever content you create never goes to bed. It keeps your message alive in digital space allowing your targeted audience to find what they are looking for at any time 24/7. In addition, digital marketing allows you to easily repurpose and rejig your campaigns to sustain the interest of your leads and to keep them returning for more.

Measurable Results and Attribution

Digital marketing allows marketers to track leads and nurture such leads with a view to making them customers. With digital media, marketers can see how many prospects stop by their websites, what they click on, and where they go after leaving the sites. They can make use of online tools to diligently track these prospects and attribute all their actions adequately. By setting Key Performance Indicators, KPIs, marketers can continually analyze the performance of their content. That allows them to learn more and better understand their audiences, and how they interact with the brands they are promoting. By doing so, they can build up very useful real time and historical data to aid their marketing decisions. Such data helps marketers to focus more on workable tactics and high-impact actions that help to deliver the most leads and better sales.

Digital Marketing Tips to Drive Sales

Sales! Sales!! Sales!!! It is sales that drive digital marketers in their day to day activities online. Particularly during festivities, no digital marketer wants to be left behind in the great scramble for sales and bargains. Nearly everyone out there is looking to maximize their sales and the scramble remains huge and highly competitive. Everyone is always trying to outdo everyone in a scenario where potent digital marketing skills tend to make the difference.
These here tips if carefully and diligently followed can help to make the difference about who gets to make more sales no matter how huge the scramble for buyers becomes.

Deploy Relevant Affiliate Marketing Tools

If you want affiliate marketing to deliver impressive results for your digital marketing business, you’ve just got to deploy the right tools. Adequate care must be taken to select and use these tools to get results. If the tools you select can help you get better attribution and tracking while improving the quality of online traffic and leads generation, they are good tools. It is such good tools which help to ensure better conversion rates and sales which every online marketer wants. Additionally, working with integrated browser extensions, good affiliate tools can help your online business seamlessly sign on different types of publishers as affiliates. Such publishers may include but not limited to bloggers, celebrities and social media influencers who can use deep-linking tools on messenger/social media platforms. They work to help simplify links generation process. One great way to generate accurate and functional affiliate links which publishers can easily use in the contents they produce. 


 
Effectively use Mobile Marketing Strategies

In our world of today, everyone is in a hurry and always on the go. That is in no way slowing down or obstructing business. People now do business effectively on the go and in transit. Welcome to the world of mobile digital devices particularly smart phones. Many marketers now use over 70% of the time they spend online via smart mobile devices. That is one huge access which smart marketers can depend on to market and make sales on the go. For brands, smartphones now constitute a very unique marketing opportunity that is too huge to ignore. Equipped with mobile marketing apps, these devices can now effectively collect and track data which marketers can rely on and use in their mobile marketing strategies.

Use Different Marketing Techniques
 
In online marketing business, what works is what you use if you want to stay relevant. Deployed singly or in combination, what gets the right results is what you need. There is no right or wrong marketing technique so to speak. Every marketer simply needs what works well for the brand they are marketing. Smart marketers prefer a decent and healthy mix of different digital marketing techniques to create the maximum impact in a highly competitive market space. If you are looking to maximize your sales, you can devise ways to leverage on multiple outreach channels such as price comparison, chat messengers, blogs/forums, coupons, freebies and cashback, among others. Associating with credible affiliate networks to manage your marketing campaigns also gets satisfactory results. When properly incentivized, publishers associated with affiliate networks help to promote your brand through their audience capturing techniques to patronize your products.

Personalize Your Content

The peculiarities and backgrounds of every human being play a role in determining what they do and how they behave. That is the reason content marketing must take into account these peculiarities to direct the content it markets. In digital marketing space, content remains king anytime any day. When used correctly, it can become one of the biggest differentiators for your online marketing strategies. As a marketer, content plays a very huge role in defining how well your marketing campaigns are received by your target audience. When personalized and properly directed, the marketing results can help to make very huge impact on your sales volume. For that reason, even if you are essentially promoting the same product, personalizing your content to suit the aspirations and requirements of different target audiences is immensely important.

Target Differentiation in Your Marketing Campaigns

To be a successful marketer, you need data, credible and reliable data to help your marketing campaigns. Google helps with good analytics tools to help you generate very reliable data. With good data, you can gather intelligence about your competitors and spy on what they are doing. You can generate reliable marketing insights which you can depend on to unlock better opportunities to sell, upsell or cross-sell any product. With good data, you can plan well and be able to reach the right customer at the right time and with the right message. Your marketing campaigns can be specifically directed at different groups to enable differentiation in your marketing efforts. Whether by way of owned marketing initiatives or affiliate-driven campaigns, good data makes attribution across traffic sources more accurate. There is an added advantage of its being used to drive push notifications particularly on mobile devices. 

10 Great Products to Sell Online

Doing business online has its many attractions primary amongst which is the ease and very convenient way to get things going smoothly even in the privacy of your home. This is largely why many people are now getting involved. However, to succeed in it, apart from your own online skills, you need to sell great products which many people habitually search for online. Here are some of such products.

Shapewear

Modern trends indicate that people are becoming very concerned about their body shapes. Fashion trends encourage such people to go for wears which help their body shapes. The commonest shapewears selling well online include firming bras, girdles, bodysuits and seamless high leg knickers. The trend is these wears help women (and even men) to walk out with a body they are confident with, the reason these products are selling well online.

Video Games

Anyone with a keen eye for good business online can try their luck at buying and selling video games. They move real quickly and many people are online daily looking to pick up a bargain which independent sellers readily provide online.



Videos and Online Courses

Out there worldwide, nearly everyone has got some talents which others might be interested in. If you want to make money online and you’ve got some valuable talent, you could teach it to others for a price by ways of videos and courses. There are very popular video marketplaces like Udemy which make buying and selling courses and videos online incredibly easy and popular. It is easy to tap on to this great market if you’ve got valuable talent to sell to others.

Maternity Wear

Motherhood is one great experience in life and many women always like to make the best of it. These days, some women even go for trendy maternity wears which tend to make pregnancy look fashionable. The market is really huge. The reason the market gets bigger is that many people who have a maternity wear brand find it easy expanding their product range to other related items, such as babywear and even pregnancy health and wellbeing products. Some women who have had babies do make money online selling their own second-hand maternity clothes.

Watches

The market for watches is very large market online. It is a multi-billion dollar business. Any smart marketer can tap into this incredibly popular market by selling watches online. The market is huge and promises to get bigger with changing tastes for and styles of watches as popular fashion accessories.

Photographs

If you love photography and you have the talent for it, you can turn your love for photography into a profitable business by selling your stand-out images online. Great photography stores like Shutterstock, DigiLabs and iStock are available to you to make money with your love and talent.

Books

Online business may have made eBooks very popular, but paper and hardback books still make great profitable items to sell online. Currently, eBooks are the most popular items to download digitally and lots of people are making money from eBooks sales online. Even at that, if you’ve got a fascinating story to tell or in-depth knowledge of something people would want to learn, you can get it out to the world by way of eBook as well as Paperback via Amazon.com.

Phones and Phone Accessories

Worldwide, mobile phones are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. As the technology keeps evolving rapidly, so is the demand for mobile phones and accessories. That is why they are now great items to sell online.

Bags

Everywhere you look on the streets these days, there are bags, bags and bags everywhere of different shapes, sizes and colors. As you move around, you get to see bags for school, bags for busy mums, bags for walking, bags for hiking and other uses making it a real big business selling bags on and offline. Experts advise that if you want to successfully sell bags online, it’s a good idea to create a relationship with a wholesaler to enable you buy the bags more cheaply with a view to selling them with a good margin for profit. As an alternative and if you have the talent, you can design your own bags and sell under your own label.

Antiques

These include vintage items like automobiles, restored furniture, coins, stamps, currency, paintings and such like materials which appear obsolete but tend to be very valuable as collectors’ items. If you have any of such piece or product, getting a picture of it and advertising it online attracts buyers easily many of who may be willing to pay premium prices to have the item/product.

 

What to Tell Prospects about SFI to Ensure Sign-Ups

My first advice is for you to be sure you are a serious affiliate first before you decide to recruit serious affiliates. The reason is that this business thrives when the business leaders lead by example. If you are able to show proof to affiliates how serious you are in the business and how well you have made out, it is easy to get them to be serious. Additionally you can tell them the following about SFI as a business.

- You can participate in SFI free for as long as you want, with no obligation.
- You get your own personalized Website provided free (with free maintenance).
- You get personal mentors provided for free personal support & assistance.
- SFI is marketable in every country worldwide (that is you can make money everywhere!).
- SFI has been in business on the Internet for over 19 years.
- SFI provides extensive free training & resources to help you get started fast.
- You can share in company-wide sales/commissions every month.
- You can earn ongoing, residual income from one-time sales.
- There is support available 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week.
- You can earn unlimited override commissions down 12 levels.
- It is built from ground up for the Internet.
- You can market virtually ANY product or service in the world.
- You can have your commissions payable monthly in your country’s currency via ATM machines. 

How Getting a TCurrency License Helps to Increase Sales

Congratulations if you are an ECA. Getting a TCurrency license permits you to sell TCurrency in your ECA store. YES, getting a TCurrency license will help to increase your sales. Since the license permits you to sell TCurrency, you can start dealing in it as a product for sale in your ECA store. That is because TCurrency is also a TripleClicks product available for sale only in licensed ECA stores.

Because of the very high demand for TCurrency particularly in countries with alternative payments permits from SFI, licensed dealers always sell a lot of TCurrency to affiliates. The more the TCurrency you are able to sell therefore, the better for your sales volume. That supports the fact directly that getting a TCurrency license will help to increase your sales.