Best Strategies to Master On-Page and Off-Page SEO Skills

Most online business owners rely on organic traffic to grow their businesses. That sort of traffic comes largely from search engines. This is why online marketers always want to optimize their websites for search engines with a view to getting high ranking in the SERPs of search engines. This ranking usually translates to good organic traffic back to such websites. If as a business owner you are looking forward to ranking your website high in the SERPs of search engines, you just need to understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You will need to master some on-page and off-page strategies so that you will be able to optimize your website for better rankings by search engines. This is because for SEO to be really effective on a business website, it must be on-page and off-page. Both strategies have their unique roles in the search results as well as organic traffic from search engines.

This article will discuss some on-page and off-page SEO strategies/techniques to see if you can master them well enough for the benefit of your eCommerce business.

On-Page SEO Strategies

The technical details of optimizing the content of your website to be search engine and user friendly are collectively known as on-page SEO. On-page SEO focuses directly on website content and how it performs to attract traffic to the website. The following techniques are very helpful for on-page SEO.

1. Keyword Research

SEO on content works with keywords. Depending on the products you are marketing and the niche of your business, you can research keywords to determine which will be suitable to help search engines locate your products or website. It is best to use on your content, long-tail keywords/phrases with high search volume and lower keyword difficulty. For marketing purposes, long-tail keywords generally have a high conversion rate. When your conversion rate is high, you can get better leads through such keywords.

2. On-Page Planning

To get good results with on-page planning, you will need to be very precise and accurate. Part of this planning is to make sure you use different keywords for different pages depending on the products or message on the pages. Be sure the keywords targeted on one page are not conflicting in any way with the keywords on another page and all the website pages are interlinked with suitable internal linking. Give the pages a clear hierarchy and proper categorization. Carefully insert images and videos with the right spacing and with alt tags on all the pages. All these greatly help your on-page plan to deliver good results.

3. Search Intent Analyzation

Detecting the search intent of your website visitors helps to bring them over to your website through the right keywords related to that intent. You must therefore be able to analyze the intent of your visitors in tandem with your goals. Next is to focus on each set of visitors based on their search intent then direct your marketing appropriately using the keywords related to the intentions of each set and the objective of your website. That helps organic traffic a great deal.
 
4. Optimize for Mobile Devices

Google reports now indicate that a very large percentage of search data is attributable to mobile devices. If you do not want to miss out on this search data, it is best to optimize your website for mobile devices particularly smartphones. Google greatly values websites that are optimized for mobile devices because most of searchers are now using mobile phones to search for their queries. This is why it is hugely important to optimize your website design to make it mobile-friendly.

5. Leveraging LSI Keywords

Your marketing content gets better results if you add some keywords in the content related to your focused keyword. It is such keywords/phrases that Google considers related that are known as LSI Keywords. You get better results with your content if you add LSI keywords inside the content, its headings and subheadings as well. Be careful to space the keywords sparsely in your content to avoid penalties from Google for keywords stuffing.
 
6. Page Loading Speed

You can always tinker with your website design and content to improve on its loading speed. If a website loads fast, it is more customer-friendly than slow loading websites. This is the reason why low-speed loading increases bounce rate on a website. Besides, if your website is slow loading, Google will not rank it high in its SERPs. To tinker with the loading speed of your website, you can use lazy loading, compressed images, low-size scripts, and proper coding to increase its loading speed.
 
7. Content Optimization

For good organic traffic purposes, the content on your web page should be well optimized against the focused keyword of the site. Sparsely populating the content with such keyword is always very helpful. This keyword should be in the introductory paragraph, last paragraph, headings and subheadings and a bit here and there in the main body of the content. Adequate care must however be taken at all times to avoid keywords stuffing.
 
8. Page Optimization

Search engines usually like websites with good page optimization and they reward such websites with high ranking. To get this done, your page title must be suitable to the content and with appropriate length say around 50 characters. It should contain your focus keyword particularly at the beginning. You can boost its chances with search engines if you add an intuitive meta description that is about 150 characters long. The meta description should contain the focus keyword and one LSI keyword if convenient. Make sure your meta titles are engaging well by adding appropriate questions to lure your readers to click through.

Off-Page SEO Techniques

Off-page strategies are basically off-site techniques you can perform outside your website to improve the ranking of your website in the SERPs of search engines. Next are some of the most important off-page SEO strategies most marketers find useful. They are practically all about backlinks really.

1. Guest-Post Articles

Marketers usually guest post articles as a way to create contextual backlinks for their web pages. Such guest articles are usually submitted to other websites of the same niche as the marketer’s website. When marketers create niche-based content they insert their links into it in a natural manner. When these articles are published on other websites, the marketer gets backlinks from those websites to his own web page. This is one of the most authentic link-building techniques that help website ranking. When Google finds the links to your website to be genuine and from reputable websites in your niche, it helps the ranking of your own website. If you are guest posting articles, you must take adequate care to avoid penalties from search engines for spamming.

2. Strategic Link Building Techniques

Anywhere an online marketer can post content and he earns a backlink from the content is a strategic link-building location. Such places are quite many on the web but the most popular with marketers are: blog commenting, web 2.0, forum submission, document submission, articles directory listing and so on. This link-building strategy requires adequate care and great caution to avoid spamming penalties from search engines.

3. Social Media Platforms

These days, smart marketers have found ways to leverage the power of social media to market content on various social media platforms. If your content is good and your social media following is high, you can continuously market your web pages on social media and invite your readers to visit your website. You need a bit of ingenuity though to get good results from social media marketing. What really matters is quality, good quality and engaging content on social media to get attention. Generally, you can use video content, images, live streaming and leverage the many in-house features available on many social media platforms to effectively market your content.

4. Shareable Content

If your content is of high quality and engaging, it will be easily shareable. It is thus hugely essential that you should always endeavor to continuously create shareable content on your webpage. Make sure your shareable content is complimented with the right social media icons that can easily facilitate its sharing throughout the internet. That will directly help the ranking of the content. Why because Google in particular always has high value for a web page that is more widely shared on different digital media platforms.

Summary

It takes quite a while and a great deal of efforts to optimize your website for search engines. Even at that, SEO on a website is a highly technical business which is best left for professional webmasters to do on your website if you are unable to do it yourself. Doing it and getting it done right is hugely important for the success or otherwise of any eCommerce business. If you try the foregoing on-page and off-page techniques and you are not getting satisfactory results, hire the services of SEO experts to help you out. It is essential however for you to know some of these basic techniques that can help improve your own SEO skills. If you do, your eCommerce business will be a lot better for it.

6 Best and Most Effective eCommerce Marketing Strategies, Experts’ Tips

To grow your eCommerce business, you need effective advertising. That’s about the only way your business can get to reach more customers. It takes many marketing strategies and tactics to effectively advertise online. Some of these strategies can be deployed either singly or in combination depending on the type of products you are marketing and the marketing channels you choose to use.

Based on expert recommendations, below are 6 best and most effective eCommerce marketing strategies to help you reach more customers and achieve your marketing goals.

1. Optimizing Your Website

If you run eCommerce business, your website is the first impression a shopper gets to have about your business. Well, that shopper had better be impressed or else you may lose his business. You cannot expect to directly impress a shopper on your website if your website design and aesthetics are poor and unimpressive. What helps to keep shoppers a bit longer on your website is optimization. If your website is optimized, shoppers stay a bit longer on the website to notice the wonderful products you are selling. If they notice these products, chances are higher that they may get to purchase some of the products. You can therefore optimize your website through a simple site structure that is easy to navigate. The right shopping information should be easily noticeable and CTAs very obvious to get shoppers to take desirable actions. If the website is optimized for mobile devices, better still because Google now attributes a very high percentage of search data to mobile devices.

2. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a simple business model that thrives on synergy. Since the eCommerce business owner cannot afford to reach all prospects all by himself, he needs to combine the efforts of affiliates to do so. Business owners can therefore partner with publishers/affiliates that can help promote products for them on their blog posts, emails, social media, and videos. In the bargain, these publishers/affiliates earn a percentage of the sales made through their promotional efforts as commissions. That is affiliate marketing. Some product merchants can decide to work directly with reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI who can directly assist them with training, customer care, marketing tools, analytics and easy attribution and payment of commissions.

3. eCommerce SEO

It is expected that many customers research products well online before they even decide to buy. For this reason, if you want to give your eCommerce business the best chance of converting prospects, you must connect with them during the research stage. That is where eCommerce SEO becomes very handy. This is the process of optimizing your web pages to rank high for essential business keywords related to the products you are selling. To improve your eCommerce SEO, you must take deliberate steps to improve your Content Marketing, technical SEO, On-Page and Off-Page SEO. These improvements will help you to engage better in your eCommerce SEO campaigns. Doing so is one great way to acquire more leads and customers from the organic traffic coming from search engines.

4. Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising

With pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, eCommerce business owners can reach their audience with targeted ads on Google. What makes PPC ads particularly effective is that eCommerce business owners can take specific steps and actions to improve the chances of the ads reaching their targets. Such steps/actions include conducting diligent keywords research, adjusting ads bids in line with set goals, building relevant landing pages, using Google shopping ads and using retargeting ads. After taking all necessary steps and executing these techniques, you can improve performance through A/B testing. Since you can’t expect a single ad to effectively work for every business, experts recommend that business owners must carefully test various ad campaign elements if they want to improve performance.

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective marketing technique popular with eCommerce business owners. It is highly cost-effective too. Marketing with email has very many advantages for eCommerce business owners when compared to other marketing channels. Aside the cost-effectiveness, business owners can personalize email messages, segment the messages and even use email automation software to automate email messages to reach a wider audience reliably. All these help business owners to save time, money, and other resources and still be able to get impressive results from email campaigns. When business owners send relevant emails to their numerous subscribers, it helps to increase the open and click-through rates of the emails. In addition, because the emails are directing the recipients to a relevant web page, there’s a higher chance of converting such visitors. Therefore, if you want your eCommerce business to grow, email marketing is a must rather than a convenient option.

6. Social Media Marketing

Most people worldwide use social media platforms for fun and to connect with friends but many users also follow businesses and check out information and product offers on some of the platforms. eCommerce business owners usually provide value to their audience on social media through the type of content that can solve their problems. That is why many eCommerce businesses tend to focus on social media platforms credible locations where they can reach their ideal customers. In many business niches, there are experts and celebrities who have gained a big following on social media as a result of their excellent performance and prominence in their vocations or industries. As a result, these experts and influencers tend to have loyal audiences who trust their product recommendations. eCommerce businesses do take advantage of this relationship to promote their products. This is influencer marketing which directly compliments social media marketing. Presently, some social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram because of their unique in-house marketing tools allow business owners to sell products directly on their platforms. On social media therefore, there are many excellent opportunities for eCommerce business owners to promote and sell their products to a very wide and diverse audience.

Wrapping Up

Effective marketing is one of the best ways to give your eCommerce business the right exposure online. Having an excellent product is just not enough to do good business out there. Nobody will buy your product if they’ve never heard of it and they don’t know anything about it. By deploying the right marketing strategies as discussed above, it is possible to attract more shoppers to your eCommerce store and sell more products to them. If you need to boost your marketing results therefore, your best bet is to deploy these here strategies in the right way.

Affiliate Marketing Needs You Must Never Overlook

In affiliate marketing, if you know what to do and how to do it, it can save you several valuable hours of hard work before you start making money. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can spend a huge amount of time trying out bad strategies and promoting low paying products. Here are a few of such needs.

You need to carefully choose the affiliate products you wish to sell. If you like the products and you have bought and used them yourself, the better. Doing so is a good affiliate marketing policy since you can more easily create content around something you’re interested in and know well. In addition, you must make sure there is a need to settle for high value products as against low value products. High value products pay higher commissions of about 30%-50% on sales while low value products pay commissions in the range of 10% or less. A high ticket product sale can earn you the same as by selling hundreds of the lower value items. It is best to use subscription products, high ticket products and a product range, rather than low value products which only offer single commissions. With a product range you can benefit from subscription products, one off commissions and high ticket sales. In addition, you can also benefit from a built in sales team, who close sales on your behalf.

Most marketers prefer free marketing strategies unaware that if they use a product range, paid marketing strategies are much more within reach. With a high ticket product range, it is much easier to make a profit while running paid marketing. With it, market growth is much easier too. This is because once you’re profitable and you are running paid advertising campaigns, you can scale up quickly by simply increasing your marketing budget. If you rely only on organic and cheaper marketing strategies, scaling up is much more difficult.
 
Affiliate marketing as a business concept may look simple and many people believe they can always go it alone. That’s not quite true. To succeed better and faster in the business, you need professional help because it is quite difficult to build a successful online business from scratch. You need professionals with the technical know-how to help you build a user-friendly website, host it, optimize it and position it for effective marketing purposes. However, if you know how, you can build and host your website yourself with the help of online software. You can also get valuable help from fellow affiliates, friends, family members, coaches and mentors. You can look for help any and everywhere. If you join a community of online business owners, they can help you to build the much needed self confidence that you too can succeed in affiliate marketing. Now that’s one huge help many marketers never quite recognize as such.

 

In affiliate business, you need automation to save time and money and still get very good results. What readily comes to mind is Artificial Intelligence, AI. For communications efficiency, just get an email autoresponder. This is one great software that allows affiliates to collect emails from a website and automate the delivery of email messages to the email list they’ve built over time.  Because most customers will often need several contact points before they make a purchase, an autoresponder becomes highly valuable to keep them constantly engaged through AI.

As most marketers very well know, a single landing on a website rarely generates a sale. On a website, a visitor only has a small window of opportunity to make a buying decision. You can latch on that small window of opportunity to make a sale through autoresponder. Because you have your visitors’ email information on your email list, you can extend this time period by weeks, months or even years through constant customer engagement through autoresponder.

Last Line

Even though statistical data indicate a drop-out rate in affiliate marketing to be close to 95%, it is still a business you can make money from if you follow the rules diligently and work hard at the business. Always remember the reason you’re in the business, find a good affiliate program, do the needful and stick to it, you’ll be OK.

10 Strong Online Marketing Strategies to Boost Your Business

With a strong online marketing strategy, you can reach many more customers and consequently increase your sales. The reason expert marketers never fail to recommend to online business owners to have a strong online marketing strategy. This is because they know from their own experiences that online marketing strategies do help many online businesses in their strategic marketing efforts. You too can apply these strategies in your own business and watch the results you get. You can effectively use these here strategies to get more customers and to retain the existing ones. 

1.  Start a Blog

A blog is readily the most popular content marketing strategy available to marketers. If you take to blogging to market your products, you can deploy your blog to many uses. A blog for instance allows you to post new keywords and optimize your search engine strategy from time to time. Through your blog, you can directly offer advice, share information and easily connect with your customers. It helps to build good business relationships by first building trust with the blog readers. From there, you can generate leads and even customers with time. If you want to build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with your blog readers therefore, start a blog. Lasting relationships start with trust and a blog can help you to build this trust.

2. Market with Affiliate Programs

It is smart marketing to get as many eyes as possible to see the products you are marketing online. Affiliate marketing comes in very handy to attract these eyes. In affiliate marketing, you can partner with people who believe in your business to help share information about the business. That way, many more people get to notice your business and you can increase traffic to your website as a result. Affiliate business partnership is simple to operate. When affiliates send traffic to your website, you pay them commissions for every visitor they bring to your website as well as any sales made as a result of the affiliates’ efforts. Affiliate marketing is very effective and can directly help to improve your online marketing efforts without needing you to do a lot yourself.

3. Take SEO Seriously

You must take your search engine marketing seriously because a strong SEO strategy can improve your site’s ranking and increase the chances of your site being associated with the keywords you use on your website. SEO helps your ranking in the SERPs of search engines. A high ranking on these SERPs translates to good organic traffic to your website since the ranking makes it more likely for people to choose your business over your competitors.

4. Deploy Email Marketing

Technically, for any online businesses, email marketing is not just about sending out emails. It is much more than that. For effective and efficient emails, you must look for ways to ensure that you cater for the needs of every individual you are sending emails to. It is therefore hugely important to carefully consider and segment your email lists to meet the recipients’ needs in a personalized manner. If you factor in the shopping characteristics and purchasing habits of your customers, you can use the vital information to develop an effective email marketing strategy. 

5. Get Your Business into News Stories and Articles
 
This is one great way to bring your business to the attention of many eyes on the web. If you cannot do it yourself, it is advisable to work with good public relations professionals to get your business into news stories and articles on topics related to what your business offers. If properly handled, it can help to establish you as a trusted expert and consequently make more people know about your business. You may choose to sign up for free online services that specialize in connecting businesses with writers looking for some information about your industry.
 
6. Write Informative Online Press Releases

This is yet another great way to get more eyes to see your business online. If you write online press releases about your business, it will help you get out very valuable information about your business out there in a formal setting. Through such press releases, blogs, newspapers or other media sources will get to see your information. These sources could rely on your information to write about your business/industry without you having to put a lot of effort to connect and claim a story.

7. Hold Regular Contests and Giveaways

Contests and giveaways are very powerful incentives to attract customers. Regularly holding contests and giveaways can be one of the most cost-effective ways to increase sales for your business. This is because most people love contests and giveaways since they provide good opportunities for them to get some freebies and discounted products. Characteristically, whenever a business encourages promotion from customers in exchange for a free product/service, it usually leads to a remarkable increase in sales and connections.

8. Build a Credible Opt-In Email List

You can easily build a credible opt-in email list through promotions and giveaways as incentives. Customers usually sign up on such lists to get email correspondence about promos, giveaways, discounts and suchlike incentives. The list helps you to better connect with potential customers and existing ones and you do better business as a result.

 
9. Engage a Consultant/Coach

No matter how good you are in internet marketing, you can still use some advice to do better. That is when consultants/coaches with proven track records become handy. Even if you are not that good in digital and internet marketing, you can still succeed in online marketing with such help. On the internet, you can find internet marketing and paid marketing consultants that can help you out. Many of these people are real professionals with good track records in their trade. You can rely on their advice to do most of the things you need to do to succeed in online marketing much better. Their advice can be hugely helpful, especially for small business owners who need to focus more on their core business for business growth.

10. Take Your Web Design Seriously

Your business website is your window to the wide world of internet business. That makes the design of the website of paramount importance for you to attract customers and make sales. In internet business, a great web design is one proven and effective marketing strategy. This is because the design of your website directly determines the amount of attention and time a web visitor will spend on the web page. Since your website is central to all your digital marketing efforts, make sure that it is well designed, well optimized, neat, easy to read and with good aesthetics to make it eye-catching and attractive. So, if you do not give the design of your website the seriousness it deserves, you may end up losing customers you would ordinarily have easily attracted to the site. Even if you don’t have the requisite skills to design a good website, you can hire the services of a professional webmaster to help you out. A good website designer will deploy his skills to help make your website attractive, fast-loading, modern and mobile-friendly. That way, the website will become quite effective and useful to help you attract more visitors to the site.

Practical Strategies to Retain Online Store Customers

Online stores like any other stores need to retain customers if they want to remain in business. These stores must in addition keep up with the latest trends or risk going out of business.  No matter the sizes of these stores or in whatever niche they are operating, they need to invest in online tools to provide the best customer experience and earn customers’ continued trust. This is hugely essential to their continued operation because even a minor improvement in customer retention in any online business can lead to significant gains in overall revenue and profits. So, retaining customers is much more profitable than acquiring new ones as every smart small business owner very well knows. Customer retention is therefore a key to growing your small business online. 

Hereunder are some of the most practical methods to making your online store good enough to attract repeat customers and also to attract new ones.

Make a Strong Presence on Social Media

In practical marketing experience, most customers are more trustful of brands they are familiar with. The task before business owners therefore is to do those things that can significantly help their brands to be better trusted by customers. Doing these things on social media takes time and efforts. Such activities that can be of help are, sending personalized emails to customers, promptly responding to customer inquiries/concerns, having a highly visual, catchy social media presence, all crucial to helping you to educate customers about your brand, promote your products and generally build familiarity with your customers. Sending personalized messages to your customers directly and staying connected with them on a personal level on social media helps to cement this relationship.

Nurture Customers with Personal Letters

Be sure to have good online tools on your website to enhance easy two-way communication. These tools are very handy to help open communication with customers many of who more often than not need just a little nudge to come back to your store again and again, and eventually to form a habit of shopping repeatedly from your online store. One great way to encourage your customers to return to your website and order again is to write them optimized and personalized emails. Whatever it takes to nurture customers well enough on your website is welcome. Through a combination of Artificial Intelligence, AI, personalized one-on-one communication and optimized emails, you can maximize the likelihood of customers coming back to your website for their repeated business.

Make your Emails Stand Out

These days, customers are bombarded with marketing messages from all over the internet. The reason many can be wary of email messages. Emails that are unique, optimized and targeted tend to make the most impact. Your emails must therefore be crafted to stand out and provide customers with real valuable information. You can give these emails some personal and emotional touch by timing them to coincide with anniversaries and special occasions. At these times, you can offer your customers free products to commemorate and appreciate them on their anniversaries. Great for customer retention no doubt!

Prevent Common Shopping Problems

From experience, delays and mistakes in your product delivery process can hurt your chances of getting repeat business. For this reason, your website must not only be user-friendly, your order and payment system must be smooth and easy to use. Make sure your order fulfillment process is in perfect order, practical and adaptable. Always be sure your customers receive products that satisfy the quality standards they’ve come to expect from your brand. This together with a great order fulfillment process can help to encourage them to keep coming back to do business with you.

Offer Personalized Service

Every human being likes to be appreciated and valued. Offering personalized service to customers helps to fulfill this ideal. If you understand your customers’ needs well enough, you can always make recommendations to help them fulfill these needs. Most customers appreciate this by showing a clear preference for your business. You can take deliberate steps to personalize the homepage of your business website to include products and promotions that could be of interest to your customers. Your online store therefore needs to use CRM solutions to create different categories for customers depending on their needs, pain points and interests. By doing this perfectly, you can better address your customers’ needs, keep them satisfied and retain them.

Reach out to Customers with Abandoned Carts

In online business, an abandoned cart simply means a certain customer was interested enough to go through most of the purchase process without finishing it. That cannot be good for business. Abandoning carts may be as result of cumbersome checkout system, difficult payment system, or even some other distraction. Whatever the reason may be, reaching out to such customers may encourage them to finish the process by placing an order. Anyone who liked your online store enough to add items to a cart can easily be persuaded to complete the process. It is possible too to turn such persons into paying customers and even to retain their long-term loyalty.

Focus More on Customer Retention

To retain customers, you must first be able to acquire customers through any cost-effective digital marketing activities you are good at. It is by far cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new customers. Good advertising will make customers discover your business. That will mean spending a little extra money on marketing to potential customers though. Once customers discover your online store through your ads, their experience with your website and your product will entice them to keep coming back even without the advertisements. That is when you take steps to focus your attention on customer retention activities. At this stage, having a highly effective customer retention strategy can help you to turn regular customers into excited brand ambassadors. These in turn bring you even more business.

Effective Tips on How to Promote Your Blog

For most bloggers, blogging is essentially a business. You cannot hope to make it in any business if you don’t promote it. So it is with blogging. If you are a blogger and you want to excel in the fiercely competitive internet market-space, your promotion strategies, your products, and your brand’s reputation must excel. You must be able to deploy your knowledge and skills to promote your blog on the internet to do better than your competitors. Characteristically on the internet, the blogging environment is extremely competitive. For this reason, the more you deploy and commit your knowledge and skills to promote your blog, the better chances you’ll have to make it succeed. As the digital environment is constantly growing and technology advancements keep showing up almost every day, you must be able to take advantage of these changes to promote your blog to success.  Blogging success is dependent on many factors, and there’s a high degree of complexity when figuring out what works best for your blog. It requires your full attention, a lot of your time, energy, discipline and commitment and a great deal of patience. If you can muster and guarantee these things, you are well on your way to blogging success.

These here effective blog promotion tips if well deployed can help even an average blogger to gain some competitive advantage in his blogging niche.

Provide Relevant High Quality Content

If you want to please and satisfy your blog readers and future customers on a consistent basis, you must provide them relevant content that has high value that can earn their trust. Blogging is basically dependent on content. The more valuable content you post, the faster your blog will grow in awareness, reputation, and customer trust. Blog right consistently and people will begin to trust you. If people trust you, it becomes easy for them to do business with you and be happy to try your products/services because the barriers to purchase will be considerably lowered.

Optimize Your Blog

All blog content is expected to be targeted at an audience. Optimizing your content with the relevant keywords in your niche and targeted at that audience makes the content more effective. Welcome to Search Engine Optimization, SEO. With the right SEO on your content, Search Engines tend to rank it high on their SERPs. Of course, the best blogs usually occupy the first positions in the SERPs and they get more organic traffic. However because SEO is highly technical and can be very challenging for bloggers, hiring professional help to get it done is always a very viable option. If you want to do it yourself, you can only get it right through diligent practice and with trial-and-error approach. It takes good content, great connections, time, patience, consistency and a lot of commitment to have a good SEO on your blog.

Study and Understand Your Audience

You can better target an audience you know and understand. You can only market successfully to an audience you know and understand. It is this understanding you can leverage to sell them products/services. Put simply, it is difficult to make money as a marketer if you don’t know how to approach your future customers. That requires a good understanding of where they come from, how they act, what they want, and what motivates them to act. Through this understanding, you can have an idea of your ideal customer whom you can have in front of you as a target persona to market to. You get better results that way because your marketing and sales strategy will prove to be much more efficient and result oriented.

Leverage the Most Popular Social Media Networks

These days, nearly everyone is on social media around the world 24/7. If you are a blogger/marketer, you must figure out where your target customers love to spend their time on social media. That is where you must focus on to promote your blog. The very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram are great places to promote from but success on each platform depends on the products you are marketing and the demographics you are targeting. You must therefore decide on which social media platforms work best for you and leverage them effectively.

Leverage Relevant Niche Influencers

A niche influencer is a person that is already well known and respected by your target audience. As a blogger, you have a duty to identify influencers who do not represent a threat to your business. What this means is that even if such persons directly endorse or even promote your products, there is no chance that they’ll convert your customers to themselves or direct them elsewhere. These are the kind of influencers you should make direct contact with and request collaboration. Most influencers have their own large followers/audience and you can leverage this audience to widely promote your content through their direct endorsements or content sharing. Be willing to offer influencers commissions if they help promote your products to make sales.

Build Strong Relationships

Most businesses thrive on good relationships. So is blogging. This is why networking is a very crucial part of your blogging experience. You can build strong relationships through a good network of customers, business owners, bloggers and influencers. Through this network, you can get good business advice, good ideas, encouragement and support. Your blog can benefit from quality backlinks, if others in your network, share, retweet, or link your blog posts in their own marketing activities. A strong relationship with your “close customers” is even more valuable. These are customers you can depend on to help you with different tasks such as surveys, word-of-mouth-marketing, and any other type of support you may need from time to time.

7 Effective Strategies to Promote an eCommerce Offer

Affiliate marketers earn better commissions if they are able to effectively promote products and instigate more sales. To do this, they need good strategies to get results. With the aid of a fitting associate offer and good promotion strategies, they can maximize leads and sales from their marketing efforts.

If you own an eCommerce store and you want to get the most out of your eCommerce affiliate programs, do not ignore the following strategies if and whenever you want to promote an offer.

 
1. Decide on Your eCommerce Offer

This is one vital decision you must take before you start looking for affiliates to help in the promotion. It is hugely important to decide at the outset what you are going to promote and what results you expect. What you decide on will serve as your offer. It is this offer you can use to attract affiliate marketers. For affiliate marketing purposes, the details of the offer must include, your product/brand/business, the commission rate, shipping information, product descriptions and images/graphics related to the product/brand.

2. Position Your Website Landing Page Well

The landing page of your website is the first point of call when visitors hit your website. For this reason, it must be captivating enough to hold visitors’ attention for a while. As a rule of thumb, it is not advisable for the homepage of your eCommerce store to be its landing page. The reason is because most of your website visitors may not pay enough attention to your homepage before they get distracted. Exception however is if you are able to arrange your homepage in such a way that it serves as your products page too. The goal here is to be sure this page helps you to convert as many leads as possible to sales. For best results, marketing experts recommend that your homepage must be eye-catching and interesting enough to hold visitors’ attention a few seconds longer. To guarantee this, your main headlines must be bold, grabby and punchy. The page must have a social proof and of course a CTA. It must have eye-catching media content particularly graphics/images as well as videos. Your marketing story-line must be compelling enough with clear products benefits and features. With these seemingly little but important details in place, you can make your landing page even more effective to help procure more conversions.

3. Track with the Right Tools

The most popular tools in the business for now are Google Analytics tools and many are free to use. With these tools, it is fairly easy to determine exactly how affiliate marketing impacts your eCommerce site. From the insights garnered from the use of these tools, you can have a very distinct idea of how many people click on your ads/links, how many of those clicks turn into prospects and how many of those turn into conversions. For most marketers, such data amounts to a hugely important trove of information that allows them to effectively measure the direction and even success of their affiliate marketing campaigns.

4. Promote with Videos/Visuals

To instantly grab the attention of your website visitors, you need good visuals. The more visitors’ attention you can grab, the better for your business. Technically and for marketing purposes, visual content usually works better than written words because visuals tend to grab attention faster and better. The higher the quality of your visuals therefore, the better they attract the attention of visitors. You can even get better results if you effectively combine videos and written content perfectly. Most affiliate marketers appear to be used to that sort of combination. For this reason, eCommerce store owners should always endeavor to create and share high-quality visuals with their affiliate marketers.

5. Choose a Promotion Strategy

For a successful product offer, strategy is very important. You must decide on a suitable promotion strategy for your offers and get your affiliate marketers to key in. If for instance you decide to go with an advertising network like Google, it is imperative for you to provide all necessary information about your offer and your affiliate marketers will decide for themselves how  best to promote it. Same strategy applies even if you decide to work with larger affiliate networks. However, creating the best affiliate offers naturally starts with the right products. Next is to identify which segment of people would be better drawn to your products. This you can determine by drawing patterns from their online behavior. From this pattern, you can better target them where they can be found then tailor your ads to their biases. That way, you get the best results.

6. Direct the Right Products to the Right People

This requires audience segmentation. Without it, you risk marketing haphazardly with very poor results. A good strategy is to make sure the bulk of your marketing activities are directed towards meeting the right demands of your consumers. For effectiveness, you must always identify the right products that meet the needs of each set of consumers based on segmentation. Characteristically, most online users are always quick to disregard unspecific ads/campaigns that are irrelevant to their current needs. This is why, for effectiveness, online advertising must be targeted with pinpoint accuracy.

7. Promote with Time and Location Consciousness

The Internet is a worldwide 24/7 market place. This is why time and location are two critical factors in eCommerce marketing. You must time and direct your ads in such a way that they have a very high chance of being seen by the people you are targeting. So, you must give very careful consideration to time and location when developing your marketing campaigns if you want to get good results. You must pay careful attention to differences in time zones around the globe. That is what determines when your prospects are most likely to see your ads. In addition, your ads should be shown only to those prospects within the geographical reach of your distribution services. Promoting a product to people you have no means of serving amounts to wasted efforts which you can least afford as an eCommerce store owner.

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.

Tips for Effective Live Chats on Your Website

In today’s digital business world, communication is key. The faster and clearer it is to communicate with prospective customers and customers, the better for the business. If as is expected your business website has easy-to-navigate features, convenient automation options and simple site integration, you can easily set up instant messaging on the site. A leading customer service tool that easily comes to mind here is live chat. But, live chat is only effective when used correctly. When used correctly, live chat is a powerful communication tool that helps to quickly address customer concerns, answer questions, and give vital information and even secure sales real time. However, when wrongly used, it is capable of hindering the performance of your website by frustrating your communication activities. That scenario is avoidable if you take cognizance of these tips.

 

Be Proactive in Your Messaging

Many prospective customers who hit on your website may abandon it fast if they are unable to find answers to their nagging concerns/questions fast enough. That creates high bounce rate problems. With live chats, you can combat rising bounce rates with the use of proactive messaging. By using real-time visitor monitoring and variable triggers, you can easily target consumers based on their browsing habits. You can then utilize automated messages to ask the right questions or provide valuable information in the exact moment your website visitors need it. With such proactive messaging, you greatly increase your chances of securing sales conversion.

Make Chats Convenient and Easily Accessible

Live chat features should ideally be installed on very prominent and easily accessible location on your website. That makes it convenient to use because one of the most significant benefits of live chat is its peculiar convenience. It is great for instant messaging when compared to emails. With live chat instant messaging, marketers can greatly cut down on the time consumers spend tracking down contact numbers or email addresses. That means live chat provides consumers with significantly low-barrier support option. If well-integrated, live chat can provide a disruption-free customer service experience thereby eliminating the time-wasting need to sit on hold or wait minutes, hours, days or even weeks for an email response for example.

Revamp Your Strategies

There is a need to revamp your marketing strategies if you want to introduce live chat into your marketing. Chat allows you to add a more personalized and conversational approach to your marketing tactics. With chats, you can provide a quicker and more effective customer service to your customers. That is something that is difficult to achieve through traditional customer support services. The benefits of instant message support are extensive. They include a decrease in customer service response, minimizing support costs, enhancing user experience, increasing sales and brand loyalty. You must decide on which of these benefits you are targeting in your strategy before you launch a live chat. That is vital to your success.

Make Interactions Need-Based and Personal

Exploring ways to interact with consumers on a personalized basis is always very effective. Everyone likes to feel important and to be treated as such. That appears to be the reason why many consumers look for personalized experiences.  Quick chats are characteristically one-on-one interaction and many consumers appreciate that and they respond better to your marketing efforts as a result. So, if you tailor your marketing resources to support agents having knowledge of past chats or purchases, personalization can improve the messaging experience. Pressed further, need-influenced message personalization can effectively translate to better quality leads, increased brand loyalty and higher sales figures.

Factor in Valuable User Experiences

In today’s digital marketing world, marketing without factoring in user experience in your efforts is usually an uphill struggle. With consumer expectations increasing daily and search engines becoming more technical in ranking websites, it is now more vital than ever for marketers to increase site satisfaction and ease of use of their websites. One of the most profitable ways to do that is to introduce live chat to your website. That is one great way to enhance its user experience. Live chat combines effectively with the fundamental elements already at play on your site to maintain a cohesive experience and a search engine-friendly structure.

Optimize Chat for Mobile Usage

Google reports indicate that nearly 50% of all web traffic is attributable to mobile devices. Now that is a very huge chunk of traffic attributable to people who do business on the go and from any and everywhere. What this means is that many more people are visiting websites from their mobile devices as against traditional desktop computers. How do marketers take advantage of this development? Simple! Just optimize your website for mobile devices by creating a site, including live chat that is easy-to-use on cellphones, tablets and any other smart mobile devices. A mobile-friendly chat interface on your website can help to boost its user-experience and inbound traffic a great deal.

Final Thoughts

No matter the type of business you are marketing, incorporating live-chat feature on your website is great for customer support. Ranging from improving user experience and overall customer satisfaction to generating more leads/customers/sales, the benefits of live chat are really immense to marketing strategies. Consumers now want quick service and they want it like yesterday. Live-chat feature on business websites comes very handy there. Marketers must adapt to rapid changes in consumer expectations or they get left behind as their businesses take a hit from avoidable negligence.

Marketing Tips for Brands to Cope with E-commerce Transformation

As e-commerce world is rapidly undergoing transformation, brands and marketers cannot afford to be left in the lurch. Just as more and more businesses as going online, global e-commerce is experiencing rapid changes in tandem. Brands must take steps to cope with these changes to have maximum benefits from the rapidly changing e-commerce business activities globally. For this reason, marketers now have an urgent need to prioritize e-commerce and to adapt their age-old promotion strategies for better results. That is the only viable way they can continue to reach consumers better and to drive growth for their businesses. Here are a few tips to help drive that quest.

Create Compatible Strategies

Now than never before, marketers need to locate and follow consumers better wherever they are in the world. Thanks to the internet, this is achievable without much stress. If marketers place consumer experience at the center piece of their marketing strategies, they can take advantage of the differences in digital advertising channels to reach them better. That calls for real compatibility in marketing strategies. Marketers thus require different but compatible strategies to effectively advertise across multichannel. These strategies involve how to be found by consumers already in shopping mindset and searching online and direct promos to segmented audiences to attract sales or a combination of both.

Match Branding with Performance

Promoting a brand to have a better brand authority online and growing sales are both desirable for any e-commerce business. Depending on the circumstances, some brands may even choose to prioritize one over the other. Some marketers at times prefer to focus more on performance or direct sales results while others may choose to focus on building the brand first. Both scenarios benefit the business but in different ways. When there is less competition, it is better to build the brand first and expect to reap the rewards much later. To cope with the transformations in e-commerce business worldwide, it is advisable to match branding with performance. Marketers can blend branding and performance strategies to reap the dual benefits of both.

Create Multichannel Roles for Your Team

If you have a marketing team, it is not enough to train them well. Giving them a good focus in addition is also desirable.  It is better to have multichannel roles for your marketing team than to have them focused only on mini roles of the entire marketing infrastructure. Now that e-commerce businesses are transforming rapidly, it is the right time for marketers to rethink their digital marketing methods and media choices. In addition to rethinking their internal organizations, they can effectively work with traditional multichannel retailers, online marketplaces and delivery partners in order to cope with the emerging e-commerce environment. Brands that can do this well in the emerging e-commerce market will be able to build valuable lifelong customer relationships and grow their brands as a result.

 
Focus on ROI

In any marketing campaign, the bottom line is always the Return on Investment, ROI. Even with the transformations in e-commerce business, this remains true. It is only through good ROI that brands can conclusively prove the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. It is smart marketing therefore for marketers to focus on and tie every ad spend to sales outcomes and measure ROI instead of merely relying on softer metrics. However, Key Performance Indicators, KPIs can also be looked at differently to get the overall performance picture of the business.

Be Nimble in Your Marketing Strategy

When things are changing rapidly in e-commerce business environment, it is good to adjust and change your marketing strategies too. That enables your business to cope well. It calls for brands to have nimbler marketing strategies by making necessary adjustments to their marketing plans on the go. It allows brands to easily move advertising resources from offline channels to online channels and vice versa depending on the circumstances they find themselves at any material time. Business communication channels, messaging methods, marketing methods, supply chains, products handling and delivery methods, all require real flexibility to cope with any times and circumstances no matter how they turn out. 

Social Media Tips for Retail Products Marketing

Marketers generally expect retail products to move very fast in the market even as retail products consumers buying habits change from time to time. In recent times, more and more retail products consumers are shifting towards online shopping. What this means for marketers is that they need to promote and market more online. Marketing retail brands really needs this shift in focus particularly on social media marketing.

Here are some tips and tactics expert marketers recommend.

Stimulate Growth with Social Campaigns

With online space rapidly supplanting other marketing channels, social media marketing must now be a very essential component of retail products marketing strategy if it was earlier ignored. Many consumers now prefer e-commerce shopping windows for retail products and marketers must take full advantage of that. Aside its huge popularity, social media is now where everyone appears to be doing their own things around the world 24/7. It is smart to take your own retail marketing business there as well. On social media, marketers get very impressive results if they manage to have an effective social media marketing strategy that combines user-generated content, a bit of influencer marketing, and ample video/graphics content. By doing this effectively on social media, retail brands can grow progressively.

Use Unique Strategies per Platform

Yes, just as social media platforms are different so they are unique particularly the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. For instance, certain common marketing strategies may work well for social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube, but in others, retail brands need to adopt unique strategies peculiar to the platforms if they want to market themselves very well on these platforms. It is advisable to study the rules very well and comply with them to avoid sanctions from social media platforms. All the platforms have their own unique and peculiar nuances and marketers must never overlook that.

Market More with User-Generated Content

Content particularly very high quality and informative content is what attracts consumers online. If this content is user-generated from the free social interaction that social media permits, the better for marketers. With it, marketers can harness and hugely benefit from the influence of social media consumers who organically create and spread the word about retail products by way of photos, reviews, videos, and much more. When retail products consumers are happy with products, many do not hesitate to share pictures and glowing reviews about these products on social media. Such reviews usually convince others particularly skeptics to buy these products. That helps social media marketers to get strong growths from their marketing efforts.

Use Influencer Marketing Cautiously

Yes, for many social media marketers, influencer marketing gets results but it must be used with some caution. Influencer marketing no doubt can be an effective strategy for social media but experts say brands must exercise caution to be on the right side of regulatory laws/codes. These regulatory laws/codes vary from country to country though. Therefore, every marketer must go through due diligence to ensure compliance with extant regulations on the matter. Some codes require that influencers disclose their material relationships with products and this may tend to whittle down their real “influencer power.” Some regulations require that influencers state clearly if their post is an advertisement or a mere endorsement out of conviction from the use of the product. No doubt these regulations restrict influencer endorsements but they are still highly effective as social media marketing strategies. For best results, expert marketers recommend that brands must follow four key rules when working with influencers.
1. Provide independent substantiation for any claim that an influencer makes.
2. Encourage influencers to make only claims that are representative of an average consumer’s typical experience with the product.
3. Ensure influencers’ statements and opinions are an accurate representation of their actual experience. Meaning, influencers can’t make claims about products they haven’t really tried themselves.
4. Give influencers clear disclosure guidelines to communicate their relationships with your brand in an unambiguous way.

The Fundamentals of Small Business SEO Strategy

If you market online, even if it is a small business, you need SEO strategy, very basic SEO strategies at the very least. These very fundamental and basic strategies will enable your business to gain some marketing traction online even amidst the huge and at times suffocating competition. Essentially there are four marketing fundamentals your small business needs to focus on to have a successful SEO strategy. Many expert marketers generally agree on the following.

1.    Content Marketing
2.    Link Building
3.    Technical SEO
4.    Local SEO

 

1. Content Marketing

If you market online, the success of your marketing efforts depends largely on good content.  This content must be authoritative, informative, educational and even entertaining. That is what helps it to attract a good following. In the SEO world, content is king. No matter how user-friendly your business website is, without good content, it can hardly attract good traffic. For this reason, it is fundamental for your business website to house web pages and blog articles that contain high quality and valuable content. When this content is optimized with the right keywords for search engines, it attracts organic traffic from search engines.

2. Link Building

Link building is a digital marketing technique of driving links to your website, through a variety of methods. Your business website gets backlinks when another website or online platform links to your website. If such linking websites are reputable and authoritative online, they help boost your own site’s authority. This is why marketers deliberately use online techniques to earn more of high-quality links, as against massive volumes of low quality links. Better still if your website earns these links organically through search engines. Major search engines like Google tend to rank websites with high-quality backlinks higher. That way, Google’s algorithms strive to show more of high-authority sites to web surfers. This translates to good organic traffic back to your business website.

3. Technical SEO

Technical Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is yet another fundamental requirement for a small business SEO strategy. It allows the business website to be technically sound for online search operations. For your business website to be technically sound, it must:

•    Have a fast load time, say about 5 seconds or less.
•    Be optimized for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.
•    Be easily found and indexable by search engines.
•    Be easily navigable.
•    Be secure, by always having an up-to-date SSL certificate.
•    Avoid broken links and 404 pages.

Form the foregoing, it clearly shows that Technical SEO involves the technical optimization of your entire website. It affects the site structure, navigation, load speed, and link structure. Without a fast, functional, and user-friendly website, no amount of content or backlinks will be enough to maximize your rankings. Meaning, without it, no other activities will be sufficient to attract the required traffic back to your website. Technical SEO requires real knowledge and skills of website management and development to put in place. If as a marketer you do not have this requisite knowhow, it is advisable to hire the services of a technical SEO expert and or webmaster to handle the technical optimization of your website for you.

4. Local SEO

Most major search engines like Google now recognize that most small businesses are essentially local. Hence, the need to make local searches a priority in their search results. Welcome to local SEO. Local SEO is a type of SEO that is unique to local businesses. This is because many local businesses serve specific geographical areas. Moreover, their potential customers are often using geo-specific terms to find these businesses in their local area. When searchers type a search term on Google with “near me” phrase, Google usually sends search results nearest to the location of that searcher. That makes is easy to find local businesses online if they are optimized for local SEO searches.