How Affiliate Marketing Directly Benefits Your Online Business

Technically, affiliate marketing focuses solely on generating leads and sales for businesses. By this arrangement, affiliates work to promote products for product merchants and generate these leads and sales from these efforts. The affiliates in return earn commissions from the products sold or for the referrals. If you run an e-commerce store, affiliate marketing can directly benefit your business in the following ways.

 

Brand Awareness and Recognition

Brand recognition is one huge benefit of affiliate marketing to your business. With various affiliates working in concert to promote your business to various audiences, they help to increase brand awareness and brand recognition for your business. This way, affiliate marketing becomes an effective strategy to build, and improve your brand awareness and recognition. Affiliates are mainly responsible for spreading good news about your brand, both physically and digitally. They are the ones who reach out to a variety of people by using effective marketing messages to convince them to buy products. Through affiliates, the word goes far and wide about the goodness of your business. This directly helps your brand to get recognized and acknowledged. As the word continues to go around, your brand recognition continues to increase in tandem.

Increased Traffic to your Website

Affiliate marketing can directly increase traffic particularly organic traffic to your website. Every experienced digital marketer knows the higher the traffic your website receives, the higher the chances of your making sales. As affiliates continue to bring in consumers using their promo code or affiliate links, your website traffic increases and the sales you make increase as well. Bottom line is, more website traffic simply translates to higher sales and increased ROI. That can be really great for your business.
 
High Return On Investment, ROI

Many smart business owners use affiliate marketing as a very effective means of online advertisement. This directly helps to increase sales. Once sales increase and costs low, it means high Return On Investment, ROI. Many affiliates doing product promotion help to increase sales for your business. That directly impacts the ROI for the business. As a business owner, you can thus use affiliate marketing to increase sales and ROI. With affiliate marketing, as you make more sales, you earn more. More and better earnings lead to high ROI in the business.

Affiliate Marketing Success Tips to Increase Earnings

It is pretty difficult to succeed in affiliate marketing without hard work and dedication. In addition, you must be able to deploy effective strategies to consistently and vigorously promote products and earn good commissions. Here are some of such strategic tips:

Make Realistic Plans from the Outset: In affiliate marketing, if you do not make realistic plans right from the outset, it is pretty difficult to succeed in the business. Your goals also must not be set too high or too low. You cannot for instance expect to start making millions within a few months of starting out. That from experience is not realistic. Generating good affiliate income requires time and consistent efforts to make it happen. As you set out in your affiliate marketing efforts, aside consistency, make sure to always monitor your progress by constantly checking what is working and what’s not as against your set goals and targets. That’s about the only way to know whether you are doing great or not.
 
Consistently Create Impactful Content: You must consistently create high quality and impactful content for your audience if you want traffic. When your traffic is good, it can lead to increased affiliate products purchases. To attract this traffic, your content must not only be good and impactful, it must be about topics that have high search volume. It is such topics that help to create the right content that satisfies the needs of search queries. If you combine Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with that marketing strategy, it helps to increase organic traffic to your products. The more traffic your products receive, the higher the chances of your making affiliate sales.

Market the Right Affiliate Products: Once you’ve made the decision to become an affiliate marketer, your next challenge will naturally be what products to promote. This requires diligent research and products comparisons on affiliate networks. If you decide to market a product that does not sell well, your commissions earnings will be poor. Therefore, it helps to carefully look for products you like and believe in which are currently selling well on your chosen affiliate marketing network. You can get this vital info from search reviews of products that match your niche on reputable affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI for instance.

Diversify Your Affiliate Partners: Depending on several factors like reputation, commissions regimes, types of products and so on, you can choose to diversify the affiliate programs you’ll like to be involved with. You can opt to work with more than one affiliate marketing programs as a way of minimizing risk as being overly reliant on only one program can be too risky. Therefore, if you want to earn more revenues in your affiliate marketing efforts by way of consistent commissions, you must have a diverse affiliate marketing portfolio you can depend on to make it happen.

Be Honest with Your Audience: You can make more sales as an affiliate if your audience trusts you. You earn that trust by being honest with them at all times. To build this trust, always make sure to let your audience know about your affiliate connection in addition to disclosing your affiliate link. If your audience recognizes that you are straightforward with them, they engage more with your content. Most consumers like to purchase products from reputable vendors who they trust. If you are honest enough with your audience, you earn their trust and consequently get more patronage from them.

Leverage Social Media Networking: With over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, social media is one great place to build business networks. Many people get to know about products first on social media. Many of such people tend to purchase products online simply because they have seen them on social media. So, if can leverage your social media networks effectively, you can make more sales as an affiliate. This is more so on the very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes. On these platforms, you can connect with your large following and leverage the relationship to promote affiliate products. Social media platforms do not only help you to extensively amplify your reach, you can take advantage of their segmented audiences and in-house marketing tools to promote affiliate products. You benefit from increased sales through this process.

 
Establish Yourself as a Reliable Authority: You can make more affiliate products sales if you manage to establish yourself as an honest and trustworthy source of valuable information. When consumers trust you, they’ll come to rely on you to offer them genuine advice about products they may be interested in. This advice comes handy when they are making their buying decisions. To nurture this relationship, you must study and know very well the affiliate products you are promoting. That way, you’ll always be in a vantage position to offer good advice about the solutions your affiliate products offer to consumers. Doing so helps their buying decisions making a great deal.

Diligently Research Your Competition: You cannot market in isolation as an affiliate marketer. In fact, the business can be really crowded and highly competitive. So, you can only make it well in the business if you have a bit of comparative advantage over your competition. Without diligent research about your competition, it is pretty difficult to know what areas you can pull ahead them in comparative advantage. If through research you manage to know what products your competitors are promoting, how they are promoting them, through what online channels and to which audiences, it is possible to find ways to improve on what they are doing. That alone can to give you some comparative advantage to do business better.

Last Line

Affiliate marketing requires hard work and consistency. If you work with reputable affiliate programs and promote products in your niche that are selling well, you can make considerable sales and earn good commissions. The foregoing tips can help you to succeed in that quest and significantly improve your affiliate earnings.

Effective Tips to Successfully Manage your Online Reputation

Online reputation management in today’s digital marketing world is about managing your brand's image and reputation so that you can effectively reach potential customers and customers. It encompasses the control of information flow about your brand to give it a good online image and to enable it compete strongly. From experience, no matter what you do about your brand and how well you do it, there is no guarantee that your brand will not end up on the receiving end of some bad news that can dent if not out rightly damage its reputation. With good and prior information management, that unhelpful scenario could have been prevented or managed better. You can take care and protect the reputation of your business well in advance if you deploy proper online reputation management techniques. The following tips can be of help in that quest.

Clearly Identify What You Want to Achieve: If you want to develop an effective online reputation management strategy, you must first identify what you want to achieve. You must set clear goals right from the outset making sure these goals are achievable. Your objectives must also be clear. Clearly identify what you want your brand image to be like and what kind of reputation you want for your business. You can set these goals by directly focusing on your target audience in terms of their demographics, psychographics, and geography. Your goals must match the overall goals of your business and not just your marketing campaigns. That way, you can better channel human efforts and resources to managing the reputation of your brand and business. 

Choose the Right Strategy: Choosing the right strategy is hugely important for your brand and business.  It is imperative to determine right from the outset how you want to manage your online reputation and then choose the right tools and platforms suitable for it. It is difficult to miss the mark if you correctly choose the right tools and platforms to manage your online reputation.

Focus on the Right Platforms: The best platforms to choose and focus on are platforms where your target audience habitually hangs out online. Doing so helps you to effectively reach the audience with your marketing messages. Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes are reputed to have audience preferences, from young adults to middle age persons and so on. LinkedIn is particularly reputed for middle age professionals. So, if you want to manage your online reputation on any of these platforms, you must know the kind of marketing messages to use on each of the platforms to help your online reputation.

Choose the Right Marketing Tools: You can effectively use a well optimized website, blogs and even forums to manage your online reputation. If as part of your strategy you plan to use blogs or forums to manage your online reputation, be sure that your content is well-written and optimized for SEO purposes. That way, search engines particularly Google will rank the content high in their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic back to your website or blog since the material will benefit from better online searches.

Focus on Long-Term Results: When choosing an online reputation management strategy, it is best to think long term. No matter how good your strategy is, the effects will not be immediate. It may take weeks or even months to see positive impacts from your campaign efforts. Experience shows that when the effects start coming out, they are likely to continue for quite a while. So, do not get discouraged if the results you expect do not come immediately. It is best to think long term because the results will come anyway provided you are doing your campaigns correctly. 

Stay Up-To-Date on Your Social Media Platforms: With over 4.5 billion active users on social media, that’s one huge market out there online. An effective online reputation management strategy should therefore include staying up to date on your social media accounts. Social media platforms are busy 24/7 and all year round. A lot goes on in these platforms around the clock. Therefore, you can miss out on a lot of important information if you don't sign in often enough to check what’s going on. Make it a habit to always know what's going on with your social media account(s). If you are too busy or engaged somewhere and you cannot stay updated, consider hiring someone to keep an eye on your social media accounts for you. It is usually a good decision and investment for very busy executives who choose to do so. By staying up to date, you can easily see when something needs changing or updating and you take steps to fix it immediately before it attracts negative comments that can directly impact your online reputation.

Diligently Monitor Your Brand Online: If you want to have a good idea what people are saying about your brand/business/products/services, it is important you diligently monitor the brand/business/products/services online. You can use social media monitoring tools and Google alerts to get info about any comments about your business online. If you set up Google alerts for instance, you receive timely notifications whenever someone mentions your business name on the web. You can quickly trace and know where to make amends if the comment or observation in negative for instance. If you run an online shop, its dashboard analytics tools information can give you the right insights to determine whether or not there are any issues with your webpage load speed and if there are any broken links within pages or product listings that require immediate fixing.

Keep a Keen Eye on Negative Reviews: Yes, as you get positive reviews, it is inevitable that you’ll also get negative reviews. Even if you choose not to respond to positive reviews, be sure to quickly respond to negative reviews. Acknowledge and appreciate customers who post negative reviews and assure them that their concerns will be quickly addressed. Make sure you do so promptly as you have promised. Never ignore negative reviews outright. If it becomes necessary, never fail to sincerely apologize for what people see as not right. Take pains to always explain what went wrong and with a firm promise to have it fixed immediately. Doing so helps your online reputation a great deal.

Respond Timely to Reviews: You must make it a business habit to respond to reviews promptly. Make sure your responses are well thought out, should be sufficiently welcoming, respectful, and helpful to your customer concerns. This way, your responses will greatly help mitigate the impact of negative reviews particularly from users who write malicious or defamatory content in their reviews. Never take negative reviewers as adversaries. You must find ways to accommodate all reviews and respond to them promptly and intelligently. Doing so helps your online reputation in many ways.

Set Up Google Alerts: Google Alerts are a great way to track people's opinions online about your brand or product. Presently, one of the best and most reliable ways to keep track of what people are saying about your brand/products is through Google Alerts. Once you set up the alerts in the configuration you want your info, Google thereafter never fails to alert you when it hits on the information you want. You can also effectively use Google alerts to monitor your competition and what they are doing. Google alerts can also help you to stay on top of industry trends by alerting you about new info as it is coming in. So, if you set up Google alerts on things that really matter to your business, it helps your online reputation a great deal.

Wrapping Up

Building your brand reputation online is one of the smartest things to do if you are a digital marketer. If online users perceive your brand/business in positive light, it helps the growth of your business. The foregoing techniques have been tested and tried by marketers who take online reputation seriously and they work. The positive results they give lend them to other marketers/businesses who also want to build their online reputation. They can help you too to build a very good image for your own brand/business if you try them out.

6 SEO Tips for Your Local Gym Business

If you run a Gym business, people must easily find it in the locality to enhance your business. Search Engine Optimization, SEO is one digital marketing technique you can have in place on the website of the Gym to help people locate the Gym. SEO program helps your website to improve its ranking on search results for specific search queries on search engines particularly Google. If you manage to increase your website’s search ranking, it is an effective way to gain more Gym lovers and people who generally want to keep fit. If you have a good SEO on your website, people searching on the web using search terms like “Gym near me”, “Gym in my locality” and suchlike search terms can always locate your Gym. If your website is well optimized, it is very likely to attract more of these searchers to the website. That way, you can better engage with them and turn them to your regular Gym users. That helps to enhance your business no doubt. These here are six SEO tips your Gym website can use to improve its search rankings and consequently attract more people to the Gym.

1. Optimize for Local Searches

Every business is local. You can easily attract local people to your Gym if you optimize your website for local searches. Search terms like “Gym near me”, “Gym in my locality”, “Gym in my city” are some of the right search terms that can bring people to your website and your Gym.

2. Create Dedicated Landing Pages

A good Gym usually offers many services. For this reason, for every program or service you offer, because you cannot really be sure what everyone wants, it is best you create dedicated landing pages. That way, each page can rank for search terms related to each program or service as listed on the page. You can for instance create a landing page for various types of equipment on offer, Gym equipment and appliances people can use in-house, coaching services available, and any special packages your Gym offers.

3. Write Actionable Meta Descriptions

On your website meta tags serve as some kind of “eyes” for search engines. On a website, a page’s meta description tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. It is usually displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) underneath the title of the page. Meta descriptions must be easily actionable and direct. A good, actionable meta description should include a vivid Call-To-Action, CTA such as “check it out” “learn more” or “find out” “click to access” and so on. These terms help searchers to take desirable actions beneficial to your business. 

4. Use Relevant Keywords in Title Tags

For your SEO to be effective, you must use on your webpage special keywords you have carefully selected through diligent research. If used as title tags, they specify the title of a webpage. Search engines particularly Google use the title tags of a webpage to understand the page content. This helps the search engine to properly display the webpage in its SERPs. If for instance your Gym’s webpage’s title tags say “Gym equipment”, the webpage will rank for search queries related to “Gym equipment”. This is exactly why it is hugely important for your webpages to include the carefully selected keywords that are closely related to the product/service that is shown on the webpage. That’s the optimization that helps the webpage to appear on relevant search results as displayed on the SERPs of search engines.

5. Optimize Page Speed

The opening speed of your webpage plays a vital role in its ranking. The faster it opens, the more user-friendly it is and the higher it ranks on SERPs. For this reason, page speed is usually taken as a critical aspect of a website’s search ranking. Page speed directly affects a website’s user experience (UX) and Google takes UX into consideration when ranking a website. To enhance page speed on your Gym website, you can adopt lazy-loading techniques, use the right image shapes, in the right locations and the right sizes, and other techniques that help to save system resources.

6. Optimize for Mobile

Google now reports that about 60% of internet traffic is attributable to mobile devices like smartphones and Tablets. Nearly everyone is now having a smartphone and many people conveniently do business online with their smartphones wherever they may be. So, if you optimize your Gym website for mobile devices, your website can benefit from this huge traffic attributable to mobile devices. Missing out of this huge traffic automatically means missing out of some good business. This is why if you have not already done so, you must quickly optimize your Gym website for mobile devices.

14 Points you ABSOLUTELY Should Know to Succeed in SFI

1. Don't wait for everything to be exactly right to start...THERE WILL NEVER BE A "PERFECT" TIME! Start now, with whatever you have. The things you need will come to you as you work toward your goal.

2. Though SFI is one of the few businesses where you can earn while you learn, think of your first six months primarily as a training period. Don't expect large earnings until after you've educated yourself. 

3. Don't give your affiliates unrealistic expectations.

4. Don't be derailed by "perfection paralysis." Realize that you won't be able to do everything perfectly. Do the best job you can, then move on to the next project. Keep learning and keep moving ahead.

5. Read books (such as Napoleon Hill's classic, "Think And Grow Rich") that will convince you how powerful your mind really is. Develop the tremendous potential in you (that we all have) that has never been tapped!

6. Always present yourself and your business in a professional and ethical manner.

7. Stick to the facts. Don't exaggerate the opportunity.

8. Realize that "rejection" is natural. For every 20 people you contact, expect 19 "no's" for every "yes." You may very well do better than that, but expect 19 rejections. This way, the rejections won't bother you because you expect them. Also, realize that they're not rejecting YOU—they're simply rejecting an idea. Just keep moving ahead. Be persistent, ignore the rejections, and you'll get more than enough "yes's" to build a highly successful business.

9. Have FUN! People can't resist someone having fun. Make your business so much fun that others will flock to you to join you.

10. Ask for people's opinion on the opportunity. It's a good way to determine what objections they might have to joining and also allows you the chance to overcome those objections.

11. Don't place a few ads or contact a few people and expect the money to start rolling in. Expect to work your business consistently for two to three years before seeing a really substantial income.

12. Ask for referrals. Ask, "Do you know anyone who might be looking to earn some extra money?"

13. Build a list of contacts. Add to it daily.

14. Don't become obsessed with sponsoring a "heavy hitter." Instead, learn how to become a heavy hitter yourself.

More Awesome Tips

For even more success tips, see these and other SFI Getting Started and Sponsoring Affiliates training articles:

* LAUNCHPAD Lessons
* Be An Awesome Sponsor
* Rules Of Success
* Introduce Yourself!
* Your Role in SFI - Being A Sponsor: What It Means

Article Source: SFI Blog Forum Time-Tested Tips

Top 7 SEO Tips to Generate Organic Traffic

If you want to market successfully on the internet, you need to understand the importance of Search Engine Optimization, SEO. The right SEO on your website is one great way to get the organic traffic your business really needs to achieve both its long-term and short-term marketing goals. Without the right traffic, you cannot successfully market on your website. Getting the right traffic depends solely on the way you have performed SEO on your website. These here 7 tips will help you to get SEO right on your website.

 
1. The Right Domain Name

It is important you pay good attention to your domain name and how the URL of your website looks. Search engines do notice it hence it has a direct impact on your website’s ranking. If you use the right keywords on your domain name, it helps the visibility of your website. It is vital therefore to optimize your domain name in your URL to make it visible to search engines. That helps your website to get organic traffic from search engines.
 
2. Stick with Your Niche

It always helps your SEO if you pick a niche and stick with it. Once you get started, deviating to another niche does not help proper implementation of SEO on your website. What helps your long term marketing interest is to be known and identified with a particular niche. If you remain on that niche and consistently curate effective content on the niche, it can help trigger a good rush of organic traffic to your website.

3. Fast Loading Webpages

A fast-loading website can affect the website ranking as well. Internet users are notoriously always in haste. If your website is slow-loading, it tends to discourage many visitors who do not have enough patience. That increases its bounce rate. So, you have to ensure that the speed of your website loading is reduced to a matter of seconds. You can tinker with your website design a bit and with the use of some great tools, increase its loading speed. When it loads fast, it becomes more user-friendly and consequently benefits from more traffic.

4. Great Content Photos/Pictures/Images

Good visuals are always great on a website. They help to attract visitors and keep them longer on the website. Since human beings love to look at great pictures, they play a vital role in SEO too. The images/photos on your website must not only be of high quality, they must be well optimized. By using great resolution and optimized images on your website, it attracts more traffic. For best results, always make sure the pictures are not too many and they are of the right pixels sizes. That helps to enhance the loading speed of the website most crucially. 

5. Spying on Your Competitors

In digital marketing, keeping a close watch on what the marketers in your niche are doing is of vital importance. Doing so helps you to know how they are doing their marketing, what channels they are using and what platforms they prefer. If you know what works for them, you can do same to get similar or even better results. Through your “spying” efforts, you can even have an idea how your own SEO marketing is going to pan out. It is one great way to understand how your competitors curate unique content and by what strategies they market the content. All these can give you valuable ideas how to compete better in your marketing and with better results.
 
6. Deft Use of Keywords

You cannot have an effective SEO on your website without the right use of keywords. In fact, SEO and keywords usually go hand-in-hand in digital marketing. It is imperative therefore to always check out your SEO strategies to ensure you are using the right keywords. That’s what can drive good organic traffic to your website most of the time. So, any content that you curate on your website must have the right placement of keywords that are related and complementing. If these keywords match the intent keywords searchers are using, search engines take note. Google in particular loves this and sends such searchers to your website as organic traffic.
 
7. Avoid Plagiarism

Plagiarism is not only wrong it is also unethical in digital marketing. Major search engines like Google for instance do not like plagiarism for these same reasons. So, if you want your website to benefit from the very valuable organic traffic from search engines, you must be extremely strict about plagiarism. This is why the content you create on your website must be original, high-quality and top-notch for it to be valuable. Since millions of websites on the internet are trying to do the same things to get noticed, your own website will be choked out and unnoticed if its content is plagiarized content. Therefore, what can make it stand out from the rest of the crowd is by creating top-notch stellar content which contains no plagiarized materials. One great way to guarantee this is to be sure you are writing about topics that are different and creating content that is not present on the internet. Topics that are unique and original to your website are the best. This is what helps your website to stand out and be noticed on the internet particularly by search engines.

Wrapping Up

If you are able to implement the foregoing tips well enough, the SEO of your website will be greatly enhanced. An enhanced SEO means more visibility of the website to search engines. If the website is visible to search engines, they tend to rank it high on their SERPs. A high ranking website on the SERPs of search engines means more organic traffic to the website. So, with a constant dedication and the right implementation of these tips, you can ensure a proper ranking of your website and consequently more organic traffic.

How to Enable Monetization of your Facebook Page, Tricks and Tips

Worldwide, millions of people are on Facebook for fun and to connect with friends. Many others are there to do business and to earn some extra income online. Many business owners and brands are deliberately taking their businesses to Facebook for maximum exposure. Facebook business pages and marketing tools are great business assets that can help marketers to make a bit of money on the side and online. If you want to earn some money on Facebook you too can deliberately enable monetization activities on your Facebook page.

Most digital marketers are very much aware that through your Facebook pages, you can build strong brand recognition. Even when you do not have your own products to sell, it does not stop you from enabling and monetizing your Facebook page. Following are a few things you can do to enable monetization on your Facebook page.

Sell Products Directly from Your Facebook Page

On Facebook, if you have something to offer to your audience, say a great product for instance, you can directly sell it on your Facebook page. Facebook in-house marketing tools can assist you to make sales on the platform smoothly. If you are selling on Facebook directly for instance you can use the different Hootsuite features for direct product sales to analyze your customers’ behaviors and requirements. Better still, if you have your own products to sell. If you do, Facebook will not just be a social media site of fun but a veritable platform for good business.

Optimize Your Facebook Page

For effective marketing out of your Facebook page, it must be optimized. So, if you want to monetize your Facebook page, the best technique available is to optimize your Facebook business pages. Making your website mobile-friendly is one of the most essential techniques in the monetization process. Since a very large percentage of business owners now access data from their mobile devices, it is imperative to make your website mobile-friendly if you do not want to miss out in this huge chunk of mobile data. From these handheld devices, searching is usually easy among internet users. So, if your Facebook page and website in tandem are not mobile optimized, you are going to lose a good number of customers and potential leads. That is for sure.

Create and Sell Digital Content

Facebook is a very effective platform to sell digital content. Digital content distributions and selling are easy ways to monetize your Facebook platforms. If you do not have actual products to sell, digital contents are easily saleable products. On Facebook, you can sell eBooks and other e-products/documents to make money. If you work with reputable affiliate platforms like Strong Future International, SFI and Amazon eBooks, you can get good products to sell as digital products. 

Use Facebook Page for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing sites are an excellent place to start your business from your Facebook business pages. Affiliate marketing is a perfect way to monetize your Facebook pages. You can create the content from the Facebook pages and send the traffic to the affiliate marketing sites through an affiliate link. You earn commissions when consumers purchase products through your affiliate links.

Promote Local Events and Campaigns

On Facebook, you have excellent opportunities to create good and attractive pages for your products/brands. If you want to promote local events from your Facebook page, the page must be optimized for local business. The reason is because local events always need local promotional work for good results. Anytime you are doing local event promotions, your Facebook pages are really handy because every business is local. These local events promotion are especially helpful to make your product/brand names hugely popular around the local communities. From your local events endorsements, you earn local popularity. Through this popularity, more local people begin to notice your brand, more of them start to visit the brand and your Facebook view rates increase as well.
 
Sell Third Party Products/Services

If you plan to monetize your Facebook page, third-party products/services are a good way to start. Even when you do not have your own products, you can still make money by selling third party products/services. Sometimes, these third-party products/services can be very quick and easy ways to make money on Facebook. All you need do is to simply promote these third party products links on your Facebook page and when sales are made through these links, you earn commissions from the sales.

Summary

Through monetization on your Facebook page, you directly popularize your brand and earn incomes as well. Brand endorsement begins from there. Through brand endorsement, you can grow your audience and get more loyal followers on Facebook. The best step towards monetization therefore is to make your Facebook page hugely popular among your followers. That translates to good traffic without which you cannot expect any worthwhile income from your Facebook page. The bottom-line is to make money from your Facebook page through monetization. Any of the foregoing strategies that do not directly help that process is not worth the while.

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.

Best Ways to Boost Your Affiliate Commissions

No doubt everyone is in affiliate marketing to make money online. This money is made by way of affiliate commissions due to each affiliate from their individual promotional efforts that lead to sales. Affiliate marketing operates on performance based business model. For any affiliate to earn more in commissions, such affiliate must make more efforts to promote products. Each affiliate can boost their commissions when they do the following well enough.

 
Use the Right Marketing Tools

Without the right marketing tools, it is difficult to be successful in the ever-competitive world of affiliate marketing. You need these tools to save time, work smarter and to receive affiliate commissions accurately and quickly. If you are really keen on increasing your affiliate marketing commissions, you’ll need to discover and use solutions like smart tools and techniques that can help you to be more productive. Exactly why most successful affiliate marketers use specific tools and resources that allow them to reduce their efforts, work smarter and increase their affiliate marketing commissions.

Understand Your Audience

It is when you understand your audience you’ll know the right ads that can resonate with them. Online studies indicate that people don’t hate ads for the sake of it. Many simply despise bad and irrelevant ads. In marketing, irrelevance is one major aspect of bad publicity. When ads are not relevant to what you are selling, they don’t stand much chance of helping your sales. When you understand your audience well enough, it is then you can adequately serve them the sort of content that is not likely to confuse them, annoy them or make them lose interest very quickly in the content. If your audience has no interest in what you are selling, it is always pretty difficult to sell to such audience. You can boost your commissions in affiliate marketing if you routinely promote only items that meet the immediate needs and wants of your audience. You can do that successfully only if you understand your audience well enough.

Promote Products on Social Media Platforms

These days, social media is where nearly everyone else is doing one thing or another by way of social interactions. Presently, there are about 4.65 billion active users of social media worldwide. Now that’s one huge market out there! In marketing, smart marketers always go where the customers can be found. Once you get your business on social media, you have unlimited access to this very huge market worldwide. Once you choose the social media platforms that represent the best connection between the products you promote and your target audience, you can make more connections, more leads and conversions that can help boost your affiliate commission.

Always Look for New Offers

Marketing new offers in affiliate marketing can help boost your affiliate commission before other marketers wise up to it. If you are the first to introduce new tools and exclusive offers, you make the money first. So, always try to look out for new offers by looking through the control panels of affiliate networks like Strong Future International, SFI. If however you are using ShareASale for instance, you can view your “power rank” to find new affiliate products to promote. If a product is in the Power Rank, it simply means it is already generating huge sales. That is the kind of product to sell more of to boost your affiliate commissions.

Use a Variety of Ads

Even if created by yourself or supplied by product merchants or affiliate programs, you need to use a variety of good ads you can choose and deploy as you please. You can change them often and try different versions to see which ones work best for your customers. It takes quite some experimentation really and you need to constantly rotate the ads to get more attention. Whatever ads you choose to use should be suitable to use on your website, social media channels, and email. The ads that get the best results are the most suitable to use. It is such ads that help to boost your affiliate commissions. 

Create a Trusted Brand

Creating a trusted brand usually takes a bit of time and diligence but if done right, it helps to boost your affiliate commissions. Endeavor to create a transparent brand from scratch. The type of brand that instills trust and provides what the visitor needs, irrespective of the product you are marketing. Be sure to directly project your brand authority and honesty to a keen online audience. This is hugely important because most people tend to trust brands that are honest, transparent and consistent. If you make meeting these conditions a priority, it pays off on the long run with enhanced affiliate commissions.

Work with Bloggers and Influencers

If you can locate reputable bloggers or social media influencers in your niche who interact with your ideal buyer on a regular basis, you can consider working with them. Bloggers and influencers will help out with a wider publicity of your products to their own audiences. You can even benefit from direct product recommendation from an influencer. All these can result in more traffic, more sales and more affiliate commissions for you. Bloggers and influencers can even make additional income for themselves from the traffic they send to your website. If everyone benefits, it makes everyone to get more serious with the relationship.

Have a Coupon Site

If you want to launch a new product that is not yet widely known, forming a limited-time affiliate agreement with a coupon site is smart marketing. Since your product is new in the market, giving away a few free samples for testing purposes is always a good idea. It is one good strategy to encourage some new customers to visit your website and become your brand advertisers for free.

Build a Responsive Community

If you build a responsive community, it quickly helps you to establish yourself as a trusted brand. Brand loyalty first comes from your community. Most returning visitors come from the community and having returning visitors is about the best and most cost-effective way to grow your business. Once you start an affiliate site, don’t hesitate to deploy all strategies that can help to quickly grow your community. Some of such strategies include but not limited to building a responsive email list and becoming active on many social media platforms. To build a credible email list, just install a plugin on your site and create a simple form that allows you to collect the email addresses of all visitors who sign up to get your token offer. If you get popular on your social media handles, it helps to expand your ads network through your following. That ultimately results in getting on-demand traffic to your website. Good traffic leads to more clicks on your affiliate links and ultimately more sales and more affiliate commissions.

Optimize Your Product Pages for Conversions

If you want to increase sales, you need to provide a positive consumer experience on your website. That means optimizing the website for that purpose. To do this, you need to improve your product pages to increase conversions. Check the use of keywords on your content, how your ads and CTAs are placed, page loading speed, mobile friendliness, page aesthetics, graphics and color usage on the page as well as all other optimization techniques that can help enhance visitors experience on your website. When the consumer experience on your website is good, it generates leads and converts better. That ultimately helps to boost your affiliate commissions from more sales.

Offer Bonuses and Incentives

This is a given. You do better business when you offer good business incentives. Some of such incentives can be bonuses, discount coupons and so on. If consumers feel better treated by your incentives, they will appreciate your honesty and won’t mind doing more business with you. As an affiliate marketer, it is smart marketing to always provide an incentive for people to click your affiliate link. This is somehow a fantastic strategy that can turn out to improve your affiliate sales and distinctly set you apart from other affiliates in your business niche. That means more sales and enhanced affiliate commissions.

Post How-To Articles as Tutorials

Most people always go online for a reason. The search for information is about the most paramount reason why people go online. If you know a skill and can adequately teach it through high quality and informative articles, you attract people looking for that type of information or skill. Most internet users know that online articles/tutorials are a popular technique for quickly acquiring information and new skills. Such people often go in search of how-to articles or videos. You can deliberately write articles to teach your target audience a skill that requires them to use the product you are promoting. You can also write articles to instruct product users on how to in a step-by-step way use the product you are promoting. Such articles generate interest better, attract traffic and boost sales and affiliate commissions.

Tips to Overcome the Fear of Selling Online

Do you have the fear of selling online? If you do, you are not alone. Many digital marketers do but they all sell online all the same. The ability to face or manage the fear is what makes the difference since many people always face the fear of selling at some point in their marketing endeavors. In this article, I will like to discuss some tested tips for overcoming the fear of selling. These tips will help you to stay on the path of positivity and confidence to market your products successfully online.

 
Stay Focused Always

Staying focused matters a lot in confidence building. If you stay focused on your desired outcome, it will always remind you why you are doing what you are doing to make sales. Selling is a very significant component of every marketer’s marketing strategy. Since sales are an important part of the work you are doing to market your products, it pays to keep yourself reminded at all times the likely outcome of your efforts. That helps to keep you focused.
 
Make Selling Fun

If you can manage to make selling fun, you’ll be able to sell more products with less effort. In that quest, you can always think up fun ways to share your passion and knowledge about the product you are selling. It is easier that way to attract the attention of buyers and really get them to buy from you. You can try various fun formats like reels, graphics, animation, videos and posts you could use to showcase a product and attract attention to it. Use your imagination to create content that will have a long-lasting effect on customers and potential customers. Your creativity matters a lot when using fun to market products. There is however no cut and dry method of creativity. What works to get results is what you improve on and use more.

Believe in Your Product

Yes, if you believe in your product, you’ll have the confidence to effectively market it. That way, you can be genuinely enthusiastic why other people should like it too. If however you don’t believe in the product yourself, deep down you may feel that you are behaving dishonestly. That can adversely impact on your sales. It is thus advisable to choose and sell only products in your niche business which you have tried yourself and you have a pleasant experience with.

Build a Strong Relationship with Your Followers

It is difficult to make sales without having a good relationship with your followers. If the relationship is strong, there is a better understanding of their needs thereby making it easier to sell to them. For this reason, if you get to know your followers and take time to know about their needs as well, you are far more likely to find the perfect product that they are more likely to buy from you.
 
Try Figure out Your Selling Barriers

In human relationship, barriers create obstacles and fears. If you can identify exactly why you are scared of selling (i.e. the barriers), it will help you overcome your fears. Selling barriers come in a range of reasons. Are you shy to approach people? Do you lack confidence to deal with others or perhaps you don’t want to be seen as pushy? Or you are scared that people won’t like you? Do you lack confidence in the product you are selling? Or perhaps you are scared of rejection? All these are great barriers to selling and once you identify them, you can find your way around them. If you identify the source of your fear, it gives you a starting point for overcoming it. Even if you are scared of selling, just begin to sell. With time, you’ll gain more confidence and be able to sell better.

Learn to Accept Rejection

In sales, a rejection is nothing personal. As experienced marketers like to say, it comes with the business. Just accept that sometimes people may just not want your product, the reason they reject it. Nothing personal to it! If rejection happens as is bound to, from time to time, just move on to the next prospect. Give it another try or get them to check out another different product. You can never know, after maybe one or two rejections, the next prospect may buy from you. Accept rejection as part of the bargain and keep on selling, rejection or no rejection.

Change your Perspective as Needed

If you change your perspective from just selling to more creative processes, you make more sales as a result. Changing your perspective can always give you a better outcome than you could have imagined. For this reason, you should never focus on a certain number of sales. It is best to focus more on the process itself and try to make it as enjoyable as you possibly can. You get better sales results as a consequence.

Neither Fret nor Stress about Bad Days

You must understand that in marketing, everyone has their own share of good days and bad days sometimes. If you want to be successful in selling, expect them and deal with them as they come. Neither fret nor stress yourself unduly when bad days happen. Successful marketers often go through difficult times that may even last a while but that does not stop them from achieving their sales goals. They persevere even in the midst of tremendous stress. If you want to succeed, anytime you feel you are going through a bad patch, just keep your confidence and focus. Keep moving and make efforts to try to put the bad days behind you. Who knows? Tomorrow or even the days following may just turn out better for you.

Make Selling a Happy Experience
 
A great sale is considered made when both buyer and seller are happy. Once you have a great product that you believe in yourself, all you really need to do is to point out the benefits to your customers. Make them see the product as a perfect product that is best suitable solution for their needs. Since most customers are always looking to buy something that helps them to solve a problem or enhance their lives better, they pay attention to your product. When they buy from you, they are happy and you are happy. A win-win situation really! If you help your customers find the solution they need with your product, it saves them precious time and effort for which they will thankful to you. That means they are happy and when they buy from you, you too will be happy.

Diligently Track your Progress

Tracking is essential in sales. It helps you to know which ads, platforms and channels are doing great for your marketing efforts. If you have sales targets and your tracking shows you are meeting them, it helps to boost your confidence. Tracking your successes well has a way of helping you to stay on top of your game. Diligent tracking is what helps you to know exactly what you are doing right and what needs to be changed. It helps you to focus on your sales goals and how to achieve them.

Experts Top Tips for Choosing the Right Affiliate Program

If you are new to affiliate marketing, these here tips will be of immense benefits to you. They work not just because expert marketers say so, they have tried and tested them to be so. Read carefully.

Before joining any affiliate program, make sure to carefully read and understand the affiliate agreement before you join as an affiliate. Even if your search ratings tell you the affiliate program is the best in the world, the more it is imperative to read and understand the affiliate agreement. 

Among the lot of affiliate programs available online, try to join only an affiliate program that is long standing, safe and secure and has a good reputation in the Internet world. You can easily verify this from the ratings of Better Business Bureau or some other similar organizations. You can also get reliable information from Social Media, online Business Forums and Discussion Groups.

If you want to make money from affiliate marketing, you must identify a product/service for which there is a real need. The product should be such that you are passionate about and would love and enjoy promoting. You can conduct searches for “Affiliate Programs” in the Search Engines to settle for the best.

The product/service you choose should be relevant to your website and niche.

Choose only affiliate programs that pay good commissions at specified intervals. The commission you earn in affiliate program is your main source of income and most affiliate program providers pay a commission range of 5% to 50%. This commission comes from the sales directly attributable to your marketing efforts. While choosing an affiliate program, you must pay attention to how high and at what intervals your earned commissions will be paid.

Most Affiliate Programs are generally single tier or two tiers. A single tier program pays you for whatever business you have generated. The two tier program is a bit more complicated. It pays you for the business you have generated and also a commission for the sales generated by a sub-affiliate, you have sponsored.

When choosing an affiliate program, look out for organizations that will make the business easy for you. Such organizations must be long standing and reputable. The organizations that provide a whole range of tools and resources such as Banners, Text Links, Brochures, Websites and the right training for their affiliates. Those are the kind of organizations that will help you to learn the ropes quickly, make the business life much easier for you and help you grow the business and make money.

Ensure the tracking systems are in place to properly track and attribute sales correctly to affiliates. Such tracking systems must correctly record all the clicks and sales made through the text links and banners placed on your website, e-mails and other advertisements. 

Pay particular attention to one very important factor referred to as “hits per sale ratio”. This ratio indicates the number of hits that have to be made to a Text Link or Banner to generate a sale. The ratio helps to give an idea as to how much traffic is needed before a sale is made. Having that information helps the marketer to design the right marketing strategy and the correct use of ads.
 
Lastly and most importantly, be sure you know how often commissions are paid. You are in affiliate marketing to make money so you must make sure you know how you’ll make this money through the one most important source, commissions. Most reputed affiliate organizations pay their affiliates monthly or when they accumulate a minimum commission as indicated in the settings by the affiliate but within the ranges they allow. It is advisable to avoid any program that requires too many sales to reach the minimum amount. Some business wisdom really!

Expert Tips to Earn Money with Online Affiliate Programs

These days, many more people are trying to earn some extra money working from home on affiliate programs. With the increasing desire to earn some extra income online, coupled with the present harsh economic trends, more people are daily looking for ways to earn some extra cash by way of some online business opportunities. Affiliate marketing programs easily fits this bill since people can easily work affiliate programs part time and still be able to work on full time jobs. If such people manage to get a handle on affiliate business, it can even become a full time job at some point. Affiliate marketing is an excellent and one of the most popular ways to make money online. If you are keen yourself and you are up to it, here are some expert tips that can help you to make money online as an affiliate marketer.

Set Up Your Website: You need your own website to really make some money with online affiliate programs. That is not to say you can’t make money even without a website but, having a website of your own can make the business more lucrative for you. If you have the skills, you can design your own website as you please but if not, the services of professional webmasters can help you out. They can arrange the hosting for you as well. A professionally designed website gives you more and better features depending on your type of business. What matters most however is to always settle for the option that serves your purpose best.

Make your Website User-Friendly: If your website is not user-friendly, it cannot be traffic-friendly. For this reason, once you have your website in place, it is imperative for you to work on the website to position it to draw good traffic. Without good traffic, it is virtually impossible to make good money with online affiliate programs. For your website to be user-friendly, it must be attractive, fast loading and easy to navigate. That is what helps to keep visitors longer on the site to do business with you. To enhance this, you must deliberately create quality content on a regular and consistent basis, build up credibility and diligently work on attracting traffic to the website. With quality content and if you position your affiliate links well on the site and with the right niche, visitors will be returning to the site again and again. If they do so, it helps to increase your chances of making good sales from the site.
 
Choose a Good Affiliate Program: What determines a good affiliate program is a good niche, good platform, good products and commissions. With this in mind, you’ll find that there are many online affiliate programs out there to choose from. Irrespective of whether you are operating out of your own website or not, the opportunities to make money in affiliate marketing are infinite. However, you must make sure to work with a legitimate and reputable affiliate program. If not, you may end up wasting your time, money and efforts on a program that is not legitimate. That can be quite frustrating and even discouraging. Before signing up therefore, make sure to check well into the commission that the program offers. Most affiliate programs pay between 5%-50% commissions. You must therefore ensure you get a reasonable commission that is paid out regularly before getting involved with any affiliate program.

 
Promote Your Website: It is for the sake of traffic you must promote your website as best you can. Promoting your website becomes hugely imperative as soon as the site is properly set up. Online, you have many options you can choose to use to promote your website. Among these options are pay-per-click PPC marketing, link building, article marketing, email marketing, social media marketing and more. Once you start building traffic to your site, you will notice that your sales will begin to climb. This is a clear proof that the affiliate marketing program you have chosen is working.