9 Harmful Affiliate Marketing Don’ts

Affiliate marketing is readily one of the most convenient ways to make money online. The reason most online marketers never fail to add it to their portfolio. However, not many marketers get to make it real good with affiliate marketing for many and varied reasons. Some of these reasons hinge on the fact that many affiliate marketers tend to do certain things they should ideally not do. Some of these things do help to ruin most of their affiliate marketing efforts, the reason it becomes difficult for many of them to do great in the business. For instance, many affiliate marketers tend to focus more on the wrong aspects of affiliate marketing and end up losing some potential earnings because they don’t really know what they’re doing. Here are some of the things you should never do if you want to make some appreciable success out of your affiliate marketing activities.

1. Don’t Fail to Research your Competition

As an affiliate, it is required that you promote products/services by way of affiliate links. It is of utmost importance therefore to know what your competition is doing. You must through detailed research know at all times what your competition is up to. Make sure you know your competition well enough and how they are promoting. The aim is to do better than what they are doing that is working for them. If for instance they have more links than you do pointing towards their website/blog posts, then your chances of making money are going to be slim when compared to them. To match up, you will need at least as many affiliate marketing links that they have in order for your content/blog posts to be sufficiently competitive. You really need to stand out from the crowd if you want more people to visit your website/blog post and to buy anything via your affiliate links.

2. Don’t Fail to Know the Product/Service you Promote

It is a truism in marketing that you cannot effective sell any product you don’t know well enough. Not knowing well enough the product you are promoting via your affiliate links is a recipe for failure. This is why you must know what you’re promoting and why people should buy it if you want your affiliate marketing efforts to yield good results. If you don’t know much about the product you are promoting, how then can you expect to effectively market it to others?

3. Don’t Ignore Search Engine Optimization, SEO

SEO is extremely important if you want your website to rank high in the SERPs of search engines. SEO helps online searchers to locate you on the web. If people can’t find your content/blog posts, you can’t expect such people to buy anything via your affiliate links. Many bloggers tend focus more on other aspects of their websites but ignore SEO completely. That is one huge marketing mistake that could cause them to lose out on a lot of money. Without the right SEO on your blog content, it is lost completely in the deep sea of the internet. Affiliate marketers can therefore not afford to ignore SEO of their content.

4. Don’t Rely Only on Affiliate Traffic

For your affiliate marketing efforts to have the right traction and be successful, it is hugely important that you don’t rely on only one source of traffic. The more traffic sources to your website, the better for your affiliate marketing efforts. If you limit yourself to one traffic source, you lose out on traffic/visitors to your website and consequently your earnings. Taking advantage of many web resources/channels particularly social media to promote your content helps to diversify your traffic sources and it is good for traffic.

5. Don’t Pick Quantity over Quality

In affiliate marketing, you should never sell your visitors short. Always give them the best on offer. Promoting quality links is preferable to the quantity of links. Don’t focus on how many affiliate links to have on your content. It is better to focus more on the quality of those links. Too many poor links on your content can earn you a penalty from search engines. Too many poor links makes your content to look like spam and search engines hate spam. Your content cannot rank high in SERPs if search engines see it as spam. If your blog content does not rank high, it is difficult for many people to see it and as such, many people won’t buy products through your affiliate links.

6. Don’t Spam with Affiliate Links

Search engines are usually very sensitive to spam and there is always a very thin line between sending out affiliate links to people and spamming them. Never make the mistake of trying to send out too many affiliate marketing emails at a time thinking that doing so will help you to get more leads/customers. If you do, you risk sanctions from search engines if they classify your content as spam.
 
7. Don’t Fail to Have a Plan

In affiliate marketing just like any other business, if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. You must have a workable plan in place if you want your affiliate marketing efforts to be successful. Just like any other human activity, if you don’t know what you’re doing or where you’re going, you go nowhere fast. You cannot expect people who visit your content/blog posts to buy anything via your affiliate link if you don’t have a plan in place to lure them to do so. In affiliate marketing, planning and good strategy matter a lot. It is of paramount important to always have a good plan in place to help you make money via your affiliate links. You must know what you are doing before your content/blog posts can expect to rank highly in search engines. If they don’t, it will be pretty difficult if not impossible for many people to visit your website and do business with you.

8. Don’t Fail to Identify Target Groups

If you market content, your audience is your primary market. To market effectively to your audience, it must be properly identified and segmented. If you don’t, you’ll be making one common mistake many bloggers and content marketers make by not identifying their target groups when they do affiliate marketing. If you don’t know who your target group is, then how are you supposed to sell anything via an affiliate link? If you want people to buy anything via an affiliate link, it is of paramount important that you identify your target market very distinctly. You must know who you’re marketing to and how they are going to respond to your content if you expect them to buy anything. If you don’t, most of your marketing efforts particularly via affiliate links will yield very little or no results at all.

9. Don’t Copy-Paste Other Affiliates

If you have the habit of copying and pasting content from other affiliates, you risk penalties from search engines. For this reason, if you want to be really successful with affiliate marketing, then it’s important that you regularly create your own unique content and post consistently. If you copy-paste other people’s work, you risk being found out easily. That can lead to more sanctions including outright bans from some websites/services altogether. The rule is to regularly create your own unique content if you want people to buy anything via your affiliate links. Doing so helps you to grow your brand authority and influence and your audience grows in tandem.

How Small Businesses Can Use Social Media for Business Growth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Get the Best Out of Affiliate Marketing

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

Cost-Effectiveness

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

Increased Brand Awareness

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

Increased Website Traffic and Sales

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

 
Better Target Audience Reach

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

Final Thoughts

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

How to Understand Google Analytics Terms

Digital marketers have a lot of analytics terms they use in relation to their businesses. It is imperative to get a hold on these terms and to use them appropriately since analytics tools base their measurements/metrics on these terms. 

Here are some common terms you can measure using Google Analytics.

Keywords: Digital marketing relies on keywords as search terms to aid web users. These users find businesses if they use their keywords to search for products/services. Google analytics helps to identify and provide these keywords. Search engines use these keywords to improve the search engine rankings of websites.

Conversion Rate: Many web users habitually visit many websites. Of this lot, the percentage of visitors who do what you expect them to do on your website is regarded as “converted.” Such activities may include making a purchase or registering to download a free e-book, get a discount coupon, download how-to video or signing up for email newsletter.

Visit: This is any session in which a visitor interacts with your website irrespective of whether they do anything on your website or simply move on to another site.

Unique Visitors: This refers to the number of web users who visit your website within a specified time period. Irrespective of the number of times same person visits the site within that time period, the visitor still counts as one unique visitor.

Average Time on Site: This is the average time measured in seconds or minutes a user spends on your website.

Exit Page: This is the last page of your website that a visitor views before leaving your site. Knowing the last page your visitors visit before leaving your website can give you a lot of marketing insights into what works and what doesn’t on your website.

Traffic Sources: This refers to places sending the most traffic to your website. It could be referral sites, social media sites, search engines and traffic exchanges.

Referral Sites: These are sites where people come to your site by clicking on your link on the sites. If your website gets a lot of referral site traffic, it is an indication that your online presence is strong on those other sites.

Search Engines Traffic: This is the same thing as organic traffic. It refers to people who visit your site because it showed up in their search results. A measurement of your search engine traffic gives information on how effective your SEO is.

Page Views: Any time a web user views a page of your site, it counts as a page view. One visit may contain many page views depending on how long the visitor spends on your website and how many pages they visit.

New Visitors: This represents web visitors who are coming to your website for the very first time. The information is vital because marketers need different strategies to market to new visitors as against repeat/returning visitors.

Returning Visitors: Returning visitors are visitors who make a comeback to your website for one reason or another. Some of such reasons may include to get more information, make inquiries and even to make a repeat purchase.

Bounce Rate: This refers to the number of users who exit your website after only viewing just one page. The higher the bounce rate, the less the time visitors spend on your website.

Pages per Visit: This refers to how many pages users view on your website per each visit. The more pages they visit, the better your website engagement.

Direct Traffic: These are people who access your business by typing your URL directly in the address bar of their browsers. Direct traffic is a very good indication of your web authority and customer awareness. It also indicates how effective your marketing ads are.

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.

Easy Online Marketing Tips to Help Drive More Traffic to Your Website

If you are involved in online marketing, driving traffic to your website is of paramount importance. That is what brings online surfers to your website. The more of these visitors that come to your website, the higher your chances of making sales or creating links with new long-term clients. No matter the type or size of your business, you can skillfully use these easy tried-and-tested methods to attract more traffic to your business website.

Blog Consistently

Content marketing is becoming inevitable in online marketing. Marketers rely more on blogs to create and market content. Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your site by writing and sharing great information and stories on your blog sites. If you blog consistently and share great content, you attract a following to your blog posts. That translates to the much-needed traffic. 

Prod Your Customers with Emails

Email marketing may be “old school” but, it remains an extremely powerful marketing tool that marketers rely on to attract traffic to their business websites. As a marketer, if you have built an email list of your customers over time, you can periodically use this list to send messages to your customers reminding them of new products, promos and even price slashes. You may include a catchy call-to-action phrase in such emails to elicit a desired response. For instance a phrase like, “click here to see our latest price slashes!” can get your recipients to act out of curiosity. That translates to clicks and visits to your website.

Work with Professionals for Your SEO

If you have the skills, you can work on having a good Search Engine Optimization, SEO, on your website. If not, getting professional help is a good option. A good SEO is what helps Search Engines to index and rank your website in their SERPs. A good ranking in SERPs translates to more organic-traffic to your website.
 
Run Contests on Social Media

Running contests on social media is one great way to get people to share and promote your page if you offer them something of value in return. On social media platform like Instagram for instance, we often see businesses asking their followers to ‘like’ a photo, tag friends in it, and then share that photo to their pages. Doing so enables them to enter a competition to win valuable prizes. The benefit is that the more people who share it, the more likely it is that their followers will start to come to your page to follow you and enter the competition too. That translates to good traffic. The tradeoff however is that you must endeavor to give out prizes regularly to winners as promised. By doing so, your business will attract more and more visitors and even more new followers.

Promote with Event Hosting

You can choose to join an online event or host one yourself. Marketers prefer events like webinars, online conferences, online seminars, other online activities, and even parties. These activities allow them to fully network with fellow marketers and peers in their niche industries. If a marketer hosts an event on his platform, he will drive traffic immediately to his website. But, if he chooses to speak in some other marketer’s event/platform, his topic must be hugely interesting, authoritative and informative enough, to drive traffic to his website.

Market with Influencers

Marketing with influencers relies on one very simple business concept. What marketers do is to identify and reach out to someone with a huge social media following on very popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube for instance. They arrange with such persons to help them promote their products for a fee, commissions on sales or simply in exchange for free products. Influencers help out by endorsing such products or even recommending the products to their large followers. The right candidates with influencer credentials are usually celebrities, TV personalities/stars, movie stars, beauty queens, sports personalities, etc. etc.  For a marketer, what matters most is to choose someone in the right sphere and with the right kind of following for the products you are marketing.

Useful Marketing Tips to Launch Your Online Marketing Business

To launch a marketing business online, you must be fully aware of what you are going into. With over one billion sites presently doing business online, no doubt, there is some crowd out there in virtual space. If you are launching your own business online, this is the crowd in which your business will operate. This requires some deep strategic thinking because there is so much more to digital marketing than simply building a visually attractive website. The bottom line is to attract good traffic to your website and that requires a very good marketing strategy to achieve. The strategy which requires that you experiment and adapt well your marketing activities such as writing different types of content, trying out and sending different types of emails and having a strong presence on different social media platforms among other related activities. By this experimentation, you will no doubt make mistakes. That’s OK. Such mistakes will help you adapt and refine your marketing strategy for good results as you go along.

These marketing tips are handy to help you launch your own online marketing business.

Get a Good Domain Name

This is very important since it serves as your business identity in virtual space. The simpler your domain name, the better it is for your business. Online marketing experts always recommend a short and easy-to-remember domain name. A good domain name is what can actually make a big difference between getting lost in digital space and creating a successful online presence for your business. If you have a domain that matches your brand name, it can help reinforce your brand and make it easier for visitors to remember and to make repeat visits. Such a good domain name will not only add credibility to your business, it will also help to build your brand by way of increased brand awareness. A simple domain name also makes it much easier to get business through word-of-mouth. This is because a simple name that is easy to memorize/remember is also easy to pass on to others. With a bit of patience and search efforts, you can get a good domain name for your business from any Domain Registrars of your choice.

Clearly Identify Your Target Audience

Every online marketer must develop an ideal customer persona to target by deliberate marketing efforts. If you know who your target customers are, it is easy to market to them directly. You can tailor your content marketing strategies in such a way as to meet the wants and needs of your targeted customers. For marketing effectiveness, the demographics of your targeted customers must always be the centerpiece of your marketing goals. These demographics include but not limited to education, hobbies, housing, family, marital status, gender, age, career, salary, location, interests, buying behavior and so on, all information you need to create effective marketing content directed at your target audience.

Create a Content Marketing Strategy

You cannot effectively market online without a workable strategy, particularly content marketing strategy. The reason is obvious. Without an effective content marketing strategy, it is very difficult to achieve your online marketing goals. Blogging must be a very vital component of your content marketing strategy. If you blog on your website, make sure your strategy involves the writing of high-quality, entertaining, and valuable content only. The more blog posts you add to your website, the more visitors will be able to find you in search engines. For best results, your blog posts must be well thought-out, highly informative, clearly written, with good spellings/grammar, easy to understand/comprehend, with high-quality images/graphics and consistently published. Doing so is one great way to, quickly establish that you are an expert in your industry. That knowledge helps to motivate people to return to your website for more useful tips and opinions from time to time.

Market with a Marketing Calendar

Marketing with a calendar is one good way to assure and build trust with your customers. Make sure you stick with your content publishing calendar to avoid disappointing your readers. It may take some energy and focus to create a calendar at the beginning, but that’s OK. When your marketing calendar is good and reliable, you can easily stay on track with all your marketing efforts. Doing so helps to make sure that your marketing platforms are putting out a constant stream of content, information, and promotions that encourage readers to have the confidence to come back regularly for more.

Set Your Marketing Budget

Marketing effectively online involves some costs. Keeping marketing costs low is always a deliberate goal of smart marketers because they know too well that investing a large sum of money into your marketing efforts does not necessarily guarantee success. Even at that, you cannot just sit back and expect people to simply find and visit your website just like that. It doesn’t work out that way. You must incur some costs to promote your business. By setting your marketing budget within the limits you can afford, no matter how low, you get better results. What really matters is to set a budget that is practical and effective for the needs of your brand, making sure not to overspend or underspend. Your budgetary limitations help to take care of that.

Develop a Social Media Strategy

Your social media strategy simply involves taking your business to where your customers are by deliberate activities. These days, you’ll find most people on social media depending on their ages which are in tandem with the platforms they prefer using. For a social media marketer, what is paramount is maximum customer engagement. If you have that as one of your top marketing objectives, you must endeavor to be on several social media platforms because of their huge popularity and ease of use to share information. The reason they are a great place you can effectively leverage to reach your target customers and communicate with them easily. If you are looking for good traffic and leads, the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram and the like are a great place to market your brand. Make sure to consider these platforms in your overall social media strategy.

Establish an Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective online marketing method. You need an email marketing strategy since email remains one of the top marketing channels that marketers still depend on to get traffic and leads. When used correctly, email can be a very effective and affordable way to drive leads and sales, grow customer engagement, boost customer loyalty, and grow your customer base. First thing you must do as you launch your business is to take pains to build your own reliable email list. That list allows you to be in full control of when and how you communicate with your email subscribers. Aside from its main advantage of immediacy, you can use a pre-launch email to build awareness of your website. After launching, you need a post-launch email to keep your subscribers updated with a view to persuading them to keep coming back to check out your website. That easily translates to good traffic back to our website.

Why Your Blog Needs a Good SEO Strategy

It requires a bit of technicalities to set up a good blog. Experts advise that no one should try to learn everything about blogging at once and right from the word go. The process is gradual and takes some bit of learning on the job.  It is best to begin with and to learn from the basics as you make progress in your blogging efforts. Once you begin and start getting some results, it acts as the tonic and motivation to encourage you to learn more and to do more. One of the things you’ll learn along the way is SEO strategy which from my own experience appears to be the hardest part of blogging. Every blogger really needs it because without it, search engines will tend to ignore your blog in its entirety. If that happens, your blog loses out in the much needed traffic which search engines would’ve been sending to it.
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No doubt Search Engine Optimization, SEO, involves a bit of technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you get a good SEO strategy in place. How the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent by search engines. Simply put, SEO is a way of playing around with and position keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.

When you are getting started as a blogger, it is very essential to have a good SEO strategy. With it in place, search engines will be sending you free and high-quality targeted traffic. This is about the best organic traffic you can get on the internet. You cannot afford to miss out on it. A good SEO strategy positions your blog in very good stead to receive this traffic steadily. If you are not too sure of what to do, don’t allow the technicalities involved to discourage you. There is a way out. You can arrange to work with WordPress because it has a content management system which is optimised for search engines by default. With a good web-hosting, lightweight theme and SEO WordPress plugins, it helps you to find your way around many technicalities involved in developing your own SEO strategy. With your blog linked to WordPress, you are all set to receive organic traffic courtesy of search engines.

That is one SEO problem resolved. The second is how to research the demand for various keywords related to your blog niche. This is where you’ll need to sign up with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. These tools will help measure your traffic inflow and even the sources of the traffic. They let you know exactly what keywords people are using to find your blog posts on the internet. As part of your own SEO strategy, these same popular keywords can be deployed to write more content for better search results.

Aside Google Search Console, you can also take a look at other keyword research tools to find out which works best for you. Some of such user-friendly tools are:

Google's Auto-Suggest: As you type in a keyword in Google, it will automatically show you suggestions for longer tail keywords. These keywords are showing up because people are searching for them in Google. The reason Google is suggesting them to you.
UberSuggest: A free keyword research tool.
Ahrefs: A keyword research tool for deep researches.

Last line! Even though SEO is a blogging technicality, you should not allow all the technical analysis to demotivate you. In blogging world, you can always manage to find your way around many technicalities even if you are a newbie. What is important is to first have a blog running. Along the way, you can learn about more technical things and how to go around some of the technicalities. That is what all bloggers are doing in our highly saturated and competitive blogging world.

 

How to Create Multiple Revenue Streams for Your Blog

There are multiple ways to make money from your blog if it has been getting some good measure of traffic.  I have used some of these methods myself while I have never tried some others but I hear of bloggers who routinely earn money from multiple streams of sources. Many bloggers earn just a second pay check from blogging while others earn a fulltime income from same sources. What you earn depends largely on the streams you are using, how good you are at blogging and how popular your blog had become. This popularity is measured by inbound traffic flow to the blog. That is really what brings in the income.


 
For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. The better and more consistent they are at it, the more money they make. Many bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year while some even post much higher figures from one of or a combination of the following methods.

#1. Display ads measured with Google Adsense where income comes from PPV, pay per view or PPC pay per click.
#2. Affiliate Display ads. You can also earn an agreed percentage in commissions from products actually purchased from ads displayed on your website as an Affiliate Marketer.
#3. Sale of E-books.
#4. Fees from Webinars.
#5. Sale of how-to videos.
#6. Sale of packaged courses.
#7. Direct payments for display ads to announce or promote events or products.
#8. Earned fees for letting others market with your Email list.
#9. Earned fees for helping to run surveys on your blog.
#10. Fees from Magazine or Bulletin subscription.

This list is by no means exhaustive. As bloggers get smarter by the day alongside the deepening of the internet and proliferation of smart hand-held devices like IPhones, Tablets and Smart phones, many more income earning ways get developed by bloggers. It is very crucial to have a viable revenue strategy for your blog because even if you are not interested in making a living from your blog earnings, you need resources to keep developing and growing the blog. You may need 2-5 hours daily to add good content to your blog. This is precious time that you are investing in your blog. This time must somehow be compensated for by what you earn from the blog. Without earnings from your blog, it will be difficult for you to fund and maintain your content creation. If you can’t maintain your content creation, you will not be able to grow your blog to keep it relevant and competitive enough in the densely saturated blogging world.


 

How to Blog Like a Pro

Do you know something others don’t know? Are you good at something? Are you passionate about something? Do you express yourself well in writing? Great if you do. You can be a blogger and a good one at that just like the Pros. Now, how badly do you want to blog like a Pro? Simple! Just do exactly what Pros do. The good news is, Pros don’t do anything much different from what other bloggers do. They only manage to do better and differently same things other bloggers do in blogosphere. That is what makes them Pros. Here is how you too can get started if you want to blog like a Pro:

#1 Decide on a Domain Name

You may ask what’s in a name. In blogging, the answer is a lot. This is more so when your domain name will automatically become your brand name. In choosing a name, don’t go with the Joneses unless you want to struggle for recognition over a long time. You may even be crowded out easily if you are not lucky. You must make this choice very carefully because your web success may directly depend on it when search engines come to recognize it. Any name which resonates with your chosen niche always gets better results. AnyName.com is ok provided it is brandable and memorable. It must align with what you’ve decided for your brand recognition and it is available for web registration. 


 
#2 Carefully Choose Your Blog Niche

If you want to blog like Pro, you must carefully choose a niche and stick with it over the long haul. Your blog can not grow if it is not known for something unique to it even if it is just one thing. That is the reason you should not go for something too general like blogging for food or fitness. You can settle for a unique type of food or for some brand of fitness unique to pregnant women, to athletes or the elderly. These unique types of niches are likely to earn you recognition faster than general niches. Any niche you choose must be a combination of your talent, passion and marketing opportunity if you want to blog like Pro. 

#3 Get a Custom Logo

You may choose to get professionals to design a unique logo for you with a little fee or you go for free themes available in the WordPress repository. Either way, what matters is to get a unique logo which fits the niche theme you’ve chosen. A unique logo adds to your professionalism too. You must therefore be careful to settle for a design that is not excessively colorful and distracting. It must easily appeal to the eye and good for readability and page load speed both of which can help the SEO of your blog.

#4 Install a Self-Hosted Blog

You can easily have access to many blogging platforms on the web but some are free while some are not. The platforms that are not free may require that you pay a small rental fee monthly, quarterly or annually. The choice is yours to make. Free blog platforms like Blogger.com or WordPress.com. appear to be most popular with many bloggers. However, there is some snag with many of the free platforms. Most of them do not allow commercial use of their platforms. Some others will not allow you to own your web-property. For these reasons, most Pros prefer to register and host their own domains with reputable Domain Hosts even at a premium.

#5 Write and Publish Your First Content

This is where what you know and are passionate about will come to the fore. Just relax, collect your thoughts and start writing something great. Be ready for the long haul because blogging is a marathon and not a sprint. The rules are no that strict, but always ensure the information you are giving out is authentic, rich, personal and unique enough for other persons to be interested in reading it. Your success as a blogger is heavily dependent on how much of rich, informative and educative information you can give out about your chosen niche in a prolonged basis. That is where your knowledge and expertise really come to the fore. It is this knowledge/information that helps you to acquire loyal readership and followership. Before making the first post on your content, be sure that your “About Me” page is carefully written out to tell readers who you are and what you can do and have done in the past. Most people always want to know who exactly they are dealing with before reading blog posts.

#6 Adopt a Good SEO Strategy

This stage involves some technicalities which experts can help you with if you are not too sure you can handle it on your own. It is very important you adopt a good SEO strategy because how the search engines find your blog and send traffic to it depends hugely on your SEO strategy. It is about the most challenging aspect of blogging and it must be done right at all times because a huge percentage of the traffic expected in your blog will be sent there by search engines. Simply put, SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) is a unique way of playing around with and positioning keywords in your blog posts to enable them rank high in search results. The higher they rank, the more people find them and the higher traffic your blog gets. You can use web tools like Google Search Console, Ahrefs, UberSuggest and the likes to research keywords to know what people are searching for most and how best to use such keywords in your posts to take advantage of these popular searches. That is how SEO works.


 
#7 Install Web Analytics
 
Analytics are very helpful in measuring results, carrying out research and even spying on other bloggers. Google Analytics is most preferable here but be sure you configure its search console as well. It is simple to deploy and use. Just sign up for a free account at Google Analytics. After signing up, Google will send you a javascript code, which you have to deploy on all the pages of your blog you need to track and measure their performance. Once your Google Analytics is in place, you can daily track the number of visitors, to which page, sources of the traffic and even the countries and geographical regions of the world the traffic is coming from. The search console gives you essential data and insights about how your website is performing in Google Search. Through it, you will also be able to see the keywords that people search for when they come to your site. It gives you the right information you really need to rejig your SEO strategy from time to time depending on your blog readers’ behavior online.

#8 Install Essential Plugins

As soon as your blog is up and running, it becomes a very valuable web property which you must protect and enhance its functionality. That is when you need to install some essential and useful plugins. You may get some plugins free and you may have to pay for some others. What you use depends on what you aim to achieve or get from your blog. Here are some of the most popular plugins with bloggers.

Google XML Sitemaps: Helps to develop sitemaps in XML format that have links to all the pages of your website. This is monitored by search engines to make sure all your web pages are indexed. They get automatically updated with links as you publish new posts.
Full SEO Pack: Helps to optimize your blog for the search engines.
Akismet: Helps to prevent spam comments on your blog.
Mashare Social: Helps to show the share count of your articles and add social share icons to your blog.
CSS and Javascript Toolbox: Helps you add Javascript codes like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel that will load on all the pages of your blog.
OptinChat: Helps you add a chat module, which will automatically chat with your visitors and collect their email IDs to help you build a subscriber list.
WP Time Capsule: Helps to back up your blog's content and files every day and stores it on Dropbox.

#9 Get Your Blog on Social Media

As most marketers now know, social media is the place to be. This is because of the huge popularity of social media and the ease of sharing information and interaction. One blog can go viral in minutes via sharing to hundreds of thousands of persons all over the internet. As soon as you start publishing, just get your blog on the most popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes. That helps to put your blog before a very huge audience where you can easily source customers from the “likes” and “followers” you get on these platforms. If you do so, you will notice from your Google Analytics dashboard that your first set of visitors will be coming in good numbers from social media sites.

#10 Monetize your Blog

Yeah, this is the icing on the cake. Pro bloggers get to make real good money from their blogs when they monetize them. Some Forbes Research Results indicate that many Pro bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year with some posting much higher figures. That is good money no doubt. For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. Display ads as monetized with Google Adsense is readily one of the easiest ways to make money with your blog. But, there are many others which Pros have learned to combine into making multiple streams of income. It is also possible to earn money through Pay-Per-View, PPV, Pay-Per-Click, PPC and direct product ads on your website if your blog has become sufficiently popular by way of good traffic inflow. Other methods include, selling E-books, Lessons, Lectures, How-to videos, Webinars and many other electronic products which you can create yourself, advertise on your blog and sell to buyers online.

Tips to Write a Great Blog Post

 Traffic and leads are the real essence of writing blog posts. Your blog could have everything it takes to make it important, but unless you’re significantly generating traffic and leads from it, you may be missing out on a lot of competitive advantage that other businesses are enjoying from blogging. Most marketers very well know that it is much easier to get leads when you blog than when you don’t. When you have a good blog in place, it becomes fairly easy for you to generate traffic and leads. What really matters then is how to write great blog posts capable of generating satisfactory results.

Here are some tips to get things done properly for good results.


 
Resolve to Write Great Content Always

This is a tested and proven marketing fact. When you have great content on your blog, the content becomes a resource for both your market and your industry. That’s the first step. You must write what people like to read which will benefit them in terms of information, education and even entertainment. When your content is good, it tends to go viral fairy quickly. That is when other sites will be able to link to your useful posts and attract potential leads towards you. Most marketers know this to be one hassle-free way of generating traffic and leads fairly easily.

The Opening of Your Blog Posts must Arouse Curiosity

This helps to pin down readers’ attention. Experts advise that a great way of beginning a blog is to lead with a fact, question or statistic catchy enough to hold attention. You can present the readers a problem and aim to answer it within the first few opening sentences as a way of giving your audience real value straightaway without any rigmarole. If your introduction manages to convince them enough, it could hold them to stay on and look better into your blog for the answers they are looking for. Your biggest challenge therefore is how to create a strong opening with which to win someone over in a very short amount of time to keep them reading on.

Post More Long Form Blogs

Expert bloggers have since discovered that long-form blog posting sometimes generate 10 times more leads than short-form posting. The reasons are not farfetched. Search Engines love long form blog posts more than short ones and they tend to rank them higher in their search results. Experts recommend a minimum of 350 words to as long as 1500 words or even more. These are more likely to cover more subject depths and answer most queries and concerns of readers. Long form blogs always manage to attract better traffic and even leads.

Post More Visual Content

Visual content like images, photos and videos are better at arresting readers’ attention than written content. Blog posts that contain a lot of visual content are a lot better for generating leads. Everybody likes looking at something interesting and attractive so visuals can provide more insight depth than text. More readers really gauge the meaning of any message through visuals than any other method because images really enhance posts. They help boost their appeal thereby making more people read the entire post. Images help to provide an emotional connection and a deep, personal connection with the reading audience.

Always Test Your Content Yourself

You can test your blog yourself by assuming you are a stranger reading what you have posted. You can do this by pretending that you are someone else visiting for the first time then ask yourself the following questions:

How relevant is the post to my needs?
Am I better informed about the subject matter?
Do I feel inspired enough to carry on reading?
Would I rely on this blog for information in future?
Have I seen a clear and better answer to my problem?
Does the blog make for easy reading?

If after this test your answer to all the above questions is in the affirmative, it is a good pointer that you have a good blog post out there which is capable of generating traffic and leads.

Direct Invitation to Act

A call-to-action feature is a must for any blog hoping to generate traffic and leads. It must be visible and strategically displayed on your blog in such a way that it can’t be missed or overlooked by visitors. In addition to your call-to-action, you can also embed links within your content to direct readers to relevant sign-up pages, e-books, gift tokens and even additional relevant pages and or more information.

 

6 Ways to Convert Your Website Visitors to Customers

  The first significant aim of any online marketer is to drive traffic to his/her website. Bearing in mind that your website visitors are just getting to know you the first time they land on your website, it’s not enough to simply drive traffic. You must ensure that their first impression is a good one, and that what you offer is attractive enough to keep bringing them back. If visitors simply come to your site without taking any further action on your website and indeed making a purchase, what you have are mere visitors instead of customers which you really need. What you can do is some quick optimization on your website to transform visitors into repeat buying customers. That takes some efforts which you must be ready to make to put your website in the right shape to convert visitors to customers. Note carefully that none of these ways must stand alone if you want good results. To be effective, they need to be used strategically together to match your customer journey from introduction to sale. That requires some marketing skills because in reality, it takes dedication and time to build worthwhile, long-term relationships.

Here are some 6 tested and proven ways to convert visitors with relative ease.

01. Making Your Website Attractive

First, be sure your website is easy to use and user-friendly thereby making it very attractive to users. You must therefore invest in its design and deployment. Since quality design starts with the user experience, you’ve got to make sure your website is easy to navigate and user-friendly. You can add smart search functionality, streamlining the checkout process, and optimizing the mobile experience to make it attractive to all classes of users. That is the main reason you need quality website design because it generally takes a few seconds for users to form an opinion about your website. The design plays some role in helping them to decide whether or not they are staying or leaving. 


 
02. Improving Your Website Loading Speed

 Loading speed is also very important. Having settled for a good design, you can then boost the performance of the site. The faster the site loads, the better it is at increasing your sales. A professional website developer can help increase the loading speed of your site if you are unable to do it yourself by working on reducing the sizes of the images on the site, porting to a good Web Host and tinkering with your CDN, Content Delivery Network.

03. Improving Your Customer Support

This is rather obvious. The better you treat your customers, the more patronage you get from them. Quick and timely response to customer concerns helps keep customers. The use of auto-responders on your website can be very helpful for your customer support efforts. Anytime your site visitors have questions and concerns, it somehow gets in the way of their buying decisions. The quicker and faster you address these concerns, the faster they make their buying decisions. If it habitually takes you too long to address customer concerns, many simply move elsewhere in search of their needs.

04. Having a Captivating Landing Page

What your site needs is not just a landing page, but a “call-to-action” landing page. That is what helps in the conversion process. No doubt you are aware that Landing Pages are single, direct pages that encourage users to take a specific action. They help provide the “bait” and when the visitor “bites”, you simply get yourself a new customer. Landing pages are really useful to increase email lists, signups, social sharing, giving out gifts and eBooks, discount coupons and so many other token items which help to arrest the attention of visitors getting them to act in a predictable way.

05. Working on Your Click-Through-Rates, CTR

A CTR is a very smart way to measure your site users’ activities on your website. It usually results from a very clear invitation to some form of benefit or reward tucked away somewhere in your website. An effective CTR occurs when users know what exactly is in it for them if they honour your Call-To-Action, CTA. If they know before hand, they are more likely to take real action to get it. Hyper-specific Call-To-Actions, CTAs like “Click here for your discount code” have been known to work wonders in landing pages and even blog posts to generate high CTRs.

06. Integrating a Blog

These days, nearly every online marketer is into content marketing or direct blogging. Everyone out there online is looking for information and people get attracted to where they get information which helps them to take informed decisions. Integrating a blog in your website can serve that purpose. When people trust and respect the information your blog provides, that helps to convey some form of authority. That is the attraction which keeps people coming back for more. That way, with a smart call to action, CTA, you can convert such visitors to customers.

 

Importance of Audience Targeting in Digital Marketing

To target your audience effectively, first you must correctly identify who exactly they are and collect as much information about them as you can find. Doing so involves a considerable amount of time and resources which most marketers can least afford. Audience targeting is not only all-important, it is the foundation of every marketing component most marketers ever implement. If you are able to target your audience correctly, it is almost a given that your messaging, content and effectiveness will attract, convert and retain connections to customers more effectively and efficiently.


 
Here are some credible ways to check costs and save some time in digital marketing using audience targeting.

Content Creation:

When you know exactly who your target audience is, it is fairly easy for you to determine correctly, their interests, needs, concerns and desires. This information helps you to create content that speaks to and on those issues intelligently. Doing so helps you to attract traffic efficiently to your message, your content, your website or blog.

Content Sharing:

You can’t share content effectively without knowing the interests of your target audience. If you know their interest, that information allows you to share content that focuses pointedly on them. Sharing content that interests your audience readily creates affinity and connection with them. That somehow manages to open the much desired door into the world of your prospects. By targeting the correct audience with the correct shared content, somehow, you get to open to them the many opportunities your business provides.

Paid Media Targeting:

Since this involves some costs, you must be sure of what you are doing before you get involved. To use paid search marketing or paid social media marketing efficiently, be sure that your audience targeting is accurate. If not, you will be dissipating valuable energy and resources needlessly. If you spend money on digital media advertising that is not specific to your proper audience target, it is akin to blindly throwing money away. A real waste no doubt! Proper audience targeting is what makes paid media advertising effective. Anything contrary is a clear waste of time and resources which you can least afford.

Website Ads/Messaging:

Experts always say, “Know your customers well enough before you can successfully sell to them.” If you don’t know who your target audience is, how will you know the specific solution that your product or service can address for them? If the messages on your website or blog are untargeted, that will make it ineffective. Most internet surfers always have “the attention span of a crazy gnat.” For that reason, your website or blog always manages to get a few seconds of their attention if they drop by. If your messaging is targeting the wrong audience, that time span may not be enough for you to retain their attention long enough to notice your message and be influenced by it. So, if you fail to retain their attention long enough, it adversely affects your ability to earn their business. Meaning, you are needlessly wasting your time and resources without results.


 

Expert Blogger Marketing Tip: Create the Content Your Readers Want

 Content! Content!! Content!!! That’s what brings readers to your blog. Depending on the nature of the blog, you’ll find that readers want to be entertained or educated. Highly successful bloggers know that and invest their time and effort to create focused content to meet their readers’ needs. They know that when your content is good, educating, informative and entertaining, readers keep coming back in good numbers. That is exactly what online marketers want to happen and their businesses do make something out of this traffic.

As most bloggers know, quality and consistency are more important than quantity when it comes to content. That is why it profits many bloggers highly if they commit to producing high-quality, relevant content on a consistent basis which their readers will come to depend on for a regular cadence of fresh content. Doing that consistently and over time, you’ll manage to build a loyal following of readers who are always hungry for more. The more good quality content you dish out to them, the more they keep coming back for more. That keeps the traffic in regular inflow and it benefits your business no end.

6 Techniques to Blog Like a Pro

According to online marketing experts, nearly everyone now blogs to support their businesses. That is content marketing. You may be aware that blogging and creating other types of online content can provide a big boost to your small business marketing strategy. However, be informed that it takes a lot of planning to actually make content work toward your main business goals. If you are already into it or you want to commence blogging, there are blogging techniques you can deploy to get results like a pro. Here are some of such techniques.

01. Create Content That Gets Real Traffic and Links: The essence of blogging is to get traffic to your business. This you can do by using effective ways to increase links to your blog and improving your reach. That means you must always put a very good content out there. You can improve this content to make it more shareable particularly on Social Media.

02. Use Your Blog to Improve Your Business’s Online Reputation: The fierce battle for reputation is what makes online marketing tick. It is your business reputation that contributes largely to bringing customers to your business again and again. For that reason, no matter where you blog, you must pay particular attention to reviews and feedbacks relating to the content you are sharing. That helps you to monitor and work to improve on what is said about your business online.  One credible way to build a good online reputation!

03. Choose and Use the Right Keywords for Your Blog Niche: This technique is as old as content marketing itself and pros always emphasize it. If you want online surfers/readers to easily find your blog content by way of organic search, you need to deploy some SEO techniques. This will require you to choose and use some relevant keywords to your blog niche. That is called optimization which could be a bit tricky at times. SEO may pose a bit of technical challenges, so, if you are unable do it yourself, you can pay experts to help optimize your blog for you.

04. Always Provide Your Readers Personalized Content: This is very important for blogging. It shows you are an expert at something which you are able and willing to share it. If you habitually share sufficient good content regularly, you quickly get many readers hooked up to your blog. Posting generalized content on your blog may not solve specific problems your readers want solved. So, finding ways to create personalized content that is useful to an exact target audience is what works to get readers/traffic to your blog.

05. Use Customer and Competitive Research to Shape Your Blogging: Here, the use of Google Analytics comes in very handy. With it, you can research on and also “spy” on your customers and competitors to know what works for them and what doesn’t. Digging into customer and competitor data can help you find out which type of content gets the best results. That way, you can redesign your own content to better their results using Google Analytics research information.

06. Get More Email Subscribers for Your Blog: This takes a bit of time to set up and to garner sufficient emails. But, once up and running, it is a very good source of reliable traffic. You can lure your readers with token gifts like eBooks to get their emails. Your blog can also be designed with email subscription options which ensure your readers actually see your blog content as soon as it is posted. With their subscribed email addresses, your blog gets right in their inboxes as soon as you make the post.