Popular Social Media Platforms You Can Make Money On

A huge number of people worldwide are active on social media but very few really get to make money on it. Many of these people merely use social media to socialize and make fun but without any thoughts whatsoever to make money. Aside from not having the right business ideas to do so, what each social media platform offers and how that can help in the process of making money is usually lost on many. Well, here is the good news. If you have the right business ideas and you are able to take advantage of what each social media platform offers, there is a lot of money to be made on social media. To make money on social media, you must first ensure you have many followers you can easily influence through your content. Next is to monetize your social media accounts in various platforms to make money. Here is how the numbers stack up to enhance that effort in some of the most popular platforms.

 
On Instagram, you need a minimum of 5,000 Instagram followers and some 300 plus sponsored posts a year to generate good income.

On Facebook, you need to have at least 10,000 followers and 30,000 +1 minute views.

On YouTube, you will need at least 1,000 subscribers and some 4,000 watch hours in a year to start earning.

On Twitter, you need at least 10,000 followers and 10,000 re-tweets to earn good income.

Now let’s look at what the individual platforms have to offer to help users make money. You can take good advantage of the in-house marketing tools of most of the under listed social media platforms to help you make money on the platforms.

Facebook: You can make money by promoting other brands, affiliate marketing, selling your products and posting sponsored content.

Twitter: You can make money by tweeting as a ghost writer, do affiliate marketing, sell your own products, or work as an influencer.

Pinterest: You can make money by promoting a brand, promoting affiliate products and selling your products.

LinkedIn: You can make money by placing ads for brands using affiliate links and selling your products and or services.

Instagram: You can make money by partnering with a brand, pushing affiliate links and getting revenue from ads played on their IGTV videos.

YouTube: You can use this platform to market your video content, do affiliate marketing, sponsored posts and collaborate with brands to market their products.

7 Small Business Online Marketing Tips

Effective small business marketing can undoubtedly help your business to thrive online. Through small business marketing, you can seize the opportunity to tell others what you do and why they should patronize you or become your clients/customers. Since you do not expect people to simply show up and start spending their money on your business, you must actively market to hem. Doing so need not be unduly expensive if you know what you are doing. The essence is to create a huge online visibility for your brand at the lowest cost. For cost-effectiveness, most small businesses rely more on social media and email marketing to help promote their brands.

To increase online visibility for your small business, these small business-marketing tips can help you out.

1. Have a User-Friendly Website

It is very essential in small business marketing to have a functional and user-friendly website. A website serves as your business window in virtual space. It is where online visitors first get in contact with your business. That makes it about the most important part of small business marketing. Your website must be hosted well, and with up-to-date information about your business at all times. Make sure your website is optimized with the right keywords to make it visible to search engines. If your website is visible to search engines, they send organic traffic to the site thereby making it easy online for your potential customers to find your business.

2. Define and Promote Your Brand

Your brand must be well defined online to enable it compete effectively. You get better results if it is the brand story you consistently share with your audience. Small business marketing relies and thrives better on a well-defined brand that your audience easily understands and remembers. For this reason, how you tell the story of your brand is hugely important. If well done, it makes it easier for your consumers to connect easily and engage with your product/service.

3. Be Active in Your Local Community

Many expert marketers like to say, “Every business is local.” All small businesses are integral parts of the local community. Therefore, actively engaging with your local community is a crucial part of small business marketing. If you are active in your community, your small business will no doubt thrive well in that community. Google reports that a very large percentage of online searches are now local searches for avenues to do business. You must explore all viable avenues to put your business in the hearts and minds of people in your local community. You earn better patronage as a result.

4. Market with Video Content

Video content on your website is hugely attractive to customers who want to find out about you and your products in an easy way. How-to videos are a quick and effective way to help such customers. The reason they are attractive and are increasingly the preferred way people rely on to quickly find information about your small businesses online. If the video on your website is authentic and informative enough, it can easily get people to click on your content to know more about what you are offering. To enhance that, you can pack your ideas and expertise in a 30 seconds video to share to your customers. You get better results from video content that way.

5. Engage in Social Media Marketing

For most small businesses, their marketing budgets are always hugely limited. They tend to make up for that by spending more time marketing on social media because social media marketing is cost-effective and very cheap. That is what makes social media marketing very attractive. Social media allows you to be a part of your local community and your industry community sharing your brand info easily. Social media is a great way to easily share what you are doing and what your business is all about to a huge audience at the touch of a button. By posting fresh content on your social media sites regularly, and using relevant hashtags to make sure you find your audience, you can use social media to attract people to your website. If you choose the right social media platforms, it allows you to take your business to where your potential customers are on social media. You get better patronage as a result.

6. Be Open to Continuous Learning

Internet marketing is a continuously evolving business. You must know at all times what is working and what is trending. That requires continuous learning and education if you want to improve on your marketing efforts. It is not only imperative for you to stay on top of the changes and trends in your business sector but also on top of the new tricks and tips of marketing online. It helps to be open to continuous learning by following industry experts on social media, taking free online courses, signing up for marketing newsletters and industry bulletins, reading great articles about the latest changes and best practices in online marketing.

7. Measure Your Efforts with Analytics

You need the generous use of free online analytics tools to generate and analyze data to measure the progress you are making in your marketing activities. Without this analysis, it is difficult if not impossible for you to know how well you are using your time and resources in your marketing efforts. Put bluntly, you cannot easily determine your ROI without analytics. By using Google Analytics and or other services, you easily determine how well you are doing in your marketing efforts. Data generated from the open-rates and click-through rates on your emails and the engagement and ROI you are getting from your social media and email campaigns, can be carefully analyzed for decision-making. These decisions revolve around what to change, what to drop and what to improve upon. You can easily decide on how to adjust what you are doing even if it involves changing your marketing message a bit. That allows you to take advantage of new search terms as well as deciding where to spend more time and money on social media depending on which of the platforms is doing better in terms of engagement.

How to Get a Better ROI from Your Video Content

There are some Google reports indicating that more than 80% of online users usually opt for video content. Smart digital marketers know this, the reason they tend to take video content marketing very seriously. The Return On Investment, ROI for video content marketing is high and it gets better with better video content marketing practices. Here are ten powerful tips to help you get better ROI from your video content marketing efforts.

1. Define Your Business

If your videos are unable to effectively project your marketing business, they’re not worth the efforts. Videos that expressly define your business and get people to do business with you get good ROI for your business. People are easily drawn to and tend to prefer watching videos that tell them who you are and what you are offering them in a short and straightforward manner. Videos that help to define and market your business well tend to attract better emotional connect, and sales from the viewers. Such videos give a better ROI.

 

2. Make Your Videos Searchable

Only searchable videos get discovered online. Since search engines particularly Google have found a way to index videos, searchable videos now give better content marketing results. Using the right SEO techniques on your videos makes them visible to search engines. If your videos are searchable, anytime someone somewhere around the world is looking for an image with a specific phrase/expression associated with your video, your videos stand a very good chance of turning up in response to the search inquiries. That greatly increases their chances of getting found online as “related videos” in the search results. This development is good for the inbound traffic of your business and the ROI.

3. Plan Your Video Posts

If you want your video content marketing efforts to yield good results, be sure you have a posting plan for your videos. Random video posting easily gets your audience confused and the results are severely limited as a result. If you have a plan and you stick with that plan, it gets your audience anticipatory. That way, if you post a good content say about once a week, it gets your audience to anticipate it and at times actually go out to look for it. Your video content is better viewed as a result. When your audience shows sufficient interest in your video content, it means that it attracts their curiosity. That helps your business towards its marketing goals in terms of better sales and ultimately a very good ROI.
 
4. Optimize Your Videos

In video content marketing, shooting attractive videos is just not enough to help your marketing efforts if such videos are not visible to search engines. You need to apply SEO techniques using the right keywords and a perfect video description on your video content to make it visible and attractive to search engines. SEO helps search engines to index your videos and to better rank them in their SERPs thereby increasing their visibility. When your videos rank high in the SERPs of search engines, they tend to get more traffic that is organic. Organic traffic is by far a cheaper way to get traffic online enabling you to spend less, earn more, and consequently have a better ROI in your business.

5. Run PPC Ads with Your Videos

If you make your videos as per Pay-Per-Click or PPC ads, they tend to grab more views and engagements. Better engagement leads your video content viewers to click on your videos. If your PPC video ads are performing well, you get better traffic, more leads and sales all with lower ads amounts spent. That helps to get a better ROI in your business.

6. Tell Good Stories with Your Videos

Expert marketers say, fusing stories into your video content is one great way to improve watcher commitment. The more people watch your videos online, the more traffic, leads and sales they attract to your business. Once you build up your story, and use videos to impart it attractively to your audience, that amounts to the only major investment you have on the video. Everything the video does for your business thereafter helps to better the ROI.

 

 

7. Use How-To Exercises and Demos Videos

How-to videos are about the most effective content marketing videos online. If you are a marketer, what most consumers really want to see is how your product/service can help solve a problem for them. A real practical demonstration, that is! Videos with clear instructional exercises, unboxing and demos tend to better facilitate consumers’ interests. Such videos assist them with feeling certain about their choice to buy a specific item or take on a specific service. This greatly helps to convert a greater number of your site visitors to satisfied customers thus helping with a better ROI.

8. Analyze Your Video Results

Good Analytics free online tools and Social Media Insights are helpful to analyze and periodically gauge how your business is doing. They help you to evaluate accurately the results you are getting from your video content marketing efforts. Presently, videos have come to acquire an enormous measure of authority in the realm of online advertising. More and more people are increasingly relying on videos to make their buy decisions online. This is the why you must constantly analyze your videos to be sure they are giving you results as expected. That information empowers you to have an appreciable degree of knowledge about your videos in comparison to other contents on your website. With that knowledge, you can always rejig your video content marketing strategy for better results particularly on the ROI.
 
9. Showcase Your Star Customers on Videos

It is a good marketing strategy to urge and even actively encourage your star customers to make videos of themselves while actively using your products. If they do so, you can present the videos on your web-based life profiles and sites displaying them in action. That is one very good testimonial for your business anytime any day. Naturally, people love seeing themselves in videos. Promoting these videos with these customers can as well turn them into some kind of stars. If that happens and such individuals see themselves in promos online, they can quickly share these videos to friends, family and even widely on social media. The ROI from such efforts can be really huge for your business.
 
10. Use Call-To-Action on Your Videos

Videos that tell a great story without as much as telling viewers what to do next can hardly help the ROI of your business. That is where Call-To-Action, CTA on your videos is hugely important. If visitors hit your website, view your impressive videos and they have no clue about what to do after they watch these videos, you may be wasting your precious time and money with limited results. If for instance, you are talking on video and you cannot request your viewers to take a direct action in your presentation, you are missing out the all-important CTA. By using a backlinked text invitation to a site where you expect the video viewers to take some kind of direct action, that is also a good CTA. CTAs help video contents to garner more clicks, more leads, and more sales and ultimately better ROI. 

Digital Marketers' Most Popular Digital Marketing Formats

Marketers who have unfettered access to the internet from a computer, smartphone, or any other connected device can easily get involved with digital marketing. They need digital marketing for their advertising and other business promotional activities on the internet. The concept of digital marketing has grown over time to include a wide variety of activities, platforms, and methods that can help marketers succeed in their online businesses in our increasingly connected world of the internet. Digital marketers depend on various content formats to get out their promotional messages on the internet. Before deciding on which of the popular formats to adopt for your own marketing efforts, there is a need to research your audience and determine what they are most likely to favorably respond to.



The most popular of these formats are:

Graphic/Display Ads

Graphic ads are carefully designed and attention-grabbing visual ads popular among digital marketers because of their effectiveness in advertising. The graphics in them are purposefully designed to effectively capture viewers’ attention even when they convey only some small amount of information. They are effective at arousing curiosity and encouraging viewers to click on the ads to get more information. That way, they greatly help to boost brand recognition and reputation online. They can be interspersed with video clips and other online content for better effects. Even if used directly on a website or used on social media platforms, the effects of the graphics help capture readers’ attention for the benefit of the promotional efforts.

Video Content

Now that major search engines have found a way to index videos online, they have become very effective promotional materials for online marketers.  When used on extreme popular online video platforms like YouTube, video content has become increasing popular with digital marketers. With the increasing popularity and prevalence of sharing videos on social media platforms and other places online, video content is now a significant and dependable marketing ally for major players in the Internet marketing world. Irrespective of the type of internet business you are involved with, you can deliberately shoot short marketing videos, teaching videos, fun videos and introductory how-to videos about any particular task or product of your choice. Such videos help to promote in no small measure, such businesses effectively.

Textual Content

This is about the most popular promotional format popular with digital marketers. Anyone who knows how to write a message or a description can promote with textual content. That is the real reason textual content now accounts for a majority of the digital marketing efforts used around the world today. When crafted professionally, textual content can be very effective as website page content, blog posts, social media posts, PPC ads, email marketing and much more. The effect of textual content is more and better if it is optimized for search engines. What that means is that, for every piece of text you use in your overall promotion strategy, it should include proper SEO and valuable information or solutions your reading audience really needs. These actions somehow have the effect of acting as some sort of cold actions which help to draw the attention of your reading audience closer to the end goal which in this case is a click, a lead and or purchase.