5 Tips to Market your E-commerce Website

It is not enough to just set up your e-commerce website. You must effectively market it to attract business online. If you market your website well enough, you can significantly grow your business online. These days, more and more people are increasingly taking to online shopping, but if your e-commerce store is not easily accessible on the internet, clearly you are losing significant online business. If your e-commerce store is properly registered on the web, it must have a domain name and reputable web host. It is through this domain name that internet users can use to reach your website. That means, it is your online business address. This is the address together with its link you must market online to enable internet users find your business and possibly do business with you online. Following are some excellent tips you can effectively use to market your website.

1. Social Media Marketing

With over 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media has become one huge market and an effective way to promote businesses online. Promoting your website on social media is fairly easy. Just explore all ways to create visibility for your business website on some of the most popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the likes. If your marketing budget can accommodate it, you can promote your website by way of social media ads. Creating good quality content consistently and sharing it on the platforms is one great way to grow your website traffic. As your website traffic grows, so is the popularity of the website.

2. Search Engine Optimization, SEO

If you want your website to be noticed, indexed and ranked by search engines, explore all ways to make it SEO-friendly. This you can do by making sure the content you share on the site, all the existing pages and info on the web pages all carry select keywords to make the website SEO-friendly. To remain in this condition, you must check out your SEO regularly with online SEO tools to be sure it is doing what you expect it to do in terms of website performance. This ultimately helps your website to rank high on the SERPs of search engines. If your website ranks high on these pages, it benefits from higher organic traffic. This means it is increasingly popular and reaching wider audiences online.

3. Offer Educational Services

One other great way to market your website is to offer free educational courses out of the site. Depending on your skills and inclinations, you can offer quality webinars and podcasts to promote your website. Blogging out of the website by sharing high quality educational and informative content is another effective way to market your website. You can select any topic you blog about and get an expert to teach how-to techniques through free podcasts. This can help you to market your website and grow your business.

4. Write Email Newsletter

If you already have a responsive email list built up, writing and sending a valuable newsletter to this email list is a great way to market your website and business. You may decide to send this newsletter weekly, bi- monthly or monthly. If it manages to get to your email list audience, your customers and even visitors to your website, it can help promote the website.

5. Guest Blogging

Aside blogging out of your own website, guest blogging is also a good way to market your website. Through these efforts, you can write regular guest posts for well-known relevant and reputable websites with a link back to your website on the content or in your author bio section depending on what the guest blogging website permits. By this arrangement, finding a quality website to write quality content for as a guest blogger is no doubt a great way to market your website.
 
Wrapping Up

Content marketing is generally acceptable to most online marketers and business owners as crucial to growing and promoting their businesses online. Either in combination or used singly, digital marketing techniques like search engine marketing, social media marketing, guest blogging, email marketing, teaching free webinars and podcasts come in very handy in this quest to effectively market your website and grow your business online.

Best Ways to Generate Leads for your Online Business

The need for leads generation in your online business is to boost sales even though the process can be a bit tricky. It is usually a step-by-step process that requires resource planning and investments that you must decide upon at every stage. For best results, you must be able to leverage as many online digital channels as possible to generate good leads. No matter the size of your online business, these here lead generation tactics can help your business to grow. If you follow these tips, they’ll help you to generate the right leads to grow your online business.

 

Optimize your Digital Presence

Optimizing your digital presence is a perfect way to maintain and grow the virtual presence of a business and attract leads to the business. This is one of the best ways to get leads to your business. Optimization is a technical way of using selected keywords on your content to attract the attention of search engines. Through this SEO effort, search engines particularly Google will rank your website higher in its SERPs. That means more organic traffic and consequently leads. Therefore, one of the best techniques to generate leads online is to keep up with ever-evolving Google Algorithms. This you can do by applying the latest SEO techniques to the content published on your website.

Effective Email Marketing

If properly deployed with effective segmentation and automation, email marketing is a great way to generate leads online for free. As most digital marketers very well know, email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to make people aware of your brand and services online. By deploying emails to drop customized newsletters, promotions, event notifications, and generally create awareness about a product/service, business owners easily generate leads extensively through these activities. If you craft your emails to be short and crisp, carrying the right intro and marketing purpose, having good aesthetics particularly good photos/graphics/images, making sure to include the right CTAs, and launched extensively in a well-planned and executed marketing campaign, they tend to generate more and better leads for a business. If you package your emails in regular newsletters to your email subscribers, it is a good way to grow your brand reputation and consequently generate more leads for the business. Widely sending cold emails is quite useful to help improve your chances of getting leads and converting them into sales/revenues.

Guest Blogging

Blogging is a fantastic content marketing activity business owners can always take advantage of online. That is exactly why guest blogging is one of the most creative ways to generate leads for a business. Guest blogs are done to promote the website content of a business with the help of other blog websites. Technically, guest blogging is the process of publishing your blogs by mutual arrangement and agreement on other websites besides yours. You must be generally good and recognized as a good blogger to effectively pull guest blogging off. If you are good at it, you can publish your blogs on third-party websites mostly for free to get traffic and leads and at times even through paid guest blogging services as well. Depending on the blogging conditions of the third party guest blogging website, you may be allowed CTAs on your blog posts. Such CTAs in combination with catchy blog titles and high quality and informative blog content, can be really great for leads generation and conversion rates. 

 
Build and Grow your Presence on Social Media

With about 4.6 billion active users worldwide, social media has gradually become one huge market out there online. The most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and the likes are platforms business owners now take advantage of to generate leads and sales. These platforms also have unique in-house tools to help business owners market and grow their businesses through leads generation and effective sales pitches. How do business owners take advantage of social media? This they do by consistently posting highly informative content on the platforms and sharing it widely. Business owners who have a large following on social media platforms benefit from viral sharing of their content, higher engagement with the content, and increased feedback. These activities are great for leads generation.

Work with Social Media Influencers

Working with social media Influencers through Influencer collaborations is one of the most effective ways online businesses generate leads and convert them into sales/revenues. The rapid growth and wider popularity of social media platforms has thrown up social media Influencers. These are persons who have very large following on social media platforms. Their activities play a huge role in influencing the behaviors of their followers. Business owners who are able to collaborate and work with social media Influencers tend to benefit immensely from the activities of these Influencers. Influencer activities are a great way to get leads for a business. Business owners can arrange this collaboration based on their niche business and the type of content that suits their business. If you create content in form of how-to videos, Influencers can help endorse these videos, recommend your products to their huge following or craft content for them with links to your product. Through these activities, Influencer marketing is also considered one great way to generate leads.
 
Ask for Reviews and Customer Testimonials

If you have a bit of experience in Internet marketing, you’ll know how great customer reviews and testimonials can be in leads generation. This is why most business owners directly ask for customers’ reviews and testimonials. These testimonials play a very huge role in helping to create a positive image of your business on the minds of people who come across and read reviews about your business. Business reviews are the first things potential customers, financiers and potential business partners rely on to gauge the reputation of your business. In the Internet world, reputation matters a lot to build trust along the way. It is smart marketing therefore to ensure that good reviews are easily visible on your website and with more clarity to create positive images in the minds of whosoever gets to read them. This is why reviews and testimonials are also top creative ways to generate leads for your business. Reviews and customer testimonials are particularly very useful to build the trust factor for a business. This helps the business to attract a great percentage of leads.

Use Referrals to Attract Leads

Referrals are usually quite suitable for already existing customers and affiliate marketers to invite new customers. It is a highly effective lead generation technique. Referrals are also considered one of the most trustworthy and effective ways to attract engagements. Participating referrers and affiliate marketers are usually in it for a benefit. Such benefits range from commissions, discounts and exclusive coupons which the referrers earn when they generate sales, sign-ups and leads.

Organize Webinars and Seminars

When properly used, webinars and seminars are also very effective to pass important information or even educate a large group of people. Business owners effectively use them to market products/services. If they are advertised well advance and with attractive packages, webinars and seminars can be very effective to educate potential customers about the products/services on sale. They are thus helpful to attract potential customers who became leads courtesy of the webinar/seminar. Technically, social media platforms, video conferencing apps, and many more of suchlike tools are quite helpful in creating and organizing webinars/seminars. They’re very good lead generators as a result. Seminars and webinars are in a class of their own. They are very effective lead generation strategies that help make potential customers aware of brands and products in the market.

Summary

Generating leads for a business takes time and proper planning using the right techniques and marketing channels. The foregoing techniques are very handy to help your business generate leads. If you fail to use the right techniques to generate leads, you risk wasting your time and resources on a merry-go-round without tangible results. Lead generation is hugely important to help stimulate your business growth. Therefore, taking positive and deliberate steps to generate leads is good for your online business.

6 Proven Tips to Market Your Content for Effectiveness

Regular happenings in the digital and real worlds greatly affect trends in the content marketing space. This is why businesses must always explore all ways to adapt to these changes, without which they’ll usually have issues with their growth patterns. The immediate response should be through their content marketing strategy even though that at times may not even be enough. If marketers can implement the right content marketing strategy taking into account the happenings in the digital and real worlds in combination with artificial intelligence content creation, targeting their audience’s emotions and maintaining good quality content at all times, they can have a very effective content for marketing purposes.

 

Here are proven tips that can help your content marketing to be more effective and result-oriented.

Tip 1. Empathetic and Emotional Content Marketing

If you want the attention of your audience, try to write content with emotion and empathy. Audiences engage more with empathizing and emotional content. It is therefore hugely essential for you to know your audience well enough. You must relate with them not just as customers but as humans with distinct and unique emotions, perspectives, and lifestyles of their own. With this in mind, you can easily create a content strategy that ideally suits the needs and desires of your audience. If your audience feels you and realizes you care about them, it engenders more authentic and beneficial relationships. That is largely why empathetic and emotional content is a major key to any successful content marketing strategy.

Tip 2. Artificial intelligence, AI Marketing

These days, you cannot market content successfully of you ignore Artificial intelligence, AI. The reason AI is currently gaining a lot of attention in content marketing. Content marketers use AI content writing to help them build a much more effective and efficient content strategy, particularly when integrated with human efforts. AI helps to save time in content writing while at the same time maintaining high quality. This is why many content writing tools employ AI content creation to save time and resources and better the customer experience. Content writing software like Instoried for instance helps content writers to add empathy to their content, thereby making the content more engaging. In addition, Instoried software comes with an article plagiarism checker that helps content writers to write original content for their blogs.

Tip 3. More Interactive Content

Your content engages better if you write more interactive content. The more your audience engages and interacts with your content, the better content experience they have. The better content experience they have, the more the conversions and leads the content attracts. The best way to ensure you offer the type of content that is engaging and interactive is to use more infographics, quizzes, questionnaires, polls, and interactive eBooks in your content. It is a great and result-oriented marketing strategy to add them to the landing pages of your websites and your social media platforms.

Tip 4. More Video Marketing

Online marketers have since discovered that video marketing is a very effective marketing strategy. This has been confirmed by reliable survey reports. A recent survey conducted by Hubspot confirmed that 76% of marketers referred to ‘video’ as the most effective content format. Therefore, if you want your marketing to really stand out, go for video as your main marketing format. When you create videos, your marketing manages to form deeper connections with your audience. That way, you can easily capture their attention and market better to them. 

Tip 5. Prioritize Quality Content

In content marketing, content remains king. The better the content you are offering, the better its effects on your audience and most particularly your customers. Good content helps to better enhance your customer experience. This is why customer experience is one of the most essential criteria for digital marketing strategy. If therefore you are able to prioritize quality content, you can ensure a great customer experience. That takes a bit of work and diligence though. You can only provide quality content to your audience if your research is up to the mark and you are up to date with the latest happenings in your industry. In particular, it is critical for you to know what your target audience seems to be interested in at any time. That way, you can better market to them. This serves your marketing strategy better than merely churning out mediocre content every day. For effectiveness therefore, you must make sure your content is unique and of very high quality, even if it means not being able to share content too frequently. Never forget to check your content for plagiarism and grammatical errors. If you don’t, your readers and search engines will take note.

Tip 6. More Webinars and Live Videos

Webinars and live videos are now becoming increasingly popular in digital marketing. This is mostly due to the convenience and ease involved with their uses particularly amongst business professionals. Most B2B professionals watch at least one webinar every week. They find a great use for them because they add authenticity to content and help brands offer an interactive customer experience. Most brands succeed more with webinars and live videos in their marketing strategy because webinars and live videos provide a genuinely engaging experience even without directly promoting products/services.

Wrapping Up

What marketers really need in times like these is innovative content marketing strategy. Part of that strategy is by having more emphasis on empathetic, interactive, and quality content and using AI for various content marketing needs. Marketers need to also keep track of content marketing trends and incorporate them into their marketing strategy. Doing so enables them to stay a step ahead the competition. This competitive edge will endure only if they manage to innovatively market with webinars and live videos to drive high engagement.

How Affiliate Marketing Business Really Works

For years entrepreneurs have earned some sort of compensations for referring customers to other businesses even without implicitly referring to the business model as affiliate marketing. That has changed with the advent and popularity of eCommerce. E-commerce thrives on a reciprocal business model of earning and paying commissions out of sales made. That is affiliate marketing in its simplest form. The affiliate earns a commission from the sales generated with his affiliate link while the product merchant pays the commission as per agreed terms and conditions. This business model of incentivizing referrals somehow creates a mutually beneficial arrangement where both parties are motivated to help each another.

 

Becoming an affiliate is simple. Just choose a company whose products you’ll like to promote then sign up. After signing up, you can then commence promoting the products’ links of the company in numerous places and online channels. The affiliate relationship may entail many diverse actions but the commonest is generating sales and earning commissions on your efforts. As long as the clicks come from your unique affiliate links, in-house cookies will track the customer all the way to the final action. That is when the affiliate is entitled to a commission that could range from 5-10% of the sale depending on the program. Because of the cost-effectiveness and easy accessibility of affiliate marketing, the business model has managed to become a global phenomenon. According to credible online statistics, here is why:

•    Affiliate marketing is credited with up to 16% of all online purchases. Really huge.
•    About 80% of affiliate marketers expect their revenue to keep growing.
•    About 80% of brands now have affiliate marketing programs.
•    Presently, the global industry is valued at around $12 billion. Awesome no doubt.

These staggering statistics make affiliate marketing worth the while as a business model and a veritable avenue for making money online. Anyone can make money with affiliate marketing if they choose to. But you must first understand how it works, how to do it and how to apply yourself adequately to the pursuit. If you do, your earning potential is limitless.

The question then is, will you? Then here is what it takes.

You must be able to market vigorously and target your ads sharply. Targeting is hugely essential for affiliate marketing to work well. Irrespective of whatsoever role you are playing in an affiliate marketing strategy, your marketing must always be well targeted for it to work. That is rather obvious. If your marketing is not well targeted, reactions to it will be poor. If people don’t click on your affiliate links and take the desired action, you can’t earn a commission. That is simple enough I suppose. You get the best results by promoting your affiliate links where your target audience will be looking. Expert affiliate marketers recommend the following locations amongst others.

•    Training sessions
•    Blog articles
•    Email campaigns
•    Newsletters
•    Webinars
•    PPC (pay-per-click) ads
•    Social media posts
•    Video content
•    Google My Business platform

Depending on the products you are marketing, you can use all or some of these avenues to promote your affiliate links. You must however explore all ways to be deliberate and precise in your marketing efforts. As even a rookie marketer very well knows, promoting affiliate links to the wrong audience is all a wasted effort you can least afford.

7 Proven Ways to Make Money from your Blog

Most bloggers blog these days just to make money. You can too if you are able write a blog that most people want to read. The more popular your blog is with readers, the more money you can make from it. You do require some blogging skills though which you must master before starting out. Even with blogging skills, you need a bit of time, determination, hard work, testing and retesting before you can expect to make some impact in the highly competitive business of blogging.

Here now are 7 proven ways to make money from your blog as recommended by the pros.

#1.Affiliate Programs

If your blog is up and running, with some appreciable followership, you can sign up for some affiliate programs. After signing up and getting registered, you can then decide on some products/services related to your blog niche which you can help promote. These are products/services you will be earning commissions on as a blog publisher affiliate. These commissions will be paid by the product merchants depending on how much sales your blog is able to generate for them. There are many affiliate programs you can sign up with online but the most popular are Clickbank, SFI, Amazon Associates and Linkshare. These are the programs that already have good reputations and are working with thousands of affiliates. They pay good commissions too.


 
#2.Webinars

If you know something technical, informative and educative, you can package it in webinars and sell off your blog site. If your webinars are sufficiently helpful to your blog readers, they bring traffic to your blog site as well as helping you to make money from selling webinar slots. You must however ensure that the topics of your webinars relate to your blog niche. They must deal with issues much deeper than what your blog does not routinely deal with while offering how-to and where-to advice on getting things done.

#3.Google Adsense Monetization
 
By the time your blog starts to generate sufficient traffic, you can monetize it with Google Adsense. When you register with Google for Adsense Account, on approval, they start displaying ads on your site. You earn income from these Google ads when your blog readers visit/click on the ads. The more traffic your blog gets, the more income it generates for you from Google ads.

#4.Product Sales

If you have products related to your blog for sale, you can create a storefront in your blog page to sell such products to your blog readers. Even without a physical product to sell, you can create for sale e-products like e-books and sell to your blog readers at very attractive prices.

#5.News Content and Videos

If you are creative enough to add news content and videos on your blog, you don’t only get more and better traffic, you earn more money as a result. Online marketing experts advise that visual contents like videos, graphics and photos somehow help to attract more traffic to your blog than written content. Therefore, by embedding relevant news content and videos on your blog, you stand a very good chance to earn more money as well as very valuable return visitors’ traffic from it.

#6.Private Products Ads

If your blog becomes very popular with good inbound traffic, you can earn income from it by selling private ads related to the blog. It is left to you to decide how much you charge for displaying products banners on the ads space you’ve created on your blog. The more clicks and sales attributable to such banner ads, the more money your blog earns.

#7.Job Board

You can decide to add a Job Board to your blog if your blog provides freelance writing or blogging advice.  By doing so, the Job Board will not only add to your blogging income, it will also be giving your blog readers some good reasons to be returning to your blog. Returning blog readers are very valuable traffic as most expert marketers will tell you. With a Job Board on your blog site, you can then decide to charge advertisers some agreed fees to enable them to place their jobs advertisement on your Job Board for an agreed number of days’ duration. Job seekers then constitute their own unique return traffic back to your blog site since they know they will be able to view and apply for any jobs on your Job Board free of charge. 


 

Can Blogging Really Be a Legitimate Business?

 Blogging is something anyone can do provided they have the passion, knowledge and expertise. It is a legitimate business to the extent that it does not go against any known laws regulating legitimate businesses anywhere in the world. Not every blogger gets to make money and lives on blogging as many people do in other businesses. Successful blogging takes patience, persistence and dedication over a prolonged period of time. Expert bloggers believe that blogging can become a legitimate business career if the blogger can successfully latch on to all the available opportunities to generate revenue through affiliate networks, brand partnerships and even speaker engagements.  


 
Some of such revenue opportunities many bloggers do make money from, include but not limited to:

#1. Display ads. Measured with Google Adsense where income comes from PPV, pay per view or PPC pay per click.
#2. Affiliate Display ads. Income comes from 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. Earned fees from Packaged Courses and Speaker Engagements.
#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 Resource Magazine or Bulletin subscription.

Many bloggers need 2-5 hours daily to develop and add good content to their blogs. That is really time consuming and quite engaging as most other businesses are. This precious time that you may be investing in your blog is similar to what other people invest in their businesses. It needs to be compensated for as well. That compensation somehow comes from the earnings you get from the blog. It counts as legitimate business earnings. Without these earnings from your blogging efforts, it will be very difficult to admit that what you are doing qualifies for a business.

For most bloggers, making money with their blog is readily their most important objective for blogging. The reason they take it as a legitimate business. The better and more consistent they become at it, the more money they make. Many bloggers make averagely $5,000-$20,000 per year with some even posting much higher figures. These revenues come from one of or a combination of the many streams of revenue making opportunities in blogging. That is business no doubt.

Many bloggers now proudly introduce themselves as bloggers to other persons. Some even carry complementary cards identifying them as professional bloggers. These people see blogging as a legitimate business and publicly identify themselves with it. There are persons now known as celebrity bloggers who appear to earn well, live fabulously well and mix freely with the high and mighty in the society. That looks like acceptability which other good businesses confer on people as well. It thus appears that blogging has become a lucrative business judging from the way it has taken off in recent times all over the globe.

These days, anyone who has what it takes can make a career out of blogging. Some few years ago, blogging was considered a mere hobby. That notion has since changed with many high flyer bloggers springing up around the globe.  Everyone now agrees that there are very strong revenue opportunities for content creators who manage to generate a large audience and are very focused and consistent at giving out good quality content which this large audience likes and appreciates. These content creators are great bloggers who see themselves as business persons.



Just like most other businesses, blogging has its own challenges some of which can be very huge and discouraging. One of the biggest challenges within the blogging world now is saturation. Some recent studies project that the number of bloggers in the United States alone will exceed 30 million by year 2020. Now, that is a huge challenge for most bloggers around the world since they all depend on the same cyberspace to get noticed and to struggle to make some impact. However, for those bloggers who have the ability to think outside the box and are able to create interesting content consistently in an ever-changing technological landscape, there is hope. Experts believe such bloggers will be able to excel just like it is in many other businesses which thrive irrespective of stiff competition. Things at times do not pan out to be that easy though because blogging is business, real business, remember?

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.