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Saturday, January 11, 2020

7 Simple Online Business Ideas for Newbies

Online business station with a computer, working tools, a white coffee cup and some cookies.
Do you want to start a business online and still wondering what to do? Here’s what to do! Just get yourself a smart device and internet access then get started in your own business. Just like that! Hundreds of thousands of businesses get started each year and the internet is not saturated just yet. Don’t worry excessively about the numbers getting into business and how to compete. Once you are able to go along with a pretty good business idea, there is ample room out there for you too even if you are a newbie. You can get busy like all others and compete favorably in your own business niche if you are able to stay the course.

Consider these 7 business ideas for starters.

1. Business Brokerage Services

Building and selling a business is now a very lucrative business. The days are long gone when people just built a business and remained stuck with it all their lives. Now, you can build and flip businesses as fast as you can make them profitable. More and more people are simply interested in starting and selling businesses. That is where a business brokerage service becomes imperative. To ease transactions for people buying and selling businesses, business brokers step up to handle the details, making sure everything is in order and in compliance with extant laws. To get involved in business brokerage services, you need to know a bit of business law. In addition, you must endeavor to acquire some specialized knowledge in the industry you’ve chosen to operate in.



 

2. Affiliate Marketing

With or without experience, affiliate marketing is one business you can start pretty quickly. It simple involves positioning yourself to help sell products/services created by other persons and you earn tidy commissions for your efforts. Whether you have a product idea of your own or not is immaterial in affiliate marketing. With it, you don’t necessarily have to bother yourself dealing with customer service, product creation or any other activities relating to running a good business. All you need do is to position yourself well to promote and sell other people’s products/services real good. Tidy commissions come your way for your efforts and you are in business as a result.

3. Online Store

 
You can get into the business of opening and running an online store for your choice product(s). These days, more and more people worldwide are beginning to shop online because of its relative convenience. No doubt these huge numbers of persons need online stores to service them. You too can take a little bit out of Amazons lucrative online business if you work hard at it. All you need do for starters is to set up your own online store, build a strong brand and following. From there, you can commence promoting and selling your own products/services online to make a good income.

4. Bookkeeping Services

Not everyone who is in business knows something about bookkeeping. Business regulating authorities, tax authorities, shareholders and even Financiers require that proper books of accounting be kept for any business.  What a bookkeeper does is to help businesses with their balance sheets, provide income statements and create important financial reports. Anyone who knows some bit of accounting, some maths and is good with numbers can undertake bookkeeping business. The pay is good and you can build a good client base over time. What makes it easy to become a bookkeeper is that in some climes, you don’t necessarily have to be a certified public accountant which requires several years of study and certification.

5. Virtual Assistant Business
 

A virtual assistant business entails providing help to companies and executives to handle routine clerical jobs online. Jobs like servicing customers, handling mails, receiving, filing and distribution of communication to appropriate persons within and outside a business. Some suchlike routine chores which help to save time for executives to be better involved in more important management decision making. As a Virtual Assistant, you get paid for your services as per agreed terms. If you have a reliable access to the internet, you can run a Virtual Assistant business from anywhere. With that, you are well positioned to be involved in outsourcing jobs to any corner of the world thereby helping companies to cut down on running costs and ultimately helping to grow their profit margins.

6. Online Marketing Company

To run an online marketing company, you need a bit of computer savvy. That requires that you know some bit of online technicalities like Search Engine Optimization, SEO, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising and other methods of online marketing. These are imperative because you have to rely on them to fashion out your own marketing strategies which your business needs to succeed. With time, if other businesses notice how good you are at marketing your own products online, it can give them sufficient evidence to take you on as an affiliate to help them market their own products/services as well.

7. Language Translation Services

 
If you have a deep understanding of some foreign languages, you don’t have to compete with Google translate or some other online technology to run a language translation service. While Google does general translation services, yours can be tailored towards very specific needs on demand for branding and marketing services. Such services that really need human touch and people cannot afford to leave to technology. That makes it a specialized service and it pays well. International Organizations, NGOs, Missions and Donor Agencies servicing the entire globe will rely on translation services for as long as anyone can foresee. Many companies and persons reaching out to big audiences who regularly put out huge content online do require language translation services to help translate their content into other languages with a view to further growing their readership. Chances are good, you can pick up an engagement with such outfits if you search well for them and reach out to them. 


Wednesday, January 08, 2020

How to Optimize Your Digital Marketing Budget

Digital marketing graphics on work station with computers, notepads, pens and pencils calculators and other work tools.
In any business, operating expense account always has many competing sub-heads, one of which is marketing. Weighed against what needs to be done particularly in digital marketing campaigns, marketing budgets are usually thinly stretched and never enough. Therefore, you need efficient and effective allocation of every cent of your marketing budget to maximize profits. What helps that process is the use of some tested and practical strategies to help your digital marketing campaigns.

These here strategies if implemented diligently can help your business to get the most out of your marketing budgets.

Align and Streamline Your Marketing Efforts

 
Avoid dissipating energy and time online daily without commensurate results. You may think you are not directly spending money so it is ok. Your time has value and it is money. Streamlining and aligning your marketing efforts online helps to reduce the time spent in your promotional efforts and that means some savings in costs. Huge social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter have their own peculiarities. Depending on the product you are marketing, you cannot get the same results across all the platforms. So, find out what works best for your product and work with that instead of spreading your campaigns in all the platforms when some are obviously not giving you encouraging results.



 

Keep a Tight Rein on Your Ads Budget

Clearly, this is inevitable if you want to save costs. Expert marketers always advise that instead of spreading your budget thin on a large variety of platforms, it is best to focus only on the ones where you can take full control of both targeting and cost. That enables you to keep a very tight rein on your ads budget. If you habitually use online advertising giants like Google, Bing and Facebook, you can target your ads properly at minimally controlled costs. The more control you have on what you can spend your ads budget on, the easier it is for you to keep costs low within your limited resources.

Use Only Ads that Work

Well, if ads don’t work, they can’t be correctly referred to ads anyway. Ads that work are what you work with to save costs. With Google Analytics, you can effectively measure the source and quantity of leads or sales. That allows you to compare several ads sources such as paid campaigns, organic traffic and the like with a view to deciding on what gets the best results. Working only with ads that get the best results is the best way to save costs in online advertising.

Remarketing Ads

Remarketing or retargeting simply means deliberate efforts to target website visitors in some other platform who did not convert in another platform. This works when potential buyers who clicked on an ad in say Google but did not convert are for example targeted again on Google with the same or different ads. A more complicated marketing than that is cross-channel remarketing which works by simply retargeting users on a different platform. This works by way of some potential customers who click on an ad in say Google but did not convert but now see such ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter which tend to be tailored towards the pages they like to visit. With cross-channel remarketing, advertisers can easily boost their ads effectiveness and save costs in their advertising campaigns.


Scale Only profitable Ads

Expert marketers like to advise that any marketing campaign, be it online or offline should be started on a small scale with narrow targeting. That effort should be continued until the ad becomes profitable. Once it becomes profitable, that is the right time for the campaign to be scaled. Scaling may involve experimenting with different campaign types on the same platform as well as adding other platforms. There are essentially two main reasons justifying why it is good to start small and wait for ads to be profitable before scaling. Firstly, profit from the initial campaign usually creates a buffer for potentially unprofitable additional campaigns or platforms. Secondly, with that, business owners tend to know exactly what works well for them. That allows them to base their other marketing efforts on what they know works well for them. Armed with that information, they can simply put more of their budget into the initial campaign, without significantly increasing the risk of missing out on a return. That is smart marketing no doubt!