How to Use Social Media for Website Marketing Strategies

As many digital marketers have since discovered, social media is one great resource for their marketing activities. It comes in very handy to use in nearly all website marketing strategies. Social media is not only hugely popular, with over 4.65 billion users worldwide, it is easy and cheap to use. It is in addition a great fun and very exciting way for marketers to reach their audience. There are so many benefits marketers derive from website marketing strategies. If they explore ways to use social media for these strategies, they have additional advantage of not having to bother so much about making search engine rankings. Following are strategies that help out this process.

Cyber Marketing Strategies

Marketers derive two major benefits when using social media in cyber marketing strategies. These strategies help build relationships with customers and potential customers by directing them to your website. Secondly, if you use the right social communities, you can easily build backlinks to your website through social media. Because some of the major social community websites on Facebook and Twitter in particular use a “no-follow” tag with the hyperlinks on their sites, they disable the ability for websites to increase their search engine rankings by linking to them from the social sites. By this action, these popular social media sites become especially useful for directing tons of traffic to the marketer’s website. However, there are other social websites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, that don’t use “no-follow” tags. Marketers can effectively use these sites to get backlinks and to direct traffic to their websites. These benefits do not however compare to the benefits derivable from more popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Internet Marketing Strategies

Using social media for internet marketing strategies is a bit complicated. Marketers really need extra care when using these strategies on social media to avoid spamming label. Yeah, you can promote your business on social media but when updating your status, you must take extra care to avoid making your products promotion too obvious. If you do, you risk getting your audience bored and losing interest in your content updates. Once you recognize that there is a fine line between spamming and regular advertising, it is left to you to strictly observe some updating strategies in your social media posts that will respect this distinction. One of such observances is that you should never make every status update you make to link back to your website. If you do, you are clearly spamming. What is advisable is to make your updates as if you are serving valuable content then occasionally throw in a link back to your website. If you blog on your website, so much the better. You can make a blog post and share on social media. That automatically links back to your website without a semblance of spam.

Social Media Interactions

Ease of interaction and sharing of information are some of the biggest advantages of social media to website marketing. On social media, people know who they are dealing with as human. They are thus very free to ask questions, give answers, make comments, offer solutions and give feedback with ease. Social media puts a personal face on you the business person and that helps to put your audience at ease. Building a reputation for you and your business becomes much easier that way. You can maintain that reputation through every single update you make on social media. You should keep your content mostly focused on your niche and how the info you give can be helpful to your audience. On social media, if you want to maintain your reputation with your audience, avoid any content about race, religion and politics. Making social media updates about these subjects no matter how subtle can hurt your reputation and even your business. It is best to avoid them all together.

What You Need to Know to Make Money Online With Affiliate Programs

Many internet users have found out various ways to make money on the internet. The real challenge many do face however is deciding exactly how and where to focus their attention. Yes, many people believe that affiliate marketing provides the best and easiest opportunity to make money online. Here is what they know that reinforces this belief.

You do not need to have a product of your own to make money in affiliate marketing. Once you can position your website well enough to help product merchants market their products, you earn commissions once a sale is made through your promotional efforts. Thus, an affiliate simply acts like some sort of “middle man” between product merchants and consumers. They promote products to consumers in return for a commission for a specific action or when a sale is made. The commission payment varies greatly between products and it is usually between 5%-50% for physical products. Some Digital products often have higher commissions.

In some cases, the affiliate is expected to drive traffic to a product merchant’s products and, depending on the affiliate agreement, gets paid a commission if a product is sold, or gets paid a fee if a lead is generated. So, all you need to do to make money online with affiliate programs, is to drive traffic to a product merchant’s products. From this traffic, if the potential customer performs the required action as per agreed terms, the affiliate earns a commission.

To set up and operate an affiliate marketing business is cost-effective. You need a very small investment of some $10 or even less to get started. With that, you can set up a website, pay for domain hosting, and procure a bit of software to help you research your niche market.

What you need next is to sign up as an affiliate with a merchant or an affiliate network. They will issue you unique affiliate links that include your personal referral code. You may also have access to their promotional materials such as banners, emails or other text, you can use in promoting the product you have chosen. The unique affiliate links/codes allow for correct and proper attribution of all marketing actions and sales to the right affiliate for commissions payment purposes.

Depending on the restrictions placed on the affiliate by the affiliate agreement with the product merchant, affiliate traffic is expected to come from a website. But, traffic may also be from banner ads placed on other third party websites, emails sent out to Opt-in lists, links from Pay-Per-Click, PPC ads, links in articles, blogs, or forums and social media.

Even if you are new in affiliate marketing and without prior experience, you can do well and make money in the business because:

•    you don’t even need to have a product of your own
•    start-up costs are very low
•    there is no need to employ staff
•    there is no need for stock inventory
•    you can work when you like and where you like, 24/7
•    you don’t need premises/store space
•    you can even work from home

Online affiliate programs are numerous and easy to find on the internet. You have access to lots of reputable and well-established affiliate networks such as SFI, eBay, Alibaba, ClickBank and lots more. You also have lots of affiliate networks that represent physical big-name product retailers, such as Dobe, Affiliate Window, and buy.at. You can simply sign up free with any of these networks and start making money almost immediately.

What is most gratifying to know particularly for people who are new to affiliate marketing is that most affiliate networks are free to join. But, some are more particular about who they let into their network than others. In some exceptional cases, some affiliates may be required to pay a token registration fee to join.

Last Line

No doubt affiliate marketing is a very clean way to make money online. It is one business you can work anywhere including the comfortable confines of your home. That makes affiliate marketing a typical work from home business.