Resourceful Internet Marketing Quips

You heard that Internet marketers are making big bucks online? Well not quite. They make money alright but not every marketer gets to make really big bucks in the business. You know why? Internet marketing is not as easy as most people like to believe. It takes a lot of hard work and patience to even get noticed on the Internet not to talk of making huge sums of money. To make it in the business, you have a lot to learn if you are open to learning. There is usually a learning curve which is where most people get very frustrated and give up. By the time most people acquire the required skills to do what is needed, they are probably so frustrated when they are not seeing the money. When money is not coming as expected, many people eventually get so bored and fed up with the business that they give up at that point.

Yeah, you heard right. You cannot make money in internet marketing if you cannot attract good traffic to your business website. Traffic? How do you get that? Well, through various Internet marketing techniques such as affiliate marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing, email marketing, content marketing, paid ads, SEO and much more. Sounds really technical at this point! Not really! If you want customers for your business, you need to attract traffic, get leads and conversions. This is simply what all this jargon is trying to say.

You must find a target market to market to if you want to really make sales. Beware! You don’t target customers with guns. You target them with marketing messages. Guns will scare customers while well-crafted marketing messages will attract them. Well, I really don’t know if Americans who love to carry guns around will agree with me on this but my experience in Internet marketing supports my claims.

Yes paid ads bring quick traffic to your website but try to be careful with paid ads. Be sure your marketing budget is robust enough to meet your paid ads expenses. This is because many Internet users like to click on your paid ads just for the fun of it. Many people will click on your ads just to pass the time away at your expense. Your only way around this obvious waste of the resources for your paid ads is to directly target who gets to look at your ads.

That brings us to the new Internet phenomenon, social media. With over 4.6 billion active users worldwide, no serious Internet marketer can presently afford not to be on the Internet. Not for fun anyway but for serious Internet marketing business. If you can combine fun with business on social media, that’s OK. But hear this, these days, many people are using social networking sites to get free traffic to their business websites. On popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, paid ads can even be a lot cheaper. I give you that info for free if you have a tight marketing budget.

In Internet marketing, you cannot ignore skills, real Internet marketing skills. Many of these skills you’ll get to learn as you market along. For instance, it takes quite some skills to persuade people to buy something from you. More so when these are people you can neither physical see nor touch in most cases. Without these skills, can you imagine how frustrating it can be to bring thousands of people to your website and nobody buys anything from you? That tells you that there is quite some difference between marketing and selling. Both require slightly different skill-sets.

If you want to get involved in Internet marketing, just pull out your computer and get started right away. The bulk of the skills you’ll acquire along the way are hands-on and you’ll do as nicely as others if you stick with it and be patient. Only very few highly skilled persons can simply jump into Internet marketing and take to it with ease. The vast majority others like me will struggle and take a bit more effort before they manage to get a hang on it. For them, it could take a long slug to acquire the right skills necessary to succeed in the business. Well, I guess you are smart and even smarter than most of us in the majority. So, you can quickly get your hang on the business and do very well if you are determined to. Just reach out and pull that computer up right away. Will you? Good luck while at it my friend.

6 Most Common Digital Marketing Strategies You Should Know

Digital marketing covers a vast area of marketing particularly on the internet. Online marketers rely on digital marketing to get traffic, connect with their audience, capture leads, and make sales.  Marketers without an impressive digital presence are less likely to outperform those with active digital presence online. Smart marketers depend heavily on digital marketing to outperform their competition and gain a competitive edge on the internet. The field in quite vast and it encompasses diverse marketing strategies. These strategies directly leverage computer and internet technology to effectively promote products/services online. If you are interested in digital marketing, it is best to familiarize yourself with the most common strategies that successful marketers like to recommend. Following are six of such digital marketing strategies you too can effectively use to get results.

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing strategy where affiliates help product merchants market their products and earn commissions for their efforts. It is some kind of mutually beneficial partnership between product merchants, affiliates and consumers. Affiliates directly help product merchants to boost their business and increase their engagement with consumers. Affiliates help make available to consumers, products/services that help solve problems for them. In this partnership, product merchants sell more products/services while consumers easily find products/services that meet their needs. Affiliates who facilitate this earn more commissions from the process.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is a process of connecting with your audience through relevant information sharing. Content is hugely important for marketers to cater to the concerns of their target audience and help them seek solutions to their needs. It is one digital strategy that is very popular with marketers. If the content is qualitative and well packaged, it helps marketers to effectively reach out to their target audience and gain their trust. For digital marketing purposes, an effective content is usually packaged in the form of blogs, research data, videos, infographics, guides, podcasts, bulletins and more. These are the common techniques that help the marketer to build a following/audience over time. When the content you consistently produce builds trust with this audience, it impacts your traffic, leads and sales. It ultimately helps to boost your affiliate marketing business.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is another effective digital marketing strategy which enables marketers to easily interact with their audience by way of emails. It is essentially used by marketers for targeting new, retaining existing, and nurturing leads and customers. To have an effective email marketing campaign, you must first build a responsive email list. This you do by diligently collecting the email addresses of your target audience over time through op-in and sign-up marketing techniques. You can also grow your email list using lead magnets, pop-ups, exit-intent messages, and more. Marketers love to use emails to market because it is cost-effective and the ROI is usually quite impressive. Experienced marketers can segment their email list for more personalized marketing messages and campaigns.

4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

With more than 4.6 billion active users around the globe, social media has become hugely popular with digital marketers. Social media marketing SMM is a digital marketing strategy which allows marketers to promote content via social media platforms of choice. Marketers use social media platforms to market their brands organically or through paid advertising. SMM as a marketing strategy is a very effective way to connect with your target audience no matter where that audience is on the globe. It makes easy two-way interaction between marketers and their respective target audience. Aside its huge popularity, sharing messages on social media is quite easy and smooth. The reason social media easily facilitates engagement as your audience reacts at will and/or leaves comments on your posts. This user content helps marketers to assess the performance of their content. Many consumers use social media to research preferred solutions and make informed buying decisions. This makes social media platforms ideal for capturing quality leads and even to make sales.

Influencer marketing is ancillary to SMM. This is because most influencers ply their trade in social media as social media influencers. Influencer marketing as a viable SMM strategy is quite effective to reach out to a huge audience which can be in the millions. Influencers can even influence the buy decisions of this huge audience through endorsements and recommendations. Because a significant percentage of consumers really trust influencer recommendations, partnering with influencers can actually become a big business boost for marketers.
 
5. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising is a digital marketing strategy where marketers are required to pay for the ads they run on online platforms. If they have the right marketing budget, it is possible for marketers to run ads on different search engines and social media platforms. For search engine marketing, marketers generally prefer Google which is a lead search engine for running paid ad campaigns. You can also run paid ads on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes. Because ranking well on search engines can be a very slow process, most marketers prefer using a fair mix of organic and paid marketing strategies to reach out to their respective target audiences. Paid ads can give you much faster results if you have the right marketing budget. You can always use paid ads marketing strategy if you’re looking for a quick boost in traffic or sales.

6. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In digital marketing, it is not enough to create content no matter how good the content is. You must explore all reliable avenues to make this content accessible to your audience. That is where SEO comes in as a reliable marketing strategy. SEO is a bit technical and tricky especially for marketers that are not too experienced. For such marketers who cannot use DIY approach, they can hire the services of professional webmasters to have SEO done on their websites. SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps to make your content visible to search engines. If the search engines rank the content high in their SERPs, it increases its visibility to searchers. That means more organic traffic to your website.

Online, a search engine is usually a go-to platform for most people to find suitable solutions. When people simple tap in their search queries on major search engines like Google, it shows recommendations that cater to the respective search queries in detail. If these search queries resonate with your niche, Google throws up your content thereby making it accessible to the searchers. The more search engines throw up your content in search results, the more organic traffic it receives. This is why SEO should be your go-to strategy for more organic traffic.

Wrapping Up

The foregoing are digital marketing strategies that are popular among marketers and they get results. The reason you should know them well and be prepared to deploy them in your marketing efforts. Marketers worldwide use a mix of these strategies to achieve their set marketing objectives. They rely on them for the success of their respective marketing campaigns. You too can try them out and see which ones work best for you.