5 Awesome Website Ideas Suitable for Newbies

As more and more people are switching to online shopping, it becomes imperative for many business owners to take their businesses online. In addition, many more people are choosing to work online from home. Both of these developments have necessitated the increased need for websites. A website provides business owners the best opportunity to successfully do business online. The reason any online business owner must as of necessity have a website to make contact with consumers online and to sell products/services to consumers. If you have just decided to take your business online, depending on your type of business and the products/services you are marketing, you have the options to choose from eCommerce websites to personal blogs, to run your business online.

1. eCommerce Website

Among small businesses, a website for an eCommerce store appears to be the most popular. It is easy to set up and operate with the right guidance from professional webmasters if you are unable to DIY. Typically, an eCommerce store website requires less investment to set up and it offers unlimited growth opportunities for your business. It is not even complicated to set up. If you are going the way of DIY, you can take advantage of popular Content Management Systems (CMSs) like Wix or WordPress to set it up. These platforms also offer all the necessary marketing tools you really need to build a successful online business. On these platforms, you can set up a functional website in a matter of minutes. Once set up, you can simply list the products/services you have on offer and you’re good to go.

2. Affiliate Website

If you decide to work online as an affiliate, you can join FREE, a reputable affiliate marketing platform like Strong Future International, SFI and they’ll offer you a webpage of your own to do business from. As an affiliate, you can then use the webpage to promote products/services in exchange for sales commissions. You can also take advantage of many different types of affiliate sites such as review sites. But, SFI provides all affiliates, a free webpage, training, marketing tools, unique affiliate links/codes, and excellent customer service. The business of the affiliate is to simply promote products/services and the platform takes care of the rest. This includes products packaging, handling and delivery as well as working out the right commissions earned by each affiliate at the end of every month.

3. Portfolio Website

Business owners usually build a portfolio website to showcase their projects and attract new clients. Such websites are common with Internet or web professionals. These are professionals who work in web development, digital marketing, or the art industry. Take for instance a photography portfolio website. Such websites usually have a simple interface with the visual content at center stage. When visitors approach the website from the homepage, it gives the visitors the options to choose between different project categories. With just a click, each section will show a gallery of the fine photographs on display with different image styles and quality. Onsite, visitors have access to the contact information section. This section helps to provide easy links for potential clients to connect in case they’re impressed with what they see on the site and are therefore interested in hiring the services of the website owner.

4. Membership Website

One other great website idea is a membership site. With a membership website, you can restrict access to some of your content pieces. Some of such content pieces are online courses, in-depth reports, video tutorials, or exclusive news coverage. Some very popular news websites often implement this strategy. On such news websites, by paying just a few dollars a month, users can have unlimited access to the articles, cooking recipes, buying guides and much more.

5. Personal Blog

A personal blog remains one of the most popular types of websites among business owners. If you are a newbie, blogging is one great way to hone your writing skills, showcase your expertise, and build an online presence. Just decide on a niche then write informational and educational content on topics related to that niche. This content will help the blog to attract visitors with similar interests and turn them into loyal readers. Your blog audience will start to build up from there. Be sure to choose a blog niche that you have real knowledge about and start creating content on it. Common blog niches are landscaping, home decor, fashion, lifestyle, travel, pet care, food and drinks, hospitality and so on. These are niches that interest a lot of people and when you create content on them, you attract readers easily. That is what helps to grow your blog audience. Once you build a sizeable and loyal audience, you can monetize the blog to earn good money from it. Through monetization, you can sell ads spaces on the blog, publish sponsored posts, sell eBooks, and run ads for Google AdSense.

Wrapping Up

The first step towards building a successful online business is by creating your own website. The foregoing are the types of website ideas available to newbies which they can easily use to go into business online. Having an online presence is vital for a successful online business. A website makes that possible online. Depending on your business inclinations, you can decide which type of website to build that will be useful for your online marketing efforts.

How to Build a Sound Strategy for Social Media Marketing

If you are marketing online, it is virtually impossible for you to achieve social media marketing success without building a sound marketing strategy. If you cannot get the strategy right, you’re probably going to struggle in vain without achieving any tangible results. Building this strategy can be a fairly complex task composed of many different tactical facets. If you’ve never built a marketing strategic plan before, the best way to go about it is to first and foremost review the elements and what goes into a good marketing plan.  You can then adapt the results of that review to develop your own social media marketing strategy.

Here is how you can build a sound social media marketing strategy for your business.

Consistently Post Great Content

In social media marketing, content is king. This content must be informative, educational and even entertaining to attract audience. The more of such content you produce, the more traffic you attract to your business. Visitors are usually attracted to valuable content and nothing else. For your content to be valuable to readers, it must be well researched and written in the right context and length. It must have relevant and related images, authoritative and with detailed information or entertainment. To make it visible to search engines, relevant keywords must be surreptitiously embedded in the content. You can then share the content multi-channel to widely attract traffic.
 
Target Buyer Personas

Marketing messages that target buyer personas are usually very effective. It really doesn’t matter how large your social network is. What matters most is how many in your network fit your buyer persona. This is because only the people that fit your buyer persona are the real folks that will actually buy your products. That’s where the money is and you are in business to make money, right? Smart business owners always create content and strategies to convert consumers based on identified characteristics they’ve factored into their buyer personas.

Engage your Audience

Only an engaged audience is a responsive audience. Never lose sight of that. Having a very large audience of followers doesn’t mean much if the audience is not responsive. Even if the audience fits your buyer persona and you don’t engage them, they don’t respond. Engagement helps create the impetus for message amplification. This ultimately may result in viral messaging and consequently more traffic. You can only make engagement happen by consistently creating value in terms of content, being a real person with a strong push encouraging your audience to engage. By way of analytics data, you can get to understand how your social networks respond. That info enables you to make informed decisions about what works and what isn’t. You can then make conscious efforts to capitalize and improve on what’s working to get better results.

Post High Quantity Content

The content you post must not only be of high quality, it must also be consistent. The more content you post, the more traffic you get! Quality matters a great deal too. If your content is of poor quality, major search engines like Google will ignore it. You must as a matter of policy avoid plagiarized material or duplicate content like plague. Search engines are not very tolerant of such materials. A vital part of your content strategy should be to create a content marketing calendar to help ease the burden of creating high-quality content on a consistent basis. If you are writing about a trending or current matter, make sure you are up to date with conversations around the subject matter. If your audience is following and responding, it helps to build the type of relationship that encourages them to widely share your content.

Spend Quality Time on Marketing

Social media marketing is fun and work. You must therefore devote quality time and attention to it. Social media marketing takes time, quality time before it starts getting some traction. If you run a small business, devoting 10-20 hours a week to social media marketing is about ideal. Even if you choose to hire someone to manage your social media marketing, make sure they know what they are doing and have a clear understanding of your own social media marketing goals.

Use Cross-Functional Skills

Every business activity requires skills, real skills that produce results. So is social media marketing! Some of such skills you need are: deep understanding and use of language, strong business intelligence, great writing skills, good marketing background, good technical and working knowledge of the computer and internet technology and lots more.

Make your Strategy Easily Implementable

For a strategy to be easily implementable, it must be clear and easy to understand. Therefore, you must endeavor to write well and use the right tools of influence within your writing to get good results. This influence allows you to create content that motivates the reader towards the actions you need without appearing spammy. On social media just like many other online channels, nothing is guaranteed. You must therefore have a simple strategy that you can easily implement and adapt depending on how circumstances pan out.

Spend on Paid Ads

Yeah, you heard right. If you want quick marketing results from social media, you must spend a bit of money on paid social media ads. That can supplement your free social media marketing particularly if you have very limited marketing budget. It is best still to intensify action to get more organic traffic. That benefits your business better.

Make your Marketing Social

Social media is where you can do serious marketing and also have lots of fun if you make your marketing social. Serve your social media audience vital marketing info as well entertaining them in the process. Engage with them and generally share mutually beneficial info that is easily sharable. You can generally spend your precious time and money understanding your audience enough through your buyer personas by giving them exactly what they want. That way, they’ll respond to your marketing messages more favorably.
 
Market for Real on Social Media

Social media marketing is real marketing no doubt. That marketers like to call it social media marketing does not make it any less marketing. Social media marketing like all marketing involves content writing, communication, consumer behavior, market research, market segmentation, market surveys, direct selling, and branding, marketing tactics/techniques, marketing strategies and lots more. Your marketing is real when you do all these and more on social media to get results.