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8 Top Tips for eCommerce Success

If you want to succeed in eCommerce business, you must listen to experts. Carefully follow what they do and how they do it. Many of these ex...

Thursday, November 24, 2022

11 Vital Tips to Increase Traffic to Your Website

A lone internet marketer working on a computer.
Your business window into the wide world of the internet is your website. Your online business cannot succeed without a successful website. One major determinant of the success of a website is the amount of traffic it gets. Therefore, every online business owner who wants to succeed in the business must take deliberate steps to generate traffic and build loyal audiences. This at times presents a lot challenges to business owners largely because of the huge competition for attention out there on the internet. Despite that, business owners must generate traffic to their websites all the same except they are not keen on success. Here are eleven tried and tested tips that can help you to generate the most traffic to your website.



1. Market with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based business model that allows affiliates to help product merchants promote their products in return for commissions on the sales they generate. While the business owner has his own audience and traffic sources, the affiliates as independent business entities also have theirs. If affiliates are promoting any product of a product merchant, they help direct traffic to the website of the product merchant with a view to generating a sale from the effort. This they do mostly through embeddable shopping links and product reviews. For traffic purposes, effective affiliate marketing helps to draw traffic to a product merchant’s website. It can help the SEO of the website and increase its chances of attracting repeat visitors.

2. Implement Basic SEO Techniques

Basic SEO techniques on your website help it to get organic traffic. That is traffic sent to it by search engines particularly Google. The most basic of these techniques involves writing high-quality and high-impact content on your website, writing long-form content, fixing broken links and optimizing your URLs. If you get these techniques right, Google will rank your website higher in its SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic.

3. Prioritize your Website Security

A secure website is a trusted website because it is reliable to do business. You can therefore prioritize your website security to make users trust it sufficiently to do business with. That means traffic. Good security on your website protects your valuable data from hackers and cyber criminals. Since Apps and Plugins are quite susceptible to hacking, securing them helps to give your website users more guarantees and that translates to good traffic since many users will feel secure doing business with a secure website. To make sure your data is protected from cyber criminals, it is advisable to work with a publishing platform that offers 24/7 support and whose site network security measures are known and formidable.

4. Market with Video Content

High quality short-form video content is always very good to attract traffic to your website. You can use such videos in short-form tutorials, guides, product information, or any other content. If you choose to, you can even repurpose existing written content into videos for more effective marketing. For traffic purposes, after launching videos on your site, make sure to post them to your accounts on popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter and others. If properly done, that is by including links in the videos back to your website, it can without a doubt result in significantly increased traffic to your website.
 
5. Create Evergreen Content

You can increase traffic to your website by maintaining and keeping traffic growth continuity on your website over time. Only evergreen content guarantees that. Exactly why evergreen content should be a must-have for your website! In content marketing, evergreen content is content based on topics that never go out of style and revolve around your site’s niche. Retouching, updating and publishing evergreen content is also great for your website’s SEO. At any point in time, if you manage to create quality evergreen content around the key phrases your website is known for, over time and with smart SEO techniques, your website can reap the benefits of consistent traffic from searches. You can thus make evergreen content to always be relevant to your audience, more so if you endeavor to update it from time to time.
 
6. Be Active on Social Media

One great way to attract traffic to your website is to be active on major social media platforms. With over 4.5 billion active users worldwide, social media now appears to be one great market out there on the internet. If you do business on the internet, it means your audience resides all over the web inclusive of social media. This is more so in the hugely popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. If you are active on these platforms, you’ll discover a natural audience that is already passionate about your message and mission and is ready to engage and even participate with your content. It is from this audience you attract traffic to your website. If you habitually post highly engaging content frequently on these platforms, you increase your content’s visibility and increase the chances that your posts are favored by social media algorithms. That translates to good traffic to your website. For this to be sustained, always make sure to include interesting or engaging photos/images in the content you post on social media. Doing so usually leads to higher click-through rates and consequently good traffic.



7. Write Guest Posts

The essence of writing guest posts on other popular and reputable websites is to promote backlinks to your own website. That is good for traffic. Here is the trick. If you write quality content for another site, you will reach new audiences that may have never heard of you before. That helps to increase your visibility. With increased visibility, you will also build credibility not only with your new audiences, but also with Google’s algorithm. Over time, your guest posts will generate more backlinks to your own site which will improve your search rankings and, ultimately, increase your website traffic. Simple!

8. Optimize your Website for Mobile

Google reports now attribute over 60% of web data to mobile devices. That means more and more people are transacting business online with their mobile devices particularly smartphones. This now makes it imperative for online business owners to spend their time and effort to ensure their websites offer a rich user experience on mobile devices. In fact, Google now takes into consideration for its website ranking purposes to factor in websites that are mobile-friendly. It is only websites that are optimized for mobile that can be mobile-friendly. These are websites that can thus really benefit from the huge traffic emanating from mobile devices. On your website, if you use a CMS that prioritizes performance and the mobile experience above all else, it will ensure that your site’s mobile interface is modern, fast, and built for repeat visits. That translates to good traffic.

9. Regularly Send Email Newsletters

Most online business owners now know that one of the most effective methods to grow readership for their content is through newsletter campaigns. Significantly, emails have been around for a while but they are still a great way to target niche audiences to convert them into loyal followers. Habitually, most people check their emails daily. This makes email communication a very effective way for marketers and business owners to pass marketing messages and updates to their audience promptly. So, if you want to build a successful email campaign, just create a newsletter experience that will make your niche users want to read more. You can take advantage of AI, smart software and technology to easily to transform your site’s content into dynamic and effective email campaigns. That translates to good traffic back to your website.

10. Continually Monitor your Website’s Analytics

Marketing online without analytics is akin to marketing in the dark. It is therefore not smart marketing to create content blindly then hope and pray it will be successful. That era is gone with the advent of Google Analytics. Analytics are smart online tools that can help content creators understand the kind of content that resonates well with their desired audiences. Data from analytics tools give the real insights into online marketing activities like from where traffic is coming and what the traffic is looking for on your website. Great insights that can help the business owner generate more traffic. If you monitor your site’s analytics regularly, you will be able to see which content is performing well and which is not. This vital information allows you to adjust your content strategy accordingly to enable it attract more traffic in the short and long term.
 
11. Decrease your Website’s Bounce Rate

Decreasing your website’s bounce rate automatically means getting more traffic. Technically, your site’s bounce rate is the percentage of users who navigate away from your website after viewing only one page. The best way to tackle a high bounce rate is by providing a user experience that makes readers want to stick around and read more on your site. Good traffic that is! Paying attention to your site’s bounce rate is about the best way to use the power of data to guide every step of your content workflow. So, if you deliberately set a goal to decrease your site’s bounce rate, you will notice a significant increase in general traffic to your website. You can only prove this through testing and retesting by leveraging A/B testing technique. Through this technique, when you subject a small percentage of your site’s traffic to a new layout, you can see how the new version impacts page speed and user experience. Then you can check how that compares to your current bounce rate, and then make the necessary adjustments for better results. Doing so significantly increases your traffic as the bounce rate decreases.

Monday, November 21, 2022

6 Global Best Practices to Combat Inevitable Cyber Threats on Your Online Apps

Doing online business on a computer with a mug of beverage on the table.
The need for web Apps is increasing in tandem with increasing digitization of businesses around the globe. There is hardly any online business today that is not using web Apps. This also increases the necessity of having these Apps secure enough to do business with. If you are taking your business online, even if you fulfill the need for an App, making sure the App is secure is quite essential. Online marketing experts generally agree that developing a secure web App is one of the most vital steps any business needs to ensure business security and growth. This is more so when you factor in the current trend of increased cyber crimes and the daring nature of cyber criminals. If you want to directly combat cyber crimes and threats to your online Apps, these here global best practices come in very handy.



1. Back Up all your Data

Online, there is always a threat of compromised or stolen data by cyber criminals. This is more worrisome because no matter how secure your App is, there is always a slight chance that your data can be compromised or stolen. Exactly why you must take all steps necessary to back up your data! Backing up all your data therefore becomes an important move to put your business on a safer side. This is one very important precaution you can take to checkmate any hacker who manages to get access to your online App data. You can arrange this back up by storing all your online App information in another location and replicate the archives in multiple places. If any hacker manages to get access to your data in the primary location and compromising it, you can protect your business from serious data losses by falling back on the back up location to retrieve your important data.
 
2. Use a Virtual Private Network, VPN

A very dependable way to protect against cyber crimes is the use of a Virtual Private Network, VPN. But using a VPN does not mean cyber criminals cannot get to you. They can but the VPN adds an additional protective layer. That gives you additional security because a VPN protects against cyber-attacks in many ways through traffic encryption. VPN also has some real advantage of being very cheap to use. This adds to its attraction for business owners.

3. Use SSL Certificates

With the use of Secure Socket Layers, SSL certificates, you can secure your online Apps by simply encoding all the data that is shared on it. Presently, it is one of the best practices to combat cyber threats. This it does using SSL protocols to secure the information available on the App from cyber criminals. It is hugely important for your business therefore to activate SSL Certificates for your online Apps. Once it is in place, it becomes doubly difficult for hackers and cyber criminals to easily access the information you share on the Apps. It is actually the cryptographic keys the SSL Certificate uses that really make it pretty difficult for hackers to read your data. If they can’t read the data, they can’t steal it.



4. Provide Adequate Training

Employees that are well trained and proactive can be vital assets to combat cyber crimes and cyber threats. So, if you train your workers well enough, they’ll have the requisite knowledge about cyber criminals and cyber crimes. That equips them to know what to expect from hackers and exactly what to do to prevent attacks. You can take advantage of well-packaged cyber security training for all your employees using reputable experts and experienced web App security masters. Through these experts, your employees can learn about the online Apps and the surrounding potential threats. Well-trained employees can always put the vital checks in place to checkmate any ambitious cyber criminal at any point in time when they dare to launch an attack on your Apps.

5. Update Your App Regularly

An updated App is always a safer App to use. One of the very best practices in the business is to ensure security against threats by releasing regular App updates for your users. This is hugely important because it is outdated Apps that are more susceptible to cyber-attacks. They are more vulnerable to these attacks as well because most of the time, an outdated software may lead to weak security features which may enable hackers to easily manipulate the data on the App. An App can have its online App’s components updated on and off based on its infrastructure. This prevents hackers from easily accessing the information on the App, thus making the App effectively protected from cyber threats and attacks.

6. Manage User Permissions

One smart step towards having a secure web App is to skillfully manage user permissions. Even if you have many employees in your business, you can limit vital full internet access to a few well-trained employees. The fewer the number of such privileged workers the easier it is to keep your online Apps secure. Doing this greatly reduces the volume of data that hackers can attack. But, if you are careless enough to allow everyone in your employ unfettered access, it will take one, just one successful cyber-attack to compromise all your data. Managing your user permissions skillfully is about the best way to prevent that.

Summary

Poor App security and other vital loopholes are increasingly making online Apps vulnerable to hackers and cyber criminals. Incidentally, as Apps are upgrading, cyber criminals are learning new ways to attack them. This is exactly where the real challenge is for business owners. For now however, making an App difficult to hack is about the most practical option available to business owners. The foregoing best practices come in very handy in that quest. Ignoring them can quickly spell doom for your much-cherished online business. It is smart therefore to take all necessary precautions now before you have cause to regret.