Internet Marketing Blog

If you have a start-up, you probably have a website. If you have a website in 2020, it needs to be optimized for search engines to achieve success. Google and Bing’s algorithms now make it very hard for a completely new site to rank among competitors on the search engine results page (SERP) without first being perceived by them as trusted. This is even harder if your website impacts viewers’ money or life, such as if you’re selling a product or service. So, if you’re a start-up with a website, here is what you need to know about SEO.

Google’s Starter Guide

Google has an SEO guide for websites that need Google Search to survive (i.e., any website that doesn’t specifically reject Google). This guide clearly states that the best way for a website to be featured on their SERP is by clearly benefiting their users. They outline that any SEO you undertake should be with the philosophy of making the user experience better.

The first thing they ask you to check is whether your site is already showing on Google after its launch. At this point, you should double-check that you have a robots.txt page, as if you have just launched, it can help Google’s (and other search engines’) ‘robots’ crawl through the internet and add your page to their directory.

They specify that your website needs to be secure, serve high-quality content to users, and have content optimized to be fast and easy to access on all devices. The 4^th paragraph of Google’s guide is effectively a heads-up. It asks you if you need an SEO expert and tells you that doing so can save time and implies that the complex nature of SEO means there is a lot for a newcomer to cover. They recommend that you start off by getting an expert to audit your site, something that leading SEO companies typically include in a package. For example, Click Intelligence offers site auditing available in a custom package alongside content generation, pay per click strategy, PR outreach, and a lot more.

Google’s guide then proceeds to cover a lot of technical information, which can be overwhelming for those new to SEO, but is recommended for anybody looking to get a comprehensive understanding of the processes involved. However, they jump straight into the technicalities of SEO without outlining the importance of something else first. That something else is demographics work.

Proper Demographics Work

If you are significantly down the road of your start-up launch, you have probably conducted demographics analysis of your target market. If not, please understand that this is a vital component in selling products and services to both businesses and direct to consumers. When you start your SEO strategy, you will need to refer to the analysis you have conducted, as everything about your brand should be tailored to those to whom you wish to sell.

When you’re planning your SEO, you need to remember that the whole point of the exercise is to think of who you want to be searching for you and attempt to enhance your visibility to them. It can be worth it, at this stage, to conduct analyses of your competitors’ audiences, too. Really flesh this out – who are the users and how do they think, what do they want from a service, how do they search, on which devices do they search, etc. This analysis will help you understand that your audience will not search for your start-up by name almost all the time when you’re starting out. Instead, they will find your start-up by searching for a need they have that needs to be fulfilled. How do you tailor your SEO for them?

Keywords

Keywords are a foundation of SEO strategy. To successfully implement SEO, you need to understand the key terms that searchers are looking for, and tailor your site to include them in such a way that a search engine determines your site as valuable for those searching with your chosen keywords.

There are several free tools that can help you research keywords that you think might be valuable to your SEO. It’s recommended that you explore keywords as much as you can – expand on possible phrases and analyze where these search terms are active (which sites and which locations). Keywords can be short-tail or long-tail. Short-tail keywords are more general and shorter, e.g., “chocolate,” and long-tail keywords are more specific and tend to be longer, e.g., “best chocolate recipes.” Short-tail keywords are much harder to rank highly on the SERP with, so its recommended when you’re brainstorming keywords to choose a few short-tails but at least five long-tails to expand on each short-tail keyword you choose.

If you’re stuck with building your list of keywords, try a simple process with a complicated name: pattern recognition through stems and qualifiers. Take a short-tail keyword and apply different qualifiers to turn it into a long-tail keyword. Examples of these qualifiers are:

1. Relevant adjective – best start-up
2. Location – start-up London
3. Brand – Nike start-up
4. Product spec/feature – Student’s start-up
5. Product Type – SaaS start-up
6. Intended use – Part-time start-up
7. Comparison – Start-up vs corporation
8. Action request – buy start-up

Once you have developed a list of keywords, you can start to think about where you include them on your site. Then, you need to think about your content.

Content Marketing – The King

The importance of content has become a cliché in online marketing and SEO, but it is so for a reason. You need high-quality content that can take the form of a blog page, videos, pictures – anything that your demographics will willingly consume with interest. Content needs to be factual and enticing, and is important in the eyes of Google, as it gives you some authority within your niche. Factual, well-researched posts that are 100% original and inform readers about a specific problem and potential solutions are highly recommended, as they not only position your site as an expert, but can attract backlinks.

When people share your content online in blog posts and other pieces of content, they may choose to link back to your site to demonstrate their point. This establishes your site as helpful for other people, and search engine algorithms observe these backlinks and are more likely to position you higher up on the SERP, as they can see that your site is trustworthy and provides value. Backlinks have to be genuine; they can’t just be hacked by creating a series of blogs and copying and pasting content with the addition of a link to your site. When they work best, backlinks are from high-quality articles themselves. Sites that master content marketing generate 500% more leads, have 434% more pages on the SERP, and 55% more traffic, according to Semrush.

Taking care of your SEO on a regular basis involves a lot of content generation, as your site will need to stay fresh and relevant in order to generate genuine backlinks. That shouldn’t be the only thing you maintain with your SEO efforts, though. The world of SEO is ever-changing and is rife with major revolutions that can see a high-ranking page wiped from the face of the SERP (as was observed in the infamous Google Medic update).

If you feel you have the basics of SEO down, you should regularly audit your site to make sure that everything is working as planned – and stay up to date with SEO news, as any bit of leaked information from Googles’ search engine algorithm department can help to boost your site’s rankings.

Online shopping is on the rise in the Philippines. Out of the 76 million active Internet users in the country, 70 percent are online shoppers. There are plenty of reasons that many Filipinos are choosing to shop online nowadays. It’s convenient, they have more options, and it’s cheaper. With the quarantine restrictions in the country, it’s much safer to have products delivered to your doorstep compared to the traditional way of shopping.

Still, there are a lot of issues with online shopping that have not been addressed. One of which is the fact that not all internationally-based online stores directly ship to the country. However, that shouldn’t stop Filipinos who want to shop in the U.S. and ship to the Philippines. Here are two reasons that they should.

It’s Cheaper (and Safer) than Unauthorized Local Resellers

Local resellers are people who claim to have had international products shipped from abroad and are now selling them locally. You could choose to buy from them as they have the products on-hand and will take less than a few days to ship your product to you. But here’s where you may lose out in terms of money and safety.

If the product is genuine, then the price of the product should be higher than the price it’s listed online. Sellers sell to make a profit, so they’re not going to sell it at the same rate it’s listed. They’ll be raising the cost to cover the expenses of shipping, customers, and the others they’ve incurred to start their selling business. Then, they’ll add a mark-up for their profit.

If you find a seller willing to sell it below or at the online price, that is when you should be wary about the product’s authenticity. Fraudulent sellers can make you believe you’re buying an international product when you’re actually purchasing a dupe. In 2019, over 3.90 billion pesos worth of fake goods were seized by the Bureau of Customs. For example, if you know that Kylie Cosmetics’ Koko K Lipstick Kit is sold at $26, don’t believe local sellers offering the same kit for 100 pesos.

In short, if you don’t want the added costs and the lack of assurance of buying from unauthorized local resellers, you’re better off buying directly from the online store.

Not Everything Is Available Locally

The Philippine market is very limited to what’s popular or what entrepreneurs believe will sell to a huge niche. As a result, some of the things you like may not be available for sale locally, so you either have to settle for what’s available.

Of course, shipping internationally is not always easy. If you’ve ever tried buying a product from Amazon or any other U.S.-based store, you might see notices that say they don’t ship to the Philippines. That can easily be remedied with shipping services that serve as “your” U.S. address and ship your products directly to you without the added taxes and miscellaneous fees other shipping methods provide.

Shopping directly from international online stores gives you peace of mind knowing you’re buying the genuine product and having it shipped safely directly to your home. That may not be possible with all online stores, but luckily many shipping services can help you receive and deliver U.S.-based deliveries and ship it to your home in the Philippines.

If you run a business and you want it to be successful, you have to make sure that you are going to have a website to back it up. A website is actually essential in ensuring that you are keeping the public face of the business how you want it to be, and yet it can be challenging to ensure that you are doing this right if you have never had to look into it before. In particular, your website provides a fantastic opportunity and challenge for branding your business, something which is always important but especially so at this current time. If you are wondering how to keep your business alive at the moment, you are going to find that getting the online branding right is hugely important.

Image Source – CCO Licence

Let’s take a look at how you can get your website just right so that it is really serving your branding mission as best as possible, and so you can keep running your business as successfully as possible online.

Get The Branding Right First

Before you do anything to the website, you have to make sure that you are actually in a position where you are happy with your branding, and that is something that takes a great deal of time in itself. If you are not happy with the branding, it doesn’t matter what your website is like – it’s just not going to work when you apply it to the website. At the moment, we have a unique challenge to try and brand our businesses in the face of the current pandemic, and it is something that you will probably be spending a lot of your time on. What are the values that you want people to associate with your brand? How are you going to get that across in a simple piece of branding? These are the things you need to think about upfront.

Image Source – CCO Licence

Image-Led Website Branding

It’s important to remember what a visual medium a website is. Even though you can introduce other elements, it is always going to be primarily visual, and you need to therefore ensure that you are drawing people in visually first and foremost. If you fail to do that, then your brand is just not going to be recognised, and you are going to find that your website is failing to do one of its primary tasks. Being image-led is something that you are definitely going to want to focus on. That could mean hiring a professional corporate photography team to take photos of your building and your office and so on – once they are able to do so safely and with social distancing in place – so that you have a more professional image of your business on the website, or it could be a simple fact of improving the way the website looks generally. A messy website is going to reflect badly on the business in many ways, so this is hugely important to bear in mind.

Your URL

It might sound strange, but it is actually also hugely important that you manage to find a good URL for your business’ website. This should be as close to the public trading name of your business as possible, or at least something very closely related to it. If you are struggling to find something suitable, it is not unheard of to centre the name of a business around the chosen URL that you manage to find, even if that seems as though it should be a little strange. It is a common way through this issue, and it’s something that you should consider if you want to keep that unity of branding strong.

Image Source – CCO Licence

Focus On The Voice

Your brand should have a voice, or else it isn’t going to seem like a strong brand. But that voice also needs to come through in the website as well as possible if you want to make sure that it is really doing its thing, and it’s something that you can easily do as long as you are careful about how you write the words on the page. These words need to fall in line with the overarching vision you have of your business. If the images are right, but the text feels off, then your business is going to struggle for it, and people will trust the authority of your website much less too.

As long as you make a point of focusing on these things, you should find that you can keep your branding going strong even during these strange times.

Businesses across the world are still reeling from the COVID-19 virus and the lockdown it has precipitated. They’ve had to completely reassess their operations, enabling their employees to work from home where they can, and placing them on furlough when they can’t. Because of the sweeping disruption to global logistics and supply chains, business has slowed down considerably, even for the lucky industries that have managed to remain active during the lockdown. However, whatever the size and nature of your business, this is no time to rest on your laurels. A proactive approach is more important than ever if you expect to remain operational long after the lockdown is lifted. It’s time to look at the opportunities afforded us by the new, more relaxed pace of business.

Image by DiggityMarketing via Pixabay

It’s time to invest in growing your brand and your audience. Here’s how…

Invest in new leads

Even if you’re only able to operate in a limited capacity at the moment, this is absolutely the right time to lay the foundations for a grand resurgence when the lockdown is lifted. One possible advantage to this lockdown is that it provides the opportunity to engage with new prospects in a way that you may not have had the time to do when you had your hands full with staying on top of your operations.

Perhaps this is a good time to invest in some new lead lists. Start working on some dynamic and engaging email marketing copy that will encourage them o check out your brand. Even if you aren’t able to get your product or service to market right now, you can still start building value in your brand. Which brings us to…

Generate valuable content for your existing followers

Many businesses are using this time to double down on their content marketing and generate more high quality, valuable and practically useful content for their followers. This is your opportunity to showcase your knowledge, expertise and experience for existing customers and new prospects alike. It’s an opportunity to help them address problems or pain points that they may experience while on lockdown. The more value they perceive in your brand, the more value they’ll perceive in your products or services. Even if they have to wait a little while before they can avail themselves of what you offer.

When it comes to building positive perception of your brand in a meaningful and engaging way, it’s pretty difficult to top content marketing through blog posts, videos, how-to guides and infographics. It was important before the pandemic, and it’s arguably even more important now.

Incentivize social proof

Finally, in times of crisis, consumers may be slow to trust. Many will have taken a financial hit by the time the lockdown is over. As such, we can expect consumer confidence to be pretty low. Nonetheless, if brands invest their efforts in building trust now, they can expect to reap the rewards later. As such, now’s a good time to start incentivizing customers to rate your business and leave reviews online. Gathering as much of this social proof as you can will help you to increase your value proposition and ensure that your brand is synonymous with quality and trust.

In these trying times, one of the main ways businesses will stay afloat is to increase their website traffic. Of course, this is often easier said than done. In fact, sometimes driving more traffic to your website can be a challenge. Happily, there are some smart tactics you can use to make this happen. Read on to find out what they are.

Improve your SEO

SEO is one of the most important ways that you can increase traffic to your site. Unfortunately, there is some confusion over whether this is a task you can DIY or whether you need to get a professional in to help.

Of course, the thing to remember here is that SEO is part science and part art. The algorithms are also always changing and evolving. Therefore staying on top of this can become a full-time job in itself.

With that in mind, recruiting the help of SEO professionals like the ones you will find at hesk.com.au is a smart idea. It’s not that you can’t do things that will help to improve your SEO yourself like create category pages on your website, or include content with keywords. It’s just that when devising an overall approach, you will benefit from having a specialist in the driving seat. One that knows the topic inside out and will be useful in increasing traffic by the amount you need to stay competitive.

Image found at Pixabay – Licence CC0

Target Long-Tail Keywords

Next, if you want to drive more traffic to your business’s website, embrace the long tail keyword. This is because they are much more specific and often provide an answer to the type of question the demographic you are targeting will ask.

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Why is it so important? Well, it’s because it acts as a filtering system before customers even get to your website. The idea being that only those more specifically interested in what you have to offer will be searching such terms.

In fact, that often means not so much an increase in traffic quantitatively, but a rise in the quality of the leads you get. That is, those searching for long-tail keywords will be much better prospects and much easier to convert than leads coming from shorter and more general ones.

Make use of hashtags

Hashtags are an excellent way to get more traffic to your site. In fact, they are designed to highlight and categorize content and comments on a particular theme. Something that means those most likely to be interested in what you have to offer will be able to find you easily.

However, if you want them to work, you must use hashtags in an effective manner. In particular, understanding the procedure for using hashtags on different platforms as described at blog.pixelfish.com.au will matter. You also want them to be easy to read and use. Something that means you need to use a capital letter at the beginning of each word in the hashtag. The reason being that spaces aren’t used, and so some tags can become confusing.

With that same thing in mind, try and keep your hashtags as short and sweet as possible. In fact, if people can remember them without having to look them up, they are much more likely to use them and keep spreading your message.

Finally, the most important thing when it comes to hashtags is to make sure you pick one that gels well with your brand. For example, a clothing company with a teenage demographic may be able to use trending slang like #slay to promote their brand. However, if a high-end car company such as Roll Royce used that particular tag, it would seem forced, and ingenuine. Something that could work against engaging more users and gaining more traffic to their site.

Use Email Marketing

Another option is to integrate email into your marketing program. In fact, using email in the right way can be very helpful in generating more traffic. Although there are a few errors that you need to avoid. The first of these is spamming your potential customers. After all, no one wants an email about what you are selling every single day. No matter how good a product it is.

Picture located at Pixabay – Licence CC0

Additionally, the significant battle here is getting potential clients to actually open their emails. That means you need to get creative in the subject heading. In fact, if you can use personalization, emojis, or create a sense of intrigue like the examples at pinterest.com.au, do. After all, your email may be the best and take your customers to a great landing page, but if they don’t read it, it won’t provide you with the increase in traffic you need.

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If you want to improve your business, you’ve got to look at the most apparent aspects first. When you are reaching out to a customer, one of the most important ingredients is your website. The website will be the benchmark on how customers will judge your business or choose to purchase from you. But what happens when your website isn’t cutting it? And what happens when you’re not getting enough traffic? You may think that you’ve done everything right, but the numbers of your website traffic say something completely different. So with this in mind, this provides some troubleshooting options to springboard you into the right direction.

Your SEO Is Poor

It’s all about the Google rankings. Automatically, Google is the best source of free web traffic, but getting yourself into the top 10 or the first page is a tumultuous task. Many people choose to pay their way in, and there are numerous AdWords management services that can help you with this, but if you’re looking to do it in a more organic way, you need to make sure that your content is up to scratch. But if your content is as good as it can be, you’ve got to delve a bit further in to see if there are any other issues. Perhaps you have not optimized your content for keyword terms or not installed an SEO plugin. Because there are so many different factors at play, you need to make sure you are covering every base.

You Aren’t Promoting Enough

It may be as simple as this. You might have spent so long working on great content, but if you’re not getting the content out there, this can be a straightforward reason people aren’t coming to you. Promoting is a 24/7 game. This means that you’ve got to be on the right platforms for your target market, but you’ve got to be hammering the point home. It’s vital that if you are advertising on social media platforms that you are continually churning out content and promoting it so that it gets to the right people at the right time of day. This is where analytics tools are invaluable because if you are regularly pushing content out, but it’s not hitting people at the right time of day, this can be a problem. But now, social media is such a comprehensive tool for promotion that there are things that you can implement to promote your content regularly without even trying! Automating your social media posts has never been easier due to various tools, and this will help to maintain regularity. But you have to remember that promoting your content is about the good quality stuff. If you keep churning out content for the sake of numbers, but it’s all low quality, this will put people off coming to you. Think about the right type of content for your business. In terms of search engine rankings, video has seen a massive boost. But as a result, everybody is doing video. There is no point in doing a video for the sake of it if you are running a business that’s not dynamic or doesn’t necessarily need videos. For example, if your marketing to people in their 50s do they need video content?

Poor UX

User experience is vital. You may have fantastic content, but if you’re not getting the numbers in the traffic, it may very well be the fact that your website isn’t user-friendly. We have to remember that there is so much saturation in terms of content that many outlets are providing similar types of content. This means that if you publish something your audience may want to read, they could go to someone else for the same information. The goal is to improve your user experience so people will feel at home on your website. There are various factors at play with regards to UX, and one of the main ones is the loading time, and there are tools that you can use to check your website’s loading time. As a general rule, if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, you are in trouble. You should also make sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices. But also, you should think about the layout of your website. Much like the layout of supermarkets tease and tempt customers into a particular direction, you’ve got to think about the same thing with your site.

Keyword Problems

This is a persistent problem. The more times a keyword is entered into a Google search, the likelier it becomes targeted by the very best writers in a specific industry. This means that you are going to be competing with the big wigs, which is difficult for the best of us. Because the top rankings are usually authority websites that everybody has heard of, you’ve got to be smart with your keyword targets. The two options are either to gain authority or go for long-tail keywords. While becoming an authority can take a long time, if you use long-tail keywords that are around 4 or 5 words, this will give you a better chance of ranking in the search engine. Ideally, you should mix the two options. Working at being an authority can take some time to get right, but when you are up the top of the search engine, it can be to do with those subtle long-term efforts like implementing long-tail keywords.

One of the best lessons anybody can learn is to look at the type of business that’s making a success of their website and is ranking high. Analyze it, what is it about them that’s making them so successful? Our website is the window to the world, and if we don’t have these components in place, it’s unlikely people will stay with us for long. Many businesses tend to go for social media as their main outlet, but it’s not the best way to promote your brand in a comprehensive manner. This is where your website is invaluable. Make sure that it is gaining traffic and gaining momentum.

Many nowadays will frame technology as the solution to all woes in the modern workplace. It provides workers the tools to complete projects more efficiently, to communicate more effectively, and can automate whole processes so you need never think about it too much. However, more tech isn’t always the answer. Without careful planning, your greatest assets can also become your greatest liabilities.

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Know your security scope

With every new piece of hardware, every new program, and every new network you introduce into the business, you also introduce a new risk. Any software that connects online is, for instance, a potential gateway for someone to intrude your system and steal your data. Make sure that you’re investing in the very best digital security measures, be it anti-malware software, firewalls, or a policy that ensures everyone bringing a home device to the office, such as laptops or tablets, follows strict company protocol on how those devices are used and secured.

Have a team who can deal with the hiccups

Tech may eliminate human error, but that doesn’t mean that it’s perfect. It can slow down, it can suffer from errors, it can even lead to downtime. Having an IT team that’s on hand to respond to such issues, and prevent them from happening in future, is key. Finding good IT staffing can be difficult, so take the time to identify reliable recruitment agencies and outsourced services you can reach out to when your need is immediate and dire. Otherwise, you’re going to have your team scratching their heads trying to figure out systems that they’re not trained to.

Make sure you have a backup

A good workflow running on tech means relying on several assets. This can include hardware, software, and net connection. Having a backup for all of these things is important. For instance, allowing your team to bring their own devices to the office can get around any problems caused by a piece of hardware not working. Using Cloud software and storage can help them do the same work they would do on office devices, and having a backup internet connection means that even losing your network doesn’t result in too much down time.

Find tools that can do more than one job at a time

One of the issues of having too much software is that your team’s jobs can become increasingly complex, especially if you have specific standards on how different jobs are supposed to be done. To that end, instead of installing a bunch of different programs, each suited to a different task, try to find suites or software that can multitask. For instance, the Office 365 package can help take care of word document, spreadsheet, and presentation needs all in one.

If you want to incorporate new hardware or software into the business to help you meet specific goals then by all means, go ahead. Just make sure that you’re building the infrastructure to support it, or you can find it slowing you down more than anything.

Pexels 

Most business owners are aware that a blog is a highly valuable tool to draw consumers to your website. Whether you already have a blog or not- there’s always room for improvement when it comes to online marketing. To help you to enhance your quality fast, try a few of these pointers.

1 . Revamp your content

The first step to improving your blog is to revamp your content. With so many competitors out there, it pays to seek to improve all of the time. Look at what your competitors write about and ensure that you are providing posts that are more creative, unique and informative than what they have to offer. Of course, your content might be similar to that of your competitors in theme, but this doesn’t mean that it can’t provide something new and fresh on the topic. It’s likely that you outsource your articles, but for some originality, why not write a post or two yourself or call upon a member of your team?

2. Work with an SEO professional

If you want to improve your blog, it’s a good idea to work with an SEO professional. You may know a fair bit about SEO already, but with so much competition out there these days- a professional touch really is a worthy investment. Stephen Gagnon is a great SEO professional who can help your business to build an excellent online presence. You’ll find yourself ranked higher on search engines in no time at all!

3. Try a blogger outreach program

Another way to improve your online presence is to use a blogger outreach service. These services can help you to identify the right blogs and have your links placed on relevant blogger sites. You’ll benefit from a mention of your business by another blog in a similar industry. There are plenty of bloggers out there with a trusted following (that includes your target audience). A blogger outreach service can help you find such bloggers and get a campaign going.

4. Promote more on socials

Don’t forget to promote your blog content across all of your socials. You may have some amazing content, but it’s only valuable to you if it gets seen! To help with your social media campaigns in general, try platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer. These can help you to manage your posts, analytics and more.

5. Add video content

To get more visual with your blog, video content can be a great idea. Often, consumers will retain a message more effectively when they receive it via video. You don’t have to blow the budget to do so, a simple DIY tutorial video can be all it takes. Post on sites like Youtube and promote your content as much as possible.

Lastly, a photoshoot with your team can be an excellent way to get some great pictures for your blog. Stock images can do the job just fine, but original photos will allow you to offer more authenticity. To improve your website, a unique blog is the ideal starting point.

There are two main channels of thought, regarding an approach to business. Firstly, you need to a free-thinker. Never be afraid to venture outside the box, challenge existing concepts and be all that is good about entrepreneurship. The second way is to simply stop thinking, start doing. You don’t have to come up with an idea from scratch, just engage with the consumer and they will tell you what you need to do. The latter seems to be really taking off for startups because it’s basically a shoehorn strategy. Why look for a gap in the market, when you can be shown by the very customers that will buy your products and services? With the added threat of user trust and confidence slumping over big tech giants abusing their privacy, it’s more important to listen to the customer than ever before.

A loyalty event

If you have been in business for a few years, you will already have at least a small group of loyal customers. A small business with tens of thousands of customers will probably have a few hundred customers that you can consider loyal. These customers will have bought multiple products as well as downloaded your app, signed up with an account on your website and subscribed to your email newsletter or promotional messages. Contact these customers directly and invite them to an exclusive event. This event will be purely to gauge their opinion on all your current and planned ideas. Speaking face to face and have a rigorous debate among your most loyal customers, is such an incredibly powerful and helpful move for your business. Your marketing team must play the leading role, so they can gather as much information as humanly possible at the event.

A feedback loop

Undertaking a round of studies into consumer needs is a great way to start things off this year. Rather than sitting around in a boardroom, and brainstorming for ideas, just listen to consumers. Start a research study in a bid to find what customers want in the group of products you operate in. But finding the right kind of people that know their way around the industry, is difficult. By utilizing user research software, you can hire knowledgeable consumers. Recruit them via email notification and survey links. The latter are free of charge making it easier to cast the net far and wide. Alternatively, you may order the software company to use their intelligent sourcing engine to find customers with great insights.

More choice the better

Are you one of the millions of businesses trying to find a niche? It’s more difficult to do so if you’re working in a vacuum. It’s better for you to give your customers more choice in your products and services and roll the dice. Eventually, you’ll begin to see a trend in purchases. Perhaps consumers really love your product in a certain design or look. Eventually, you’ll begin to see what customers really want when they are given the choice to customize your products.

It’s never easy trying to get into the consumer’s mind. But having a loyalty event is a fantastic way to absorb ideas from people who operate on the same wavelength.

Image Credit: Pexels. Free to Use Licence. 

Affiliate marketing has been around for years, since well before the rise of the internet and is quickly becoming one of the most popular ways to make money online. But what is affiliate marketing? How does it work? And could you be making money from it? Let’s take a look at the answers to those questions.

What is affiliate marketing?

Making sense of affiliate marketing isn’t too difficult if you think of it as simply being paid for your recommendation and in essence, affiliate marketing is a commission-based referral scheme. For example, a company may use affiliate marketing as a way to gain new clients, paying the referee a small commission for each new client that they bring to the business. Originally, affiliate marketing was conducted through word of mouth, with sellers making a commission from door to door sales and telephone calls. Now, with the invention of the internet, the affiliate market industry has grown to a whole new level and it is easier than ever for companies and affiliates to make big money doing it.

How does affiliate marketing work?

The success of affiliate marketing lies in the human psyche and the truth is that people are more likely to purchase something recommended to them by a friend, colleague, or person that they trust (such as a digital influencer) than they are from seeing an advertisement from the company itself. Digital affiliate marketing plays to this strength enticing affiliates to recommend products or services with the promise of a commission and persuading consumers to purchase items because they feel a greater degree of trust with the affiliate than they do with the brand alone.

The internet truly has been the driver behind the recent success of affiliate marketing as it has made it easier than ever for influencers to reach large audiences and to share their recommendations via links that contain unique tracking codes ensuring that the affiliate earns a commission from any sale conducted through them.

Could you be making money from affiliate marketing?

Whether you are a business seeking new customers or an affiliate seeking new affiliate marketing opportunities then there’s money to be made.

For the business
Affiliate marketing gives businesses a driven sales force that they needn’t employ in house and is a very effective way to promote a business. Motivated by commission these people want to make a sale because they want to make money and as such, they will promote your company or product to thousands of people without it costing you a penny. As a business, all you need to do is look after your affiliates by paying them their owned commission.

For the affiliate
There are now numerous affiliate programs out there ranging from those run by huge corporations such as Amazon down to independent retail stores such as Coconut Lane. There are also now affiliate networks who compile these affiliate programs under one roof, taking a small cut of your commission on the side, but putting affiliates in contact with hundreds of affiliate programs and making it easier than ever for them to share their recommendations with their audiences.