Design

Fact: People who master the art of on-camera storytelling have more fun, make more money and build bigger empires than their competition.

How do I know? I’ve done it for myself and do it for my clients. I was an NBC reporter before launching Pink Kisses, a website devoted to helping women get over heartbreak by forgetting their exes & finding their inner bombshells. I knew I had to use every bit of my on-camera training to get the word out about my brand and guess what? It worked.

In addition to media interviews, I used online video to build a bustling community of thousands of women in just months and keep them interested. And, no, it didn’t cost a gazillion dollars to do it. I shot most of my videos on my MacBook and edited them in IMovie. But, I still was able to make huge impact just by showing up consistently, knowing my message & purpose for each video and being truly authentic. Try it!

1. If you’re not using video, you’re missing a huge opportunity! Using online video on your website and blog opens the door to a continuously growing online market that is willing to share your message with friends and family. Over 2 BILLION videos are viewed on YouTube everyday! How much is 2 billion? Combine the audience numbers of all three major broadcast networks. Now double it!

2. You can show your personality & company culture. It’s a chance to spice up your blog & and show your business to world in a new way. Maybe you’re a goofball. Maybe you’re wildly sarcastic. Maybe you love to play with fashion. Video allows you to show your community those wonderful little idiosyncrasies they might not catch through your writing or just expand on what they’ve already seen in photos and words on your blog. Create videos where you’re truly being genuine and authentic about your cause, your story or your message that day. Watch what happens.

3. The celebrity factor. Using video to get your message out to the world allows you to form powerful and long-lasting connections with your customers on a MASSIVE scale. I call it the celebrity-factor. Have you ever felt like you knew a favorite celebrity even though you’ve never met them? You can save time AND energy by leveraging the same principles in your business.

4. You can recycle content you’ve already created by adding a video. You’ve been blogging for years now and you’ve put out a TON of great content, but for some reason you feel totally guilty recycling your writing… even the best stuff. Video is an awesome way to expand on a piece you did last year or revive something you wrote about before and still make it seem fresh. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just grab a post from 2009, dust it off, and read it over. Then flip on the camera and chat about it. Done.

5. Ignite your brand. Creating videos allows people to see the face behind the blog and to get to know the brand behind the business. If done effectively, video also places you in a unique position to be an expert in your field. That can lead to TV and media opportunities, book deals, your very own reality TV show, you name it. But, how can you make huge impact and create change in the world if you’re not being seen & heard? You’ve got something to share that’s incredibly valuable and 100% unique. Start showing people who you are. Now.

If you want to be a successful blogger, you must get targeted traffic. Otherwise, no one will ever read the thought-provoking and authoritative content you are writing. No one will ever buy the ground-breaking product or service you provide. No one will ever visit the useful, targeted ads that you display.

The goal of every Internet marketing campaign is to increase traffic and to increase conversion rates. There are many ways that you can get more traffic to your blog, and some strategies are more effective than others. Here are some of the top tips for getting more traffic to your blog:

Keyword Research and SEO

Finding out what your customers are searching for in Google is the best way to make sure your site is the one they find. Research keywords related to your niche to find out what your customers want, then use those keywords appropriately in your site. Use keywords in your page titles, blog content, meta descriptions, image descriptions, tags, and more. You can even use your keywords in choosing your domain name.

On-page search-engine optimization is the best foundation for any marketing strategy for boosting traffic.

Commenting

Comments are a great way to build community, generate back links, and drive traffic. On your own blog, creating an environment that promotes reader comments encourages a community. Readers who comment on your blog become engaged in the conversation, coming back to your blog to check for additional comments and to offer replies. The more they return to your site, the more likely they are to become regular visitors.

You can encourage commenting on your own site by installing plugins like CommentLuv that link back to their blogs, by including a call to action at the end of your posts, or by writing compelling content that encourages discussion.

Commenting on other blogs is a great way to build links back to your site. In addition, when you leave interesting and informative comments that further the discussion, you invite readers to learn more about the content on your blog, encouraging them to become visitors.

Guest Posting

Writing quality guest posts for top blogs in your niche is a great way to build quality back links to your blog. Showcase your best work to highlight the kind of quality that readers can expect from your blog. The link will drive traffic to your blog and help boost your SEO efforts.

Accepting guest posts on your blog is also a great way to encourage more traffic to your blog. Guest bloggers will promote their post for your blog on their own site and their social networks, encouraging their readers to check out their post and your blog.

Giveaways

Everyone loves to get something for free. Offering giveaways, contests, and other promotions on your blog is a great way to encourage visitors to your site. Leverage the traffic-generating potential of these promotions by utilizing all the methods you have available for entries. This can include becoming your fan on Facebook, following you on Twitter, pinning your content on Pinterest, or sharing your content on any of these social networks. Each of these actions can be an entry, encouraging readers to promote your content more and increasing your potential for new traffic.

E-Mail Marketing

Growing your opt-in e-mail list is key to not only promoting your products and services but also to growing the traffic on your blog. E-mail marketing keeps readers informed of new blog posts, reminding them to return to the blog to check out new content. It is also a great way of letting them know about special promotions, new products, and other features of the blog. Getting readers to sign up for e-mail is a great way to capture these readers and to avoid losing them to apathy or forgetfulness.

Building traffic to your blog is critical to its long-term success, and it’s something that you have to continually work on. These tried-and-true strategies will help you get the traffic you need.

Are there any other tricks that you use to get more traffic to your blog? Tell us your ideas in the comments!

All your digital marketing efforts should be guided by a powerful online marketing game plan because it can be the difference between a successful and a failed business.  Therefore, while embracing all facets of your online existence, from visibility to branding, customer acquisition to SEO strategy, your plan for growing your business through the Internet has to be all-encompassing and methodical.

Here are 3 vital components to build into an effective online marketing strategy.

1. A Solid Online Marketing Plan

Before you think about making any moves or investing any money in online marketing, you have to take some time to design a clear-cut plan. It doesn’t have to be intricate, but having a plan you have written down will help your long term focus. It can also be useful as a guide for making critical decisions about budget and priorities.

It’s advisable to work with a digital marketing company; starting with your target in mind and writing down your goals. Your digital marketers should present you a series of questions which you will need to answer.

Your plan should be largely based on in-depth research about your competitors, your customers, your own business, and your industry. It should feature clear answers to crucial questions like:

• How many sales per week or per month do you need to make to break even?

• What percentage of sales growth do you want to record in the next year or the next five years?

• Do you have a particular type of ideal consumer you want to attract?

• How big is your share of the market, and how big do you want it to be?

• Are you planning on being dominant within a particular area, or do you want to expand nationally? Or on a global scale?

• Who are your target market, and how will you get through to them?

• Who are your main rivals and what can you give to customers that they can’t?

• What are your rivals’ marketing channels and how much are they investing into each of these channels?

After you have been able to define these goals, you can work towards defining the steps that are required to be taken for them to come to fruition.

2. Partners You Have Confidence In

Your online marketing will usually comprise of various components. Ideally, all of the different activities will not be handled in-house. It’s always a huge benefit when each cog in the complex wheel of online marketing is supported by a network of brilliant people. These experts can provide specialist skills and experience to your business leaving your staff to concentrate on sales and customer service.

The areas of your digital marketing and how much of digital marketing you outsource is entirely up to you, however, for the areas listed below, you might want to think about working with experts:

• Web development
• SEO
• Content marketing and distribution
• PPC advertising campaign management
• PR and media outreach
• Branding
• Social media management
• Email marketing

The support and expertise you can get from experts in each of these areas can make a huge difference when it comes to marketing projects. Their wealth of knowledge could be useful at all stages of the process, from planning to training, execution to reporting, and optimization.

3. Dedicated Budget for Online Marketing

Having a plan is fantastic, but having enough budget is a whole new ball game. A sufficient budget is required for vital online marketing initiatives and not having one is a general barrier that a lot of businesses face. You should have a rough estimate of the amount of money you would need to invest to be able to compete effectively, and also meet your short-term and long-term targets.

A lot of business owners get discouraged by the initial failures and decide to put a halt to funding future marketing initiatives. However, if you give up too soon, you will never experience the long term success that you desire. It’s best to view your marketing budget as an investment for the long term.

Lastly, make sure you carry out regular reviews of your strategy. Online marketing is dynamic, so it’s important that you adopt a strategy that is adaptable to best practices and new channels while evolving to meet the ever-changing realities of your business.

The use of social media is on the rise. These sites, which were previously used for socializing and catching up with friends and family, are now being used as advertising platforms for businesses.

Facebook is the leading online social media site with an estimated 2 billion monthly active users as of June 2017.

It has numerous features such as live chats, sharing and tagging pictures and images to mention a few.

It is not a wonder that most companies are going for online marketing strategies, with over three million active advertisers recorded in March 2016.

An active advertiser is said to be one who has advertised on Facebook in the last 28 days. However, this does not guarantee instant rewards for the company due to various reasons. You can improve conversion rates with these four easy ways;

1.Send your visitors to your landing page instead

It is always advisable to use optimized landing pages as opposed to company websites.

On the landing page, potential customers get more detail of what the advertisement entails.

It provides them with information they need to know about the specific product as well as reviews from other people who have used the said product and their experiences whether positive or negative.

If the link on the advertisement leads to the company’s website, the potential customers will be bombarded with unnecessary information along with having to look for the product or offer they saw.

Chances are they will get bored and go back to what they were doing no matter how attractive the offer was. The landing page should have the following features;

• The most crucial part of your landing page is the headline. The headline should be clear and to the point, and give the visitor information about the product or service in a short time. You can get better outcome by skipping the advantages of using the product or service and go straight to the results of either buying or downloading the product or service.

• You should also have a subtitle to add more information in regards to the headline. Here, you can include the benefits your potential client can get by using your product or service.

• You could include reviews or testimonials from people who have used the product or service and got positive results from it. You can also include pictures of you or your staff members handing out vouchers or coupons to lucky winners if you are promoting an offer by your company.

• Last but not least, you should have a clear call to action. This is to encourage the visitor to try out the product or service or the offer your company may have. The offer can be a free trial period or something of the sort.

2. Get more specific by using the exclusion button and also use retargeting ads for prior visitors

Audience Insight is a tool on Facebook that was created to aid advertisers know their target audience and target ads more effectively. You can also use it to know more about your audience. You can check out for other similar interests your target audience may have, demographics, location and pages they like.

You can use this in the targeting section when developing your ad.

The exclusion button is the least used option but can come in handy when you want your ad to reach to a specific audience. For example, you can have an ad that targets single men who own dogs as pets and another ad that you want to target married men with kids who own dogs as pets.

If there is a group of single men with kids who own dogs, then that may fall in any of the two target groups stated above.

However, you can use the exclusion button to block them out so as to reach a more specific target.

Retargeting ads are used for the members of the audience that have already visited your ad and not made a purchase decision yet but are still likely to purchase your product.

3. Quality video ads with a touch of creativity

Just because ads are based online does not mean they should be of low quality. Just as you would laugh off a poorly produced television advert, which is the same way your audience will ignore your ad if it reeks of poor quality.

Good quality images or/and videos are important when you want to capture your audience’s attention.

Invest in a professional photographer or videographer who will capture what you desire for your ad and an editor that will give you a satisfactory finished product.

Quality online ads may not be as expensive as quality television ads but they are just as important for best results.

You can also get creative when designing your ad and go for carousel types. With this type of advertisement, you can give out as much information as possible that is accompanied by attractive images.

4. Use different copy lengths on your ads

There is a theory that states that any advertisement that has a shorter copy will perform better that one with a longer copy.

While in theory this sounds true, in actual sense this is far from it. When it comes to Facebook ads it is always advisable to test, this is because target audience react differently.

When developing your ad copy, always have in mind the people you are targeting. Convey a message that will capture your audience. You can write a long and short ad copy with the long one having some storytelling incorporated in it.

Always have a call to action in the advertisement that tells the audience what they are getting into. It can be a bold blinking sign that asks the visitor to get more information about the product, book a room or a flight or simply get a free sample.

When it comes to Facebook ads, there is no guarantee that that one approach way will give you the desired results. You have to keep trying and testing different strategies as well as giving those ways enough time around in order to be able to estimate or weigh their outcome.

With time, the different approaches that work for you will stand out and, you can use them to continuously evaluate the level of progress attained.

Businesses put a lot of investment into their online marketing strategies, and rightly so. The internet has the potential to convert small-time businesses into conglomerates. While the potential is endless, you will need a plan to get your business thriving on the internet.

Unfortunately, a lot of companies are either not maximizing their possibilities or simply use methods that don’t work anymore. In this piece, we focus on SEO, a core aspect of internet marketing.

Virtually every online merchant uses SEO, and often times they have a wrong approach.

Here are 3 things you’re doing wrong.

1. Not working with the right people

Working with the right team of professionals is very important if you are serious about SEO. Online marketing is a vast and multifaceted domain that needs a team to work through. There is a big workload and you need different people who will do their bit skillfully.

You don’t need assemble professionals that you rent office space for; it is not such an expensive venture, at least not with the internet on hand. Source your projects to different agencies with the requisite professionals. You will spend very little outsourcing tasks if you already know a thing or two about SEO since you don’t have to give everything to other professionals. Finding a reputable agency for such work is important so that everything works together nicely.

Getting online marketing experts

You need about 4 experts who have the know-how in different areas of SEO to get everything you need. There are numerous professionals on the internet that can create great unique content for your website. Ensure you check the credentials and past projects for each before handing them your projects. The right team should include experts such as;

• Designers
• Writers
• Social media experts
• SEO experts

This is basically the whole package. This kind of team works on all aspects of your website from the look to the content, rankings and visibility. A lot of online businesses neglect one or the other of these attributes and consequently miss out on a higher ranking and a wider outreach.

2. Using the wrong link strategy

Backlinks are an important part of SEO marketing. Search engines are favorable to authority sites and backlinks are the best way to get some credibility on the internet. As a matter of fact, 90% participants in a State of Link Building survey in 2016 said that they used guest postings and content promotion/publication for an effective link strategy.

A further 78% of those who took part declared link building the most successful strategy for improving SEO.

Before you start off creating backlinks for your site, you have to remember to only use quality links. The growth also needs to take a natural course. You run the risk of raising red flags if you have too many backlinks too quickly. Google will also penalize you if you use links to websites that have been flagged or those with poor domain authority, which is
anything below 20.

Google is always keen to provide its users with quality content, which means the same goes for your website. Guest-blogs and link directories that look spammy are to be avoided at all costs. The only way to go is to write high quality content that provides actual value.

Share your content with the influential sites in your niche where you can get a larger audience and combine this with social media promotion. Establishing lasting relationships with influencers is important too so that you can always pitch a good idea and have it published to the readership.

This kind of link building takes longer than coming up with hundreds of bogus backlinks whose sources are questionable. However, you will have more than you need if you can find 4 high authority sites that can get you actual leads.

3.  Keywords are always important

Just some time back, keywords were all the rage but today, content wins over keywords. That might be as it is, but keywords are still important for search engine ranking. Online businesses are getting it all wrong though.

A lot of businesses target the wrong keywords and many more are guilty of keyword stuffing. Search engines know when you are trying to game the system and will penalize you for it. Word-for-word repetition can easily be identified by the search engine and will damage your ranking.

It’s better to have synonyms of the keywords and allow the keywords to occur naturally all through the content.

Utilize tools which are readily available online so that youknow which keywords to target.

When it comes to picking the right keywords, forget about the ones with the highest volume. Instead, go for applicable long-tail keywords that are typically a 3 to 4 word phrase. Choose those with a reasonable search volume and apply them.

Doing your homework is important in finding keywords that will bring about the results you are looking for. Find out what keywords are trending in your niche and incorporate those in your content. This means that you should constantly stay on top of the latest in terms of keywords and keep refreshing your content every now and then.

By now, you know that SEO is not meant only for the search engine but for the people visiting your site too.

With this in mind, you also need to remember just how vital SEO is to your online presence and put in the financial investment. Most businesses don’t have a budget for their SEO strategy and often end up doing too little.

It is advisable to have a dedicated budget that fuels your SEO campaign.

Companies that have put in the financial investment have enjoyed success with search engines because every aspect of their website is covered. With the right budget, all you have to do is make sure you avoid these often overlooked pitfalls. However, mistakes will always happen at one point or another. Keep scrapping off parts of your online marketing strategy that don’t work
and keep testing your current strategy to ensure it still applies to the prevailing SEO trends. Never forget to do away with the mistakes of yestertimes and focus on the promise of greater ideas.