To help you start fostering those relationships online, we’ve put together 10 strategies for building a community that your clients and customers want to be a part of.

Let’s dive in!

1. Use Social Listening

The first idea is to pay attention to what your audience is saying online about your industry and what their problems are. This is called social listening, and it’s the perfect way to be proactive about what your audience wants from businesses like yours.

Take advantage of social listening tools to help you track certain keywords, topics and users. Tools like Mention are the perfect solution for watching conversations online.

Keep an eye on the online interactions surrounding each of the items you decide to track in order to learn more about what your clients are interested in and what they might want to learn more of from your business.

Then, solve those problems and address those interests any way you can. This doesn’t just have to be through your services. In fact, you can offer a resolution through your giveaways, content marketing, add-ons and more.

2. Create Community Groups

One great way to create genuine and authentic connections with your clients is to launch online community groups.

There are several online spaces that are perfect for hosting a community for clients and other interested parties to join, like Facebook or LinkedIn groups, Slack communities and more online community building platforms.

Brands like Visme host online communities for their users, providing informational content and product insights, as well as giving them a chance to discuss projects with each other.

Create and promote a community for both clients and potential clients to join. Start discussion threads, share valuable information and build an online group/networking area.

Not only is this a great way to build stronger connections with your clients, it’s also a great way to strengthen your personal branding as well as improve brand awareness.

It also enables your brand to create a word-of-mouth funnel for generating new leads. People will refer people to your community and they will want to work with you after seeing the value you already offer.

3. Promote an Open Feedback Channel

Create a way to get honest, anonymous client feedback. Put together a forum, web page, email account or whatever is best for your workflow exclusively for accepting feedback. You can also consider using chatbots to collect instant feedback on your website.

Moreover, make sure to pay attention to the feedback you receive and implement any necessary changes to better serve your clients.

There are many different ways you can create open feedback channels and welcome client concerns.

First, make sure to be open from the get go with your clientele so they feel comfortable leaving feedback and information in these channels.

Second, consider your target audience and the way they prefer to communicate. You want your feedback area to cater to your audience and be easy for them to use.

If they prefer email, send out anonymous surveys or provide a contact email specifically for this type of communication. If they’re tech savvy, you could create an open forum or embed a form on a web page. You could also create polls to share with your clients.

Be sure that you let all of your clients know about this channel for expressing concerns anonymously as well so that the chances they take you up on it are much higher.

4. Showcase Clients in Social Media Content

Talking about client success stories and your biggest clients is a great B2B marketing strategy. There are a number of different ways to do this.

First, consider creating case studies to showcase clients who have seen major results due to your work. These are effective selling tools and allow you to highlight your clients and get them more exposure as well.

You can also share client social media posts onto your own feed or simply promote their products and services, like we see in this example below.

For B2B and tech industry clients, using Twitter marketing tools. For more visually-oriented clients, sharing photos on Instagram can be a great way to lead your audience directly to your clients’ websites and social profiles.

If you hop on this strategy, you can measure engagement and clicks on those posts as one of your social media KPIs, and even let your clients know how each one has performed. They’ll definitely appreciate the added gesture and exposure.

Consider creating social media ads and PPC campaigns as well for even further exposure.

5. Create a Loyalty Program

Have you had a handful of clients for a longer period of time? Show them you’re grateful for their loyalty and continued business by creating a loyalty program.

This is a great way to reward return clients each time they sign up for services, when they reach major milestones or when they refer new clients your way.

There are many different types of loyalty programs and rewards you could offer, from discounts to cash bonuses, as well as simply asking long-term clients how they would prefer to be rewarded.

Another option could be to create an affiliate marketing program to give clients who refer to work your way a portion of the profits.

6. Check In With Clients

The best way to build a great rapport with your clients is to be incredibly communicative and upfront. There are a few different ways you can go about this.

For instance, create regular update meetings or emails to let clients know about your progress while you work on a project. Another idea is to be fully transparent about any clauses you may have in your contract.

Also, if any obstacles come up, be clear and communicative with clients from the get go. They’ll be much more appreciative to hear about delays beforehand, rather than after the deadline.

And if you’re waiting on a client for something, don’t be afraid to send a follow up email or two in order to help move the process along smoothly.

7. Put Together a Regular Newsletter

A fun strategy for both strengthening your existing client base and opening up an opportunity to gain new ones organically is by starting a newsletter that you send out to your email list.

Sending newsletters with valuable content can help your clients feel even better about working with you because you obviously know your stuff. Come up with a topic or structure for your newsletter that you can easily update with new information each time you send it out.

You also want to make your newsletter easily shareable so your clients can send it to others who might be interested, generating new leads for your list.

Also, be sure to promote your newsletter across your own online channels, like your website or social media profiles, in order to reach an even wider audience, just like this freelancer did on Twitter.

8. Offer Exclusive Discounts/Sales

One way to make return clients feel valued is by offering exclusive discounts or sales every now and then.

While you never want to sell yourself or your business short, occasionally hosting a flash sale or placing a discount code on a random web page can be a fun Easter egg for your clients.

Choose different outlets each time you decide to do this, like a blog post, a web page, a social media post, a newsletter, or even at the end of a webinar. Disappearing posts, like Instagram and Facebook Stories or Twitter Fleets are also the perfect platforms for announcing a limited-time only sale or a discount code.

9. Create Valuable Content

Content marketing is huge for creating connections – as long as you’re consistently creating valuable content for every step of the customer journey.

Not only that, but content marketing is also a great way to reach an even wider audience, both through social shares of your blog content and the organic traffic that your SEO content can generate.

Valuable content isn’t just limited to your blog, though. Creating video content, podcast episodes, infographics, SlideShares and other types of unique content are great ways to expand your network as well as share your knowledge.

You can further engage your audience through enticing YouTube intros, interactive content and the like.

10. Show Your Brand Personality

Being genuine and authentic in all of your communications, both with clients directly and in your online content, is a great way to build relationships and community foundations.

Social media marketing is all about building connections and being your authentic self, and you want to show your followers who you really are and what you really stand for.

Part of ensuring you show off the brand personality you want to convey is putting together a brand voice. This should embody your company mission, the traits you want your brand to emulate and the reason you do what you do.

Here’s an example from TOPOL.io where they showcase their brand personality through emoji and friendly, relatable messaging.

Look for ways you can convey the same fun, energetic voice in your own copy and online content so you can let your own brand personality shine.

Strengthen Your Own Client Relationships

Building stronger connections is key to long lasting client relationships, so it’s time to start putting a few of these strategies in place. Determine which ones make the most sense for you and your business, whether you’re a freelancer or solopreneur, or you’re representing an entire company.

The post Best Ways to Connect With Your Clients to Build a Strong Community appeared first on OmniKick.

Digital voice (and video) transmission tech dates back to 1995, but since the internet wasn’t as powerful as it is today, VoIP wasn’t a feasible communication channel. The sound quality was dreadful, the connection unstable and the calls cut off all the time.

Eight years later, Skype released the beta version. It was the first globally known, audio-only VoIP service that in the following years expanded to video calling, file sharing and more. 

We could argue that VoIP tech started developing much earlier, with AT&T’s Bell Labs and Picturephone in the sixties, but it wasn’t until the 2010s that VoIP went mainstream.

The internet connection quality rapidly went up, and VoIPs followed. In 2019, the U.S. VoIP industry has reached $14 billion — and with the current global health situation, we expect these stats to skyrocket by the end of 2020. 

Now, why do these stats matter and what does VoIP have to do with marketing strategy anyway?

We plan to reveal that in today’s blog! 

For now, here are some spoilers:

• It saves tons of money
• Traditional phones’ features cannot compare
• VoIP brings local flair to across-the-globe communication
• Office presence is not required
• You’ll have an insight into precious data and the ability to act on it instantly
• Customers are happy and so is the customer support team — feed two birds with one scone (no stones here, birds are cool)

Sounds good? Thought so — let’s dive in, so you can learn how to build the best marketing strategy yet with the business telephone system your enterprise deserves.

While Running Costs Go Down… 

Introducing VoIP into your business enables you to cut the costs in multiple ways, and is one of the main reasons to adopt this model of communication.

Installation costs. First of all, there is no need to install a special office phone line or any new hardware. VoIP uses the existing equipment and infrastructure you own and only requires an initial 15-minute installation. The only thing you need for your VoIP to work is an internet connection. It is much more expensive to set up the traditional telephone system — and it lasts longer.

Call pricing. Remember when you accidentally called an international number as a kid and had a “fun” conversation with your parents when the phone bill came in?

No?

Well, some of us do — and while it wasn’t really a fun conversation, the call surely was expensive.

Anyway, the cost of international calls with traditional phone systems didn’t change much. The costs are based on duration and distance from your base, and there are no freebies. 

VoIP providers offer cost-effective plans at lower prices, and many of them even include this feature for free or provide free minutes.

Service maintenance and overhead costs. Maintenance costs are also higher, while the only running cost of a VoIP comes from the data usage. Additionally, it’s much cheaper and easier to add or remove extra phone numbers than it is with POTS (plain old telephone service). 

Updates. When it comes to scalability, VoIP wins again. The software and bandwidth updates are faster and easier than POTS updates, as VoIP requires no additional hardware installations. 

Features. Finally, the features such as Call Transfer, Call Forwarding or adding remote extensions are included in the basic VoIP packages. With POTS, each additional feature needs to be implemented separately, and it adds up to a hefty bill. Most of them are only available with cloud technology in the first place.

In the end — this saves you plenty of money when it comes to telecommunication costs!

…Conversion Goes Up!

Saving lots of money is already great news, but on top of that — using VoIP increases the conversion rate as well!

By using this type of cloud service, you have an opportunity to expand your marketing strategy through other channels besides online ones. In addition to email, ads, social media and others, VoIP will enable you to reach out to your customers and speak directly to them.

There are multiple scenarios in which issues cannot be solved the other way. Some of these include:

• Explaining something complicated
• Having to answer plenty of questions
• When it’s urgent, important and/ or personal

Although cold calling does have a bad reputation for being intrusive, it’s not what it used to be (and even when it was, back in 2010, it still had a better success rate than email). Reps have many tools at their disposal to “preheat” the call and contact people who are a good fit, and cloud tech that VoIP resides on is one of them.

Now we’re diving into the customer satisfaction area! In the following chapter, we’ll explain how VoIP technology helps you warm up what was once named “cold call” and converts leads to long-term customers.

Maximize Customer Satisfaction — Dynamic And Effective Communication

Handling the impatient customers’ requests fast is a must if you want to stay ahead of the competition. Keep them on hold just a bit longer, and you’ll lose the happy customer; with that, you may miss a bunch of referrals from them, as well as a future purchase.

By using VoIP, you’ll have instant access to all the info you can need! Cloud technology stores and updates the data in real-time, making access fast and intuitive. This makes the conversation effective and most importantly — short. 

The following features will help the reps handle the calls at all times:

• Call History — access the list of calls made earlier to keep track 
• Call Recording — listen to the previous conversations with a certain client and stay up to date with their situation
• Call Comments — leave useful notes for future reference, or access them to learn more when taking over the customer from another rep
• Shared Call Inbox — allows multiple sales reps to participate in call and help if necessary

Still, customers and clients can reach out to you in more ways than one. Email, Chat or Phone Support — everything goes, so even the customers that shy away from speaking over the phone have a way to ask for help or info.

Website Call Widget is another thing that makes it easier for customers to reach out. They can use it to make a call without leaving the website. Customer support reps can assist them at the moment of speaking, and guide them through the problem-solving process. Email exchange could take days — this way, everything can be resolved in a matter of minutes.

In addition to the features described above, VoIP has a way of handling the calls even before the reps pick up the phone. Queue management with IVR menus, auto-attendants — all of these direct the customers to the right department instantly, eliminating the need for transferring the call and without wasting their (and reps’) time.

What’s also amazing about VoIP is that you can do all of this outside the office!

VoIP Increases Your Availability — No More Office-Bound Work

If you opt for VoIP instead of a landline, you can work from anywhere, provided that you have a stable internet connection and your device is not showing technical troubles. Just the same, you can use any smartphone or laptop — from the office, home, coffee shop or any other location you pick.  This can be especially powerful for digital nomad solopreneurs who create educational resources like online courses and want to offer consulting on the side.

It’s possible to assign the same business number to multiple devices, so you’re never caught off guard (or with an empty phone battery without a charger in sight).

This option became crucial in 2020. for the obvious reasons. However, being able to answer the call this way would still matter if the current situation didn’t have the dystopian elements. 

For some businesses, being available outside the typical office hours is a prerequisite. 

Then, there are different time zones you want to cover if you strive for a global presence. In the end, for huge customers in the crucial stages of the sales funnel, not answering the call is not an option! This way, you can speak to them whenever they want, and provide them with an exceptional customer experience. 

Also — did we mention that VoIP opens the doors for the markets far away, but makes it look like you’re right there?

Global Reach With Local Appeal — With Geographical Number Targeting

Need to reach the customers located across the continent? 

VoIP allows you to pick a phone number that matches any geographical location you wish. This also means that you can use multiple phone numbers, a different one for each area.

With this feature, your small business can have the appearance of a bigger enterprise, with HQs established in multiple cities, or even countries. Local numbers also help with customer segmentation — their needs may vary depending on the location, so you can easily group them and present them with offers relevant to their location and cultural preferences.

As it strengthens your company image, it also appeals to local customers. They will see a familiar area code, and won’t think that you’re far away, or that the call will cost them a fortune. And it really won’t — VoIP packages include toll-free numbers as well!

Geographical number targeting is also a great way to track the ad campaigns, and then analyze and compare their success. Find out how to do it below!

Measuring Your Campaign’s Success — See What Works Well And Improve Instantly

Continuing with local numbers and ads success — there’s a “trick” that will show you what ad converts the best. 

When you’re putting the special, local ads together, include the local phone numbers so your customers can use them to contact you. VoIP can provide you with a fair amount of those numbers. Then, you can take a look at the stats, and see what number brings the most calls and sales! This way, you can pinpoint which ad worked the best and make a direct connection between the ads and the sales.

You can also apply this strategy when determining which web pages on your website have the best CTAs. Create and place a special number on each page (or place the Website Call Widget there), and you can estimate the success by noting down which number got the most calls.

However, VoIP has more useful functionalities that help you build marketing campaigns with high conversion rates. Integrate it with your existing CRM and sales tools and you’ll get an interactive dashboard, with all the data right where you need it.

Help Your Customer Service Team — Improving Performance With Little Effort

Including VoIP in your sales and customer service teams’ tech stack will make them work efficiently and alleviate the everyday stress that comes from working in a fast-paced environment. 

The features are devised with teamwork in mind. Assign the Call Owner, and you’ll leave no place for confusion, as everybody knows their tasks and who to turn to in case they need extra info or help. Dedicated Account Manager is in charge of key customers with a long track record of high-priced purchases — eliminating the need for multiple reps to juggle several accounts and mix them up.

The Call Recording feature we mentioned also helps with onboarding new team members: go through the notable calls with them, and you won’t need to schedule special onboarding sessions. Practical, real-life examples are the best learning material!

A Shared dashboard brings the whole team together; no matter where in the world your reps are located, they can access the data in real-time and communicate with coworkers.

Summary

For every well-made marketing strategy, it’s important to go where your customers are. Using VoIP, next to live chat or emails, provides yet another channel for you to do so. 

It’s a cloud service that seamlessly integrates into your existing tools, and ties them together into a powerful kit that makes your teamwork fast and effective. Not only will your team appreciate it, but the customer satisfaction levels will notably grow. Installation and maintenance are cheap and easy, and it pays off on so many levels!

The post How To Build An Effective Marketing Strategy Using VoIP appeared first on OmniKick.

Google’s search algorithm keeps evolving with new updates aimed at weeding out content that does not offer value to searchers. That’s why it is essential for you as a marketer to ensure that your content engages audiences, builds brand authority, and generates returns.

But that’s not all:

You also need a content marketing plan to boost your search visibility. At the same time, you should remember that not all of your content will deliver as expected.

But that’s not the real problem.

The real problem will arise if you don’t do anything about your underperforming content.

How can you improve your existing content so that it offers value to your audience and ranks well in search results?

Find out below.

But before we get into that, let’s learn how to find out which of your content pieces need optimization.

How can you identify content that needs optimization?

Before you can improve your content, it’s essential that you conduct a thorough website content audit.

You can use analytical tools such as Google Analytics and SEMrush to get valuable insights into how well your content is performing.

You can collect data about:

• Sessions
• Time spent on site
• Bounce rate
• Impressions
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• Number of inbound links
• Referring domains
• Backlinks
• Social shares

Armed with this information, you can easily identify content that has:

• Poor organic traffic
• Poor or no conversions
• High bounce rates
• Little time spent on page
• Outdated information
• Duplicate content
• No backlinks or spammy links

Once you’ve identified underperforming content on your site, it’s time to learn how to optimize it for better performance.

How can you optimize underperforming content?

To improve underperforming content, you need to optimize it and convert it into useful and relevant content. You should also optimize it for the search engines to ensure that it generates high-quality traffic, leads, and conversions.

Here is how to start improving your underperforming content:

1. Upgrade old content

You should start by analyzing the quality of your content and then enhancing it further.

• Find high-traffic keywords: Find relevant keywords that can help you rank for searches related to the topic and incorporate them into your article. However, do not overuse keywords.
• Update your tags: Use relevant keywords in your title, meta description, and heading. Make them intriguing and catchy too.
• Incorporate long-tail keywords: Doing this can increase the chances of your article to rank for voice searches.
• Link to fresh, updated resources: If your article includes statistics that are more than two years old, you should replace them with recent statistics from trustworthy sources.
• Add internal links: Link to other relevant content pieces on your website.
• Fix broken links: Update or remove any broken links.
• Match search intent: Adjust your existing content so that it aligns with the search intent of users. It should provide the information and solutions that your target audience is interested in.
• Add visuals: Add screenshots of recent statistics or relevant videos to increase engagement.
• Increase engagement opportunities: Include compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) in your post, embed tweets, and include social media share buttons to boost user engagement.

While updating your content, you may also find a few articles where you will need to rewrite more than just some sections. In this case, you can also consider rewriting the whole post and publishing it as a new article.

However, you should take the time to write an article that offers real value to your readers. Research the topic thoroughly, provide actionable advice, and include recent statistics and real-life examples.

In short, ensure that it is the most robust resource on the given topic on the web.

Then, inform your audience about its existence by promoting it through various channels and platforms.

2. Improve content quality and relevance

How do you improve the quality of your content?

Start by identifying and updating duplicate content with well-written content. Remove any links that linked to duplicate content.

You should then look for opportunities to combine content pieces that cover the same topic or fall under one broad topic.

You should go through the top articles that rank for your target keywords to find out:

• What information is missing from your article?
• Where does your content quality lack?
• Which related keywords does the article rank for?
• Does the top-performing article include new insights or industry updates on the topic?
• Does the article answer searchers’ questions more efficiently than your content?

Another option is to use content discovery and curation tools to understand what kind of content people currently find interesting about the topic.

You can then conduct in-depth research into the topic and incorporate useful points into your posts to boost engagement.

Once you’ve collected enough information about the topic, you can decide whether to write one in-depth article that covers the topic completely or create content clusters.

3. Resolve technical issues

You may write great content and optimize it with high-traffic keywords. But you may still fail to rank higher in the search engines or find it difficult to keep readers engaged.

Why?

Because your website architecture might be derailing your progress.

To find out if your site is optimized properly for users and the search engines, you should quickly audit your site for technical SEO and fix issues like:

• Crawling problems: Ensure that Google bots can crawl the page. You should also remove duplicate content, fix redirects, and add your blog posts to the sitemap.
• Site speed: Test your site speed and fix any issues to reduce the bounce rate.
• Title and URL: Ensure that you’ve included the target keyword in your title and URL. If not, you should update the old URL and apply a 301 redirect to the updated URL to avoid 404 errors.
• Meta description: Include the keyword phrases you are targeting in the meta description to encourage the search engines to rank you higher and entice searchers to click on your article.
• Content: Make it easy for your readers to skim through your content and find sections they want to read about using a table of contents.

You should also improve readability by writing short sentences and paragraphs. Always divide large chunks of content into meaningful headings, paragraphs, and bullet points.

Ready to optimize your underperforming content?

Ultimately, an effective content marketing strategy is not only about creating new content. It’s also about improving the quality of old, existing content to ensure that it is relevant and up-to-date.

Though finding and optimizing underperforming content may seem challenging, it’s worth it. In fact, enriching your existing content can offer you the most significant gains.

Have you considered optimizing the underperforming content on your site? If not, start today.

If you have other questions, ask them in the comments below. I’ll be happy to help.

The post 3 Tips to Improve Underperforming Content on Your Website appeared first on OmniKick.

“The Art of War” is a book written around 500 BCE in ancient China.

The author, Sun Tzu was a military general, strategist, and philosopher.

His book has influenced many military operations and conquests over the years.

Why would a CEO of a social media startup give a book about war to each of his employees?

Gaining the attention of anyone online is like a battle.

You’re competing against many other businesses and individuals. They all demand the attention of the same person you want.

Search engines are one of the most reliable channels to drive web users to your website.

To rank high in search engines, you need to understand SEO (search engine optimization).

Your competitors want to rank number one for the same keywords you want.

They are applying the same SEO tactics you know.

How do you ensure that you continue to win the SEO battle and get more targeted visitors from search engines?

There are eight brilliant ways to stay ahead of the competition in the battle to claim the top spots in search engines.

1. Monitor trends

Keywords are the most important elements of search.

When a web user enters a phrase into the search box on Google, it returns relevant and useful results to the searcher.

You want your website to show up first for a phrase that is related to your business.

Every few years, they tend to be a rise in new keywords or phrases across most niches or industries.

Old keywords lose some interest among web users. New keywords emerge.

Google Trends is one of the potent tools digital marketers overlook.

The tool will tell you if a topic or phrase is losing or gaining interest online.

Create a lot of high-quality blog posts that target new, emerging keywords, and you’ll quickly establish your authority for those phrases in Google before your competitors do.

By the time your competitors are fully aware of these new keywords, they’ll be playing catch-up.

Search users will have recognized your website as an authority in that niche.

2. Fight link decay

The term “link decay” is not new in the SEO world.

As you probably know, links are a big part of search engine algorithms.

Therefore, link decay has been part of the search algorithms for a long time now. Perhaps, since their inception.

Link decay means your backlinks are losing value as time passes by.

For example, a backlink your site got from a high authority site ten years ago is not as valuable now as it was back then.

If you gained 300 backlinks three years ago and stopped building links, and a competitor got 100 links from established sites in the past year, they have a higher chance of surpassing you in search engine results.

Because they have new backlinks.

Search engines will think that if your competitors are getting a lot of backlinks than you right now, it means people love what they are doing.

Another type of link decay is when the pages you got backlinks from changed content and your links were removed.

Maybe the domain name expired.

Your backlinks are de-indexed. You’ve lost those links.

I don’t believe in the magical power of old links or links from old pages.

I don’t believe that links created five years ago are more valuable than links created a month ago.

If the page the link is coming from isn’t being updated on a regular basis, it loses its relevance in search engines.

Okay, let me give you an example.

Steve Pavlina, one of the most popular personal development bloggers, got a backlink from Lifehacker.com in 2006.

A link earned over a decade ago can’t be as powerful if your competitors are getting links from authority sites regularly.

So, fight link decay.

How do you do that?

Publish evergreen content that will continue to earn backlinks for many years to come. You should also keep updating your pages.

It makes your content the perfect choice for website owners or bloggers who link out.

An article published by Cyrus Shepard on Moz titled “How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint,” is a perfect example of a blog post that will continue to earn links for years to come.

The article was published in May 2013, and it’s still relevant and useful today.

3. Strive for link diversity

SEO was simple some years ago. The more links you have, the higher you rank.

Today, search engines look deeper into your backlinks. They analyze where they come from, and whether they matter to web users.

Your site should have different kinds of backlinks coming from various sites.

Here are some of the common ways to get links

• Guest blogging
• Press releases
• Blog commenting
• Infographics publishing
• Footer backlinks
• Business directories
• Bookmarking sites
• Social media profiles

And many others.

When you gain most of your backlinks through one particular link building method, it puts your search engine rankings at risk.

No link building tactic should make up 40% of your overall links.

To be on the safe side, I recommend 10%.

Spread your backlinks across various link building tactics.

By doing that, you’re diversifying your link profile.

Your link profile will appear natural and good in the eyes of search engines’ bots.

For example, by heavily relying on guest blogging to get most of your backlinks, you’re at risk of getting hit by a search engine penalty when they decide to stop valuing links from guest posts.

Because most of your backlinks come from guest posts, it’ll take you some time to recover from the penalty.

Instead of waiting for your site to get hit by a search penalty, you should start diversifying your backlinks now.

Doing that will help you have a better link profile and enjoy a strong presence in search engines.

4. Foresee more competition

If you’re in a competitive niche, it’s probably because many people are making good money there.

And if you’re in a low competition niche, you should expect competitors to increase because more people will think it’s easier to build a business there than crowded niches.

If competition is high in a particular niche, you’ll find it harder to rank for top keywords in that niche.

For example, as an SEO consultant, ranking for the keyword “SEO consultant” is tough because a lot of people do what I do.

They want to rank for that keyword too.

You’ll have to work harder and smarter than competitors if you want to gain a lot of traffic from search engines.

It doesn’t matter whether competition is high or not.

So, instead of doing better than your current competitors, you should expect new upstarts who are ready to do more to overtake you in search engines.

You should out-think, out-work, and out-brand your competitors.

By out-thinking the competition, you create new exciting content ideas that’ll interest search engine users.

By out-working the competition, you create more content than anyone in your niche.

For example, when Pete Cashmore started Mashable, he was writing seven blog posts per day. That is more than what most of his competitors were publishing in a week.

By out-branding the competition, you invest a lot of time into brand-building and educational content. Your goal is to get people talking about your brand everywhere on the web.

For a high competition keyword like “compare credit cards,” you’ll expect banks, financial institutions, and financial press to rank #1 for the keyword.

Instead, it’s a niche site, comparethemarket.com that is ranking in the number one position for this keyword that receives a huge number of searches per month.

Create a lot of blog posts that target long-tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are phrases that contain 4 or more words that are related to your business.

Don’t wait for new competitors to knock you out.

Out-think, out-work, and out-brand them before they appear.

5. Get quick wins by ranking for easy terms

Every niche has some easy keywords anyone with a low authority domain can rank for.

I use Keyword Explorer by Ahrefs to determine the ranking difficulty level of a keyword.

Ahrefs uses a scale of 1 – 100 to determine how difficult a keyword is.

Any keyword below 30 is an easy keyword.

For example, the keyword “small business marketing consultant” has a difficulty of 26.

If you take a closer look at the sentence below the difficulty score, you’ll see Ahrefs suggesting that I only need backlinks from 30 sites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.

It’s easy to rank for keywords like this because your competitors aren’t focusing on them.

Perhaps, they haven’t built many backlinks to pages that target those easy keywords.

Ranking for keywords that are easy help you establish some level of authority and credibility in search users.

For example, MedCognition, a medical and technology startup may avoid trying to rank for tough health and medical keywords, and instead focus on queries that receive low searches on Google.

When search users see you as an authority and credible expert, they’ll spread the word about your site. That may drive more backlinks to your site, which you need to rank even higher in search engines.

6. Upgrade your SEO strategy

When you’ve used the same SEO tactic for a long period of time, and gain the same type and quality of links, your organic search traffic may stop growing.

An SEO strategy could become less effective over time.

Perhaps, because your competitors are using the same approach.

Or, the strategy has become too common and no longer works.

You’ll have to upgrade your SEO strategy to start receiving better and more traffic from search engines.

For example, when long-form content became an SEO strategy, marketers who first used it saw big boosts in their organic search traffic.

In a Forbes‘s, R.L. Adams writes that he “ranks number one for so many of the most competitive searches, and almost all of those articles are over 2,000 words.”

Today, writing long-form content as an SEO tactic isn’t as effective as before.

So many people are now creating long-form content to receive more visitors from search engines.

Neil Patel wrote that Kissmetrics generated 2,512,596 visitors and 41,000 backlinks within two years, using infographics.

Kissmetrics traffic from search engines increased as a result.

Today, there are too many infographics on the web, and the tactic is less useful for link building.

Upgrading your SEO strategy means finding and using new tactics that boost search traffic.

7. Don’t sacrifice quality and quantity

Quality and quantity are both vital to winning the SEO battle.

Search engines rarely reward inactive sites.

Each blog post you publish is an opportunity for people to see your site in search engines.

The more blog posts you publish, the more visits you’ll receive from Google and Bing.

A study by HubSpot found that companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.

The quality of your posts is also important.

Publishing low-quality articles won’t help you win in search engines.

Higher quality content will help your site rank for many keywords.

Quality content is not easy to create.

If it’s easy, everyone will be doing it.

For example, I spent 10 hours creating this article.

When you publish a lot of high-quality articles, search engines will have no choice but to rank your website high for competitive keywords.

8. Branch out into related niches

If you publish a lot of high-quality articles, you’ll soon exhaust topics and keywords in your niche.

Instead of writing about the same topics, branch out into related niches in your industry.

For example, if you’ve exhausted the bodybuilding niche, you can start creating content about nutrition.

Bodybuilding and nutrition are connected.

After exhausting topics and keywords in the nutrition niche, you could branch into men’s or women’s health.

Even if you’re a local business, you should create content that targets topics related to your profession.

As you continue to venture into related niches, search engines will see you as an authority.

The post 8 Ways to Dominate The Competition in Organic Search Results appeared first on OmniKick.

And you read too much about it as I do.

You’ve probably come across the below lines more than once:

“Steve Jobs was a college dropout.”

“He, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne started Apple in his parents’ garage.”

“Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985.”

“Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.”

“Apple released the iPhone in 2007.”

The stories behind the Apple brand alone make you desire their products.

The number one reason Apple has been so successful can be traced to Steve Jobs.

Jobs was a master storyteller.

He talked about everything he’s done, his life and mindset.

Jobs discussed taking calligraphy classes.

“I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.” – Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was the first to give us a real choice in fonts, even though he didn’t invent typefaces.

Storytelling is a powerful key to building a memorable brand.

Neil Patel is one of the most respected digital marketers and has a popular personal brand.

In one of his blog posts, he shared a story about how he got started in digital marketing:

“The first website I ever started was a job board called Advice Monkey. I was trying to get the website ranked for terms like ‘job search’ and ‘tech jobs.’

I hired a few SEO agencies to help me out, but none provided any results. After tens of thousands of dollars down the drain, I had no more money and no choice but to learn how to optimize Advice Monkey for search engines… all on my own.” – Neil Patel

Alex Turnbull, the CEO, and founder of Groove wrote about how he built a company that generates $5 million annually within three years of doing content marketing.

When you tell exciting stories, it makes your company worth remembering for prospects and customers.

Share your personal opinions

Some years ago, Mark Schaefer published an article titled “Content Shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy.”

Schaefer elaborated on what he calls “Content Shock” using personal opinions.

“If I was ‘paying’ my readers $500 a week in 2009, I am probably paying them $1,500 per week now because of the pressure to create more and better content that will keep their attention.

Next year, it might be $3,000 per week — just to MAINTAIN my readership in the face of the Content Shock.

At some point, the amount I am ‘paying out’ will exceed the amount I am bringing in and at that point, creating content will not be a smart business decision for me and many other businesses.” – Mark Schaefer

The article sparked a discussion in the digital marketing niche.

It is now one of the most popular pages on Schaefer’s blog, according to Open Site Explorer.

Mentioning a bunch of facts and statistics won’t make someone follow your brand and buy your product.

People want to know where you and your company stand on issues.

They want to know your opinions.

Saying what others have said isn’t going to separate you from the competition.

When Matt Cutts, the former head of the webspam team at Google, wrote a blog post on why you shouldn’t use guest blogging to build links, Neil Patel came out with his own opinion on the subject.

Here’s a snippet from the blog post published by Matt Cutt:

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.

Why?

Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your book. It’s not that way any more.”

And below is a snippet from Neil Patel’s post. Pay attention to how he wrote his thoughts on the topic.

“The reason guest posting won’t work the same way it used to is because companies are trying to guest post on irrelevant blogs.

The content they are publishing isn’t high in quality either. In other words, they are trying to do the bare minimum to get a link.

So, what I think Google will end up doing is this:

1. Discount guest-post links from irrelevant blogs.
2. Discount rich anchor text links from guest posts.
3. Start looking more at author rank to figure out if you are writing high or low-quality content.
4. Place more emphasis on social signals as the more social votes a post has, the higher its quality usually is.

In the end, if you are using guest posting to rank for specific head terms, I don’t think it will be a good long-term strategy. But if you use it to help build up your brand, referral traffic, and overall sales, it will continue to be a great strategy.” – Neil Patel

Think of the people you like. They share their opinions with you, and you agreed with them.

Think of the people you don’t like. They probably shared their opinions with you, and you disagreed with them.

Andrew Chen is one of the most respected people in the startup community.

Why?

He shares his personal opinions about various startup topics on his blog.

Recently, he published a blog post, talking about why marketplaces are underestimated.

With so much new content getting published every day on the web, you need to stand out.

The best way to do that is to share your personal opinions.

Do your research on a topic before writing about it.

Focus on delivering an extraordinary value

“The more value you create, the more valuable you become.”

An extraordinary value delights customers because it blows everything out of the water.

Asim Qureshi is providing so many values on Quora.

I see his answers almost every time I visit Quora.

According to him, his two startups have traffic from Quora as their main marketing channel, and the conversion rates are high.

Quorans are familiar with Asim because he’s providing a lot of good answers on the platform.

Lead, teach, inspire, and listen to your customers in ways that make them like and recognize you.

Go the extra mile for them. Never settle for less.

Create something better than the competition. Continue to do this for a long time.

Never settle for the average or normal.

By creating amazing content on a regular basis, people will start to notice and remember your brand.

Engage with people

Here are the things you must do to make people develop a sense of connection with your brand:

• Make them feel heard
• Answer their questions
• Help them fix their problems

One of the best places to achieve all these is on social media.

For example, Nike makes its customers feel heard on Twitter, even if it means replying with a GIF.

Social media lets you engage with people who are interested in your business.

When you engage with people on social media, they interact and share their experiences with you.

People want great content. They want an interactive, real-time conversation with you.

Don’t ask how you can sell to them. Ask how you can help them.

When you do this, people have so much love for you.

If you only tell people about what you sell, they have the option of disliking and forgetting your brand.

But when you talk to people about their needs, interests, and problems, it makes them like you.

Deal with negative criticism and focus on the positive

Everyone isn’t going to love what you’re doing, and that is fine.

Some people will criticize you and your brand.

How you deal with criticism is what’s important.

If you handle a negative review of your brand well, it’ll help you win those angry customers. Loyal customers will be proud of you more for that.

But when you mishandle a criticism, angry customers may dislike your brand more, and even some loyal customers may not be happy about that.

So, how do you deal with negative reviews when they appear?

First, you should respond to negative reviews.

For example, if someone complains they don’t like the service you’re providing.

Explain why your service is great, and what you’re going to do to fix it.

If they are wrong, you should appreciate the feedback and promise to improve the experience for the next time.

Explain to them why you think you have decent service, product, or offering right now.

Some people will still disagree. You just can’t please everyone.

The important point here is to respond to these people in a friendly and positive way.

Don’t tell a customer that they are wrong and don’t know what they are saying.

Responding negatively or rudely could upset your happy customers and fans.

Your response should be positive.

Secondly, you should use negative feedback to improve your business.

Even if you’re not receiving negative reviews, you should strive to make your business better.

The more you try to please unhappy customers, the less negative reviews you get.

If many people can rate you 4.5 or 4.7 out of 5 stars, it means you’ve built a brand worth remembering.

Newtons respond positively to a request to bring back a discontinued product.

A response like this win hearts.

The brand could’ve said that they will never bring back the discontinued product, hurting the customer in the process.

They promised to pass the comment to their team. Comments like this make an unhappy customer feel heard.

When you ignore a negative comment, it could turn into a social media wildfire.

So, respond to all negative comments and focus on being positive when you do.

Become a media company

Brands use the media to reach and communicate with prospects.

The media has been evolving a lot over the last ten years. A lot of businesses have not been evolving with constantly changing media.

Today, every brand can become a media company to succeed and stay ahead of the competition.

We are now living in a world where you don’t have to invest in the printing press, or satellite, or a sales team to distribute your story.

Everybody can use the internet to distribute their stories via amazing tools like YouTube, Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

You don’t need the help of a newspaper, blog, or influencer to reach prospects.

All you need to do is become a media company first.

Even though your company sells products and services, you also have to create interesting and entertaining content people want to read online.

The faster you realize that you need to become a media company, the more you’ll succeed in a few years from now.

For example, HubSpot was a media company before it began to develop and sell software for marketers.

HubSpot has too much content that its website now receives over 4.5 million unique visitors each month.

Smart Insights is a marketing consulting firm. They publish a lot of content on their blog, which receives over 1 million monthly visits, according to SimilarWeb.

It’s not surprising that Smart Insights has been able to attract renowned brands like 3M, Canon, HSBC, and HP as clients.

Even a California insurance agency like Nielsen Professional Insurance Services, Inc. is putting content there on the web.

There’s no way you’ll create so much valuable content and prospects won’t continue to remember you.

Despite the intense competition online, medical startups like MedCognition should focus on being a media company.

Don’t abuse marketing tactics

Web users receive lots of spammy emails from digital marketers.

I’ve subscribed to a few email newsletters, only to realize that I’ve been bombarded with tons of emails some hours later.

Digital marketers are good at taking a marketing strategy that is working and abusing it until it no longer works.

Above, I talked about companies like HubSpot and Smart Insights publishing lots of blog posts every day.

Some digital marketers will create lots of auto-generated content and publish hundreds of blog posts per day. These are fake blog posts.

Because answering questions on Quora works, some marketers will answer a question with one sentence.

They’ll try to answer a lot of questions as possible with one sentence.

Some might even copy and paste other people’s answers and claim the credit for them.

Don’t!

Instead, deliver great value each time with your ads, emails, blog posts, Quora answers, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter updates.

Build a community around your brand

In their first three years in business, social media management tool, HootSuite grew from zero to 3 million users.

They achieved this feat without spending a dime on ads, marketing, and PR.

Their secret?

Community building.

By the end of 2012, they had hosted over 100 Hootups, as they call it.

Here’s the video they made celebrating 100 Hootups, in 10 languages, 46 cities, and 13 countries.

When you build a community around your brand, customers become advocates of your products and services.

For example, Apple has built a community around their products.

You don’t need to see Apple’s ads before you buy their products.

Just meet two Apple fans and watch how enthusiastic they are about the brand.

Immediately, you’ll start to develop a love for it.  You’ll want to buy it so you can become part of the Apple community.

Check out this article to further help you build your brand online.

You can start a Facebook group or page for your business and publish updates that get people to talk about your brand.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a business. A dentist and orthodontist in Phoenix can build a community on Facebook.

Advocates will talk about your business in bars, meetings, and recommend it to their friends.

Building a community around your brand takes time.

It means showing up every day and delivering exciting content people want to share with their network.

It also means creating a remarkable product or delivering a service the competition can’t beat.

The post How to Build a Great Brand Customers Don’t Forget appeared first on OmniKick.

But everyone doesn’t know that a first impression only takes 7 seconds upon meeting someone.

Websites are no different.

Visitors have less than 7 seconds to decide if they like your website and will want to become a customer in the future.

First impressions depend on many factors.

In this post, I’ll reveal the factors that have the most impact.

Let’s get started.

1. Get trust indicators

Trust is the first thing web users look for when they land on a site.

They ask themselves if they can trust a website.

If they can’t, they leave.

Trust is everything online.

Whether you’re a startup, a mom-and-pop shop, or a local service business, you need trust indicators on your site.

Your website is the face of your business online.

A well-designed website shows people can trust the business.

When you visit the site of ETQ, a footwear shop in Amsterdam, you trust the business immediately.

Their site was designed with care using a minimalist approach the business itself uses.

They have the kind of site you may want to buy shoes online.

Trust doesn’t stop at the beauty of the website.

Branding matters too.

Your website is an extension of your brand.

What are the core beliefs and colors of your brand?

They should be visible on the website.

For example, when you visit Apple’s website, it shows simplicity.

Simplicity is one of the unique attributes the Apple brand has.

They show that attribute through their website.

Web users should also feel secure on your site.

How do you achieve that?

By getting an SSL certificate installed on the site.

An SSL certificate will make your URL (website address) has “https://” in front of it.

For example, Apple’s site has “https://” in front of its address.

An SSL certificate keeps your website safe and secure.

Web users will feel safe to interact with your business online and give you their data.

2. Get a stunning responsive design

Above, I mentioned that web design plays a major role in helping people trust your site.

A good web design doesn’t just make people trust you. It also makes it easy for visitors to become customers.

How?

By getting a responsive design.

Responsive web design makes your web page look good on every desktop, tablet and smartphone device.

Many devices have different screen sizes.

Using a responsive web design makes the layout of your website match the screen size of every device out there.

Nearly nine-in-ten Americans today are online, and 77% own a smartphone.

You can’t make your website perfect for desktop devices alone.

If you want to get more customers on your website, it should be well-designed for every device.

More people are browsing the web on mobile devices than desktops.

Mobile internet usage surpassed desktop in 2016.

Getting a responsive web design will ensure that your website continues to convert visitors from desktop and mobile devices. For example, Maverick Restaurant, a Southtown San Antonio Texas Brasserie has a very simple website.

3. Make your call-to-action button noticeable

A call-to-action button is a message that prompts users to take action on your web page.

The call to action (also known as CTA) button is an essential part of your website.

A good CTA button should increase visitors’ interaction on your website and help you achieve your business goals like sales, email subscriptions, sign-ups and so much more.

Your CTA button should be noticeable at first glance without messing up your overall web design.

For example, Zoom’s CTA button stands out on its homepage.

If your CTA button isn’t instantly visible to visitors, then it has failed to achieve its goal.

For example, it takes time to notice Tableau’s CTA button.

Their “See It In Action” CTA button has a tiny font, and it’s on a white background.

Shoeboxed is another example. They offer receipts scanning and expense reporting services. When you land on the website, the CTA button is one of the first things you notice. It gets your attention.

4. Don’t use stock photos

Businesses use stock photos because they are easier and cheaper.

But, in fact, it costs you more in terms of the potential customers you’ll lose because of them.

Using your own photos on your website adds a human factor to your brand.

Prospects will see the true colors of your brand.

Web users believe stock photography is fake, which influences the way they see your brand.

Thousands of businesses could be using the same stock photos that are on your website.

Clients and prospects may start to wonder if your business is truly unique and trustworthy when they see the same stock photos that are everywhere online.

Hire a professional photographer to take unique pictures for your business to use on its website.

The photographer should take various photos that represent your business.

Ask the photographer to take photos of your products, employees, clients, office, and more.

For example, Square uses real photos taken at the business place of a customer.

Avoiding stock photos will help your website appear unique and trustworthy to prospects.

5. Don’t use too much text on the homepage

There’s nothing wrong with creating lots of text content on your website through blogging like I’m doing right now.

Search engine bots can only read text content.

They can’t read videos and images, though, they learn more about visual content through the texts that surround them.

Your homepage is a special and different place.

Adding too much text content would be overkill.

The purpose of your homepage should be to turn visitors into customers.

Too much text would thwart that.

If you look at the homepages of most business websites, you’ll notice that they are short with little text content.

The homepage of Freshdesk, a customer service platform, is short with little text content.

The homepage is not the place to tell everything about your company, product, or service.

Although, all this information will be helpful. The homepage is not just the right place for it.

Too much text will distract visitors and dilutes your initial message.

Combine a little text with visuals like images and videos on your homepage.

Top Yacht Charters uses very little text on its homepage. Instead, the company relies on images to convey the value of its service to potential customers.

6. Adopt a hierarchy that enhances usability

Hierarchy is the difference between a site that influences the user flow and decisions and a site that just looks nice.

The headings and subheadings are a good place to implement the hierarchy concept.

A great heading hierarchy should lead users to the information they are looking for on your website.

For example, BigCommerce has a heading that says “Solutions.”

By clicking on “Solutions,” you’ll see subheadings that say “Enterprise,” “Small Business,” and “B2B.”

These subheadings show the different types of businesses BigCommerce serves.

So, if you’re a small business owner, you’re probably looking for a BigCommerce product for “Small Business.”

And if you’re a b2b business owner, you’re likely to click on the option for you.

BigCommerce has another heading that says, “Sell Everywhere.”

By clicking on this button, you’ll see options like “Ebay,” “Amazon,” “Facebook,” “Google Shopping,” “Square,” and “Buy Button.”

They offer more information about each service to help prospects better understand their products.

Use this kind of hierarchy in your heading too.

7. Display your business contact number

Customers expect to be able to reach a company through the phone. Not just email, social media, and live chat.

Customers get faster support on the phone than other customer service channels.

It’s also easier to build rapport with a customer when they hear a real voice than someone texting them on the other side of the computer.

If you’re selling expensive products or services, you need to make your phone number very visible on the site.

MedCognition, a healthcare startup based in San Antonio, Texas, displays their phone number on their site.

Google AdWords lets advertisers add phone numbers to their ads and enable calls directly from Google search results.

A study by Google found that 70% of users have called an advertiser directly from the results page rather than clicking on the ad.

If Google is allowing advertisers to receive phone calls from their ads, it shows that the biggest search engine in the world knows how important the phone is for businesses.

8. Get a favicon

What is a favicon?

Favicon is short for “Favorite Icons.”

It appears on the open tab label in your web browser to help you recognize a website.

If you can, use your brand’s logo as your favicon as Nike and Addidas do.

Using a favicon for your website will help you differentiate your brand from competitors and make it more polished and professional.

9. Make your website load extremely fast

The average web user can only wait 2 seconds for your site to load.

Visitors start to abandon your website if it doesn’t load after 2 seconds.

By 4 seconds, 25% of visitors are gone if the site is still loading.

If your site’s loading speed is too slow, visitors may find it difficult to trust the business even if the website is well-designed.

Page speed is so important that Google has started penalizing slow websites by pushing them down in its search results.

Use a tool like Pingdom to test how fast your website loads.

Anything above 2 seconds is bad.

Pingdom provides some performance insights I can use to make my website load even faster than that.

A lot of factors can contribute to slow loading speed.

Here are some of them:

• A poor web hosting service
• Bad WordPress (or website) configuration
• Big page size caused by images that are not optimized
• The presence of external scripts in your website’s code

10. Don’t rely on JavaScript too much

JavaScript can do everything on your website.

It can create an HTML element and change images. It is the jack-of-all-trades of the web.

But relying heavily on JavaScript is a bad idea.

Nothing beats simplicity on the web.

You can achieve simplicity with pure HTML and CSS.

You should only use JavaScript when it’s necessary.

Sites that are built with pure HTML and CSS codes are faster.

Glynn Bird, a developer advocate at IBM, created his website by modeling Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web.

He used zero JavaScript.

Glynn achieved a performance grade of 100 on Pingdom. His website loaded in less than a second and faster than 100% of tested sites on Pingdom.

Here are some things you should know about JavaScript according to Bartosz Góralewicz, the co-founder, and Head of SEO at Elevate.

You’re probably not a web developer to understand JavaScript, but these are headaches you don’t want your website and business to deal with.

Ask your developer not to make your website rely too much on JavaScript.

Building most of your site with JavaScript will make it difficult for search engine bots to crawl and index.

What other ways can you make your site more appealing to web users and make more money?

The post How to Create an Appealing Website That Generates Sales Nonstop appeared first on OmniKick.

The ability to respond to these questions well is the difference between winning and losing in sales.

Some questions are more specific and related to your business.

Others are more general about a broad topic. For example, when a customer is asking your opinion about topics like work-life balance, wireless technology, and cybercrime.

Make sure you understand a question before answering it. Avoid any topic you know little or nothing about.

There are 3 simple questions every prospective customer will ask you:

1. Why buy?
2. Why you?
3. Why now?

Your products or services won’t sell unless you answer questions.

Even companies on the Fortune 500 or Global 2000 lists still answer these 3 questions.

Being able to answer these questions effectively will enable you to build a multimillion-dollar company within a short period of time.

In this article, you’ll learn compelling ways to answer these 3 questions.

1. Why buy?

If you’re selling a product or service (someone else’s or your own), you should know why people buy your stuff.

Simply looking at your product and saying what it does is the wrong answer.

Know the primary reason why people buy.

For example, OmniKick is a tool that helps marketers’ collect email addresses on their websites.

But that’s not the primary reason people use our tool. Marketers use OmniKick because they want to develop deeper relationships with their prospects and make more money as a result.

Let’s look at the top primary reasons why people buy.

People buy to save money

People can do crazy things to save money.

A young couple lived in Google’s parking lot for 2 years to save 80% of their income.

A Tesla engineer saved $10,000 by living out of a van for 5 months.

Of course, most people don’t go to extreme lengths to save money.

Some people want to buy a home, car, and maybe get out of debt. Some companies want to reduce their annual expenses. So, they want to save money.

Sometimes, we spend to save money.

If your product or service helps a prospective client save money, he or she will be interested in buying.

People buy to make money

The alternative of more money is not having enough money. Or worse, it means being broke.

People want more money because it makes them feel secure. They want to have enough money to live on.

Most business owners will tell you that they want more money.

They want to have more money in their reserves so they can take more risks that help their business grow.

They want to increase sales and revenue. They want to employ more people to free up some time to pursue other goals.

People are always willing to buy your product and service if it means they’ll make more money than they are earning right now.

With my services, for example, I help businesses generate more sales and make more money through content marketing and search engine optimization.

People buy to save time

People are happy when they buy to save time, according to research published in the New York Times.

For example, an innovative product like PerSim from MedCognition helps first responders train faster using an augmented reality simulator.

Spending money to save time reduces stress. People are always willing to spend to save time as long as they can afford to do so.

For example, I became an Evernote Premium user because it helps me create, organize, and find my notes faster than other solutions out there. Evernote saves me time.

You buy faster computers to get more done in less time.

You buy smarter smartphones.

Your time is so valuable that you’re willing to spend money to save some of it.

So, if your product or service helps people save some precious time, that would be a good reason for them to buy it.

People buy to feel secure

One of the things that motivate people to buy is the need to feel secure.

They want to believe that what they have today will be there tomorrow.

For example, in the banking and finance industry, the need to feel secure is a critical motivator for acquiring and retaining customers.

Security is the feeling of certainty.

Everyone needs to feel secure in one way or another.

For example, computer users want to feel safe when they use their devices. They want to be sure that their personal information is secure online.

Tap into what makes potential clients feel secure, and they will be ready to buy your product.

People buy to gain knowledge

Knowledge is power.

With more knowledge, you’ll have more options, which then increase your power.

For example, Karen Brody, a relationship coach for men argues that men need her service to open any woman’s body, heat, and mind. She offers knowledge many men seek.

Knowledge is not limited to developing a new skill.

Sometimes, big companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon acquire startups to gain vital information about web users.

Then, they use the information they get to improve their own products and services.

For example, Apple quietly bought Topsy, a Twitter, and general social media analytics service, for about $200 million.

Apple’s goal was to use Topsy’s data and social signals to bolster Siri and its App Store relevance.

If your product or service helps customers gain the knowledge they need, they will be willing to buy your product.

People buy to be healthy

Being healthy increases your productivity, helps you save money on life insurance, enhances your mood, and make you live longer. And a lot more.

People who are healthy look young. They also feel more attractive to the opposite sex.

When you tap into any of these reasons why people buy, prospects are more likely to want your products. For example, Drip IV Lounge published an article on their site titled “How an IV Drip Can Prevent Illness.” This article answers the question most of their prospects have.

Let’s move on to the next question potential customers ask.

2. Why you?

Why should prospects buy from you and not your competitors?

The first question tells them they need something you sell.

But they are others who sell the same or related products.

You need to give prospects a strong reason to buy from you and ignore your competitors’ offers.

How do you do that?

Build and protect your online reputation

What is the first thing you do before signing up for a company’s service?

You do an online search.

You ask your friends if they’ve used their services before.

What people see and say about your brand matters a lot.

A negative article that shows up in a top position on Google search results for your company’s name could mean you’re losing 50% in potential business.

When you build and protect your company’s online reputation, customers will trust you.

How do you build and protect your online reputation?

Conduct a simple search for your company’s name on Google.

Are the results saying positive things about your company?

And are you dominating the first page for your company’s name on Google?

For example, I entered “CA Technologies” into the search box on Google.

The brand dominates the whole of Google’s first-page search results for their name.

I could see links to the company’s US, UK, and Australia sites. And I could also see the brand’s social media profiles on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

The company’s Wikipedia and Glassdoor pages also rank on the first page.

By dominating the first page, the company can control what people see and read about their business.

Control what people read about your brand on Google and social media by becoming an active content creator and social media user. For example, On Your 6 Designs sells high-quality handmade Kydex holsters. The company dominates Google’s first page results for its name.

Set up a blog on your company’s site and pump out quality content on a regular basis. That will help you gain higher visibility on search engines.

Take your company’s name on top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others.

Make sure you’re active on these platforms. Engage in discussions and share valuable posts.

Ranking high on search engines for your company’s name and keywords related to your business, and being active on social media helps you control the narrative about your brand.

That is how you develop and safeguard your company’s reputation online, and this helps prospects choose you when they are ready to buy.

Earth Class Mail is a digital storage company based in the United. When you enter the company name into Google’s search box, you’ll see that they dominate the first page of Google results.

Make it easier for customers to do business with you

We live in a period of options.

If doing business with you is stressful, hard, or challenging, it’ll be easier for prospects to go to your competitors.

Making life harder for prospects isn’t going to make them want to choose you.

It should take less effort and time for customers to accomplish their goals with your business.

Your business should be well-staffed to deal with customers’ problems.

They should feel safe and secure doing business with you.

Customers should enjoy the easiness of doing business with you so much that they don’t want to try competitors.

Offer customers value they won’t get from competitors

Value is what customers get from your products or services.

Price is what they pay to get that value.

If you offer the same value as competitors, customers may want to purchase from the cheapest merchant or provider.

By increasing the value of your product, you’ll persuade customers to focus on the value they’ll get rather than the price they’ll pay.

For example, why do people buy Apple products even though they are expensive?

Apple offers more value than the competition.

Apple focuses on the quality and overall user-experience, and consumers love the design and aesthetics of both hardware and software of their products.

These are values you won’t get from Apple’s competitors.

Customers determine the value of your product by evaluating the price they pay and the benefits they get from buying.

Decide the value of your product before customers start doing that for you.

Amazon prides itself as “a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” That’s value.

What’s the value customers can only get buying from you?

Your product could be affordable and offers the most value.

Or, your product could be expensive and still offers the most value.

It’s not easy to develop some unique value customers can’t get from competitors.

It takes time, serious deliberation, some inputs from the customers themselves, and a thorough understanding of the market to create extraordinary value.

Focus on addressing prospects’ most pressing concerns

Be proactive in dealing with potential customers’ questions and problems.

Don’t wait for prospects to come to you before you address a problem most of them have.

Research, discover, and address problems ahead of time.

How do you address prospects’ most pressing concerns?

By creating quality content that solves a problem for prospects.

When you do that, you impress potential clients.

They think of you when they finally need a product or service you sell.

Because you’ve impressed them by addressing most of their questions and problems, they’ll pay you back in forms of buying, referring customers, and saying good things about your brand on social media.

An article, video, an infographic, or a podcast that addresses a prospect’s most pressing concern is called custom content.

Eighty-two percent of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content according to Demand Metric.

For example, SaaS companies like KissMetrics, Moz, Groove, CoSchedule, and Buffer acquire customers through publishing content that solves problems.

Below is a screenshot of an article that addresses a real problem for Groove’s prospects:

Publishing content like this makes customers choose your business when they are ready to buy.

Build a World-Class Customer Service Team

No matter what type of business you run, customer service is very important.

Customer service is another point of contact with prospects. You have to make it remarkable.

Sometimes, potential customers will have questions only a customer service representative can answer.

So, equip customer service reps with the tools and knowledge that will help them handle prospects perfectly.

If a prospect isn’t well handled, he or she could decide to buy from competitors.

A representative should exhibit patience, empathy, and consistency to prospects.

Some customers will be irate. Some will be full of questions. Others will be chatty. A rep should know how to handle all of them.

A prospect who is not well-handled is a lost advocate of your brand.

3. Why now?

Let’s assume that prospects now believe they need your product (why buy?). And you’ve given them strong reasons to ignore competitors and buy from you (why you?).

Now, prospects should know why they should buy now.

Why shouldn’t they postpone buying your product until next week, month or year?

They need to know why.

Buyers love to delay buying. It’s hard to make them part with their cash.

Promote limited-time offers

Prospects are more likely to act when they know there’s a time limit attached to an offer.

Many digital marketers ignore this strategy. It’s a technique any business can use.

It fueled the growth of Udemy, an online learning platform.

SiteGround, one of my favorite web hosting services also uses this marketing strategy.

SiteGround sent me an email asking me to refer a friend within 5 days and get up to 3 months of free hosting. The offer also puts me in a draw for the latest iPad Pro.

Offers like these make me want to act fast.

Note that you have to be honest when using this strategy.

Some websites show a sales offer to expire within an hour.

But when you revisit the site an hour later, you’ll find the same offer, similarly set to expire an hour later again. That’s deception.

Offer a money-back guarantee

If you’re running a software business, it costs you a few seconds of your time to refund a purchase. Though, some payment processors won’t return the processing fee.

This process could be a little bit more complex if you’re selling a physical product or service.

But it’s possible.

For example, Zappos, an online shoe and clothing shop based in Las Vegas, has a 365-day return policy.

You won’t think twice about buying from Zappos because you can always have your money back if you’re not happy with the product.

When you offer a money-back guarantee, it gives customers a strong reason to buy immediately.

All their doubts about your product or service disappear.

Offering a money-back guarantee answers a customer when he/she asks, “why should I buy right now?”

By answering these 3 questions every prospect asks, you’ll increase the sales you generate online.

Remember, the questions are:

1. Why buy?
2. Why you?
3. Why now?

What other questions do customers ask themselves before buying online?

Tell me in the comments.

The post 3 Important Customers’ Questions You Should Answer appeared first on OmniKick.

Before then, I’ve read uncountable articles and watched lots of videos on affiliate marketing. None of them produced a paycheck. It was my hard work and grind that did.

I have earned a lot from affiliate marketing since then.

Forget about luck.

Forget about shortcuts. There is nothing like a shortcut when selling online.

You can sell lots of your products and services, but it’s only when you take massive action. Action produces results online.

What are the things you have to do to sell online?

This article shows and tells you the right things you MUST do to get results.

The tips you’ll soon discover will help you grow your online business.

Learn how to write well

While growing up, most of us are told about the importance of hard work, honesty, and other things, but rarely communication.

As we grew older, we began to understand the importance of communication.

It’s not enough to come up with big ideas and create the best products. You also need the ability to convey your messages and thoughts clearly.

There are three main ways to reach people online:

1. Text-based content, e.g., emails, infographics, e-books, SlideShares.
2. Audio-based content, e.g., podcasting, audio interviews, webinars.
3. Video-based content, e.g., YouTube, Facebook Live, Instagram videos, video interviews.

You can do without audio and video-based content as long as you can write great text content.

Some marketers are shy of cameras. Some don’t like the sound of their voice. Yet, they are successful.

It’s because they can write well.

For example, Stuart Walker, the creator of NicheHacks is one of the successful, yet shy marketers I know.

Stuart doesn’t create videos. He doesn’t use his real image as the face of his brand. But he writes well. And that is all that matters.

Anyone can become a great writer with practice and consistency.

Writing is putting down the voices inside your head.

Learn from writing masters like Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, William Faulkner, and William Zinsser.

The book, On Writing Well by William Zinsser taught me many things about writing.

Read like writers.

Writers read everything. Fiction. Nonfiction. Business. Romance. Sports. Marketing. Politics. Stocks.

You are what you read.

When the late Portuguese Nobel prize winner, Jose Saramago was asked about his daily writing routine, his answer was, “I write two pages, and then I read and read and read.”

It is after you’ve read a lot you can have words and thoughts inside your head.

It is then you can begin to transform those thoughts into text content for prospects.

The content you create online will help you build an audience that’s interested in you and your products and services.

A digital entrepreneur or marketer who doesn’t know how to write well has an obstacle to overcome.

Create a product or service people love

If you sell something people want and love, it is likely that you’ll be successful on the web.

It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter where you live. It doesn’t matter whether or not you have investors.

For example, Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his garage. He saw that people wanted to buy things online. Bezos began with books and slowly introduced other products in his online store.

Today, Amazon is “the everything store.”

You might be struggling to sell online because people don’t want your product or service. If that is the case, you shouldn’t stay married to a single product idea. Pivot.

The word “Pivot” became popular in Silicon Valley through the efforts of Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup.”

Pivot means to change your customer segment, or your channel, or revenue model or pricing, or activities, or costs, or partners, or your customer acquisition strategy, or even your product.

For example, Slack began its life as a video-game company before realizing that there’s a business opportunity in the chat app the company developed to communicate internally.

Today, Slack is worth at least $5 billion.

YouTube started as a video dating site. It pivoted into a video-sharing platform.

Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake got the idea for Shopify while trying to open an online store for snowboarding equipment in 2004.

They were disappointed with the existing e-commerce solutions on the market and decided to build their own. They pivoted.

Today, Shopify generates $150 million in revenue per year and powers 500,000 stores. Not bad for a pivot.

There are lots of consumers’ needs yet to be met. If a product idea isn’t selling, pivot. Find better ideas, or try selling to another customer segment.

Continue testing until you find that product idea that sells.

Don’t stay married to your product ideas.

I love the idea of selling before building.

Try to confirm if there’s a need for a product by asking people to pay for it before building it.

That way, you can gauge demand for a product idea before committing your money and time to it.

Trying to sell a product people don’t need is a waste of your precious time and resources.

Instead, sell a product that people need. You’ll find it much easier to succeed that way.

Work hard and network

Work HARD at promoting a product that people love.

If you don’t work harder and smarter than the next guy, you may soon be out of business.

Selling online is more complex than offline because they are an array of technologies and opportunities available at your disposal on the web. You’re required to understand many of these technologies before you can take full advantage of them.

There are Google My Business, Yelp, Google Analytics, Google AdWords, WordPress.org, Boomerang, MailChimp, Skype, Slack, PayPal, Evernote, FreshBooks, ZenDesk, SurveyMonkey, Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Instagram, Medium, LinkedIn, etc.

Competition is fierce online. You need a combination of lots of tools to gain a competitive advantage.

Learning these tools and understanding their various uses and benefits is, in itself work.

How do you learn all these marketing tools?

You learn them by visiting blogs dedicated to the marketing industry.

I read marketing blogs like Moz, Search Engine Land, Hubspot, Social Media Examiner, Content Marketing Institute, and ConversionXL on a regular basis. That’s work.

Brad Smith, the founder of Codeless, a B2B content creation company, recently published a case study on Moz titled “How ‘Message Match’ Can Lift Conversion Rates by 212.74%.”

If you’re a business owner who sells online, you should be asking yourself questions like “what is message match?” and “how can it help increase your conversion rates?”

Andrew Dennis, a Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Siege Media, wrote a case study on Search Engine Land titled “How to rank #1 on YouTube search in 30 days.”

If you want to acquire more customers from YouTube, the 2^nd largest search engine in the world, this article shows you what to do.

You’ll gain a thorough knowledge of digital marketing when you read these marketing blogs on a regular basis.

And don’t just read. You should also surround yourself with talented digital marketers.

Attend marketing industry meetups and conferences in your area to develop relationships with other digital marketers or business owners like yourself.

Hard work combined with the knowledge you gain from reading marketing blogs and the relationships you build with talented marketers, will help you make lots of sales.

Educate your customers

No matter who your customers are, they want information that helps them learn, grow, and improve in some ways.

For example, Earth Class Mail helps business digitize their mail. The company educates prospects through its blog.

When you educate potential customers, they’ll see your business as an established brand they can trust. They’ll also become more engaged with your brand.

This is called content marketing.

You provide content that educates people. Through that content, they become aware of your business and what it does.

For example, Invision is a prototyping tool designers use to design products before transferring them to programmers who turn them into real products.

The company has a blog that educates its users, who are designers.

Invision creates content on topics their prospects want to read.

Create content that addresses the prospects’ pains. Publish a case study that helps them learn from your success and failures.

Produce content that teaches prospects practical skills.

Shopify publishes how-to guides and tutorials on its blog.

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar

Produce awesome content on a regular basis

The truth is that content marketing is nothing new.

In fact, there’s too much content on the web right now than people can consume. Content supply has exceeded demand in most industries online.

Mark Schaefer calls it “Content Shock.”

If most of your competitors are already producing lots of content online, it’s possible that your industry may be having content shock.

But content shock is not an excuse.

If your industry is experiencing content shock, it means you have to raise the bar of quality content in your industry.

You’ll have to beat competitors by creating what digital marketers call “10x content.”

To create a 10x content means to produce remarkable content prospects haven’t seen before. Something so unique and beautiful that your customers can’t wait to see and read.

How do you create 10x content?

By going deeper into your topic, like I am doing right now. Then deliver the content in an attractive way that’s enjoyable for your audience.

There’s another way to create a 10x content:

You produce content that isn’t easy to replicate by competitors.

For example, Alex Turnbull, the co-founder of Groove interviewed Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of Moz.

Quality interviews like this with a famous person is rare.

Bloomberg published an article titled “This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind.” It cites lots of credible stats and contains interactive graphics.

These are 10x content. They are not easy to replicate.

When you publish 10x content on a regular basis, your business will gain greater exposure through word-of-mouth. People will talk about your 10x content on social media. Other content creators will link to it.

Scan competitors’ content and find ideas you can improve massively.

Earn people’s trust

Trust is the most scarce and valuable resource online.

The barrier to entry online is almost zero. Anybody from any part of the world can create a website, product, and publish content on the web.

First, show your face. People should know the person behind the business.

People will relate to you better when they can see your face.

Proofread your content to ensure that you don’t embarrass yourself. The presence of grammatical errors on your site will make people feel uneasy, and they may question your knowledge as a result.

Websites that are filled with grammatical errors are hard to trust.

If a business can’t produce an article that is error-free, their site isn’t the place you want to spend your money.

You can also earn trust by appearing in the press.

If the press is writing good things about a particular business, the company must be delivering a valuable service to its customers.

When a reputable news source like the New York Times writes good things about your business, it extends its trust which it has built over the past 160 years.

For example, here’s a mobile application that was recently mentioned in the New York Times.

Another way to earn trust is to engage more with people on social media.

Make your business organically sticky

To be organically sticky is to dominate a particular marketing channel.

For example, James Altucher and David S. Rose are organically sticky on Quora. They’ve both conquered the Q & A platform.

James Altucher has close to 200k followers on Quora. Every question he answers gets thousands of views. It’s hard to visit Quora and not hear and see the name “James Altucher.”

Hubspot has conquered the Google search engine. Their pages rank for many top keywords in the marketing industry.

They produce lots of blog posts every month and optimize them for search engines. That is why Hubspot is organically sticky in search engines for keywords in the marketing industry.

Gary Vaynerchuk is organically sticky on every social media platform.

Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Twitter. Snapchat. Medium. YouTube. He is everywhere with millions of followers.

Choose a platform and make it your home. Build a name for yourself on the platform.

“You can only be sticky if you are consistent.”

When you are popular on a platform, selling to anyone becomes easy.

Optimize every aspect of your marketing

If you’re not optimizing every aspect of your digital marketing campaign, you’re most likely leaving a lot of money on the table.

Whatever you do to market your business, you must track, measure, and improve it.

Optimize your landing pages (where you collect prospects’ names and emails), value proposition, content marketing campaign, homepage, marketing emails, PPC, Facebook ads, etc.

The web gives business owners the freedom and tools to track, measure, and improve their sales activities.

Optimize your marketing to make it work harder for you.

A/B testing is a common and effective conversion optimization strategy.

According to research from Hubspot, A/B testing of landing pages can generate up to 30-40% more leads for B2B sites, and 20-25% more leads for e-commerce sites.

Use the data you get from your current marketing activities to improve future activities.

When you use the tips in this article, you’ll sell lots of your products and services without relying on luck.

What other tips do you know that help you sell online?

Tell me in the comments.

The post How to Sell Anything Online appeared first on OmniKick.

“What’s the number one thing you look for in someone who can scale with a company?”

Here’s her answer:

“Someone who takes feedback well. Because people who can take feedback well are people who can learn and grow quickly.”

Collecting feedback and using them to learn can help you grow your business within a short period of time.

Content marketing is, no doubt, one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. But a lot of entrepreneurs and marketers struggle with it.

Why?

This article points out why content marketing may not be working for your business and what you can do to fix it.

Before I proceed, I’ll like you to know that this article isn’t for everybody.

I assume that you’ve been investing in content marketing and aren’t seeing returns to justify your investments.

I also assume that you’re serious about making content marketing work harder for your business and willing to follow instructions laid out on this page.

There are ten reasons why content marketing may not be working for your business.

Let’s find out what they are and how you can fix them.

1. You’re not getting backlinks on a consistent basis

There are more ways to drive traffic to your website today than years ago.

You have Facebook, Facebook Ads, Google, Google AdWords, Medium, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Bing, Instagram, YouTube, Quora, Reddit, etc.

Search engines, especially Google and Bing are my favorite traffic drivers.

“…The clear champion of website traffic is organic search. Overwhelmingly, organic search trumps other traffic generators, driving 51% of all visitors for both B2B and B2C businesses.” – BrightEdge, Cracking the Content 2014

Search engines send visitors that are more likely to convert than any other traffic source.

Social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can send thousands of visitors to your site, but they are not always reliable for creating customers.

Social media users tend to leave the site quickly because they are not on social media to buy products from companies. Their number one reason for being on social media is to connect with friends.

Organic search is different.

Web users are on search engines to find solutions to their problems. Search engines present content that matches the intent of its users.

Success on search engines depends on link building.

What is link building?

“Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own.”

You need better and more backlinks than competitors to succeed in search engines.

Link building isn’t something you do once and forget about. You have to be consistent with it. It’s something you must continue doing as long as you want to keep ranking for a particular keyword that’s relevant to your business.

It’s something you must continue to do if you want to keep ranking for a particular keyword that’s relevant to your business.

Many business owners would say “let’s build ten backlinks this month and we’ll do it again six months after,” or “let’s build ten backlinks for every keyword we are targeting.”

Link building doesn’t work that way.

Let’s assume your company sells email marketing software.

Keywords like “email marketing software,” “email marketing tools,” “email marketing tips” and “email marketing service” are all related to your business. These keywords are competitive because your competitors are also targeting them.

These keywords are competitive because your competitors are also targeting them.

You need to prioritize consistency if you have limited resources.

You can’t build 500 backlinks for each keyword and hope for success.

Pick one or two keywords and give them everything until you’re on the first page of Google. And you can’t rest on your laurels.

Search engines can drive targeted traffic to your website. But consistency in link building is the key to success in search engines.

2. Visitors don’t find your content useful

If visitors don’t find your content useful, no amount of search engine optimization and social media marketing tactics will help you acquire a good number of customers from content marketing.

Web users will value your brand more if they find your content meaningful and useful.

Nancy Duarte, the CEO of Duarte, a presentation design agency, wrote that changing her book price to free increased downloads and the company got a lot of traffic. Revenue increased by a huge percentage as a result.

Revenue increased by a huge percentage as a result.

The company also published a slide document on SlideShare, which has been seen over 268,000 times, and drove 100,000 visitors to their website and generated 21,420 e-mail addresses for the business.

For example, Louis Vuitton is a fashion brand.

They created a video titled “The Art of Packing.” This is useful content for their ideal customers.

MR PORTER is an online retail destination for men’s style.

The brand maintains a blog called The Journal where they publish content that targets their ideal customers, who are men.

Recently, they published an article titled “Which Beard is Right for You.”

You don’t need to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer to create useful content for your target audience. You just need to be efficient.

The key here is to research and plan.

Who is your target audience?

Maybe they are stay-at-home moms or teens.

What phrases are they typing into search engines?

Perhaps, they are typing phrases like “how to dress like your favorite painting” or “how to get fit for the holiday.”

Check the sites that are ranking high in Google for phrases that are relevant to your business.

What are they missing that you can add to your content?

Make your content more useful by adding more examples, images, videos, illustrations, or case studies.

Find holes in competitors’ content and fill them.

For example, breast augmentation is a hot topic among women.

Let’s assume that you’re a breast surgeon and want to drive more traffic from search engines.

The keyword “breast augmentation” is a popular keyword on Google.

This Cosmopolitan article titled “21 Things You Should Know Before Getting a Boob Job” currently ranks high for that keyword and lots of other keywords related to breast augmentation.

According to data from Ahrefs, this article receives 23,000 visits from search engines.

When you look at the content, you’ll agree that there’s room for improvement.

The post has no images, videos, quotes from any authority or influencer. If you can create something better, you’ll get lots of backlinks and social shares.

If you can create something better, you’ll get lots of backlinks and social shares.

As a result, your content will receive more relevant visitors from both social media and search engines.

3. You don’t put much time and money into content marketing

Budgets for content marketing have increased every year since 2010.

Nine out of ten B2B marketers are doing content marketing.

B2C companies are also doing content marketing. In fact, 73% said they expect to produce more content in 2017.

Forty-six percent of B2C companies said content marketing is more effective for them than one year ago.

If you run a B2C business, it means you should expect even more competition this year as companies increase their investments in content marketing.

As companies increase their budgets and time in content marketing, you can’t continue doing the same thing and expect better results.

Put more money and time into developing a strong content marketing strategy. That’s how you can get better returns on your investment

4. You’re doing everything by yourself

If your business is a one-man show, you’re already doing a lot.

Throwing content marketing into the mix is only going to make things more difficult.

Content marketing alone is a monster on its own. It requires different skills.

Below are the basic skills needed to execute a great content marketing campaign:

• Research. Learning and gathering data about your ideal customers. You need data to create high-quality content.
• Photoshop. You need this to create images for social media updates and blog posts.
• Copywriting. Write blog posts, social media updates, and emails.
• Editing and proofreading. A single grammar error can embarrass your brand online.
• Link building. This involves reaching out to bloggers and influencers and convincing them to link to your website in order to increase your authority in search engines.
• PR. This is the process of getting major news outlets and authority sites to write about your company.

And more!

Unless you’re superhuman, it’s impossible to be good at all these things.

Another big challenge is time.

We all have 24 hours a day.

No way you can do all these things in a single day and still have time to run your business.

For example, Larry Kim is a writer and co-founder of WordStream, a search marketing company based in Boston.

Recently Larry Kim published an infographic on Medium.

When you scroll down to the bottom of the infographic, you’ll see a note that says “Presented by WordStream.”

That’s the job of a designer.

Hard to imagine Larry designing an infographic while at the same time having time to write and promote his companies.

That’s why you need help.

There’s a limit to what you can do.

If you’re really serious about getting a lot of customers through content marketing, be ready to hire people who have the skills and time to do tasks you can’t do.

5. You don’t have a conversion funnel

Most visitors who land on your site through your content aren’t ready to buy. At least, not immediately.

Perhaps, they are not thinking of buying your product or service at all because they like what they are getting from your competitors.

Because someone isn’t willing, thinking, or ready to do business with you the first time they visited your site doesn’t mean they can’t become customers in the future.

You’re losing a lot of potential sales if you’re currently neglecting these visitors.

Content marketing alone isn’t enough to convert visitors into customers.

You need to build a conversion funnel.

According to Conversioner:

“Conversion funnel is the path the website visitor follows before making a purchase.”

You shouldn’t just ask someone to buy a product.

They should be educated about the product.

They should know why they need it, the benefits it offers, and what they’ll miss if they don’t buy.

Here’s a perfect illustration of a conversion funnel:

Various businesses have different conversion funnels that fit their business models and match their customers’ behaviors.

If your ideal customers are the most senior executives in organizations, your conversion funnel may have a stage where you need to call these top people.

For example, if you’re running a company that sells iPad POS and Business Platform as Revel Systems does, you’ll need to call business owners who use POS.

How your conversion funnel looks like depends on the complexity of your product and the people who need it.

When 10,000 people land on your site, it’s impossible to turn all of them into customers.

The people who will become customers need to go through some stages.

This could mean asking for visitors’ email addresses by offering them a free e-book or an e-course in return.

Then making them aware of a problem they have using email marketing, before introducing your product as a perfect solution.

Email marketing software lets you set up your conversion funnel once, and it will repeat the process for every new visitor.

Having a conversion funnel will help you develop better relationships with potential customers before asking for the sale. It increases your chances of turning more visitors into customers.

6. You are not promoting your content

There are two components of content marketing:

1. Content creation
2. Content promotion

Most digital marketers tend to focus on the first part and neglect the second part.

Many people spend more time creating content than promoting content. Wrong.

Content promotion is more important than content creation.

Derek Halpern of Social Triggers follows the 80/20 rule. It means 80% content promotion and 20% content creation.

Brian Dean confessed to sending more than 250 emails to promote a single blog post.

Buffer’s co-founder, Leo Widrich, wrote around 150 guest posts in a nine-month period promoting their product.

Here are 15 effective ways to promote your content:

1. Share it on Facebook
2. Share it on Twitter
3. Share it on a relevant Subreddit
4. Advertise it on Facebook
5. Reach out to influencers
6. Reach out to sharers of similar content using a tool like Buzzsumo
7. Turn your content into a slide deck and publish it on Slideshare
8. Send it to your email list
9. Republish it on LinkedIn
10. Republish it on Medium
11. Share it on Facebook Groups
12. Use it to answer relevant questions on Quora
13. Turn it into an infographic
14. Publish guest posts and link to your content
15. Target keywords in your posts for SEO

7. Influencers are not sharing your content

Your content may be smart, inspiring, fantastic and still receive zero attention.

Why?

Being a superior content creator alone isn’t enough to succeed in the digital world. You need more.

You need help from other content creators in your industry.

Guys like Brian Dean built a successful B2B site within a short time because influencers shared his content with their followers.

BuzzSumo analyzed the social share counts of over 100 million articles and found that getting one influencer to share your content can result in 31.8% more social shares. That is how content go viral online. Through influencers.

Getting three influential people to share your content can double the number of social shares your content receive.

What if you can get five influencers?

That guarantees each content you publish becomes a success.

Influencers are active content creators with a good number of fans who care about them and what they share.

Influencers can be active Facebook users with massive fans. They can be Twitter users, Instagrammers, YouTubers, or bloggers.

Influencers are authorities, knowledgeable, and respected in their fields.

You need the help of influencers to increase the reach of your content and acquire more customers.

8. You’re in a competitive niche

Let’s assume that you’re doing content marketing in a tough niche where most of your competitors are established brands who have all the resources and talents to swallow your business. What should you do?

Should you simply forget about content marketing?

No!

If you’re in a niche where your competitors are regularly publishing amazing content, you can still compete.

A tough competition indicates that you can specialize. Dig deeper.

For example, if you’re in the photography niche, it’s too competitive. Instead, specialize in wedding photography, or graduation photography or even vacation photography.

Meg runs Snap Happy Mom, a blog about photography tips for moms.

Create content that targets specific people your competitors are currently ignoring.

The niche may be small, but you’ll have a better chance of reaching your ideal customers than attracting everyone.

9. You want quick results within a short time frame

Here’s the harsh truth many don’t want you to know:

Content marketing takes time, plus the process is boring.

But content marketing can add huge value to your business.

Content marketing can make you a thought leader in your industry. People won’t see you as a thought leader after seeing a few videos or articles from you.

You’ll have to continue delivering high-quality content on a consistent basis for a long time before people can start to pay more attention to your name and business.

The main goal of content marketing is to make people familiar with your name and business. You can’t achieve that within a short time.

Look at people like Neil Patel, Gary Vaynerchuk, Rand Fishkin. These people have been doing content marketing for a long time. That is why their names are spread across the web.

If you’ve only been doing content marketing for a few months, then you shouldn’t be expecting any worthwhile results yet.

Content marketing takes, at least, between six months to a year to start generating real results.

10. You don’t enjoy creating content on a daily basis

To create compelling content, writing should interest you.

If you don’t enjoy writing, readers will sense it from your work. It’s not so hard to do.

Imagine seeing a TV host presenting on your television. If the presenter doesn’t like his/her job, the feeling will come through the screen. You’ll touch the dial immediately you sense it.

To do something well, you have to like it.

If you like content marketing and hate writing, it means you need someone who’s truly passionate about writing.

There are many talented writers on the web you can hire for your business.

What other reasons you believe is making content marketing not work for your business?

Tell me in the comments.

The post Why Content Marketing Isn’t Working For Your Business appeared first on OmniKick.

However, marketers and spammers have abused the golden opportunity the web offers us. Every day, I receive tons of emails from individuals and organizations who know nothing about me and want to sell me things.

They lie and expect me to respond to their messages.

I simply hit “Delete,” and feel no remorse for it.

Recently, Tim Soulo of Ahrefs shared this email he received:

Even if the sender was telling the truth, the recipient (Tim) had a feeling that the claims were lies.

There are some things you shouldn’t say and do when sending emails even when you have good intentions.

Let’s assume that you know nothing about email outreach, and want to create the best messages that get anyone’s attention.

How do you do that while making the recipients believe that you truly know them and serious about connecting with them?

There are some email outreach mistakes you must avoid if you want more people to respond to your messages and act on them. 

1. People know when you’re lying

It doesn’t take too long for anyone to detect liars in their emails.

According to psychologist Gerald Jellison of the University of Southern California, we are lied to about 200 times a day.

All those lies don’t come from our emails, of course.

But no one can argue that email isn’t the best place for people to lie, especially strangers.

Web users regard people who truly know them. That is why 41% of consumers buy more from retailers who send them personalized emails.

I’m not talking about e-commerce here. We are discussing email outreach. But the same rules apply.

Give people the sense that you truly know them and your emails will have higher response rates.

Personalize your emails. Dig deeper to find any relevant and useful information that will make the recipient feel you did your homework.

Unfortunately, this part of the email outreach can’t be automated.

Making people feel you truly know them increases your chance of getting them to act.

2. People can tell when you’re asking too much

Everyone in the world is super busy. I’m talking about people who work and are great at what they do.

If you’re writing long emails, the chance of them getting read is near zero.

Getting someone to open your email and read it means they are giving you their valuable time.

Even if they don’t respond, you’ve scored a win by getting them to read it.

I know you don’t only want people to read your outreach emails. You also want them to reply and act on your messages.

To achieve that, you need to stop writing long emails.

The reason why most people write long emails is to appear interesting.

If your email is interesting but long, people may save it for later reading because they don’t want to miss the interesting part.

But here’s the harsh truth:

They’ll never open your long, interesting emails again because they are too busy with other important issues.

How many times have you seen an interesting article, video or email, saved it and went back to it?

We rarely go back to our saved interesting emails. Instead, we continue to add more interesting content to our already filled interesting list.

Most people’s jobs are not reading and responding to emails. They have a lot more to do.

So, writing long emails is like asking too much.

Asking too much is not limited to long emails alone.

You could be asking too much by requesting for something your email recipient can’t give.

For example, requesting them to review your book.

You can also be asking too much by making more than one request at a time.

For example, asking the recipient to share your content on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

You should only ask for one thing at a time.

Research what the recipient might be interested in and give it to them. Don’t make them do a lot of work.

For example, if you want to secure a guest post on a recipient’s blog, try providing content ideas they might be interested in publishing on their blog.

Don’t ask them to provide you with ideas. Do the work and make decision-making so easy for them.

Emails like the above make people act real quick.

3. People know when there’s nothing special about you

There should be something special about you that will drive people to respond to your emails.

The influencers in your industry receive hundreds of emails each day. There should be something unique and interesting that separates you from other individuals who want attention from these influencers.

Recipients can quickly search for information about you on Google and social sites. That’s how they know if you’re a real person and who you say you are.

I always recommend that individuals build a brand for themselves.

Be active on at least one major social platform where you connect and engage with people in your industry.

I’ve received amazing emails from some people, only to realize that they don’t exist anywhere else.

Connect with people on social media. Build a name for yourself.

You don’t have to become an influencer for people to take you seriously. At least, you should have a few things to tout as your achievements. It tells people how motivated you are and it makes them want to connect with you.

It could be anything.

Maybe you’ve published 30 articles on LinkedIn.

Or, you’ve accrued 10,000 views on Quora.

Or, you have an active personal blog that ranks well on Google.

Or, you’ve acquired an incredible amount of different skills.

No matter how little your achievement may seem, it sends a signal of seriousness and realness to your recipients.

For example, imagine receiving an outreach message from someone like Angelos Chalaris.

Angelos Chalaris is not a popular name in the web development niche, but he has published a few articles on Medium, and his profile shows he’s on to something great.

You are likely to take him more seriously if he lands in your inbox than a random guy who’s nowhere to be found online except in your email.

Build a name for yourself online and do amazing things that will make people want to respond to your outreach emails.

4. People can quickly spot typos

Writing a dress when you mean address means you’ve lost the attention of the recipient.

Typos hurt your credibility. They make you look stupid and unprofessional.

You must avoid typos at all costs.

Typos are unforgivable when you’re trying to win people’s attention, turn them into customers or get business referrals from them.

For example, writing the Untied States when you mean the United States:

The Untied States spread the Occupy Wall Street movement to the globe.

Businesses lose millions each year as a result of typos.

One typo could make a recipient question your intention and perceive you as being unqualified.

Before hitting “Send” on an email, proofread and pay attention to each word, sentence, and paragraph.

There are a lot of tools out there to help you proofread your emails.

I am a big fan of Grammarly.

They offer free plugins for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Install their plugin in your web browser of choice.

If you want the best service, I recommend you pay for the premium option which costs $139.95 if you pay annually.

It’s easy to miss typos when you’re tired or in a hurry.

Using a grammar checker like Grammarly will prevent you from making inexcusable mistakes in your outreach emails.

5. People know when you’re using a template

The web is full of outreach templates for various purposes (e.g., link building, guest posting, influencer marketing, and PR).

For example, the Yesware team shared an email outreach template that worked for them.

Here’s how the real template looks like:

By using the above email template, you’ll be messaging everyone using their favorite artists or celebrities as a way of starting conversations with them.

Imagine everyone doing this. Templates tend to lose value over time as people continue to use them.

It’s not hard to tell that it was a templated email message. Any smart person who receives lots of emails each day (as most of your recipients do), would know that it’s not natural.

There are other things that could be of interest to someone more than their favorite artists.

You both could have some other things in common. You can start your message with one of those.

6. People know when it’s all about you

Most individuals and companies are their own worst enemies in people’s emails because they tend to focus too much on themselves.

To get something meaningful out of your email outreach campaign, you should think of the recipients first.

What are the benefits they get from acting based on your outreach emails?

Every other thing comes second.

Keep the benefits simple.

People care about themselves. Not you. And if you’re going to boast about your achievements, their inbox isn’t the best place to do that.

No matter how small your request may be, emphasize the benefits recipients will get.

You should introduce yourself, of course. But don’t make the conversation about you.

What are the other outreach email mistakes you see people make?

Tell me in the comments.

The post Six Mistakes to Avoid in Your Email Outreach Campaigns appeared first on OmniKick.

It doesn’t produce results on its own, and it must be combined with other things to be effective.

What are these things? 

1. Something to sell

Two groups of people do content marketing.

The first group starts content marketing to create awareness for their products and increase sales.

The second group visited amazing sites like Social Media Examiner, Buffer blog, Quick Sprout, and Moz.

They see content on these blogs.

Wanting to build something similar, they started investing in content marketing.

If you are among the second group, stop doing content marketing immediately.

Content marketing is not a hobby.

It’s a way of raising awareness for a product or service.

You don’t make money from pumping out content.

You need to sell something to make content marketing worthwhile.

I can bet that you’ll soon run out of money and passion if you continue doing content marketing for its sake.

Some people will say that they are just doing content marketing and will come up with a product down the line. That is still the wrong way to approach it.

By going that route, you’ll create content of all sorts. You’ll attract different types of readers.

For instance, Tim is passionate about dieting.

Tim publishes content about different kinds of diets such as the Atkins diet, raw food diet, vegetarian diet, and weight watchers diet.

Let’s imagine that Tim’s traffic picked up.

Then one day, he decided to release a product about the weight watchers diet.

He’ll see very few sales, or no sales at all because the majority of his audience isn’t interested in his weight watchers dieting product.

Assuming Tim planned to create a product about weight watchers diet from the beginning, he would have created content that appeals to his ideal customers.

I’m not saying you must create a product before building an audience with content marketing.

At least, you should know what your product will look like before building an audience. That will help you tailor your content marketing campaign to fit the kind of audience that needs the product you have in mind.

For example, Ramit Sethi sells several products on his website.

He creates content his ideal customers want to read.

HubSpot creates content their target customers, who are digital marketers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and marketing agencies, want to read.

Knowing your target customers and what they like to read is crucial to the success of your content marketing campaign.

That is why you should build the product first, or at least know the product before you start doing content marketing.

2. A good web design

You need a good design.

A good site design improves your visitors’ experiences, which increases sales.

Leadpages is currently killing it with content marketing. The company used it to acquire 15,000 paying customers within a year.

The site design makes you want to use their product.

Get a simple design

Your site should have a simple layout. It should have simple navigation with a few options.

Look at the website of Xero. The site is easy to navigate.

According to a study by Google, “visually complex” websites are rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts.

Don’t include every link in the navigation menu.

The navigation menu should contain links to a few important pages on your website.

Choose the right color scheme

The color you choose can improve or hurt your brand identity.

Never use a color scheme that isn’t associated with your company.

For example, Starbuck’s colors are green and white.

You can see how they use these colors on their website.

For example, if your logo has orange and white, and your site’s dominant colors are black and red, then you’re doing it wrong.

John Deere’s colors are green and yellow. They reflect on the site design.

Picking the right color combination is vital for building trust in the minds of web users.

They expect the same colors that represent your brand across every platform on the web.

Draw attention with large buttons

Your call-to-action buttons help you drive traffic to your site’s sales pages and other important pages.

By making your buttons bigger, they get more attention from visitors.

More attention leads to more clicks.

And more clicks generate more sales.

Your call-to-action buttons are an essential element of your site design.

It’s tough to increase revenue with content marketing if your call-to-action buttons aren’t receiving clicks from visitors.

For example, MailChimp invests in content marketing.

When reading their blog posts, you’ll notice that their call-to-action button is bigger than other links on the site’s sticky navigation menu.

The button is not only bigger. It also has a separate background color which helps it stand out on the navigation menu.

If you’re hiring a web designer, he/she should be able to make a simple design that’s easy to use, knows about colors and create experiences that make your call-to-action buttons stand out and get a visitor’s attention.

Without a great web design that delivers an outstanding user experience, content marketing is a waste of time.

3. A profitable sales funnel

Sales and content marketing are not the same things. Though, they are intertwined.

You need a sales funnel to generate maximum ROI from your content marketing efforts.

According to Infusionsoft:

“A sales funnel is the upside-down pyramid that represents the journey potential customers go through to become customers.”

The truth is that people don’t become customers after reading one blog post.

They go through some stages where they read several different kinds of content before deciding to buy your product.

You should systematically take them through these stages.

When you do, it makes it easier for them to buy. It helps them understand why you’re the perfect merchant.

A sales funnel consists of 4 main stages:

1. Awareness
2. Interest
3. Decision
4. Action

Allow me to explain each stage quickly.

Awareness

The awareness stage is where potential customers discover your brand, product, or service.

You get awareness through blogging, social media marketing, pay per click (PPC) advertising, PR, etc.

For example, here’s Buffer publishing a blog post to generate more awareness for their social media management tool.

Interest

This is the stage where you ask visitors for their emails in exchange for a free ebook, course, or consultation.

Your aim at this stage is to have their emails so that you can tell them about your product and how it will help them achieve their goals.

For example, Copyblogger is offering free membership to their marketing course. You need to sign-up with your email address to access this resource.

Decision

The emails you’ve collected give you the power to reach out to potential clients.

At this stage, you explain the value they will get from buying your product. You lay out the pricing, options, cons, and pros.

You can use videos, webinars, testimonials, and discounts to persuade customers to buy.

Grammarly made me a customer because of this email.

Who doesn’t like a 51% annual discount?

They wouldn’t have been able to contact me if they didn’t have my email.

Action

This is the final stage of the sales funnel.

It’s where prospects input their credit cards and buy your product.

It can also be referred to as the checkout page.

This stage is essential to your business because it’s where prospects decide to become customers.

If the action stage is broken, the first three stages of the sales funnel are a complete waste of time.

Problems that could arise on the checkout page include:

1. Unnecessary costs or fees you didn’t tell buyers before leading them to this stage. Another word for this is greediness.
2. Failure to use security logos on your checkout page. This makes buyers feel less safe with their payment details. They may decide not to buy because of this reason.
3. Poor usability. For example, if your checkout page isn’t using a mobile responsive design.

Without a well-designed and structured sales funnel, you’ll be leaving a lot of money on the table even if you’re doing content marketing right.

4. An excellent customer service

Often, successful content marketing relies most heavily on content created by customers rather than your brand.

The most effective content marketing is when customers are talking about your brand on their blogs, social media accounts, review websites, online forums, etc.

Before consumers make purchasing decisions, they visit Yelp, ask their friends on Facebook and Twitter, and Google what others are saying about your company.

A single negative review that ranks high on Google could cost your business a lot of sales.

Don’t invest in content marketing until you’ve gotten your customer service right.

In today’s digital world, having excellent customer service is vital.

If you gain customers through content marketing and lose them due to bad customer service, then it makes no sense.

Those unhappy customers will tell their friends and family about the negative experience they had with your company. That hurts your business reputation and makes it harder for content marketing to produce an excellent result.

These four things are important to content marketing:

1. Have a product to sell. Or at least, have a product in mind before starting your content marketing campaign.
2. Invest in a great web design that is easy to use and increase trust in your brand.
3. Set up a profitable sales funnel.
4. Create an excellent customer support system.

What other things do you believe are needed for content marketing not to be a waste of time?

Tell me below in the comment section below.

Thanks for reading.

The post 4 Key Things Every Content Marketing Campaign Needs appeared first on OmniKick.

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Then Jared seeks wisdom:

I called some of my friends from Silicon Valley, some of the best digital marketers in the world, and asked how you scale this stuff…

Dr. Laeeq Khan, the director of Social Media Analytics Lab, Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University, wrote on The Hill:

Trump was the most Googled candidate, and also most mentioned on Twitter and Facebook.

Trump had 4 million more Twitter followers than Clinton.

Clinton’s social media engagement increased somewhat by the third debate, but by then many voters had made up their minds.

Donald Trump, the most unfavorable presidential candidate in U.S. history, used social media to win the presidency.

There’s no limit to what you can achieve with social media.

You need to build an engaged audience to be successful on social media. Without an audience, there’s no way to be successful.

Imagine a Twitter user with 40 followers sharing an update. Who’ll see it?

Nobody will see the update when you take into account the fact that social media posts disappear pretty quickly.

But when a Twitter user with 40,000 active followers share an update, you can be sure that it’ll receive some engagement in the form of retweets, likes, and replies.

So how can you build a massive audience on social media?

Know your audience

Dale Partridge has built a massive following of over 370,000 fans on Facebook.

His fans share one thing in common: Entrepreneurship.

When Partridge shares a post on his Facebook page, it always receives a decent number of likes, shares, and comments from his fans because it resonates with them.

To be successful in social media, you need to know your audience.

Who are they? What do they like to read?

Imagine yourself being invited to give a speech at an event where you know nothing about the attendees. You may deliver a terrible speech. You could also make a great speech. There’s no way to know.

Now, imagine you’re given some information about the audience. You know who they are, what interests them, why they are at the event, etc.

Armed with this information, you can make a speech that will interest your audience.

Take a piece of paper and pen and write out details that help define your audience.

Write:

• Age
• Demographic
• Income level
• Education level
• Interests/hobbies
• Gender
• Relationship/Marital status
• Behavior
• Lifestyle

Determine your audience size

After you’ve recognized your target audience, it’s time to estimate their size. You don’t want to choose an audience that’s too small.

Having a small audience size is not a good thing. It means few people are interested in your social media activities.

I’m a big fan of the Facebook Ads Manager.

After inputting some details about my audience in the Ads Manager, Facebook estimated my potential reach to be 45 million people, which seems good.

Let’s assume that you’ve defined your audience and know its size, what’s next?

Be aware of the best practices of your chosen social channels

I’m sure you have some social media platforms in mind, where you want to build your audience.

These are the four biggest social networking sites right now:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. LinkedIn
4. Twitter

Each one of these platforms has its unique differences. People have different mindsets and expectations when they are on each site.

Facebook is the most popular social site with over 1.8 billion monthly active users.

Facebook users expect to connect with you on a personal level than on any other social network. The primary reason people sign into their Facebook accounts is to stay connected to their friends and families and know what’s happening in their lives.

All your friends are likely to be on Facebook than any other social site.

Instagram is all about images.

Where are you? What are you doing? What are you looking at? Who are you with?

Just like Facebook, Instagram is personal. It’s for sharing those real-life moments.

LinkedIn is different from the rest of the social outlets because it’s specifically designed for businesses and professionals. People only go to LinkedIn to showcase their job experience and professional thoughts.

Twitter is the best place to get trending topics. And if you want to stay in the loop in any industry, just follow the right people on Twitter.

The hashtag (#) was popularized on Twitter.

When you see a trending hashtag on Twitter and decides to use it in your tweet, people from around the world will see it. People who aren’t your followers may retweet, like, and comment on your tweets.

Let’s talk about these four social sites because they are the biggest.

Facebook marketing best practices

Facebook is the perfect place to be if you want to build a massive audience online.

Before you start building your audience on Facebook, you should know its best practices.

Facebook best practices are accepted and the most effective marketing techniques for Facebook.

What are they?

Create a Facebook Page

A Facebook page is a free marketing tool for both individuals and businesses. It costs nothing and less than a few minutes to create a Facebook page.

With a Facebook page, you can contact your fans every day and remind them of your presence.

An active Facebook page helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field. It’s your home on Facebook.

For example, below is Tim Ferriss’ page on Facebook.

Host contests on Facebook

Contests work well on Facebook. It’s one of the effective ways to get your audience pumped up on Facebook.

Think of products your audience loves, and offer them as prizes to contest winners.

The great thing about contests is that they help you build your audience on the world’s biggest social platform.

Here are some things you can ask fans to do to qualify to win:

• Like a post
• Like your page
• Comment on a post
• Post to your Facebook page

Below is a screenshot of a mall running a contest on Facebook.

Read Facebook Guidelines before running a contest.

Create a Facebook Group

A Facebook group is like a community where your fans can interact with each other.

What’s the difference between a Facebook page and a Facebook group?

A Facebook Page allows you to create an authentic and public presence on Facebook. Facebook pages are visible by default.

A user only has to follow you to receive the latest updates on their News Feed, so they don’t have to visit your page again to see the most recent posts. They see it automatically because they’re following your page.

A Facebook Group is a community of people who share common interests and express their opinions.

When you create a group, you can either make it public or private.

A private group requires administrator approval for new members to join. Current members can also invite their friends to join.

Creating a Facebook group is a great way to extend your reach and build deeper relationships with your audience.

There will be some individuals in your audience who are experts too. A Facebook group gives them the opportunity to share their tips and help others in the group.

For example, Stuart Walker uses his Niche Hacks Facebook group to communicate with his fans.

Your group can help you develop relationships that’ll generate more sales for your business.

You can also use your Facebook group as a customer service hub for your products and services.

Promote your post with Facebook ads

Facebook marketing expert, Claire Pelletreau recommends you set aside anywhere from $40-$400 per month to dedicate to one thing:

Promoting a handful of the posts you publish on your Facebook page.

Facebook users won’t organically discover your posts, especially if your Facebook page is still new. You need to put your posts in front of them. Facebook advertising is the way to do that.

You should be willing to test your ads with different formats and posts and go with the ones that receive the most likes, comments, and shares on the platform.

Utilizing facebook ads library may also offer insightful analysis of the marketing tactics performed by other companies, giving you the knowledge you need to improve the reach and engagement of your own ad campaigns.

Instagram marketing best practices

Six hundred million people use Instagram monthly. If you want to build an audience who loves images and young, Instagram is an ideal social platform for you.

What are the best practices for marketing on Instagram?

Publish eye candies

If you can post visually-stunning content, you can build an audience on Instagram.

Millions of photos are being uploaded to Instagram each day. If you can make your image stand out, you can succeed.

Your images should be attractive. Show Instagram users something they haven’t seen before.

Geekdom Media uses Instagram to tell their podcast audience the next episode the team is working on.

Post from unique locations

Instagram users can quickly get bored with your posts if you keep publishing photos from the same location. They want to see something new each time you post.

You should be ready to explore the world if you really want to build an audience on Instagram.

Some people go as far as visiting different exciting cities and attractions. That can be very expensive of course. But it’s the price you have to pay to become an influencer on Instagram.

Tell good stories

There should be a story behind every image you share. Write your story in the caption section.

What you write in the caption will help followers understand the real message behind the image. It makes it easy for users to write comments that relate to the image.

Top Yacht Charters uses Instagram to tell interesting stories about available yachts.

Use Hashtags

As I mentioned above, hashtags originated on Twitter. Today, they’ve become part of every social media channel.

Hashtagging is an important activity on Instagram. It increases the reach of your images beyond your followers.

There are a lot of Instagram users who follow hashtags.

For example, some people follow the #coffee hashtag because they like coffee so much.

Posting an attractive and creative image with the #coffee will expose your brand to coffee lovers. Isn’t that a smart thing to do?

LinkedIn marketing best practices

LinkedIn is a site for professionals. It’s a place where you should act and be a professional.

If you want to build an audience who are professionals and entrepreneurs, LinkedIn is the best place to do that.

A lot of professionals have used LinkedIn to build multimillion-dollar businesses.

For example, James Filbird used LinkedIn to build JMF International Trade Group Ltd, to $5 million in revenue largely through his effort on LinkedIn.

Matt Guiver, the founder of Jumpstone International, a firm that helps business owners tackle complex challenges and take strategic actions that move their businesses forward should be an active LinkedIn user.

Create a professional profile

Marketing on LinkedIn starts with your profile.

Do you have a customized profile URL?

Do you have a customized background photo for your LinkedIn profile?

Do you add your work experience on your profile?

Do you show your work samples on LinkedIn?

Are you getting endorsements for your skills on LinkedIn?

Publish on LinkedIn Pulse

Publishing on LinkedIn offers visibility for your name and company.

Unlike Facebook where your post can organically reach 2.6% of your followers, LinkedIn lets you reach 20% of your network.

Twitter marketing best practices

Twitter’s 140-character bite-size updates transformed the world’s access to real-time information and social media.

It wasn’t possible to read the news in 140 characters before Twitter came.

Twitter is more of a place where people share and discover the latest events in the world than where they connect. Succeeding on Twitter is easy when you understand the unique difference of the platform.

As I write this, a huge Google Docs phishing scam is going on. Twitter made me aware of it, so I’m unlikely to fall prey to it if I’m targeted.

Keep your updates short on Twitter

Unlike most social platforms, where you have all the space and freedom to write long updates, Twitter doesn’t allow you to do that. You have a limit of 140 characters.

To succeed on Twitter, first, you must learn how to write short, educative, interesting, and entertaining updates in 140-characters or even less.

Use visuals in your Tweets

Tweets with images receive 18% more click-throughs, 89% more likes, and 150% more retweets.

Twitter users love images. By sharing more images you’ll become more successful on Twitter.

Use hashtags

Once in awhile, there’s a trending topic or event that you have something valuable to contribute to. For me, that is the best time to use hashtags on Twitter.

Don’t use hashtags in every update you share on Twitter. Or even worse, don’t use unrelated hashtags. In fact, don’t force hashtags into every Tweet you share.

If you believe your Tweet would add value to people who are not your followers, or individuals who are following a particular hashtag, then use it.

Respond to other people’s Tweets

If you want people to share and reply to your Tweets, you should be willing to do the same thing. Give what you want.

Recently, I responded to Rand Fishkin’s Tweet. He did the same to mine.

Give people a strong reason to follow you

There are already enough influencers on the web today.

The articles, videos, images, and podcasts that are being published on the web on a daily basis are so much that web users can’t see 1% of them.

For example, I follow influencers I like on Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even iTunes.

Reading all their content is impossible.

If you want people to add you to their already massive list of influencers whom they respect, you should give them a strong reason to do that.

There are four questions you should answer before you can create a great reason for people who may be interested in you on social media.

1. Can people trust you?
2. Do you really care about your audience?
3. Can you offer your audience a sense of stability?
4. Can you offer them hope?

Let’s start with trust.

People trust you because of the achievements you’ve had. If you’re a complete beginner who hasn’t achieved much in your field, you’ll find it difficult to gain people’s trust when you’re just starting out.

The trust in you will increase over time as you continue to achieve results in your field.

For example, a lot of people follow Gary Vaynerchuk because he’s had a lot of success over the years.

You have to deliver on a consistent basis, in a reliable manner and walk the talk before people can begin to trust you.

Next is caring. Do you really care about your audience?

Showing you care is going the extra mile for your audience. For example, responding to messages, social media comments, and shout outs.

Another way of showing you care is delivering the content of high-quality they won’t find elsewhere on the web.

The third question is about stability. Can you offer a sense of stability to your audience?

A lot of your followers want to quit what they are doing right now. Many of them aren’t looking for any magic secrets because they know it doesn’t exist. What they need is a constant reassurance that they are on the right path.

They sometimes lose confidence in themselves. They just need someone to cheer them up. Yes, your fans are like your babies. That’s why they are your followers on social media, and you’re their leader.

Your audience also needs hope. Perhaps they are going through some tough times now. For them to follow you, they need to be sure that the future will be bright.

They want to feel optimistic each time they see your updates on social media.

You can’t give people all these things the first time they see you on social media. But by continually delivering over a long period of time, you’ll grow your following on social media.

Develop a growth strategy for social media

Everyone who is looking to build an audience on social media searches for strategies that work.

If you’ve been reading from the beginning of this article until this point, you’ve seen the tactics that work for each social platform I listed above.

There are a lot of social media marketing tactics out there.

Every social media tactic won’t work for you. Because it produces results for some people doesn’t mean you’ll have the same success with it.

Peg Fitzpatrick is a social media expert who manages over 11 million followers across various social channels. Below is what she has to say about developing a growth strategy for social media.

Your social strategy is the plan that’s going to make your social media work.

It’s a combination of content creation, content curation, creativity, and organization.

Random acts of social media won’t do a darn thing to help people find you or to be known for a topic area. To build your authority in your niche, you need to create a solid social strategy that will help people find out who you are, what you do, and most importantly how you can help them.

You need a solid growth strategy to win on social media.

Pick one or two strategies that have worked for people in the past. Test them and see if they are working for you. Drop any strategy that isn’t working for you and find another.

You can’t be doing random things and expect success on social media.

Jason Stone built an Instagram following of over 2 million by sharing image quotes about entrepreneurship, motivation, money, and education.

You don’t have to start from scratch. You can learn to use other people’s growth strategies. Perhaps, in a unique way.

How will social media grow your business?

It’s good to know your “why” for building an audience.

The process of building an audience on social media is tough and boring.

Your “why” will keep you determined and laser-focused.

It’s not enough to know what you do or how you do it. You should know why you’re doing it. That’s what makes you continue doing it.

Almost everyone knows how to build an audience on social media. There aren’t any magic secrets to making it work.

Why a lot of people are not building an audience on social media is because they don’t have a reason to. That’s why they aren’t doing it.

People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.

Do you want to use social media to promote your business?

Or, do you want to use social media to become an industry expert and increase your chances of landing a top executive job?

What is your “why” for building an audience on social media?

Tell me using the comment box you’ll find below.

The post How to Build a Massive Audience on Social Media appeared first on OmniKick.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.—Benjamin Franklin

A marketing plan is your guide to promoting and growing your business.

A good marketing plan will ensure that you know your marketing objectives and the best ways to achieve them. It also keeps focused. It helps you establish tasks and timelines. And can help you obtain financing.

According to a survey by CB Insights, there are 20 reasons why most startups fail. The survey showed that 14% of startups fail because of poor marketing.

As you can see, there are other bigger reasons like:

1. No market need (42%).
2. Ran out of cash (29%).
3. Not the right team (23%).
4. Get outcompeted (19%).
5. Pricing/cost issues (18%).
6. Poor product (17%)

A solid marketing plan will help you avoid these pitfalls:

A solid marketing plan will tell you if there’s no market need for your product.

A solid marketing plan will help you make the best use of your budget.

A solid marketing plan will help you recognize and hire the right people who can execute and achieve your marketing objectives.

A solid marketing plan will also help you differentiate your business so that you’re not directly competing with your competitors.

The first step towards creating the perfect marketing plan

I’m sure you can’t wait to create that perfect marketing plan for your business.

Now, you probably want to pick a pen and a sheet of paper and start drawing up a plan of how you’ll conquer your competitors. But it doesn’t work that way.

The process of creating a great marketing plan can be tedious. Sometimes, it could take days, or a few weeks to draw up a perfect plan.

Because of this, you need a deadline for your plan. You can’t just sit and start creating a plan without knowing when it’ll end.

Begin with the end in mind. — Stephen Covey

Having a deadline in mind will keep you focused and help you come up with something great.

Without a deadline, it’s easy to feel lost and start execution when the plan is not yet completed. This mistake may seem little to you, but it can wreck the business within a short period of time.

You should avoid working with a plan when it’s not completed. That’s why you need a deadline and stick to that deadline.

Who are the people who will execute your marketing plan and what are their roles?

This is where the real planning starts.

Except your business is a one-man show, you’re tight on budget and willing to wear many hats, you’ll need some talented people on your marketing team.

Your budget will play a big role here.

If you have a decent budget, you may want to make some bold marketing moves – which means, you need people who can get the job done.

In what specific roles do you need people?

If you believe that you don’t need people, you may want to use those skills you already have, or the skills you’re willing to learn within a short period of time.

You should know what roles are important in your marketing team:

1. Content Creator(s): This is the person who produces content for your website and business. This person creates content that grows your organic search traffic, social media traffic, and other traffic channels.
2. SEO Strategist: This is the person who chooses the keywords to target, does on-page and off-page SEO, and handles every other thing connected to SEO.
3. Graphic Designer: This is the person who creates custom images, logos, and infographics to use in your blog posts, share on social media and others.
4. The PR Professional: This is the person who obtains free publicity for your business by getting it into the news. A PR professional also protects and enhances your company’s reputation.
5. Website Designer: This is the person who takes care of your website design and ensures that it looks attractive.
6. Web Developer: This person modifies your website and makes sure its user-experience is great. A web developer also helps you create different forms of content e.g. free tools for your prospects.
7. Account Manager: You need an account manager to ensure that no one is overwhelmed with their jobs. An account manager provides you with various reports like traffic, links, email subscribers. The account manager presents all these reports to you and helps in figuring out things you can improve.
8. Email Marketer: The email marketer is focused only on helping you build a massive email list of passionate people who are interested in your product and services.
9. Social Media Marketer: This person is in charge of building your social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and others. A social media marketer also helps you develop and maintain a strong relationship with fans on those social platforms.
10. Conversion Rate Optimizer (CRO): This person is tasked with conducting split tests, optimizing every aspect of your website for the purpose of generating more profits.
11. Paid Marketing Expert: This is the person in charge of paid advertising. This person controls your advertising campaigns on Google, Yahoo, Bing, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms where your prospects spend time online.

The above list doesn’t necessarily mean you need 11 people on your marketing team.

Sometimes, these skills may overlap. But it’s important that the people on your marketing team have all these skills. And like I said above, your marketing budget and goals will determine the number of people you hire.

For example, you don’t need a paid marketing expert if you’re not planning to do any paid advertising.

Also, you may choose not to have a graphic designer on your team if you’re pretty good at designing and have the right tools.

It’s important you know what roles you want to fill on your marketing team.

How much are you planning to spend on marketing?

A merchant who sells 15 different types of products may need a bigger marketing budget than a merchant who sells just one type of product.

The amount you spend on marketing will largely depend on your cash reserve and how much risk you’re willing to take.

You need to set a marketing budget. It’ll help you create a marketing plan that fits your budget.

What are your marketing goals?

Now you have the roles in your marketing team, and you’ve set your marketing budget – what’s next?

The next step is to establish your marketing objectives.

What are the goals you want to achieve with your marketing efforts in the next month, quarter, or year?

You can’t just say “I want more website visitors, leads, and sales” or “I want to have a bigger email list.”

You need to establish the specific numbers and the time period you want to achieve the goal.

You can say:

“I need 20,000 visitors, 500 leads, and 12 customers within the next 12 months from my inbound marketing efforts in order to achieve my revenue goal of $600,000 from inbound marketing.”

You can also say:

“I want to rank number one for the keyword term “widget consultant,” since I estimate that it will generate 300 visitors to my website per month, producing at least two customers.”

Here’s a 6-step process for setting a smart marketing goal:

Step 1: Determine how much revenue you want to generate from your marketing efforts. You can say you want to generate a revenue of $600,000 in the next year.

Step 2: Determine how many sales you need to hit that revenue goal. For example, if each product sells for $600, it means you only need to sell 1,000 pieces of your product during the whole year to hit your goal.

Step 3: Identify your closing rate and how many opportunities you need. Let’s assume you have a closing rate of 50%. It means you need 2,000 closing opportunities to hit your goal.

Step 4: Determine how many sales qualified leads (SQLs) you need. You’ll have some leads who are not qualified as your sales lead. Some people are not just ready to buy your product, or they can’t afford it. These people are not sales qualified leads. But they are still leads because they may need your product in the future. So, you can say you need at least 6,000 sales qualified leads.

Step 5: Determine how many marketing sales leads you need. You can say you need 20,000 marketing leads. Marketing leads are just leads. Most of these people aren’t even sure if they need your product. They can still become sales qualified leads in the future.

Step 6: Identify your traffic goals. These are the people who visit your website. A small percentage of them will give you their emails, making them marketing sales leads. If you’re going to get 20,000 marketing leads within a year, then your website should be receiving around 50,000 to 100,000 visits per month while you’re actively collecting emails.

These are just guesses, of course. But if your site is getting 50,000 to 100,000 monthly visits, then achieving your 1,000 sales goal shouldn’t be hard.

Conduct market research

I’ll assume that you have a product or service that people want. You probably researched before developing your product. For example, MedCognition is a startup that creates and sells affordable, realistic holographic patient simulation for pre-hospital providers. This is a product that’s needed because it reduces errors in life-saving situations.

(And in case you didn’t conduct any product research, this is still the stage where you’ll know if people will be interested in your product).

This is the longest phase because you’ll have to do a lot of things like:

1. Research your market potential. You’ll want to find out if a lot of people want your product.
2. Research your market share potential. You’ll want to find out if you have an opportunity to quickly dominating a small segment of your market.
3. Image research. This is where you’ll draw a clear picture of people who really need your product (and who can easily be reached).
4. Research your market characteristics. This is where you’ll find out any information about your competitors, what affects demand and supply in your niche, when sales tend to peak, and how your target customers may react to your product.
5. Forecasting research. This is where you’ll forecast the future and what changes could affect your marketing strategies and objectives.
6. Research business trends. These are trends that could put you out of business, or make you a strong market leader.

Here’s a clear picture of what I’m talking about:

Design and delivery are moving parts that need constant tweaking. To stand out from the crowd keep updated on current trends. How do you do this?

Competitor research and following the habits of your target audience. In fact, there are many different methods for market research.

Be unique, be bold, or just follow the old tried and tested strategies. Your objective here is to ensure that you’ve all the facts and current practices in order to develop a solid marketing plan.

Find out everything you need to know in this phase.

Your objective here is to ensure that you have all the facts and current practices in order to develop a solid marketing plan. So make sure you find out everything you need to know in this phase.

Choose your preferred marketing strategies

There are hundreds of marketing strategies out there.

You should focus on a few effective marketing strategies.

The marketing strategies you use should fit your budget.

For example, creating infographics when you only have less than $2,000 to spend on marketing isn’t a wise idea.

A highly attractive and shareable infographic could cost up to $2,000. So infographics are definitely not for you if you don’t have at least $20,000 – $30,000 to spend on marketing.

There are two kinds of marketing:

1. Interruption marketing
2. Inbound marketing

That is not to say I hate interruption marketing.

There are some situations whereby you need interruption marketing to hit the ground running.

As you can see in the above image, there are so many marketing strategies inside both interruption marketing and inbound marketing.

What you want to do here is focus on a few effective marketing strategies that fit your marketing budget and industry.

Outline your marketing tactics

Let’s assume that you’ve chosen your preferred marketing strategies.  What’s next?

It’s time to outline them.

How are you going to use each marketing strategy?

For example, let’s say you chose video marketing as one of your marketing strategies, how are you going to use it?

Here are some questions for you:

• What types of video content will you create?
• Who will produce those video content?
• How will you promote the videos?
• How will you collect leads from each video?
• How many videos do you intend to create per month?
• What percentage of your marketing budget are you willing to allocate to video marketing?

For example, HubSpot has a YouTube channel named HubSpot Academy.

HubSpot, a marketing software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts uses its YouTube channel to educate prospects and puts a clickable short link on its video description sections in order to direct potential clients to its site.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

As you can see in the above image, that’s the link HubSpot uses to collect leads from its YouTube videos.

Know how you want to measure success for each marketing strategy

You can’t just say that a marketing strategy is effective so you should continue using it.

Sometimes, you may need to ditch a marketing tactic because it’s not helping you achieve your marketing objectives.

Let’s continue with the video marketing example.

Let’s say that your YouTube video isn’t driving many leads per month to justify your investment, you may decide to change course.

You can decide to put a call-to-action inside your YouTube videos instead of the video description like how HubSpot is doing it.

You can decide to talk about your landing page and directly ask viewers to go and register to download an e-book or an e-course.

You can stop posting videos on YouTube and start creating highly shareable videos for your audience on Facebook or Twitter like HubSpot is doing here:

You may decide to completely stop video marketing and try another marketing strategy that can give you a bigger return on investment (ROI).

Without a way to measure success, there’s no way you’ll know if a marketing tactic is giving you the desired result. I highly recommend that you have a way of measuring success for your marketing strategies. Even if your company is small, track, and measure your marketing efforts. It helps you do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Conclusion

You can have the greatest marketing plan in the world, but it’s useless if you don’t stick to it.

Implementing what’s in your marketing plan is crucial to your marketing success on the web.

While it’s highly recommended that you stick to your plan, you should also remain flexible by willing to test new assumptions.

There’s nothing like a perfect marketing plan.

As you continue to follow what you’ve outlined in your marketing plan, some of your strategies will fail.

Instead of drawing a new plan, starting all over from scratch again, you should only alter a small part of your plan.

The post Marketing Plan: How to Formulate A Detailed Plan appeared first on OmniKick.

Marketing is the activities that are involved in making people aware of a company’s products, making sure that the products are available to be bought, etc.

So what is digital marketing?

Digital marketing means using the internet to create awareness for a company’s products and making sure the products are available to be bought right there on the internet.

Sounds simple, right?

There is more to digital marketing than the words found in the above definition.

Digital marketing can be very difficult if you don’t have the right skills.

But with the right set of skills, marketing on the internet is as easy as pie.

Today, 40% of the world population is online.

The first billion was reached in 2005. The second billion in 2010. The third billion in 2014.

This massive growth in internet usage has made the digital marketing industry worth several tens of billion dollars.

In fact, the figure hit $62 billion in 2012 for the United States alone.

The growth in digital marketing has increased the need for more talented digital marketers. That’s why there’s a rise in digital marketing agencies around the world.

Local businesses are starting to understand the importance of taking their shops online because that is where the consumers live.

So what are the skills you need to succeed in the internet marketing world and become a sought-after marketing consultant?

There are 15 skills you need:

1. Writing And Copywriting

What do you see everywhere you go on the web?

You see words, isn’t it?

Without words, the web is meaningless.

Let’s talk about writing. It is the most important one. In fact, it’s where digital marketing starts.

To communicate with potential clients, and win big, lucrative deals, you need to have good communication skills. This starts with writing.

Your writing skill doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be good.

It is after you’ve mastered writing can you become good in copywriting.

You may not be the one who always writes the sales copy for products, but you should, at least, be able to recognize a good sales copy when you see one.

2. WordPress

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world.

In case you don’t know what CMS is, it is the software or platform we use to build our websites or blogs.

According to BuiltWith, at the time of writing, 38% of websites currently use WordPress.

That’s interesting when you consider the fact that the second, which is Drupal, only has 8% of the share.

WordPress began as a personal publishing platform back in 2001. By 2008, it has transformed into a full content management system.

WordPress gives you 100% control and creative freedom to do whatever you like. You own everything.

WordPress is used by recognized brands such as CNN, New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Mercedes-Benz, and Vogue.

It also used by government websites both in the United States and Great Britain. Even the U.S. military uses it to power their sites.

WordPress is good for ranking sites on search engines. Google rate it above their own Blogger platform.

WordPress is secure. It is frequently updated by a community of worldwide developers that care a lot about it. There are also various security plugins to help protect you from attackers.

WordPress is easy to use and simple to learn. You can easily learn WordPress within a week if you commit a few hours to it per day.

WP Beginner has a simple tutorial that will help you learn WordPress within a week.

After you learn WordPress, you’ll be able to recognize any technical glitches in a WordPress site and fix it immediately.

3. Photo-Editing

Visuals are taking over the marketing world.

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

We love visuals because they help us learn faster.

Web users have short attention spans. You need to capture that attention, or they would leave your website within a few seconds.

Visual is the most effective way to get and keep that attention.

Many studies have shown that our brains process visuals faster and they help us retain and transmit much more information.

Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.

When you consider the fact that visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content, it means you have to know what makes a good visual good.

This is where a good photo-editing skill comes in.

I’m not saying you have to become a fully talented photographer, but at least, you should know what makes a photo perfect for a blog post.

Pairing the right images with the right content is important.

Except you have an eye for the right photos, it will be hard to know when and how to use a particular image.

Learn photo-editing to create and edit pictures that help your digital marketing efforts.

A search on YouTube will present you with some high-quality photo-editing tutorials.

4. HTML

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve font, color, graphic, and hyperlink effects on World Wide Web pages.

HTML powers the web.

Knowing HTML is making sure you’re fully prepared to become a digital marketer.

You may not end up using it every day, but the times you end up using it, you’ll be so grateful that you know how to use it.

A lack of HTML knowledge is one of the biggest obstacles many digital marketers face.

The knowledge of HTML will save you precious time, money, and frustration.

You don’t need a full HTML skill. Knowing the basics alone can save you tons of time.

For example, you need HTML when formatting your blog posts and email messages.

You use HTML to make your content easy to read like adding heads, bullets, numbers, holds, and italics. You also need it when you have to make your content easy to use like adding internal links.

Okay, imagine I know nothing about HTML, it would have been hard to add the headers you see throughout this article.

Even if using WordPress makes it easy to do all those things without much knowledge of HTML, you still need to know it when pitching guest posts.

Most publishers want to receive your guest posts in HTML to save them the time of doing the formatting themselves.

5. Email Marketing

If there’s a marketing channel every digital marketer must master, it is email.

Email marketing provides the best return on investment (ROI) more than any other marketing channel.

For every $1 dollar spent on email marketing, an average of $40 is realized.

Out of every digital marketing skill, email marketing is one of the hardest to learn and do. But it looks simple.

You can quickly gain a lot of insight into other people’s internet marketing approach by visiting their blogs, websites, and landing pages.

With email marketing, you’ll have to subscribe to a competitor’s (mentor) email list to learn from them. Sometimes, this takes time. It’s not something you can quickly learn within days.

You’ll have to follow every one of your competitors (mentor) move by reading each of their emails and learning their tricks.

You can use OmniKick to collect the email addresses of your visitors. It’s free to get started with OmniKick.

6. Google AdWords Advertising

Google AdWords is one of the effective ways to reach new customers and grow your business.

AdWords is the largest and most widely used online advertising network in the world.

In 2015, Google’s ad revenue amounted to almost $67.39 billion. That year, advertising accounted for the majority percent of the online company’s total revenues. This should tell you how important the AdWords program is to Google.

New internet marketers have to master Google AdWords because it’s the easiest way to reach customers when they want your stuff.

AdWords lets you reach people who are in your location. It also lets you show your physical address so prospects can see that you have a real business.

AdWords is scalable, measurable, flexible, and it’s also easier and faster than SEO.

There are a lot of courses out there that will teach you everything you need to know about AdWords before you start.

Don’t jump straight into AdWords advertising without reading some guides as you can seriously get your fingers burnt which can be very expensive and unforgivable.

7. Facebook Advertising

Facebook is the biggest social site in the world with 1.59 billion monthly active users as of December 31, 2015. This figure is too much to ignore. It means most of your customers are on Facebook.

Advertising on Facebook gives you the opportunity to reach your ideal customers.

Facebook is different from other ways of advertising online because you can get your advert to just the right people. You choose the audiences for your adverts and can reach them at any time, on any device.

Top brands such as Red Bull, Disney, Oreo, and KFC are taking full advantage of the Facebook platform to further reach and connect with their customers.

You have to master Facebook if you are really serious about becoming a sought-after digital marketing expert or you want to raise your business to higher heights.

8. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is about mastering all aspects of various social platforms.

With this skill, you’ll know how to combine Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and others to boost your business.

Why I separated Facebook advertising from this is because Facebook is like a planet on its own. It’s big and you have to learn how to take full advantage of it separately.

Facebook is bigger than every other social network. They are a wide range of different users on it.

Learning social media marketing is simple:

You need to study how your mentors or competitors are doing it. You can also learn from the established and emerging brands too.

Social media helps you learn more about your ideal customers. It helps you respond to their problems and questions in real-time.

Social media will also give you more sales as customers will vouch for your company if you can deeply connect with them.

Social media is no longer a fad. It has become an important part of internet marketing which is why you must master it to prove to cash-rich clients that you have the credentials to lead their big marketing projects.

9. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing a web page to rank high on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!

SEO has become a very important digital marketing skill due to 92% of U.S. adults using search engines to find information online.

Businesses and individuals are continuously at war over who should appear on the first pages of search engines.

To rank high on a search engine like Google, you need to feed it with the right metrics. You also need to help search engines learn about your content. That is what SEOs do.

An internet marketer should understand the basics of SEO like internal linking, anchor texts, headline titles, XML sitemap, meta-description, and link building.

10. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization is another important aspect of internet marketing every marketer should know.

Imagine a website receives hundreds of thousands of visits but it finds it hard to convert those visits into real dollars.

Sometimes, increasing the amount of traffic a website receives isn’t the solution. It could be that the website is not better optimized for conversions. This is where a CRO comes in.

According to Wikipedia, conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process of increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that converts into customers, or more generally, takes any desired action on a webpage.

The knowledge of conversion is vital to any digital marketer.

When you fully understand how conversion rate optimization work, you’ll be able to help business owners generate more customers with less time and money.

11. Google Analytics

Every aspect of your digital marketing campaign needs analytics to measure, managed, and analyze its effectiveness to maximize performance.

How do you know where your most profitable customers are coming from?

How do you know if your site is achieving its marketing goals?

How do you know if visitors like your content?

The answer all lies in analytics.

You need to be aware of the right metrics in your marketing analytics dashboard.

Marketing analytics? What does it mean?

Marketing analytics is the measurement and optimization of your marketing activities.

Google Analytics is the best marketing analytics. In fact, it is one of the most popular tools available to digital marketers.

You need complete knowledge of how Google Analytics work.

A lack of it will make it difficult for you to track, analyze, and present your marketing reports.

12. Content Marketing

According to Copyblogger, content marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers and repeat buyers.

Another definition I like comes from the Content Marketing Institute, a site that pioneered the term “content marketing”:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Content is the foundation of all marketing. You need content to pull customers into your marketing funnel.

But it’s not all kinds of content formats that work in every industry or niche.

The content format that works for an automobile business may not work for a food business.

This is the work of the content strategist:

To know the right content to create and where to distribute it.

As a digital marketer, you must be able to know what kind of contents work in the niche or industry you are in.

Having this content strategizing skill is very important.

Without it, you may be creating the wrong content that doesn’t resonate with your customers.

13. Viral Marketing

A talented digital marketer also needs to know how and why some products and companies go viral.

First, permit me to define what viral marketing means.

Viral marketing is a method of product promotion that relies on getting customers to market an idea, product, or service on their own by telling their friends about it, usually by e-mail, word of mouth and social media.

A lot of companies have gone viral over the past few years. And a lot more would go viral in the coming years.

Understanding the secret behind each marketing campaign that goes viral is a must for a digital marketer.

For example, Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” campaign is a marketing success.

Each viral marketing campaign teaches you new things you don’t know about marketing before.

The above Dove’s uplifting promotional video generated record-breaking online interest, yielding more than 114 million views the first month.

“Real Beauty Sketches” aims to underline the stark contrast between how women view themselves and what others see.

According to data cited by Dove, 54 percent of women worldwide confess to being their own worst critic of how they look.

The video features Gil Zamora, an FBI-trained forensic artist who draws a series of women from out of sight behind a curtain, completing the sketches based on each woman’s verbal description of her appearance.

Zamora also created drawings based on strangers’ accounts of the same women.

In most cases, the sketches based on the strangers’ perspectives corresponded to more accurate and flattering depictions than those based on the women’s own self-effacing descriptions.

“Real Beauty Sketches” struck a chord with consumers, generating close to 3.8 million shares in its first month online and adding 15,000 new subscribers to Dove’s YouTube channel over the following two months.”—Jason Ankeny, Chicago Based Writer and Entrepreneur contributor

If there’s one thing this Dove campaign will teach you, it is the fact that making people feel uplifted could make a marketing campaign go viral.

You can learn tons of things from many other viral marketing campaigns out there. And you can start applying what you learn from them into your own digital marketing endeavors.

14. Growth Hacking

As a digital marketer, there will be a point where cash-rich startups would start approaching you to help them grow their usage numbers.

This can be a very difficult or impossible task if you haven’t steeped yourself in the growth hacking sea.

Growth hacking is a marketing technique that aims to attract users at a relatively low cost.

Your primary goal as a growth hacker is to grow the number of users for a specific product, and nothing else.

Many people often confuse digital marketing with growth hacking, but growth hacking is a subset of digital marketing.

To become a complete digital marketer, you must fully grasp the concept of growth hacking.

Growth hacking could mean hunting the first user by hand, doing things that don’t scale.

It could mean growing on the back of someone else like Zynga did with Facebook and Airbnb did with Craiglist.

It could also mean growing using the power of your existing user base and connections. This involves doing things like referral marketing, retargeting, and word-of-mouth marketing.

“Hotmail already had about 20,000 users one month after launching in 1996 and it opted to market its service directly to the friends, family, and colleagues of those users by employing a simple strategy:

It added a tagline, “Get Your Free Email at Hotmail,” at the end of each existing user’s outgoing mail.

When a Hotmail user sent out an email on his or her account, the recipient could click on the tagline link, which would direct them to a page where they could set up their own account.

As a result, the company user base not only skyrocketed to 1 million users within 6 months but the email startup also executed one of the web’s earliest growth hacks (though the term wouldn’t be coined for another fourteen years).”—John McLaughlin, start-up founder, and entrepreneur based in Manhattan and a writer for Fueled

Growth hacking is a valuable digital marketing skill that could start sending multimillionaire founders to your doorstep.

15. Mobile Marketing

Smartphone sales are growing at a fast rate.

In fact, 75% of Americans admit to bringing their phone to the bathroom.

This has made mobile marketing an important marketing skill. The knowledge of how mobile marketing works will give you an advantage over your competitors.

Consumers behave differently on mobile.

You have to take advantage of this fact to make yourself more competitive in the digital marketing field.

With 70% of mobile searches leading to online action within an hour, many businesses will be looking to use mobile marketing to reach their customers.

Except you’re pretty good at mobile marketing, it will be difficult to win clients and huge business deals.

Mobile marketing starts with perfectly optimizing your site for a good mobile experience.

Mobile marketing also means claiming your business on location-based platforms like Foursquare, Facebook Places, and Google My Business.

Conclusion

These are the top digital skills you need to compete in the digital world. Develop these skills and you’ll be able to compete in any niche or industry.

And don’t forget to start using OmniKick to collect the email addresses of your visitors.

The post 15 Top Skills You Need to Compete in Digital Marketing appeared first on OmniKick.

It automates, streamlines, and tracks different marketing tasks with the use of the software.

Yes, the human element still has a role to play, but a high proportion of eCommerce tasks can automate.

But good software or automation tool shouldn’t only be a way to make things easier for the marketing team.

It should also help you close more deals and win more deals to keep your business growing.

Marketing automation is one of the most exciting prospects in the industry today.

One can gain from getting an eCommerce marketing automation tool.

Yet, the intricacies of the tools are hard for some people if they don’t know how to use it.

The ideal approach is to integrate many tools into your marketing plan.

Implementing proven eCommerce marketing strategies need a shift in the mindset.

The tools allow you to tap into various benefits. This allows you to get new leads and foster relationships with clients.

These things lead to increased productivity and sales in your conversion funnel.

In this guide, we take a look at some of the strategies to automate eCommerce marketing.

This should bolster your sales and provides you with important data.

Such practices help to make good business decisions in the future.

Strategy #1: Engage Customers With Dynamic Content and eCommerce Automation

Having dynamic content is important to ensure you make the most out of your marketing tool.

This is what drives your interaction with your customers. Dynamic content is the customization of content for the visitors.

Having no content or displaying the wrong content is worse. It can lose a potential customer within seconds.

Of course, you must have the right content to please your customers in the first place.

This should align with the customers’ behavior patterns. Such content gives your eCommerce marketing the best chance of success.

As you gather data about your leads it becomes easier to engage and convince them with your content.

The nature and medium of the content can also make a big difference.

Content such as blog and article posts are better placed at the top of the funnel to attract the customers.

But visual content is better suited to get them to actually buy.

These include pictures and videos which work well to get your point across.

Strategy #2: Building Nurture Relationships by eCommerce Automation

Having a Drip campaign is one of the most important aspects of eCommerce marketing.

This is because it helps in securing and nurturing relationships with your leads.

The automation depends upon the customer’s online behavior.

For instance, when a customer subscribes to emails, they receive a welcome message.

Once the lead visits the product page you can send more content.

This includes newsletters and product-related emails. Broadcasting a single message to all email subscribers doesn’t work.

It is better to have a drip campaign instead.

Tailoring content to meet user interests and behavior is important.

It helps the customer to get what s/he wants. It is a win-win situation for the company and the customer.

There are many studies that are in favor of this. Drip campaigns end up generating 80% more sales through eCommerce automation.

Drip campaigns also build trust and credibility with leads without direct human involvement.

OmniKick is one such automation tool. It allows you to build drip campaigns. This helps to target and engage specific customer interests.

Strategy #3: Identifying Quality Leads Via eCommerce Automation and Lead Scoring

Companies receive hundreds of visitors to its website. It can be difficult to distinguish potential leads from those that aren’t worth the time.

At the same time, because a lead is downloading a form doesn’t mean that s/he is ready for the sales call.

Things can also become complicated when the lead isn’t ready. The same can occur when the salesperson doesn’t have the required information.

This is where automation for eCommerce comes in. It helps in determining when a lead is ready for a sales call.

Lead scores work by assigning a specific score for every activity.

The lead that has the highest score in a given frame of time is the most potential lead.

The ideal automation tool helps you identify potential leads by tracking online activities.

It also assigns specific scores to them to make the job easier. These behavior-based scores help segment the users.

This helps saves time and increases the chances of closing the loop.

Strategy #4: Re-engaging Old Leads Via eCommerce Automation

eCommerce marketing automation nurtures new leads and pushes them through the funnel.

But it also helps you to re-engage with old leads that were once active on your platform. The leads liked your products/services once.

But, for some reason or another, have lost touch. Re-engaging old leads with new content and lucrative offers can further your sales.

Most businesses tend to forget that old leads were once associated with their brand.

This is because they managed to provide them with solutions to their problems at an earlier time.

Go through the records and conversation histories.

This will help you identify who spoke what to whom, when, and why. Rekindle the conversation with updated content and re-engage the leads.

They will need less nurturing than new leads which can allow you to close the loop earlier.

Strategy #5: Personalize Your Website Through eCommerce Automation

The landing page of your company’s website makes a huge impression on customers. That is why a personalized website is essential to increase user interaction.

It makes a better impression and leads to sales. This allows you to use their data to personalize the landing page and the content.

With enough content, you can personalize the experience of even anonymous visitors.

For instance, let’s say you are an online retailer. A potential lead visits your website looking for shoes.

It would be better to give prominence to shoes on the landing page itself.

Personalized web pages allow you to cater to different leads. Also, it helps you build better relationships with them.

This allows your company to makes the best impression that it can on your customers.

Strategy #6: Track VIP Customers Via eCommerce Automation

In order to grow your business, you need to please your customers. The best way to do so is by having a loyalty program.

Instill a sense of loyalty in the customers for your brand. Soon, they will start selling your products for you.

People like to feel a part of something bigger. This leads to the feedback loop of increased engagement.

You can automate eCommerce marketing this way and create a positive feedback loop.

Invite your customers to a loyalty program to let them know that they’re a part of your family.

Loyal customers will stick it out with the company through thick and thin. They form the base group of customers that a business can bank upon.

eCommerce automation helps you target the most engaged customers. It works through a system that integrates with your website builder.

OmniKick is one such tool. It lets you identify and engage your most valuable customers. Have a lead-scoring workflow and send an invitation to join your loyalty program.

Set up user actions with your loyalty program. Award them when they engage with your website as such. Award users with discounts and free shipping.

Also, you can provide early access to exclusive products and services.

This will ensure that your customers keep coming back for more. It will also allow you, customers, to build better relationship with your business

Strategy #7: Utilizing Social Media and Chat Bots With eCommerce Automation

Social media is the greatest avenue by which eCommerce expands. This leads to higher awareness and improves customer relationships.

Also, understanding the needs of the customers helps to provide quick solutions.

The world of social media is so vast that there are ways to reach your target audience.

At the same time, you should manage content to avoid floundering.

Automation then becomes a crucial aspect of the game. This is because it is impossible to track every time someone mentions your brand.

It is only fair that customers would want to know more about your products and services.

They will ask questions and post queries about the same.

At such times, conversational bots come in handy. This ensures that you engage with customers and increase your brand presence.

ChatBots can reduce customer service costs. Such eCommerce marketing strategies aim to organize your entire marketing in one place.

By engaging with the customers, you maximize the potential value of the visitors.

Strategy #8: Use eCommerce Automation in The Checkout Proces and Increase Sales

The most important eCommerce marketing strategy is also the most neglected one. It is the optimization of the checkout process.

The previous steps are of no avail if customers abandon their carts.

Make the process smooth and trustworthy throughout. It is the easiest way to decrease cart abandonment.

Ensure that you have everything laid out on one page.

If there are many steps, have a progress bar at the bottom. The customers must be able to visualize the whole process.

Furthermore, ensure that the buttons are easy to find. Make them accessible and make the process simple. It will lead to less frustration and cart abandonment.

This last stage of the process should include all extra costs incurred. Customers don’t like it when shipping cost comes at the end of the payment process.

If possible, show the shipping cost at the beginning of the checkout page.

Also, provide them with an estimated date of delivery. Ensure that you have many payment options for the customers to choose from.

Strategy #9: Conduct Tests and Analyze Results Via eCommerce Automation

Automated eCommerce marketing can help you test the different variables. These include user experience, email marketing, and user preferences.

Such tests can help your business collect vast amounts of data from customers.

Automated eCommerce tools such as HumCommerce are a good example of that. These analyze trends and metrics that perform better than others.

The A/B testing done between different variants of a web page are ideal. Through analysis, you can help improve different aspects of marketing automation.

Also, heat maps and tracking forms can get data and give you an insight into how your web pages are being received. E-marketers can conduct such tests

Strategy #10: Provide Relevant Info to Sales Team Via eCommerce Automation

It is important to provide your sales team with relevant information. This enables them to have the best conversations that they can with the customers.

Track interaction between the company and the lead and give it to your sales team.

A CRM system allows your sales team to have a converse with sales-ready lead. Through it the conversation becomes personalized and engaging.

Additionally, track your leads on every channel. Be it on social media, search engines, or events. This can provide relevant information to the sales team.

Also, it helps to highlight the type of content your lead is interacting with.

This can further increase sales. Relevant content is the best way to ensure that your leads engage with your company.

Strategy #11: Integrate Your Business Via eCommerce Automation

The expansion of eCommerce has seen many complications arise. That is why more and more businesses are turning to market automation techniques.

eCommerce automation help businesses to cooperate and sync with other programs. This promotes a friendly software network and marks the task easy.

The integration of eCommerce marketing tools makes information exchange seamless. This creates organizational support and makes the work much more effective.

In essence, there are two kinds of integrations which are as follows:

Direct Integration – API integrations work to transfer data between two software applications.

You can turn on or off these direct connections with an administrative login.

Accessing without an administrative login will need help from the development team.

Third-party Integration – In this type, the data flows from a cloud application to a central hub.

Then, the data transfers from the central hub to another cloud application.

The disadvantage here is that it doesn’t sync in real-time and information can get delayed.

eCommerce automation allows marketers to co-exist with other programs through integration.

Wrapping Up:

With the right implementation, eCommerce automation can lead to more leads. It also helps to maintain customer satisfaction, and help grow your business far and wide.

Of course, it requires some experimentation and creativity. Such practices can help you to find the strategies that work best for your company.

If you have the right analytical tools, identifying the target audience is easy.

You can even pursue new leads and rekindle old leads to further your product. All these strategies can help you build your brand.

All this creates a following of loyal customers that buy your products and services.

Execute these strategies the right way and there’s no telling how high your business can grow.

An active platform has various benefits for the marketing team. These not only make their work easier, but it also allows you to win more deals in the future that can be banked upon.

The post 11 Proven eCommerce Automation Strategies to Get More Sales appeared first on OmniKick.