What is Content Marketing? This is a simple and clear intro on content marketing and how to make it work for your business. The best way to promote your product and make it known amongst the right target audience is enroute content marketing.  Creating relevant and useful content spun around with your product or service serving as the focus point will yield the desired results within a short span of time. What Would be the Desired Result? Of course, it is profitable customer action through undivided engagement. The information you provide must be comprehensive in supplying all the necessary details that will encourage the customer to make his buying decision without an iota of doubt in his mind. Your product/service should always aim at offering a holistic solution in the long run rather being a temporary relief measure. Read the following: A great resourceful article from Modelfa.com whose main purpose is to support financial advisors as they grow sustainable businesses, increase their visibility, and change their clients’ lives. Why Content Marketing? It is but mandatory to create a website that speaks for your product or service and helps the business to sell by itself. So, what are the elements that you should focus upon while creating this online tool that will attract thousands of audience? BLOG – Do have a blog for your website. Concentrate on quality as well as quantity. More the content, more the traffic. SEO- This is the most important entity when it comes to better search engine ranking. You have to showcase your presence in the market when the user types in the keyword while going for a product buy. Maintain a strict schedule for blogging – consistency is the key to survival. Encourage social sharing on your blog- original content always finds its way into the social media circle and once your content gets positive impressions, no looking back. Try to provide innovative information in your press release and don’t forget catchy headlines are good catches. Ok now… What NOT to Do? 👉Don’t be too salesy…you know what I mean… try to impress the audience with your informative and educational content and do not explicitly promote your brand. Lead the buyer through all the goodness your product/service has to offer and let the buying decision be the natural choice. 👉Tailor the content that will be an apt solution for the challenges and issues your target audience is facing rather than creating generalized information. I tell ya… it works like a charm. This can be done only after proper research on the interest and preferences of your target demographics. 👉Though SEO is an integral part of the search engine rankings… “Keywords can definitely not become kings.” If you go overboard with keywords and not focus on the content, people will find it artificial and the message will not cut across. 👉Don’t give monotonous content…develop a content marketing strategy with a right balance between text and visuals. Know what the audiences expect from you and give it consistently. 👉There should be a natural flow in your content and the tone should match the mood of the prospective...

How To Evaluate SEO Performance Most e-commerce managers are obsessed with rankings. They are always searching on Google for something to indicate that their rankings are getting better. When they notice changes in the search engine results, they assume that their search engine optimization (SEO) program’s performance is flawless. Unfortunately, this is not always true. Frank Abagnale, the Customer Success Manager of Semalt Digital Services, explains the real factors that influence your website’s ranking and performance. Competition: What else is ranking? Nowadays competition has outgrown the conventional organic search tactics used by competitors. Every e-commerce company owner wants the site to outrank their business rivals in order to improve visibility, get clicks and make a sale. However, most search queries set off elements in the search results that draw away attention from conventional organic results and push listings down the page. Personalization: Who is ranking? Today, rankings are highly customized to an extent that there are no longer impersonalized rankings for most searches. Basically, the rankings a consumer sees on his iPhone will be different from the rankings you see on your tablet or computer. As a result, no one can ever say with certainty “We rank first in Google!” Normally, rankings are customized based on: Location. This is the most common factor that influences personalization of rankings. When search engines determine the location of the user using a cell signal or device’s IP address, they deliver customized search results. Device usage. Rankings that appear on smartphones are not the same as those appearing on a desktop or tablet. Mobile devices usually get links into apps. As a result, sites with mobile-friendly experiences will rank higher. If a consumer is searching for something on the iPhone, the results will be very different from what appears on your desktop results. Search history. Every time you log into the search engine’s account, the search engine gets access to all your search history. A perfect example is when you log into your Gmail account on your computer, the search engine logs into your Google account and Google search. This information is used to customize the search results appearing on your device. Social behavior. Using platforms such as Twitter and Google+, Google gets full access to your social behavior. This explains why some content from brands or friends is displayed in your search results, but is not displayed when other people initiate search queries. Demographics. Search engines place every user into a demographic group using their past behavior to deliver highly targeted ads. Based on the factors stipulated above, you now understand how search engine results are customized. These factors give a preview of why ranking report tools are likely to return impersonalized data for a consumer even when your ranking tools indicate that you are ranking first for your most valuable keyword. A prospect may not see the same results from their end which means that they not likely to buy from you. This means that if a rank reporting tool cannot give accurate data to help your business generate income, then it is not a reliable tool to indicate performance. Representation: What keywords to choose? Tracking rankings means you choose a set of phrases and keywords that you would like to rank for and plot the performance of your site in ranking for those words. The phrases you choose have the potential to change the appearance of your performance. Most of the time, companies find it easy to use phrases and keywords they are already ranking for including their brand or words with low competition. This usually makes it appear as if their SEO performance is flawless even when it is not. On...

10 Best Ways to Grow Your Instagram Following 1.Inspirational Quotes: Quotes are evergreen and they have the capability to make a deep impact in the minds of individuals. It is one of the best ways to establish and improve your brand on Instagram. Try to post quotes that reflect the ideology of your product or service with suitable hashtags. Say, you are an entrepreneur and want to give your online course a boost, create quotes that might educate your audience who want to become hard core entrepreneurs and give the link for your online course or book in the BIO. 2. Quick Tips: People always love quick tips rather than a long story when it comes to a visual platform like Instagram. I’d definitely be impressed if a fellow IGmer offers a quick tip visually for my clear understanding. For example, the instagram post given below was widely appreciated because it gives a quick tip on how to manage pinning on Pinterest. When your post is ‘straight to the point’ and with less clutter, people start loving you more. 3. Showcase Your Products: Oh yeah, this is important. How then you expect your customers to get a feel of your product? The picture should speak for itself in that… it must be able to create leads bang on to your landing page. If you wish to take your customers to a different page, then you need to have multiple Instagram id’s. These can be represented by inserting @idname and the specific link can be given in the bio. 4. Follow me on Pinterest/Facebook: If your primary work platform is Facebook or Pinterest, then you can lead your customers to the respective pages by providing respective links in the bio. You have to understand that only one link can be provided in the bio section, so that link has to work in your favor. The info you provide must make believe your audience that they can benefit by following you – in terms of knowledge or info on WORKABLE business ideas. Lot of links talk about money making and please don’t fall for them. 5. Support Others and Tag Them: It is always good to give a little credit to your fellows rather than self bragging which we all do most of the time. When you start tagging the right persons, many good things happen. What is the meaning of shoutout in Instagram? An Instagram shoutout is a screenshot of another user’s profile page uploaded to your account to show support and give exposure to the other user. Shoutouts can increase a user’s followers and provide advertising to small businesses and websites. Try to network with instagrammers who compliment your ideas. People’s psychology is that.. ‘Give back what you get.’ So, they will try to reciprocate and support you by giving a shout out or a good comment. Eventually you’ll end up with a good network or team and plenty of business avenues. 6. Show Your Work Area: Hey, who is not interested to take a sneak peek into others’ secret of success! Transparency helps you to win over hearts and a classic example would be Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s work area capsule which can be seen by one and all. When you share pics of your work space, you tend to increase your credibility. People believe in you more when they see what you exactly do and how you interact with your colleagues in the work space. 7. Promote a Freebie: I love freebies that come unconditionally. Yeah, not the ones that come after lot of email id punching and submission of your life history! Try to give away a great resource, say...

Launching a blog might be easy but running it successfully is a tough call, and you might want some serious, genuine insights on the inside secrets. Hence this post on “The Best Blog Traffic Building Techniques” which will serve as a kick starter to find your easy way through. 1. Identify Your Target Reader Your task is to find your target reader and then identify the social networks that reader prefers. Content marketing success starts with knowing how to find your target audience. After all, how can you begin creating content before you know who your audience is? Good content marketing takes time. You can’t afford to waste that time with content that isn’t perfectly focused on your target market. You need to find who your people are. But how? It’s true that great content tends to naturally attract an audience. It does not, however, guarantee that it will be the best audience for your brand. That means visitors that are likely to: a. Connect your content to your product.b. Buy your product because of your content. Before you can create content that resonates, it helps to know your intended audience (as well as who they are not). An audience definition should ideally connect these three things: 1. Your product or service2. Your main audience demographic3. Your content’s mission 2. Determine The Traffic Potential Of Target Social Networks From my experience, the social media sites that send the most traffic to blogs in general are: 1. Facebook2. Twitter3. Quora4. Pinterest5. LinkedIn The results vary depending on your target reader. If your blog post is more oriented around professional readers and business, you might have more potential traffic from LinkedIn and Quora. If your target reader is more visual it might make more sense to focus exclusively on Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram. Once you start getting traffic from social networks, you’ll be able to evaluate the traffic to determine if your target reader is visiting your blog. In your analytics, watch bounce rates on your posts. Segment out traffic from social media networks. You’ll be able to determine if traffic from certain networks provide better traffic than others. 3. Ways Of Driving Country-Specific Traffic Top level domain extensions like .com and .org usually rank higher on global search engines, but in order to have your blog or website target a specific country, buying a country-specific domain is always a good idea. You may notice that most Aussie bloggers are using the .au domain extension, and they rank pretty high in Australian Google. Similarly for India, you can target .in or. co.in as your domain extensions with good results in India. For traffic from the U.K. (United Kingdom), grab a. co.uk domain extension for the best results. 4. Google Webmaster Tool Geo-Targeting Google Webmaster Tool, a free tool from Google for bloggers and webmasters, will be very helpful to a blogger or webmaster seeking country-specific traffic. This tool allows you to set which country your website is targeted to, which helps you get traffic from that targeted country. Log in and verify your website in the Google Webmaster Tool, and under Configurations > Settings you can specify which country you wish to target. 5. Curate Top Posts in a SlideShare Video LinkedIn uses a short Slideshare video of daily headlines to give users an idea of what’s going on in the media and preview what they’ll find on LinkedIn’s Daily Digest channel. The videos are only a minute long, but they’re able to give viewers the headlines and the most important points. They’re perfect for people who don’t have time to read the full blog posts. To emulate this tactic in...

The Eight Pointer Guide to Choose Affiliate Programs Before joining an affiliate program, do a little research about the choices of program that you intend to join into. Get some answers because they will be the deciding point of what you will be achieving later on. How to Write Killer Content for the Web Will it cost you anything to join? Most affiliate programs being offered today are absolutely free of charge. So why settle for those that charge you some dollars before joining.   1. When do they issue the commission checks? Every program is different. Some issue their checks once a month, every quarter, etc. Select the one that is suited to your payment time choice. Many affiliate programs are setting a minimum earned commission amount that an affiliate must meet or exceed in order for their checks to be issued. Make Money With These 15 Smartphone Apps That Pay You For Using Them 2. What is the hit per sale ratio? This is the average number of hits to a banner or text link it takes to generate a sale based on all affiliate statistics. This factor is extremely important because this will tell you how much traffic you must generate before you can earn a commission from the sale. 3. How are referrals from an affiliate’s site tracked and for how long do they remain in the system? You need to be confident on the program enough to track those people you refer from your site. This is the only way that you can credit for a sale. The period of time that those people stay in the system is also important. This is because some visitors do not buy initially but may want to return later to make the purchase. Know if you will still get credit for the sale if it is done some months from a certain day. HOW TO MAKE FULL TIME INCOME FROM AFFILIATE MARKETING 4. What are the kinds of affiliate stats available? Your choice of affiliate program should be capable of offering detailed stats. They should be available online anytime you decide to check them out. Constantly checking your individual stats is important to know how many impressions, hits and sales are already generated from your site. Impressions are the number of times the banner or text link was viewed by a visitor of your site. A hit is the one clicking on the banner or text links. 5. Does the affiliate program also pay for the hits and impressions besides the commissions on sales? It is important that impressions and hits are also paid, as this will add to the earnings you get from the sales commission. This is especially important if the program you are in offers low sales to be able to hit ratio. 6. Who is the online retailer? Find out whom you are doing business with to know if it is really a solid company. Know the products they are selling and the average amount they are achieving. The more you know about the retailer offering you the affiliate program, the easier it will be for you to know if that program is really for you and your site. How To Work From Home Selling On Amazon FBA 7. Is the affiliate a one tier or two tier program? A single tier program pays you only for the business you yourself have generated. A two tier program pays you for the business, plus it also pays you a commission on the on the sales generated by any affiliate you sponsor in your program. Some two-tier programs are even paying small fees on each...