10 Best Online Advertising Strategies for Marketers

About 10 million people visit the Great Wall of China every year.

Don’t you desire a traffic figure for your website that sounds as appealing as this?

No worries, we got this! All you need to do is tweak your marketing algorithm and follow the right strategy.

It can be overwhelming to choose from the myriad of schemes available, especially for beginners.

Moreover small businesses and startups need to be practical about advertising campaigns and spend wisely. What they need is a cost effective and functional campaigning strategy at the same time.

Let’s have a look at 10 most effective online advertising strategies that gave the most successful marketers a head start.

1. Target your audience

This strategy is the foundation to fabricate an effective brand image. If you do not target a specific audience for your product, you are utilizing resources in vain.

Many businesses miss on this important aspect of campaigning.

Based on your existing customer profile you can target audience with similar psychographics and convert more leads to prospects and then to customers.

Be it online or offline, make sure the presentation and visuals of your brand intrigue your customers.

2. Personal Branding

As digital marketers, do we even have to think twice before saying Neil Patel and how he channelized his popularity to build a multi-million dollar empire?

That is how amazingly this technique works. Branding yourself helps you leverage your personality to gain trust and credibility.

The way you present yourself determines if or not people will want to buy from you. As it’s easy to predict your viewpoints once they see you and listen to you.

Boring as it might seem in fiction, predictability is all what people want in real life.

3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The technical structure of your site determines the search position ranking of your website.

This structure is fabricated by SEO to bring your website under the lens of the search engine.

It is a form of paid online advertising which is achieved through optimization of the content on the website. It helps generate more targeted traffic.

4. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads

Pay per click ads is the inorganic mode, used to drive traffic to a website. As an advertiser you pay the publisher when the ad is clicked by a user.  PPC basically means the amount spent to get a click on the ad.

The advertiser bids on the keywords specific to the target audience.  Bidding implies the amount he is willing to pay the advertising service for a click.

5. Native Ads

These kind of paid ads are embedded onto the website in a way that they blend in with its visuals and functioning. Hence, the name native ads.

If you sponsor your content on a website, you must keep up with the consistency of the native user experience.

According to figures reported by sharethrough, consumers looked at native ads 2% more than editorial content and spent the same number of seconds viewing.

They provide a decent experience as they do not interrupt website usability. Strategists may find it more appealing than video ads.

Furthermore, native ads can bag you more prospects owing to the use of click bait headlines.

6. Social Media Marketing

Social media is the heart of the marketing system. You have the scope of pumping your content through various channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram depending on the brand personality and the target audience.

This method might not get you quick results but has the maximum potential for a long sustaining brand image. Not to mention, your content is your trump card here. It is important that you give your audience a delightful experience.

This method helps gain visibility and drives brand equity. Given the reach of social media, you can build inbound traffic using your syndicates.

7. Email Marketing

For this one to work, you need a strong follower’s base.

Mind you! Email marketing can be tedious but has potential for ROI.

Keep content easy on the eyes and brand at the top of the mind.

Poor content quality will not leave you without your targets marking you as spam.

Target your purchase lead list or those in the current customer database.

Email marketing increases trustworthiness and enhances the chance of repeat business. It psychologically moulds the customer to believe that you value the relationship with them causing them to stay loyal and be your verbal advocates.

8. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a kind of outsourcing program which emerged as a result of market complexity.

This is a performance based strategy whose success lies in the efforts of the affiliate. The affiliate gets the website visitors and buyers in return for a reward.

The merchant, network, publisher and the customer make up the core of the affiliate system.

9. Big Data

You may run as many ads online but if they are not seen by the right people, it is not a bang for the buck.

You might have come across ads for products you just viewed on an e-commerce website popping up on a different website you visit. Ever wondered why?

This is the result of up-front research of marketers and their inorganic marketing strategy put together.

They make sure their ads are viewed by the target audience with the aid of big data.

Big data is only a high-standard way of addressing a database containing relevant information, gathered from various sources in abundance.

Advertisers use the big data information to run online advertisements on screens of the audience of their interest.

For example,

They will use marketing data from different sources to determine the youth visiting a particular website are also interested in music instruments. They will run music instruments on sale ads micro-targeting that group.

10. Text Link Ads

This is basically hyperlinked text on a website or a blog. It works well in monetizing a website. When visitors click the link, you as an advertiser have to pay the publisher of the blog or website.

The pay is in accordance with the pay-per –click method.

The popularity of the blogger or the website on which you link these ads plays a crucial role.

In addition, these ads improve the search engine ranking of your content.

Conclusion

Each of the above strategy mutually compliments the benefits of the other. For optimizing your marketing process it would be best to glean them all tactfully.

Do share your experiences if you found the information helpful. If you feel we have missed out on some important strategies, please feel free to share in the comments.

90 Link Building Strategies to Use in 2018 [Infographic]

Higher search engine rankings are based on the authority of webpages. As you probably know, quality links can increase your site’s authority as well as improves its SEO value. Link building helps you to increase the flow of high-quality links pointing to your website. It‘s a proven marketing strategy by many businesses for improving their brand awareness.

Contact Jointviews

Google considers quality links to your site while ranking. Links indicate that whether your page is useful as a result. Search engines only want to show useful results to its users. So, all your SEO efforts for higher rankings are imperfect without link building strategies.

Do you want increase your domain authority through link building? Here is an infographic illustrating 90 linking building strategies that you can include in your SEO strategy in 2018.

90 Link Building Strategies to Use in 2018 infographic

10 Competent Strategies for Enterprise SEO Success

Enterprise SEO, in particular, focuses on implementing the best SEO strategies on every page of your website. This is not easy since you have several stakeholders as well as the constraints of budget, time, technology etc. to deal with. If you wish to be successful at enterprise SEO, you need to be prepared to handle internal hierarchies, inter-departmental chaos and the tendency of professionals to disagree with what they have not done before.

Here are 10 Enterprise SEO strategies compiled by experts from major SEO companies that are recommended for success:

  1. Educate

The tech people, marketing and sales people, the management and the product people may not understand SEO well. Take every opportunity to educate them about the practice. Conduct in-house workshops, include topics in internal newsletters and share links that can be used for the further study on enterprise SEO. Also, share case studies of how SEO efforts have helped other companies gain leads and earn more revenue.

  1. Influence

Read about the SEO practices of other companies and keep case studies ready with you. Discuss these whenever you get an opportunity with the right examples and right output at the right time. You could attend internal meetings of departments you think should contribute to your approach and let them know how SEO can benefit in accomplishing their goals. Also, have informal conversations with key stakeholders during lunch or tea breaks.

  1. Be data-relevant

Spend time collecting data and analysis that is relevant to your domain. Prepare dashboards that you can instantly access when questions arise. Be alert so that you are on top of everything whenever an SEO issue emerges in your organization.

  1. Focus on the KPIs

While having case studies and data is important, you must establish clear ways of evaluation to understand how success will be measured. These KPIs are not just for your own benefit but also include the targets that need to be achieved by other stakeholders. Discuss the KPIs with your senior management and get into an agreement on how these will be achieved in the future.

  1. Develop relationships

This is one of the most important strategies. SEO professionals tend to be too technical and do not generally interact or be social with other colleagues. The fact is that in order to get more approvals on your ideas and proposals, you need to be liked. Make sure you leave your monitor every now and then and talk to people about how SEO can change the dynamics of the organization’s business objectives.

  1. Have technical knowledge

SEO people often need to communicate with developers and if you want to become the indispensable SEO expert in your company, you need to be technical yourself. Only when you understand the challenges of your developer will they empathize with the changes you want them to implement. They will be more open to your recommendations if you are able to speak to them in the technical language they understand.

  1. Communicate

It’s obvious that only the SEO people recognize the need of this marketing strategy. However, if you go on selling your ideas telling people how it can be beneficial for the enterprise, you would get ignored. You must be equally willing to listen to the individuals of the other departments, understand their goals and thereby suggest the actions that need to be taken. You must craft your recommendations in a manner that they are a win-win for both you and others.

  1. Dynamic content

A website can have several pages. The content you develop for these pages must be such that it is leveraged to your benefit. Every domain understands that they need to have relevant, in-depth content about their service. However, you also receive a lot of region-specific searches. This means that you must have unique content for different geographic locations so that there are appropriate answers for every searcher.

  1. Content Consolidation

It is generally observed that large-scale websites are split into sub-domains or completely separate websites. However, if enterprises want to maintain their market position, they must adopt content consolidation as an effective strategy. Different pages and domains can be used to support each other giving a more consolidated image of the enterprise.

  1. SEO Site Health Monitoring

Minor alterations and technical glitches on the website could drastically reduce the traffic you would have otherwise received on your website. Therefore, it is important to constantly monitor and evaluate the health of your website from an SEO perspective and any issues identified must be addressed immediately.

When you utilize the above-mentioned enterprise SEO strategies, chances that you succeed at your efforts and drive more organic traffic to your website are higher.

10 Successful Affiliate Marketing Strategies for Social Media

Affiliate marketing is one of the first methods marketers and bloggers use to make money online. It is, in fact, one of the oldest ways of making money online. Affiliate marketing is a multi-billion dollar industry and is rapidly growing.

Affiliate marketing is a process wherein you promote another company’s products or services and when sales increase, you earn a commission. Depending on the efficiency of your marketing skills, you can achieve great sales targets and ultimately make more money. Revenue is generated in affiliate marketing only after a specific action is performed. This action needs to be completed by a sale and only then will you get your payment.

Here are the top 10 social media affiliate marketing strategies that will help you gain success:

  1. Create Affiliate Redirect Links

A raw affiliate URL does not look friendly and therefore, people are afraid to click on it. They are unsure of where it will deter them. A re-direct, on the other hand, looks much cleaner and attracts more clicks. It is ideal to use in affiliate marketing, email marketing or on any other social media platform.

  1. Create Excellent Content

Creating excellent content that is better than other affiliate marketers and proving to be the best in the value chain is a challenge these days. Affiliate marketers have the ability to create content of high standards while others don’t have the ability to compete them. This helps them in winning their customers and increasing sales towards their product.

  1. Know Your Audience

Affiliate marketers are always smarter and know what their audience wants. The most successful way to use affiliate programs is to try and promote the products and services that match the needs of your audience. In short, try and educate your audience about the relevant products and the services that they are interested in and give them the right content for their product. This will help in generating more sales.

  1. Keep Your Relationships Clear

Feel free to disclose your affiliations with your clients. They will appreciate this quality and work with you for longer, increasing your earnings. If they are not satisfied, they may just bypass you and go directly to the vendor.

Honesty is very important to build a healthy relationship with your client. Transparency between both of you also helps you in offering some kind of bonus or incentive from time to time to your reader. Trust building can definitely be a powerful tactic that can increase the number of affiliate sales you generate.

  1. Write Timeless Content

Try and write content that can be updated from time to time simply by adding links to your recent articles. Even if your article gets shifted from the front page, your readers should be impressed going through it. Most platforms allow you to show ‘most recent’ or ‘most popular’ on every page, so even if your article is not new, it will always show access to your new pages. Old content shared by you can still give you good revenue.

  1. Be Patient

Affiliate marketing strategies need time to build and revenue from these also builds with time.  Some of these affiliate programs give lifetime revenues. It forms a chain. So, if you refer a visitor, you continue to make money from that visitor even if he doesn’t come back to your site.

If your focus is on promoting a particular type of product, you can keep getting your commission every month on the same product, thus increasing your revenue. Affiliate programs are not a get rich fast plan but can give you an opportunity to make slow and steady income from your blog.

  1. Select Affiliate Products Carefully

Try and go through all the different options for products or services available through different marketing programs. Study them well and figure out which ones are best for the end users.  Next, try and put attractive logos or change the ad patterns and use different graphics and texts to see which are the most expensive. Working on all this might take some time but you can figure out the best way.

Trying and changing ads regularly will definitely attract more viewers. You should strongly promote digital information products. These products are very active because customers can get instant access when they purchase them and these provide higher commission rates than buying physical products.

  1. Promote High-Quality Offers

Affiliate marketing tends to do exceptionally well on social media when you promote a high-quality offer. In such a situation, everyone wins. The customer wins since they obtain an awesome deal; the affiliate marketer wins since they earn a heavy commission on driving traffic to the website, earning sales and the product manufacturer wins by generating revenue for what they have created.

  1. Content Comes First

Content marketing strategy should be your first priority. Content is the base foundation for any product or service. It behaves like a life-saving drug for any product. There will be no traffic on your page if your content is not interesting or effective. If you compromise with your content and only think about making money online, you will lose viewers on your page.

Your strategy for the site should be to find products that add value to the site’s readers and also products that have the potential to increase the site’s revenue.

  1. Use email auto-responders

Email auto-responders help to convert new subscribers into trusted readers. These readers will click on the links you recommend and get influenced by the products you propose. Set weekly responders to remind the customers and readers about your products every alternate day.

Affiliate Marketing helps to increase sales and when effectively combined with the right social media strategies, the results are highly commendable.

Top 12 E-commerce SEO Strategies to Grow Your Business

The E-commerce industry has significantly grown in the last one decade. In fact, both small and medium-sized businesses are looking for E-commerce SEO strategies that help them boost the brand and improve the bottom line.

According to Statista, e-commerce sales were estimated at USD 1.92 trillion in 2016 and are expected to reach a USD 2.35 trillion by the end of 2018.

But just having an E-commerce business and believing in these stats is not going to give you success. What else do you need? Read on to get insights into 12 E-commerce SEO strategies that you need to follow if you want guaranteed growth through E-commerce:

1. Simple Categories

A lot of E-commerce portals forget to label and categorize their products carefully. This confuses the consumer as he/she is not able to find the product they need. Remember to keep categories that are easy-to-understand with logical labels, and filters. Your conversion rates will automatically be promoted.

2. Unique Product Description

This is one of the SEO tricks that will help to break through the competition. It will improve your SEO rankings and drive more traffic to your website. Product descriptions must be unique, not more than 250 words with relevant keywords in the product title and synonyms in the description. Identify high-search traffic keywords in your category before you give your product a title.

3. Attractive Images

Since E-commerce stores take away the touch-and-feel aspect, images play a major role in influencing purchase decisions. You may have a high-quality product but if your image is blurred, consumers will not be attracted to it. Product photos can communicate what copy cannot. Good photos can improve SEO, market your brand and establish an image and also be shared on Social Media for increased sales.

4. Clear URLs

Website addresses should not be complicated. For instance, a www.mystore.com/girls-dresses is more convenient to navigate than www.mystore.com/shop/cat-1245. Have relevant keywords in the URL with every category separated by hyphens.

5. Social Media & Blogging

Sharing quality content on your social media platforms helps to keep the target audience engaged. Inform them about your activities – sales, offers, new product launches, season collections and other details via social media. Maintain two-way communication with your customers, even if it is in the form of a negative feedback.

6. Offer Incentives

This is one of the most important E-commerce SEO strategies. Your customers must feel incentivized from time to time. Such an approach not only increases conversions but also generates loyalty customers. Bonus items, discount codes, and free delivery options over a particular price increases order size.

7. Reminder Cart Emails

A lot of customers search for products, add them to the cart and then abandon the purchase. Sending reminder emails to inform them of their incomplete order is extremely helpful in getting the customer back on your website. Adding a creative copy or discount update in such emails comes in handy too.

8. Focused Re-marketing

This has emerged as one of the most popular strategies to give the customer a hammer effect. Remarketing through Facebook, or Google Search advertising helps to engage all those consumers who abandoned their shopping carts without completing the checkout process. However, do remember that time here is of immense importance. Customers have several E-commerce players to choose from and if you don’t act fast, they would make the purchase elsewhere.

9. Customer Reviews

A lot of customers like a product but are iffy to buy it. Majority of such users scroll down to find the reviews given by previous customers and you must by all means flash all the positive reviews that you have received. Positive customer reviews boost confidence and make a significant impact on your conversion rate. Moreover, reviews help to improve SEO rankings with your product title and some original content posted by other users.

10. Direct Call-to-Action

Calls-to-action actually drive the sales. This must be clear with a single message that does not confuse the consumer. A button that says a little more than ‘buy now’ adds a little bit of urgency to the product greatly convincing the customer to make the purchase.

11. Instant Checkout Process

Most customers hate signing up and leaving in their details leading to cart abandonment. Keep your checkout process optimized with simple instructions to ensure sales success. However, this does not mean that you sacrifice on the security. Assure your customers that their confidential information is safe and secure.

12. Suggested and Recommended Products

It is an art to increase the order size with relevant suggestions at the checkout page. Make sure what you offer as a recommendation is actually suitable and attractive, and does serve the purpose of upgrades.

That’s it! Practice these interesting E-commerce SEO strategies and watch how effectively and efficiently your sales will grow. See how more and more customers start to engage with your brand.

5 Strategies for Collaborative Content Marketing

Some companies have a single person handling their content marketing campaigns. If you are one of them, you’d know that there are certain advantages with respect to the management and control since there is only one voice masterminding everything. However, you would also know that you are not witnessing the benefits of collaboration.

Content collaboration is simple – several people working on the same piece of content. These people could be from within your organization,  or industry influencers. In certain cases, content may also be collaborated from competitors.

Now, why do you think collaborative content marketing is beneficial?

1. Resources – Through collaboration, resources can be shared for effective utilization of each other’s specialization. For instance, if you are good at curating images, you collaborate with a person skilled at research and create something that is relevant and interesting.

2. Point of views – When more people work on a particular subject, there are different perspectives and takeaways. This makes the final piece of content flawless.

3. Audience – If you collaborate with industry influencers, your reach in terms of the target audience instantly increases. This makes collaborative content marketing extremely powerful for attracting links and shares.

Collaboration helps you reach out to a larger target audience and improve the metrics of your content marketing campaigns. So, what are the strategies that you must use for collaborative content marketing?

1. Form a great team

In order to have a strong collaborative content process, your team must be qualified and well-organized. The functionality of the team must be clearly defined. Each person should be involved and supportive to enhance the ability of collaboration. The final outcome must have a pool of ideas behind it and not just influenced by the marketing team.

2. Share access and control

Give several people the access to write and edit a piece of content. This may sound unusual since the inputs of several people could just ruin the entire objective of the document. However, on the flip side, it could also help prepare a document that is complete with all the information and ideas required to make it interesting and relevant for the target audience.

3. Make use of technology

Collaborative content marketing involves several people contributing to a particular topic. Managing this inflow can be a little challenging. This means that you need to utilize appropriate tools to organize and streamline the collaborative process.

4. Quote and Mention

This one is extremely interesting and simple. When you write an article, include a quote written by someone else. The quote could be back linked and in case it is by someone popular in the industry, it could just add more insight and evidence, making the content strong. Please note that it is important to let the people you are quoting know about your actions.

5. Spread the information

The best research and content collaboration effort can only reap results when it is shared appropriately. Your marketing team must use the information in a manner that it generates profitable sales. Knowing what consumers would like to read is only answering half the question. The second half is to find the means to disseminate this information in a manner that it finally reaches the end consumer.

According to experts, headlines, subheadings, bullet points must all be effectively used to concisely present the information. It must be optimized, adding value to the time spent by the user reading it.

Conclusion

Collaborative content marketing is easy but an important strategy to remember is that you must create information that is relevant. It could come through inputs shared by experts in different skills. The second aspect is to utilize this meaningful information appropriately by sharing it through the right medium that reaches the end consumers.