What is Content Marketing? (A step by step guide)

‘Content is king’

This phrase emphasizes the importance of content marketing in the success of any business.
This guide is geared towards any individual or Business who is interested in leveraging content marketing for the growth of their Brand.

The guide will completely take you through the concept of content marketing

What is content Marketing?

First of, I'd like to define what content is.

What is Content?

according to Wikipedia,

content is the information and experiences that are directed toward an end-user or audience.

As usual, Wiki lets us down when it comes to providing a satisfactory definition of terms.
Anyways, Simply put...

Content is any purposeful information that is shared or presented in a particular format to an audience through a channel

Did you take note of the components of this definition?

• Audience
• Purpose
• Information
• Format
• Channel

These components will be useful in the journey to learning content marketing
Now, What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of marketing geared towards attracting a specific audience through the creation and distribution of valuable contents with the sole aim of building a loyal customer base and ultimately, driving sales

Take note of the intent of content marketing:

• Building a Loyal costumer base, and
• Driving Sales.

Of course we all know that the goal of every business is to drive sales and make profit. However, if we intend to use content to drive sales, we must first Build a loyal customer base by offering free valuable and relevant solution to the problems of our audience. This is what builds the trust.

My point is: in every content marketing campaign, valuable content comes first before pitching of sales.

Content marketers put first the interests of their targeted audience, win their trust before trying to sell them services or products.

This is why the main strategy in content marketing involves Creating Contents that revolve around solving the problem, thereby building trust and bridging the gap between customers and brands

Why Content marketing Is important

The gains of employing content marketing in your business strategy is countless. Here are a few:

Content Marketing Helps Build Brand Awareness and Reputation

Most people who don't know about your business become aware through the useful contents you create and share across all platforms.

Because building trust helps establish a positive reputation for brands, Businesses use content marketing to enhance their credibility by providing quality and relevant informational contents that are valuable to their targeted audience

This helps to create a positive opinion about your brand on the minds of your customers

It is Cost effective

Content marketing is quite affordable compared to traditional marketing. It generates 3X more leads according to Demand metric. This makes it an adaptable strategy for small businesses on a low budget because even a little financial input yields much bigger and satisfying results

It Enables brands showcase their expertise

Your expertise in your field is noticeable in the informational materials you pitch to your targeted audience. The value your content gives can give them the impression that you do what you do better than your competition. They easily separate you from competitors especially if you consistently answer their questions and provide solution to their problems

Generates Leads

Leads are what we need to sell our products. That is why most businesses do marketing. Thanks to content marketing, strangers can now know about your business through the useful and informative contents you create. If they find it appealing enough, they could make a purchase.

All you need do is streamline your content to their needs. The deeper they come to trust you, the sooner they'll make a purchase decision

Attract Ideal Buyers

As important as lead generation is, it comes to nothing if it attracts the wrong people. That is why an ideal content marketing strategy is streamlined to reach targeted audience, these are people who are interested in buying what you sell. Just give them good reasons to make that decision and watch your sales skyrocket

The Journey to Content Marketing, How to start

Now that you are aware of the advantages of content marketing. How do you get started?
Well, every successful marketing plan begins with two important steps according to content marketing institute. These steps serve as guides to what type of content you should be creating and what not to

1. Understand Your Goals

Before jumping into content creation, it would do you much good if you first ask yourself what you want to achieve with your content. How is it going to benefit your business?
A reasonable content marketing plan needs to do at least one of these

• Build Brand awareness
• Build your mailing list
• Convert your audience into paying costumers
• Retain current costumers or push them into making more purchases

2. Create a Mission Statement

I usually term this “Your why”.
A good mission statement is one that clearly answers questions such as:

• why does your business exist?
• What is your overall goal
• What measures are you taking to achieve that goal

Likewise, in the buildup to your content marketing strategy, the creation of your mission statement must include:

Who Your Target Customers Are (Audience) : This helps you narrow down the specific kind of person you are trying to reach with your content

What Value You Want To give (Information): What kind of knowledge do you intend passing out to your targeted audience through your content?

The Desired Outcome (Purpose): How would the information you give help your audience? what would they be able to do with the knowledge that comes from the consumption of your content. How do you want your audience to feel after consuming your content. What actions should they take that will first of all benefit them (call to action). Whats's in it for you?

Where the information will be accessible (Channel): Where are your target audience located? Which channels best serve your purpose helping you achieve your desired result? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, youtube, or LinkedIn?

What form the Information comes in (Format): How will your content be presented to them? What works best on your chosen channel? Would it be videos, podcasts, or written articles? Don't forget to decide the size, length and style, etc. for your content based on your chosen channel

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What is Passive income?

I am not just here to talk about making money online, I want to unveil the secrets to starting and growing an online business that generates passive income even while you sleep
Passive online income is far from impossible. I have seen people do it over and over again. And good thing is, inasmuch as the number of internet users increases, the opportunities to make online aren't going away anytime soon.
However, be mindful that it is never going to be an easy process. And moreover, there is no shortcut
I usually tell people that every shortcut to anything in life is eventually going to be short-lived. So if you are expecting a get rich quick scheme, sorry to disappoint you, This ain't for you.
In this guide, I'm going to take you through the best proven and productive strategies to start a scalable online business.
This route to online wealth requires an upfront investment and sacrifice.
Of what?
Time, a great deal of time
[caption id="attachment_26137" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Building a passive income driven business involves an upfront investment of time[/caption]
Can you make out that time?
If So, lets get on with it

What is Passive Income?

Passive income is defined in various ways. It could be in terms of real estate investments or the stock markets. But as it is, this blog is basically focused on internet business.
So, we'd define passive income as:

The creation of Online Businesses that grow, scale and generate income without necessarily requiring a real-time presence.

Online businesses start with the creation of products that solves problems and add value to their target audience, then reap the benefits later.
As online entrepreneurs, we don't TRADE time for money. we INVEST time upfront. Afterwards, it materializes into a money generating venture that grows while we get a breathing space to relax and do other things.
[caption id="attachment_26132" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] You can afford to relax and catch fun while your business scales and generates income without being actively involved[/caption]
What are these businesses that can be done online and make money?

Passive Income Business Ideas That Works

There are many ways to generate passive income online. However, the most productive ways to it is through information marketing.
People surf the internet everyday in search informations on a lot of things. If you have the information they are looking for, they are ready to pay for it.
Below are a few examples

Starting A Blog

A blog is one of the common ways in which people make money online. You must have heard of famous bloggers like Linder Ikeji , Seyi Makinde and a host of others who rake in millions daily from their blogs
But what is a blog?
According to First Site Guide, A blog (short for “weblog”) is an online journal or informational website. It is a platform where a writer or even a group of writers share their views on an individual subject.
Online Entrepreneurs use weblogs to connect with target audience by posting relevant and valuable information that solves problems
I will teach you different ways to utilize a blog in generating income. But first here is a comprehensive guide on how to start a blog from scratch

Become an affiliate marketer

Affiliate marketing is one of the oldest ways of making money online. It involves recommending a particular product to others and getting a commission after sales.
This form of marketing is the easiest and cheapest as you don't have to create or sell a product. All you have to do is link buyers to a seller and and get your commission when sales is made
With a properly scaled affiliate marketing business, you can earn thousands of dollars of passive income monthly. That however depends on how well you perform.
Affiliate marketing can be very competitive. To ensure your success, I will show you how to get started; What works and what doesn't; and how to best maximize your affiliate income.
Here is a list of must read articles for you:
What is Affiliate Marketing And How Does it Work?
How to Start Affiliate Marketing
Must Have Affiliate Marketing tools
Affiliate Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Write an E-Book

Publishing and selling E-books online is another great opportunity for you to earn passive income. No longer do you need publishing houses, editors and printing presses to get your books out there. You can do that right now on your computer.
You don't have to scour the internet to find out how to do this because I have prepared several articles for you to learn how to write, publish and make money off E-books.
If you are wondering what E-books are
Uhm.. E-books are books made in formats that makes it downloadable online. And you can join the league of Huge Howay and Amanda Hocking in making money online from self publishing e-books.
E-books can be sold on amazon and even on your own website and you could make huge amount of money from it.

Create an Audio Book

If you are an online entrepreneur and you aren't creating audio books yet, you are probably leaving a couple of dollars on the table and missing on some potential audience. Because out-rightly, i can tell you there are millions of audio book listeners worldwide.
According to George Smolinski of Gutenberg Reloaded, the audiobook market is growing at a rate of 30% per year which makes it quadruple the rate for ebooks.
A post on Kindlepreneur with Dave Chesson explains how to make and publish your own audio books

 

Start A Dropshipping website

A drop shipping website is an e-commerce website. But drop shippers don't own or stock their products. They simply take orders on their websites and use third-party sources that produces and ship the products to the buyers on their behalf
Drop shippers are more like affiliate marketers. The only difference is that they act like the products are theirs. Some even have have manufacturers brand the products in their name so you hardly know they aren't the producer.
Dropshipping is another smart making money online business. If you want to make money dropshipping products, here are guides to Help you

How Dropshipping Works

Finding and Working With Suppliers

The Supply Chain and Fulfillment Process

Picking Products to Dropship

Starting Your Business

Evaluating Sales Channels

Running a Dropshipping Company

The Key Elements for Success

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What is SEO?: The ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization shouldn't sound new to online marketers especially bloggers. Why? because we all know that majority of people who surf the internet start their online journey using search queries. Everyday, people make searches on Google and other search engines.

In fact, as at the time this article was written, over 2 billion searches have already been made on Google that day alone. Not considering a host of other search engines. This is why it is important to optimize your content or website for search if you want to become a successful blogger, digital marketer or whatever job description you adopt.


A smart blogger and marketer knows and treasures the presence of his/her website on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Because traffic generated from search engines alone can measure up to 60% of your blog's audience, expectations have it that you would do anything considered necessary and right to get your web pages on top of search results related to your keywords.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, an integral part of your marketing campaign that must be done if your site would compete with others on search engine's result pages.

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your contents so that it appears at the top of search results especially when users make search queries related to your keywords.

To give you a clearer picture, assuming you have an article about "How to make Jollof Rice". If you want search engines to display this article when people search the keyword "Jollof Rice", Search engine optimization  is the magic tool you need to achieve this most treasured feat in the world of digital marketing.

The thing about SEO is that: it is as much about the people you are writing for as it is about search engines.

What do I mean?

A successful SEO endeavor involves two parties.

First is your Audience,

• what are they searching for online?
• What answers are they seeking?
• Which words (keywords) are they’re using ?
• What type of content do they like to read?

Knowing these things will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer. That is about your audience

The second party involves Search engines themselves. After knowing how to craft contents that connect with your audience, you need to know how to deliver such contents in ways search engine crawlers or bots can find and understand.

In this guide, expect to learn how to do both.

Why SEO is important

Although, display ads, social media or other online platform generates a lot of traffic to websites, majority of online traffic are driven by search engines.

Moreover, aside from generating high traffic, those traffic are very specific, high intent traffic. I mean they are directed towards people who are already searching for what you offer which means a purchase decision or conversion is likely to be the end result.

Search engine optimization is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas display or social media advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Optimizing your website will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

How Search Engines Work

Though it is imperative you stick to the idea of curating contents streamlined to the needs of your audience, Knowing how search engines work will help you decide how best to optimize your contents, incorporating the important elements in ways that search engines require.


There are three basic stages in which search engines operate

1. Crawling:

This is a process by which search engines send out robots or spiders in order to discover what is being published on the world wide web. It is your choice however to decide whether you want these robots crawling your site or not. SEO allows you to instruct the robots on how they crawl your web pages.

When these robots crawl your web pages, they discover links through the help of tags like HREF. These inks are then added to the list of sites to be index

2.Indexing:

Indexing is the process by which the crawled data and pages are organized to be displayed with relevance to search queries.

Anytime a page is crawled, a copy is sent to data centers to be stored and organized. it is these stored, organized data that are displayed on search result's pages (SERP) when you make search queries

3. Ranking:

Ranking is a process by which search engines display results according to the order of relevance to search queries using what is called The Algorithm. The Algorithm is often a closely guarded secret of various search engines. But we do know that it is some kind of complex equations through which the value of any given site is calculated in relevance to a search term

Categories or Phases in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization can basically be broken down into two Basic phases, which when gotten right, will have a positive bearing on your search engine ranking.

They are:

• On-site or On-page SEO
• Off-site or Off-page SEO.

I would like to illustrate this phases using you as an individual.

Lets see:

To be considered lovable, you need to possess a great personality. From the the physical aspects of beauty to the non physical qualities like Humility, honesty, intelligence, self sacrifice and so on. The process of improving yourself (Your website pages and content) in order to attract people to you, can be likened to On-site SEO.

Now, Because of your endearing personality, a number of important people want to be associated with you. This increases your reputation and how people talk about you. In fact, they would easily recommend you to other people. This in SEO is referred to as off-page SEO. The external links and recommendation you get from other sites.

Unfortunately unlike on-page SEO,  you dont usually have complete control over Off-page SEO.
Now lets take them one after the other.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO refers to every steps you take to optimize individual pages of your website to enable them rank higher for relevant keywords  in search engines Although there is nothing like a perfectly optimized web page because ranking algorithms keep changing. Which is why you constantly have to keep improving the quality of your pages.

But there are undisputed aspects of your web pages you need to always pay attention to. They are:

Site Architecture

A good website architecture ensures a great user experience for anyone who visits your page. starting from a safe connection to fast loading times, and a mobile-friendly design. These are what keeps them on your site. And the longer they stay, the better it gets.

You also need to make sure your site is ready and easy to crawl for search engine bots.

Content

Every marketer would tell you 'Content is King' and they are about a 100% right. Even google rewards you for uniquely crafted contents that provides optimum value by indexing your pages on search engines.

So when SEOs tell you to focus on improving your contents in order to increase your ranking on SERPs, they are never wrong.

What makes up a good content?

Quality!

The effect of quality in your content should never be underestimated. In the course of search engine optimization, Writing relevant, in-depth  and easy to understand contents that answer the questions of your audience is a kick-starter.

Be mindful of the readability of your articles so as to reduce bounce rate. When searchers find it hard to understand your copy, they are prompted to leave your website almost immediately. This can hurt your SEO dreams

Keywords

Keywords constitutes a very high percentage of SEO efforts. They are one of the main elements of Search engine optimization. Keywords as the name implies, are words or phrases that sums up what the content of a web page is about. When used well, they attract relevant, organic search traffic.

If you are going to do well with keywords in search engine optimization, you need to understand both the search intent of your target audience and what they are typing on google while making search queries.

Afterwards, you need to understand how to strategically place your keywords on your page in order to attract search engines bots

HTML

Like Neil Patel said, running an online business without knowing the basics of HTML would be the same as driving without knowing what the colors of traffic lights mean.
Inasmuch as you don't have to be a professional coder to excel, you still need to understand the basics of HTML.

Fortunately, there are sites like W3Schools or Code Academy where you can learn everything you need to know for FREE

There are four HTML parts you must endeavor to optimize every time you create contents. These are

1. Title Tags: Title tags are the headlines of your content. They show up at the tabs of your browsers. A web page can have only one title tag. In HTML, title tags are often referred to as h1-tag meaning heading of the first order
2. Meta Descriptions: Meta descriptions are what shows up as excerpts when your page appears on google results or social network. If you optimize a meta description result, Google will never cut it off and end with “…” or make it seem like it ends mid-sentence. Optimized meta descriptions also often mention the content’s keyword up-front.
3. Schema: Schema is the result of a collaboration of several search engines. It’s basically just a subset of specific HTML tags that will improve the way the search engine result pages display your content.
4. Sub Heading: Sub headings are the h2, h3 h4, h5, h6 tags that help format and structure your content and give your readers easy reference points. they have less SEO power, but they still matter. Hence, you should use them.

Now, having seen how you can improve your site from the inside, Lets now see how you can optimize from the outside.

Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the techniques that help a website feature at the top of search results. Like I said, you have limited control over this phase of SEO.

This phase is centered around building a rich inbound link profile and attracting links from high-authority websites. The main intention of this practice is to show search engines that your website is reliable in your niche.

Gaining Search engines' Trust is a very important factor to your SEO game. But how do you build trust?. Here are a few ways:

Authority

Increase your domain and page authority by getting quality back links from authoritative sites. This can only be achieved if you create top-notch valuable contents. These contents might come in form of articles, videos or infographics.

Decrease Bounce Rate

Another way to build trust is by making people stay more on your site.  Bounce rate refers to the measure of how many visitors of your site left immediately after viewing just one page.

So many factors can determine if people will stay on your site and consume more contents.
How fast does your website loads?

How useful and relevant are your contents?

Are you attracting the right readers to your site? if not, they don't have any business staying long

Social Shares

Another way to boost trust is the amount of social shares your articles gather especially from top influencers. Everyone's dream is to see their contents go viral. To achieve this, make sure your contents are share-worthy

White hat vs Black hat SEO 

There are two strategies or techniques marketers often practice in Search engine optimization. These are

• White hat SEO: This refers to the techniques and strategies of improving a site's rank on site engines by abiding to site engine rule. People who practice white hat SEO are primarily focused on providing value to their audience.

• Black hat SEO: Black hat SEO refers to strategies and techniques that are practiced in a bid to fool or outsmart search engines. While Black Hat SEO works, it puts websites at risk of being penalized or de-indexed from search results. So they are often practiced by people after a get rich quick scheme.

However, if you want to build a sustainable business, white hat SEO is the way to go. Focus on your human audience, give them the best content possible and play according to search engine's rules

Search Engine Optimization Guidelines

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Basic principles:

• Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
• Don't deceive your users.
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.

Things to avoid:

• Automatically generated content
• Participating in link schemes
• Creating pages with little or no original content (i.e. copied from somewhere else)
• Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.
• Hidden text and links
• Doorway pages — pages created to rank well for specific searches to funnel traffic to your website.

It's good to be very familiar with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. Make time to get to know them.

See the full Google Webmaster Guidelines here 

Bing Webmaster Guidelines

Basic principles:

• Provide clear, deep, engaging, and easy-to-find content on your site.
• Keep page titles clear and relevant.
• Links are regarded as a signal of popularity and Bing rewards links that have grown organically.
• Social influence and social shares are positive signals and can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.
• Page speed is important, along with a positive, useful user experience.
• Use alt attributes to describe images, so that Bing can better understand the content.

Things to avoid:

• Thin content, pages showing mostly ads or affiliate links, or that otherwise redirect visitors away to other sites will not rank well.
• Abusive link tactics that aim to inflate the number and nature of inbound links such as buying links, participating in link schemes, can lead to de-indexing.
• Ensure clean, concise, keyword-inclusive URL structures are in place. Dynamic parameters can dirty up your URLs and cause duplicate content issues.
• Make your URLs descriptive, short, keyword rich when possible, and avoid non-letter characters.
• Burying links in Javascript/Flash/Silverlight; keep content out of these as well.
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Cloaking — the practice of showing search engine crawlers different content than visitors.

Guidelines for representing your local business on Google

If the business for which you perform SEO work operates locally, either out of a storefront or drives to customers’ locations to perform service, it qualifies for a Google My Business listing. For local businesses like these, Google has guidelines that govern what you should and shouldn’t do in creating and managing these listings.

Basic principles:

• Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
• Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.

Things to avoid

• Creation of Google My Business listings for entities that aren’t eligible
• Misrepresentation of any of your core business information, including “stuffing” your business name with geographic or service keywords, or creating listings for fake addresses
• Use of PO boxes or virtual offices instead of authentic street addresses
• Abuse of the review portion of the Google My Business listing, via fake positive reviews of your business or fake negative ones of your competitors
• Costly, novice mistakes stemming from failure to read the fine details of Google’s guidelines

Conclusion

At this point, i'm sure you have realized how important search engine optimization is for your online business. If done well, you stand to achieve real success in the digital world.

For questions and additions, please use the comment box below

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How to create a good social media marketing plan

Creating a social media marketing plan is more or less like climbing a mountain. You can see people who have successfully climbed to the top, which reassures you of the possibility of success. Yet, you still need to device a way to also navigate yourself all the way up.


Whenever you are faced with this, always remember that your plan and strategy has to align with your ultimate goal. What is it you want to achieve at the end of the day?


Review your goals and decide how each social media channel will best achieve them. And when you turn this evaluation into an actionable plan, you will be able to know where, when, and what you should post on each channel and ultimately, what your efforts are meant to achieve.
When devising your social media plan, here are steps to take to ensure success


Step1: Select Your Preferred Social Networks

First, I want you to understand that every social media network out there is different. Of course they are all social networks, but they have different and unique styles, audience and practices. 

This is more reason why you need to handle each networks accordingly. You don't need to be on them all, just pick the ones that best suit your strategy and is capable of helping you reach your ultimate marketing goals.

Consider these factors when selecting your preferred social networks:

Audience

The first thing you should find out is where you are most likely to find your targeted audience or customers. Your content and marketing efforts are nothing if they are not reaching the right people. 

Where are your potential customers hanging out?

Which social media network has the right demographics?

Nature and Content Preference

Another factor worth considering is the nature and content preference of each social network. For example, Twitter users are used to short-form contents or phrases, captioned images and short videos while the network itself doesn't even allow long form contents. LinkedIn and Medium on the other hand, is best served with long form contents but memes and captioned photos would be inappropriate.

Moreover, Your audience might prefer to connect with your brand in a twitter chat but reserve Snapchat for conversations with personal friends.

Understanding the nature and content preference of each social network and targeted users will help you pick which one best suits your marketing strategy

Time

Time is a factor that not only determines which social network to leverage, but also how many.

How much time can you devote to a social network? 

For a start, plan on at least one hour daily per social network. Also make sure you are consistent

Resources

Whatever social network you pick, you must be sure you have the resources needed to excel there. 

Do you have the required skills? 

How about Human resources, do you have the right personnel?

Social networks like Facebook and Medium for example emphasizes on quality content. While visual networks like Instagram and Pinterest requires videos and images. 

Do you have the resources required to create what’s needed?

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How to Start an Online Business - The Ultimate Guide

At this time and age, the internet has gone beyond those days when all we do is check emails.

Online technology is now at a stage where we now chat with family and friends through Instant messaging. And thanks to E-commerce, everyone can now shop online and get delivery of stuffs like foods, clothes and many other items you can think of from the comfort of their homes. You can even make video calls or watch your favorite TV programs or sport team play live.

As a matter of fact, Conducting Researches has never been easier, thanks to the availability of various resources on the internet.

Because the Internet has become pretty much part of our everyday lives, smart entrepreneurs are beginning to take their businesses online where it is easier to reach more customers. Developers, Content creators and businesses constantly work to make sure that online experiences evolve in such a way that we can easily shop, learn and connect.

The more time we spend online, the more increasingly available the digital opportunities become.

You no doubt want to leverage these digital opportunities available to build, grow and take your business to the next level.

The Big question is,

Where can you start from?

The main purpose of this blog is to teach you various and easy ways in which you can harness the digital opportunities available to build yourself an online business, become visible and measure your growth.

Your Online Goals

Knowing what you want to achieve online is pretty much a good route to starting an online business as it helps you set priorities and put your plans into place

There are many ways in which an online presence can help your business. These might include

• Building relationships on social networks
• Taking product orders online, 
• Finding new customers or even keeping existing ones

The best way to begin is to ask yourself the simple question:

Why exactly do i want to be online?

Let's assume you own a Barbing salon, your ultimate goals might be to cut more people's hair, sell more premium services or sell more of the products you offer. But before anyone can walk through your door, they need to know you even exist. These are reasons you might want to go digital

Whatever your digital goals are or where you currently stand, your priorities would change naturally and grow as your business grows.

To make sure you are progressing and meeting your objectives, it is very important you measure your progress along the way. The online world also provides you a way to measure these progress through what we call Analytics. With Analytics, you are able to discover which of your goals are working out and where you need to improve.

Building Your Online Presence

There are a couple of options available online for you to build a digital presence such as

• local listings, 
• social media,  
• website or even 
• mobile apps. 

Getting these right can make a huge difference to your entrepreneurial  journey

Online Directories

Today, it is quite easy for any individual or business to get themselves an online space. While a website might be the first thing you think of, you necessarily do not have to start from there.

Assuming you make cakes or run a bakery in a place like Ota, Ogun State. Your first step to finding customers online or being found online might be to get your shop or office listed on local online directories like Google My Business.

So when someone searches google for Bakeries in Ota, you'd appear in the results. Despite having no website, your business shows up in result pages.

Social Media Pages

You might also decide to open social media pages like Facebook page, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn to give your customers a glimpse of your business and what you can do. These might include photos of beautiful cakes you make or videos of happy customers leaving feedback after having been rendered a wonderful service by you.

However, Inasmuch as there are a lot you can achieve without a website, it might get to a point your business needs a home of its own on the web - a one-stop shop where customers can easily find everything they need to know about you online.

Website

As you plan your website, the most important thing is to think about what you want people to do there.

Would you want them to call you or message you on WhatsApp, Visit your office, Buy Products directly from your site or even schedule an appointment?

Include your phone number or WhatsApp link on every page. Don't forget to include a map and driving direction on the contact page of your website.

You could even enable e-commerce functions so they can place orders for products and make payments without leaving your site

Mobile Apps

Websites are not the only online home anymore, Many businesses create mobile apps which their customers can download on their smartphones and tablets. This helps you leverage the different digital doors apps open up.

With mobile apps, you can create loyalty programs or send reminders and new offers to your customers directly on their smartphones.

Depending on your goals, you can opt in one or all of these. The most important thing is staking your claim online and allowing people find your business

Becoming Visible Online

How do you get to let your customers find you online?

Having established an online home, there are different ways through which you can let your prospective customers find you.  Here are examples:

1. Search Engines
2. Displays ads
3. Social media
4. Email Marketing

1. Search Engines

When someone types something on google for example, they're letting it know what exactly they are looking for. Lets assume you offer a service or sell a product that is relevant is being searched, search engines will show your business in the search results.

There are two ways in which you can use search engines to become visible,

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): 

This helps you promote your products in search results for free. SEO is all about getting your site in front of the right people who are searching for your products and services.

There are lots of ways to do this, which will be explained in the guide to search engine optimization, But the key is knowing the exact phrases people actually type on search engines. These are regarded to as keywords. 

Keywords are the most relevant words to your business. Understanding this will help you improve the way you show up when these words are actually searched

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): 

This lets you buy ads space in search result pages. Businesses pay to advertise to people searching for specific keywords online.

Major search engines like google use auction systems where lots of businesses compete by bidding on the keywords they'll actually love to target.

2. Display Ads

Display ads appear everywhere online and often come in different formats like text, images, videos and ads you can click on and interact with.

According to Google, the Display Network reaches over 90% of global internet users expanding across 2 million sites!

They can be a great way to get your messages out and you are able to choose who you want to see your ads and on what web pages or websites you want to appear on

3. Social Media

These are especially useful for building a brand/customer relationship. On most networks, you get to create pages or profiles for your business. You can enhance your connection with loads of people by starting meaningful conversations and sharing contents you've created thereby growing your business' online social presence

Below are Topics for you to get started with social media marketing

What is social Media Marketing
1. How to create a good social media marketing plan
2.  The Guide to getting Social Media Engagement

4. Email Marketing

Outside the junk emails and inbox cluttering spam mails, email marketing can prove to be a game changer for your marketing endeavors.

Email marketing is best leveraged when you send relevant information and offers to people who already said they'd like to hear from you. This can be done by letting people sign up or opt-in to receive emails from you.

Under Email marketing, I'll Cover these Topics

1. What is Email Marketing
2. How Email Marketing Works
3. How to Start Email Marketing
4. Must Have Email Marketing tools

Conclusion

Everyday, thousands of business owners are making the web work for them. The opportunity to reach customers from around the corner and around the globe is too big to ignore. Its time to take the plunge,go digital and grow!

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