Archive for the ‘Business Success’ Category
Generate Brand Awareness With Content Marketing
By Rahimah Sultan
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You can generate brand awareness, persuade customers to take action, and drive revenue with an engaging content marketing strategy.
There are many types of platforms, channels, and media encompassed in content marketing. This is a review of what you need for content marketing success, moving forward, and some of the best content marketing tools.
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5 Blogging Trends You Should Not Ignore
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
Blogging has been around for a long time and while its basic foundation remains the same (write and publish), some changes do occur that may be passing trends or they may become permanent. You need to be on top of the latest blogging trends and keep up to date with content marketing strategies in order to remain competitive.
To keep you up to date on what’s going on now, this post will look into five of the trends you can expect moving forward. This will help you stay current with the latest practices and may inspire you to do something different on your blog.
1) Visuals
Visuals have always been a large part of blog content and are on the rise. And that’s a plus for your brand’s visibility and retention.
Although using visuals is good, you’ll need to use custom graphics as opposed to generic images. People tend to ignore stock photos these days.
With tailored graphics, you have the advantage of branding. When you use custom-made visuals, you can choose color palettes and fonts that resonate with your blog’s design and viewpoint. This makes your blog posts and pages look consistent and not patched together. You can also design visuals like charts, infographics, and graphs that directly reference the content they are part of.
If you’re not a designer, you can still take advantage of this blogging trend with tools like Canva, Visme, and Prezi. They’re perfect for beginners who are not knowledgeable about design. These tools come with pre-built templates, fonts, and color palettes that make designing custom graphics easier. They also have an option for creating/importing your own color palettes and fonts.
Since blogs are becoming longer and more detailed, design and interactivity become more important. Visual content offers readers a way to scan your content without reading the entire post.
2) Interactivity
Since people’s attention span has increasingly dropped over the years, interactivity has become a more important way to keep them engaged. You can embed interactive videos and also interactivity to those videos like hotspots and time triggers such as popups and CTAs to move viewers to certain areas of the video in order to reach a particular time stamp. You can use the Vimeo platform that can do this right out of the box.
By using a website such as Giphy, you can use animated images called GIFs to add some color and humor to your content in order to make it less boring. Once you’ve decided on a GIF, it can be inserted into your content by using either autoembeds or add it via an image block.
3) Originality
In an environment where websites tend to repackage the same information over and over, being original adds freshness to your blog, establishes your commitment to your readers, shows your thought leadership, and can immediately make you stand out.
There are several ways to make your content original. You can talk about a distinctive topic, provide a unique perspective, or conduct your own research. Conducting your own authentic research is the easiest way to level up your blog. However, not everyone has the bandwidth to do original research. So, you can reach out to others in your industry and conduct your own surveys using Google Forms and Typeform.
You can also tweet about your queries using the hashtag #JournoRequest on Twitter.
4) Content Experience
A shift from consuming content to experiencing it is a bigger blogger trend to focus on going forward. You can no longer simply deliver accurate information to your readers. You’ll have to consider other factors to make your content more appealing. You can do this by focusing on core web vitals and improving your overall content environment. Core web vitals are measurements of key aspects of page speed and user experience that also influence search ranking.
Some examples of a bad content ecosystem (environment) are:
Lots of popups or other interruptions and distractions like multi-step cookie notices
Autoplaying audio and videos
Web design problems such as low contrast among others
Bad website or information structure that leaves visitors not knowing what to do
Your goal is to make sure that each section of content is part of a bigger puzzle that makes sense.
5) Cross-Channel Promotion
One of the trends that will be dominant is cross-channel promotion, a marketing strategy that integrates all your marketing channels and unifies their plans, data, and goals across the board.
Just churning out blog posts is no longer enough to be successful on the internet. You now need to invest your efforts in other marketing channels like social media, SEO, and email marketing.
Unlike multi-channel marketing, which also uses several channels to attract customers with each channel working independently, this cross-channel promotion uses all channels to push out the same message at the same time.
The first thing you need to accomplish this is a Customer Data Platform (CDP). CDPs can help consolidate and organize consumer data from all your channels in one place. Three good sources are Bloomreach, Insider, and Segment.
Then you can use micro-segmentation to group your audience by different demographic details, characteristics, and buying behaviors so you can hyper-personalize your content and marketing channels to suit prospects where they are in their journey.
Some examples are starting an email with the reader’s name, writing content to target readers’ needs, adjusting mailing frequency to suit their needs, and otherwise catering to whatever else your audience is looking for. This is a great way to stand out while blogging.
Even though blogging is a well-established medium, there are trends that come and go. Staying on top of these developments allows you to decide which ones you want to use and when. Most of these 5 blogging trends you should not ignore heavily focus on user experience. The best trend to follow is figuring out how to better serve your readers with the content you write and how you present it. In doing so, you’ll end up with a better blog than when you started.
11 Steps to Start Your Own Business (Part 2)
by Rahimah Sultan
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In the last article 11 Steps to Start Your Own Business Part 1, we covered the first five steps of starting your own business. We’ll now cover the remaining six steps.
Now that the business is set up, what’s next?
6. Get Your Finances in Order
Open a business bank account and keep your business and personal finances separate. Your business account can be used for business transactions such as invoicing customers or paying suppliers. Usually, a bank will insist you have a separate business bank account in case you want a business loan or line of credit. You’ll have to provide your business name and business tax identification number (EIN) when opening a business bank account.
You’ll need to hire a bookkeeper or get accounting software. There are some software programs that double as bookkeeping tools and often include features such as check writing and managing receivables and payables. The software can also be used to generate invoices, track your income and expenses, run reports and calculate taxes. These services can be accessed online from any computer or mobile device.
You must get an idea of your startup costs before funding your business. To do this list all physical supplies you need, estimate the cost of any professional services you’ll need, add the cost of any licenses or permits required to operate, and calculate office space cost or other real estate. If applicable, add payroll and benefits costs.
Since businesses can take years to make a profit, it’s better to overestimate startup costs and have too much cash on hand rather than too little. Some experts recommend having enough cash to cover six months of operating expenses. You should also know your break-even point; the point at which your business makes money.
7. Fund Your Business
There are many ways to fund your business. Some require more effort than others. There are two categories of funding: internal and external.
Internal funding includes credit cards, personal savings, and family and friends. This option has the inherent risks of lost wealth due to not paying debts or hard feelings because of strained relationships if the company goes under.
External funding includes:
Small business loans and grants
Angel investors
Venture capital
Crowdfunding
Whatever the source plan for profit. It’s much better to take home all your money rather than lose part of it.
To choose the right funding source consider the amount of money you need, the time frame for repayment, and risk tolerance.
8. Apply for Business Insurance
Even if you don’t have employees or you have a home-based business, you need to have insurance. The type depends on your business model and your risks. You might need more than one kind of policy and, as your business grows, you might need additional coverage. In most states, if you have employees, workers’ compensation insurance is required by law.
The basic types of business insurance coverage are:
Liability insurance which protects your business against third-party claims of bodily injury, property damage, and personal injury such as defamation or false advertising.
Property insurance for covering the physical assets of your business, including your office space, equipment, and inventory.
Business interruption insurance to pay for the loss of income if your business is forced to close temporarily due to a covered event such as a natural disaster.
Product liability insurance for protection against claims that your products caused bodily injury or property damage.
Employee practices liability insurance that covers claims from employees alleging discrimination, sexual harassment, or other wrongful termination.
Workers’ compensation insurance for medical expenses and income replacement for employees who are injured on the job.
9. Have the Right Business Tools
The right business tools can help make your life easier and your business run a lot smoother. They can also help save time, automate tasks, and aid you in making better decisions.
Following are some tools to consider:
Accounting software
Customer relationship management software (CRM)
Project management software
Credit card processor
Point of sale (POS)
Virtual private network (VPN)
Merchant services
Email Hosting
10. Market Your Business
Don’t spend so much time creating the products that you have no marketing budget by launch time.
A web presence is essential even if you’re a brick-and-mortar business. Here are tips for establishing a web presence. You can have a standard informational site or an e-commerce site where you sell products online.
After getting a website or e-commerce site you need to optimize it for search engines so that when a potential customer searches for specific keywords for your products, search engines can direct them to your site.
As SEO is a long-term strategy, don’t expect a lot of traffic from search engines initially—even when you’re using all the correct keywords.
Provide quality, relevant digital content on your site. Content marketing should be one of the most critical tasks on your daily to-do list and should be used in conjunction with social media.
Get listed in online directories like Yelp, Google My Business, and Facebook to find local businesses. Include your business in as many relevant directories as possible and create listings for your business in specific directories that focus on your subject matter.
Develop a social media strategy and use social media to drive traffic back to your website where customers can learn more about what you do and buy your products or services.
You don’t have to use all the social media platforms. But you should have a presence on Facebook and Instagram as they offer e-commerce features that allow you to sell directly from your social media accounts. Both platforms have free ad training to help you market your business.
11. Scale Your Business
In order to scale your business, you’ll need to grow your customer base and revenue. You can do this by increasing your marketing efforts, collaborating with other creators, improving your product or service, or adding new products or services that complement what you already offer.
Consider ways you can automate or outsource particular tasks so that you can focus on scaling your business. For example, if social media marketing is occupying too much of your time, you can use a platform such as Hootsuite to help you manage your accounts more efficiently. You can also completely outsource the time-consumer.
You can use technology to automate certain business processes including accounting, lead generation, and email marketing. By doing this you will have more time to focus on other parts of your business.
It’s important to watch your finances and make sure you’re still profitable when scaling your business. Make sure you have enough money to cover your costs. You may need to either reduce your expenses or find ways to increase your revenue.
As your business grows, you will eventually need a team of people who can help you run the day-to-day operations. This might include hiring additional staff, contractors, or freelancers.
Now, with these 11 steps to start your own business, you can get started today.
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11 Steps to Start Your Own Business (Part 1)
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
Where do you start?
Starting a business can be very exciting and rewarding. But where do you start? There are many ways to approach creating a business as well as many important considerations.
What is often touted as overnight success requires years of dreaming, building, and positioning before a big public launch. So, remember to focus on your business journey and not measure your success against anyone else’s.
Before beginning these 11 steps to start your own business you need to get in the right mindset. You should know that it takes consistency, creating habits and follow-up routines, and writing out every possible step it takes to achieve your goal. Then order those steps by what needs to be done first. Some steps may take a few minutes to accomplish while others will take a long time. The point is to always take the next step and keep moving forward.
1. Determine Your Business Concept
How do you determine your business concept?
Before deciding what type of business to start, there are several things to consider:
What kind of financing do you have?
How much time do you have to devote to your business?
Do you prefer to work from home, at a workshop, or from an office?
What passions or interests do you have?
Can you sell information (a course) rather than a product?
What expertise or skills do you have?
How fast do you need to scale your business?
What kind of support do you have to start your business?
Will you be partnering with someone else?
Does the franchise model make more sense to you?
If you’re not sure of what kind of business to start, consider one of the following:
Start a blog
Start an online store
Start a franchise
Start a cleaning business
Start a bookkeeping business
Start a drop shipping business
Start a clothing business
Start a landscaping business
Start a consulting business
Start a vending machine business
Start a photography business
2. Research Your Market and Your Competitors
As an entrepreneur, you should spend more time on getting to know the competition rather than on products. If you ever apply for outside funding, your potential lender or partner will want to know what makes you (or your business idea) different from the rest.
If market analysis shows that your product or service is saturated in your area, see if you can come up with something different. For example – housekeeping. Rather than general cleaning services, you can specialize in homes with pets or focus on garage cleanups.
Primary research is the first stage of any competition study. This means getting data directly from potential customers and not basing your conclusions on past data. For this, you can use surveys, questionnaires, and interviews to learn what consumers want and would actually buy.
Secondary research uses existing sources of information, such as census data, to gather information. The current data may be studied, compiled, and analyzed in various ways that are appropriate for your needs but it probably won’t be as detailed as your primary research.
Thirdly, you can do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis which will allow you to get the facts about how your product or idea might perform if taken to market. It can also help you make decisions about the objective of your idea. Your business idea might have some weaknesses that you hadn’t considered or there may be opportunities to improve on a competitor’s product.
3. Create A Business Plan
A business plan is a document that serves as a roadmap for establishing your new business. It outlines your company’s objectives and how you plan to meet them.
Even if you intend to self-finance, a business plan can help you bring to life your idea and spot potential problems. When you write your well-rounded business plan, include the following sections:
Executive summary
Company description
Market analysis
Organization and structure
Mission and goals
Products and/or services
Background summary
Marketing plan
Financial plan
Come up with an exit strategy. The most common ones include:
Selling the business to another party
Passing the business down to family members
Liquidating the business assets
Closing the doors and walking away
The best option for you will depend on your goals and circumstances.
It’s important to have a scalable business model that can be replicated easily to serve more customers without acquiring a significant increase in expenses.
Some standard scalable business models are:
Subscription-based businesses
Businesses that sell digital products
Franchise businesses
Network marketing businesses
One of the most important things to do when starting a small business is to plan for taxes which can be very complex. There are several different types of taxes you may be liable for, including income tax, self-employment tax, sales tax, and property tax. Depending on the type of business you’re operating, you may also be required to pay other taxes, such as payroll tax or unemployment tax.
4. Choose Your Business Structure
When structuring your business, it’s essential to consider how each structure impacts the amount of taxes you owe, daily operations, and whether your personal assets are at risk.
The most common business structures in the US are LLC, LLP, Sole proprietorship, and corporation.
Follow this link for more information.
5. Register Your Business and get Licenses
After choosing a business structure, you have several legal issues to address. Following is a good checklist of items to consider when establishing your business:
Choose a business name
Register your business and get an EIN
Get appropriate licenses and permits
You’ll officially create your business entity by filing forms with your state’s business agency. As part of this process, you’ll need to choose a registered agent to accept legal documents on behalf of your business. You’ll also pay a filing fee. The state will send you a certificate that you can use to apply for licenses, a tax identification number (TIN), and business bank accounts.
All businesses, other than sole proprietorships with no employees, must have a federal employer identification number. You can submit your application to the IRS and you’ll usually receive your number in minutes.
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MLM Marketing Online
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
To build a business in this day and age, you need to use some form of MLM online for the duplication process.
The old form of MLM required people to attend meetings, and conferences, and to do in-person recruiting to build their teams and grow their businesses.
Now, everyone wants to be able to be on their phone or laptop and successfully recruit new distributors and build a money-making side business. Here are two strategies for doing MLM marketing online.
Strategy #1 – Social Media
Social media has taken over, and there are people who have never known a world where social media didn’t exist.
Every day people spend hours online. It’s how many socialize, get entertainment, news, and communicate and participate with others.
So anyone in MLM should be using social media to market their business. It’s not hard to do and is a simple way to meet people and prospect them for your business.
There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. Most people fail because they forget to act like humans and just start spamming their business and product links on their personal profiles, on pages, in groups, and in private messages on messenger to perfect strangers.
This does not work.
When it comes to links for your MLM business or product, do NOT:
Post them on your personal page
Post them in groups
Post them on pages or as a reply to other peoples’ comments and
NEVER send a link to anyone in a message without first having their permission
For success in MLM, you only have to meet as many people as you can, get them to know, like, and trust you, and then ask them if they’re open to looking at your opportunity.
If you do this on a daily basis, you’ll be successful.
Let’s use Facebook as an example.
You should be adding friends daily, about 5 at a time and up to 20 a day. Don’t overdo it, as you will be shut down by FB.
You can join pages and groups that interest you, and start talking with these people and adding them as friends.
Facebook has a feature where they suggest friends to you. These are friends of friends you already have.
Add those people and send them a message that states something like:
Facebook suggested we become friends. I sent a friend request. I see we both know so and so. How are you?
Get to know your new friends by commenting on their posts, messaging them, and having normal conversations.
You’re growing your network, so take your time and don’t rush. When the time is right in the relationship, you can ask them if they’re receptive to looking at your business.
With some friends, it could take 2 to 4 days, while others may take a month or longer.
It doesn’t matter, because you’re consistently adding people as friends and engaging with them.
Strategy #2 – Create Influence
Influence is a strong and powerful thing. Just about all of the top earners have it in some form. Unlike offline influence, which is hard and takes a long time, online influence is quite simple and straightforward.
You can do it by creating your personal Facebook profile (or any social media profile) and by using what is called Attraction Marketing.
You start by focusing on whom you want to recruit, and by picking a target audience. These are people who you do or can relate to; realtors, hikers, bikers, people interested in good health, etc.
Now that you’ve chosen your target market you need to set up your profile in a way that they’ll find attractive. You need a nice personal picture and a compelling cover photo. Your about me section should sound appealing.
Don’t mention or refer to your business or product in any way, shape, or form.
Now, start posting things that your target market will find interesting, informative, educational, and entertaining.
Let people get to know, like, and trust you by posting things about yourself and your life. Show them posts of you out and about enjoying life and having a good time with friends, family, etc.
Then you can post about your business or product but do it sparingly.
Only post about your MLM business or product about 10% of the time. When you do post about the business, just give hints. Don’t give everything away.
Instead, make people curious by giving them a little bit of information about what you’re doing but not everything, like a movie preview.
Don’t say the name of your business or product. Don’t post a link, and don’t make spammy posts like: “I’m looking for 4 people to help me make $1200 in the next month.”
Attraction Marketing uses marketing techniques such as blogging, Facebook advertising, video marketing, and email marketing to set you up as an authority in your chosen niche.
When you use these marketing methods, people get to know, like, and trust you as an expert in your niche. They’ll look up to you and will want to work with you and buy from you.
Using these 2 strategies for MLM marketing online should enable you to easily transfer skills from the old form of MLM business building to today’s online method.
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Marketing Trends and Strategies for 2023
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
New approaches are necessary as the success of marketing strategies becomes more dependent on real-time data and evolving technology.
As third-party research and data are becoming less relevant, getting to know your audience doesn’t look the same as before. New analytics tools are providing up-to-the-second details on which campaigns work and which ones should be done away with.
To make an emotional connection, you need marketing strategies that integrate branding and storytelling, not just promos and PR. Brand stories and values inspire audiences and also give them reasons, besides a rock-bottom price, to make purchases.
Storytelling, using someone who is well-liked and trusted, humanizes a brand and builds customer relationships. Satisfied clients and influencers can be effective sources of content for videos, blog posts, and general campaigns.
What are some top marketing trends?
1. Video marketers will use short content.
Getting to the point with short-form videos can actually be very effective. They not only take less bandwidth but this type of format aligns well with the short attention span of online audiences in a variety of demographics.
2. Social media will become a customer service tool.
This is relativity new and it’s no coincidence that this trend is emerging when many social media platforms are expanding their e-commerce capabilities thus making providing customer service on these platforms even more crucial.
3. More businesses will leverage SEO
We marketers must make sure our websites and content are as discoverable as possible, especially on Google, which can provide both long-term and short-term traffic returns. While SEO is not new, its strategies are becoming more and more ingrained within today’s marketing strategies.
As interest and need for SEO strategies grow, so do search optimization opportunities. With the evolving of Google algorithms, SEO has become about more than churning out basic posts that answer simple search inquiries.
4. Mobile optimization will be even more important.
As people are spending more and more time on mobile devices, especially millennials and Gen Z who continue to grow buying power, mobile-optimized digital experiences will be even more crucial to consider as a business owner who markets to these fast-paced, highly connected generations.
Mobile experiences aren’t just important on brand websites, they’re also important in other key marketing strategies such as delivering mobile email experiences to subscribers.
5. Inbound marketing will remain a best practice.
As outbound marketing tactics have become less effective in reaching prospects and leads, inbound marketing has become a valuable asset to create brand awareness and build trust, digitally, through refocusing strategy to drive customers to seek out your content.
Inbound marketing requires you to produce good quality, valuable content tailored toward your target audience and buyer personas and their needs.
6. More brands will test out native ads.
Native ads work. When you pay to feature your content on a third-party website, you’re investing in native advertising which is designed to blend in and promote your brand to a new audience that, otherwise, might not learn about you.
Native ads don’t feel like traditional ads so consumers are more likely to view them, especially over banner ads.
You can find examples of native ads on social media, content recommendation platforms (those links to various other content you can click at the bottom of the page to read more on or related to the topic), through search engine results, or in campaigns.
What are some strategies?
1. Cohesive customer experiences.
Although customers don’t interact with brands through a single method or channel, they expect a personalized, tailored experience that speaks directly to their needs.
Marketers need to understand specific interactions in the customer’s entire journey and focus on a complete experience, not a point-in-time campaign.
To better understand your user experience, you can create a customer journey map (you can do a Google search for “customer journey map”) which is a visual representation of how a customer acts, thinks, and feels through the buying process. It can be a valuable tool for creating a cohesive experience.
2. Improved user experience across devices.
User experience or UX refers to how a person feels when interacting with a system. A good UX design will provide a positive experience that fulfills users’ needs and keeps them loyal to your product or brand.
Your website and/or app is probably your most valuable marketing asset, and a great UX can make all the difference when convincing consumers to become customers.
When you design your site, keep the layout simple and include easy-to-use navigation. Don’t overwhelm users with too much information on the main landing pages.
Also, optimize your website for mobile, especially since more than half of users worldwide use their phones to browse the web.
3. Voice search tactics for SEO.
Marketers are beginning to leverage voice search as a search engine optimization (SEO) tool. These digital assistants are designed to answer short, informational queries such as “Who painted the Sistine Chapel and “What’s the weather in San Francisco?” but they’ve also started to process more customized searches, like “What coffee shops are open near me?” and, “Do they serve lattes?”
Businesses’ responses are how they frame information. To answer readers’ questions based on intent, creators are opting for more conversational question-and-answer formats so that when consumers use voice search, they’ll get high-quality, accurate responses more quickly.
4. Conversational marketing.
Conversational marketing uses targeted messaging and AI automation to engage with people when they’re on your website instead of directing people to lead capture forms and waiting for a response.
This digital marketing trend employs intelligent chatbots with machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), which allows customers to have a two-way conversation with a brand. Shifting from an asynchronous way of marketing to real-time conversations presents a major learning curve as conversational marketing grows in 2023.
5. Interactive content.
If you’ve used the internet within the past decade, you’ve likely come across interactive content without even realizing it.
Today’s audiences want content that demands attention. Marketers are developing dynamic, two-way experiences that encourage active engagement from their target audiences with content such as:
Quizzes
Interactive infographics
Calculators
Games
Assessments
Contests
Interactive videos
Interactive maps
Interactive content is a great trend to try if your content marketing goals include:
Enhanced audience engagement
Improved customer learning
More leads and conversions
Increased brand loyalty
Streamlining the customer experience
By keeping up with current marketing trends and strategies and shifting to real-time marketing and campaigns, you can design strategies that create profitable relationships instead of short-term results.
Marketing strategies are road maps that include tactics for converting audience interest into sales. But, plans are only as good as the data that updates them. Shifting to real-time market and campaign insights leads to messages that persuade and connect with the people behind the numbers. Brands that don’t lose sight of why audiences convert, can design strategies that create profitable relationships instead of short-term results.
With these marketing trends and strategies for 2023 tips, you have an overview of what the future holds.
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Backlinks and How To Build Them
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
Although you are probably familiar with SEO and marketing, you may be confused about some other features of online marketing. One of the aspects that can be confusing is backlinks.
In this article, I’ll provide information on backlinks and backlink building for your website.
What are backlinks?
The links from other domains to your domain or webpage are backlinks. They can improve the traffic that comes to your site and they help boost your website’s ranking in search engines like Google and Bing.
Backlinks, which are one of the most popular ways to increase your site’s search engine ranking, can be the deciding factor used to establish how popular your website is among readers.
When another site links to your website, some of its value is passed on to your website. If you have a lot of high-quality backlinks pointing to your site, yours will rank higher in the search engines.
Backlinks help with:
Ranking – Generally speaking, the more quality backlinks your web pages get, the better chance your web pages have of ranking for relevant search engine searches.
Referral Traffic – If a website has links from reputable websites, visitors who click on these links might be interested in your content as well.
Increased Visibility – Since search engines revisit popular pages more frequently than unpopular ones, backlinks from the popular pages may help them discover your site and material more quickly.
How important are backlinks in SEO?
There are so many different types of backlinks and ways to get them and not all of them are good for SEO. Some types of backlinks can actually hurt your rankings.
Backlinks let Google know that your website is worth ranking higher than others that don’t have any.
Google wants to show the best results first, the ones that are most relevant and useful to users, so it uses things like PageRank, keyword usage, and backlink data to establish which websites should be ranked higher than others.
You need high-quality backlinks pointing toward your site from trusted sources if you want your site to rank higher than others with fewer or less valuable backlinks.
Valuable backlinks:
Should come from a trusted and authoritative website
Should include keywords in the link’s anchor text
Should come from sites relevant to your niche
Should be do-follow links
To determine a domain’s trustworthiness, be sure:
It’s registered with a trusted domain registrar
It has a good number of backlinks from high-quality websites
It has been around for a long time and has a lot of content on it
It’s hosted on a reliable web host
What is the difference between a link and a backlink?
Internal links are links between web pages on the same domain to help users navigate the site while external links or outbound links go from one domain to a different domain that establishes a relationship between the two domains.
In other words, an internal link within the same site is considered the link while the links from the other webpage of a different domain may be called the backlink. Search engines understand the relevancy and reward the target URL by driving the traffic or pushing it in the SERPs for the keyword used in anchor text.
Backlinks pointing to your website indicate that your content is valuable. Backlinks are one of the most essential search engine ranking factors. They play a vital role in every website’s success (or failure).
Now, we’ve covered the basics of backlinks. Keyword research, on-page optimization, and backlink building are the three important elements of SEO. Obtaining backlinks is possibly the most important of these.
Links are beneficial in more ways than one, as they help build awareness and increase traffic. Link building should be a key component of everyone’s SEO plan. Now that we’ve covered the basics of backlinks and how to build them, you should be able to use this information for improving your site performance.
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Back to Basics in Marketing
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
In order to succeed, the market must know you. A strategic marketing effort is an indispensable part of your business. If people don’t know you exist, there will be no one to buy your product or services.
What is marketing?
Typically, marketing is the activity and practices carried out to publicize and deliver offerings of value to prospects and customers. It’s the effort to promote and sell products and services. Marketing has evolved over time from traditional methods to digital marketing.
It’s the effort to promote and sell products/services. Marketing has evolved through time, from the more traditional methods to the recent digital marketing industry.
Both traditional and digital marketing are similar in that they aim to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with prospects and customers. However, digital marketing methods have become more prevalent due to the shift in people’s purchasing behavior to online.
There is a set of proven marketing tactics that you can use in any combination that suits you while getting back to basics in marketing. They are:
Product
Price
Promotion
Place
Process
People
Physical evidence
What do I need to do to ensure marketing success?
1. Define your marketing strategy
To be successful, you must have a well-defined marketing strategy. You need to:
Know your business and marketing goals
Know what you’re promoting and selling
Research and know your market
Profile your customer and competitors
List and develop strategies to supplement your goals
2. Use SEO
To rank high in Google’s SERPS, you must have correctly done search engine optimization (SEO). If done right, various SEO strategies can help drive more traffic to your website by ranking you high.
Use relevant keywords and phrases in your content, but not so many as to be penalized by Google for “stuffing.”
There are many keyword tools you can use to help capitalize on preferred keywords and phrases.
Use quality link-building. Including hyperlinks from other websites is an effective SEO tactic.
Linking to authoritative websites can help boost your ranking, as these are link-worthy sites that increase your website’s authority level.
Only link to sites that are relevant to yours, so Google will not demote your ranking. You can check out the popular link-building tools that can help bring in quality link-building opportunities.
3. Use a Trusted Web Host
Google likes fast websites. The web host and the hosting company you choose can greatly influence search ranking.
4. Use Quality and Updated Content
Your content is the currency that forms the base of all your marketing strategies. Good quality and relevant content are what Google uses for ranking.
Your website must make sense and be beneficial so your audience will return for more.
5. Use Video Marketing
Because people are visual, videos have become the driving force for most digital marketing ventures.
Video is a powerful storytelling medium that connects with your audience emotionally through sound, motion, and attractive visuals. It also offers a better online user experience to your audience.
Videos also break up chunks of text, improving readability. ‘How to’ and technical videos are more effective than technical manuals. Live videos promote more interaction with people allowing them to feel like being part of the conversation by commenting during live sessions.
Use unique crafting content for your videos to make you stand out. Video marketing can be a powerful and effective way to engage and entertain your audience while conveying your core message.
6. Leverage Social Media
Social media is the preferred choice for most marketers. The number of social media users is daily increasing. Use your social media marketing effort on platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and others. Each channel has its own strengths. Use these strengths to increase your organic reach and increase awareness and get a higher conversion rate.
Be sure to incorporate social media plug-ins in your content so your audience won’t hesitate to share your content via social media. This will increase your outreach.
7. Use Simple and Short Forms
Gaining access to relevant data is crucial for a successful marketing strategy, however, collecting data from your audience is a delicate matter, because the way you do so can either encourage the user to voluntarily opt in or leave.
Your audience’s privacy is of utmost importance. Your web forms should be simple and contain a minimal number of fields. Focus only on what you need.
Your forms need to be simple, direct, and easy to understand to help your audience to decide to opt in to share their information with you.
8. Use Email Marketing
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to reach out and promote your business. However, you must have a list and use well-crafted emails that target your preferred audience.
9. Use Automation
Embrace automation to help with everyday repetitive tasks. Identify these and get the tools you believe will free up your time for others things that require specific attention and detail. Your productivity will increase as you spend your time efficiently.
10. Use AIDA
To capture users’ attention, use AIDA which is short for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This is an age-old formula proven to work on almost every marketing channel. The purpose is to capture the user’s attention (Attention), create a sense of need in the user (Interest), tug their heartstrings (Desire), and finally provide solutions that push the user to buy (Action). All your marketing strategies must revolve around this formula.
Although we’ve learned from the past that the basic and proven marketing tactics are here to stay, they aren’t etched in stone. You must always do the things that are necessary to tweak your strategy for maximum benefits. The above are some of the popularly used smart hacks that you can use to build your marketing foundation while focusing on your unique selling points to stand out among the many and get back to basics in marketing.
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Successful Email Marketing: A Start for Beginners
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
Our introduction to email, before the World Wide Web as we know it today, was AOL and its message – “You’ve got mail.”
Since then social media replaced it with tweets, likes, and status updates.
Here are some steps that need to be taken in order to be invited into people’s mailboxes.
You can read the article here
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Some Things You Need To Know Before You Start Blogging
by Rahimah Sultan
Advertising Disclosure: Marketing Success Review may be compensated in exchange for featured placement of certain sponsored products and services, or your clicking on links posted on this website. There is no expense to you.
Blogging is NOT dead, although it has changed from what it used to be and is still changing. Some previously used blogging tactics no longer work. In order to remain relevant, bloggers must also continue to evolve.
Today there are over 600 million blogs on the internet. (source: blogging.org). To be successful now and in the future, the best thing you can do is position yourself as an authority figure in your niche.
Note: For more interesting blog data see.
Here are five blogging tactics – in no particular order – that no longer work:
1. Clickbait headlines
Clickbait headlines are the outrageous ones to get your attention and have no user-satisfactory content. They are misleading, sensational, or spammy. This also applies to YouTube videos. It makes your channel less and less effective for driving traffic.
You should focus on writing headlines that are based on the real value that you are delivering in your content.
2. Blogging about everything
If you blog about everything, you’ll confuse people. They won’t know what your area of expertise is. Stick to one or two topics.
People don’t want generic information but specific information from people they can trust and believe in and with whom they can actually have a personal connection.
3. Blogging about your personal life
People used to blog about their children, what they ate that day, or just share bizarre personal details that people connected with. That is simply entertainment content that belongs on social media (in particular Instagram) where that kind of content is more accessible and easier to consume.
Although you can still blog about your personal life, you’ll need a fantastic Instagram and/or YouTube channel to go with it.
When people want entertainment they look to social media. However, when they want answers to their problems, they choose Google, namely websites.
But, there are always exceptions. Just remember to entertain on social and use your website for education.
4. Posting all the time
Now that content is more prolific on the internet, the tactic of posting more content to try to get more traffic is also outdated. Your focus should be on the quality of content, not quantity. Create content that stands out.
Generally, it’s better to create one (1) high-quality blog post per month than publish 5-6 average or mediocre posts that are short-lived.
To help establish yourself as an authority figure, use longer, more detailed posts.
If you really know your material, you’ll be able to talk about it for a long time (or hundreds of pages…).
The exception to this rule is if you’re a brand-new blogger, starting a blog from scratch, you’re probably better off publishing more posts because publishing more content can help you get some initial traction on social platforms like Pinterest and YouTube. Writing different kinds of content more frequently can help you learn more about what your audience is most interested in.
5. Blogging with no supplemental video or audio content
If you wish it to survive in the future, your blog needs to evolve into a multi-media site.
The more options people have to consume your content, the better. Using the following mediums will help:
Your blog
YouTube
Pinterest
Google
Email List
Your blog is now a multi-media website. It’s no longer just a blog.
For long-term blogging success, you need to dedicate your time and energy to becoming an expert in your niche.
What are some other things you should know before you start blogging?
1. Building habits is essential especially when your time is limited. You need consistent blocks of time you can spend on your blog. That may be:
a) Early morning – get everything ready the night before
b) During lunch break at your day job – get away from your desk and grab a bite to eat while working on your blog
c) In the evenings – you can just outline your post if you find it hard to focus after a long day
d) On the weekends – block out half a day on Saturday or Sunday
Finding a time that you can consistently use for blogging, week after week, will make it easier to form the habit.
2. WordPress
WordPress is usually the best option. Within WordPress are two more options so be careful. Also, there are plugins for anything you want to do in WordPress. Read
3. It’s easier to write quality blog posts by using a great template.
4. End all blog posts with a call to action.
5. The most important part of your blog is the headline. Read.
6. Keyword research is vital for SEO which brings in traffic.
7. You should build an email list as soon as possible (from day one).
8. When used correctly, social media is an effective traffic source.
9. Making money from a new blog will take UP to 12 months minimum.
10. Digital courses and eBooks are a great way to monetize your blog.
11. Use affiliate marketing to grow your blog income.
12. Link building from other websites is crucial.
This is by no means a complete list. More things can be added but this will get you off to a great start.
What are the best blogging platforms?
When choosing a blogging platform you must take into consideration what is best for your needs.
If you’re just starting, use a platform that’s easy to set up and use. If you have no coding experience choose a platform that needs no code. Developing a blog isn’t simple and you don’t want to add new skills to your to-do list.
You’ll need to think about the layout and features you want and the blog tools you may need as your blog grows.
Some things to think about are:
Monetizing your blog with a newsletter now or in the future
A multi-media experience with lots of images and videos
Using it to build SEO for your small business site
Using it to build your reputation as a thought leader
Skills you need to learn to build your blog
Can a blogging platform help with these skills
When you have a clear plan for your blog, you’re ready to choose a platform.
Many who choose a platform start with cost. Some of the best blog software is free. Check each provider’s plan and how many tiers there are. Then check their primary and unique features. Pay special attention to the out-of-the-box features compared to add-ons.
Here’s a list:
WordPress: Best for customization
Wix: Best for drag and drop
Weebly: Best for e-commerce blogging
Drupal: Best for developers
Squarespace: Best all-in-one platform
CMS Hub: Best for marketers
Medium: Best for its built-in audience
Blogging is not dead. But you have to keep your strategies alive to be successful on the internet. These are just some things you need to know before you start blogging that will be helpful.
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