Entrepreneur's Guide

To Digital Marketing

A Business Series By

FourWeekMBA
Other Books By FourWeekMBA

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The Entrepreneur’s Guide To Digital Marketing

A Business Book Series by FourWeekMBA

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CHAPTER ONE 6
Personal Goals and Business Goals 7
Why You Have Not Succeeded At Goal-Setting 10

CHAPTER TWO 18
Keeping track of your goals 18
Common Goal-Setting Problems and Their Solutions 20
Best Practices for Goal-Setting 23
The Objectives and Key Results Methodology (OKR) 24
Why OKRs Are Important 25

CHAPTER THREE 27
Key points for goal-setting 27

CHAPTER FOUR 31
Organizational alignment 31
Important Tips on Organizational Alignment 31
Failures in Employee Alignment 34
Achieving Your Personal Goals as an Entrepreneur 36

CHAPTER FIVE 39
Understanding the Basics of E-Commerce 39
Advantages of E-Commerce Businesses over Physical Stores 40
Models of E-Commerce Businesses 41

CHAPTER SIX 42
Selecting a Niche 42
Choosing and Sourcing for profitable Products to Sell Online 43
Searching for a Manufacturer 49
Things you need to know to effectively sell online 50
Scaling 54
Automation 55
Customer Service 55
Things You Can Do To Improve Customer Service 55
Analyzing Competition in your Preferred Niche 56
Steps Involved In Competitive Analysis 56

CHAPTER SEVEN 59
Understanding the Concept of Dropshipping 59
Benefits of Dropshipping 60
Important Factors for Dropshipping 61
How To Effectively Handle Third-party Suppliers and Quality Control 62

CHAPTER EIGHT 64
Digital Marketing as a Tool for Business Growth 64
Challenges of digital marketing 67

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CHAPTER NINE 69
Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 69
How to effectively utilize search engine optimization for the growth of your online business 70
Keyword Research 70
Optimizing your website architecture 74
On-Page Search Engine Optimization 76
Essential Pages To Have On Your Website 78

CHAPTER TEN 79
Becoming Profitable as an E-Commerce CEO 79
What Email Marketing Really Entails 82
Email Marketing Strategies 93
Email Marketing Service Providers 98
Email Marketing Analytics 111
Influencer Marketing At a Glance 115
Influencer Marketing Strategies 131
How Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your SEO 138
Influencer Marketing Analytics 142

CHAPTER ELEVEN 148

Podcasting as a Digital Marketing Medium 151
Benefits of Podcasting 151
Creating Your First Podcast 153
Your Podcast Launch 161
Your Subsequent Podcasts 163
Inviting Guests to Your Podcast 164
Picking the Best Possible Host 167
The Perfect Edit 168
Podcasts and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 169
Optimizing Your Podcast for Google 173
Other Ways to Monetize Your Podcast 176
Affiliate Marketing 177
Advertisements 178
Sponsorship 179

CHAPTER TWELVE 182

What Is Copywriting? 182
What Makes A Good Copy? 184
How To Appeal To An Audience 188
Write For Your Customers 191
Understand Your Product 191
Social media interactions 192
Customer Surveys 196
Customer Interviews 197
Employee Interviews 198

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 Analyze Analytics 198
Monitor Your Competition 200
Structure Of Your Copy 203
The Headline 203
The Lead 207
Unique Value Proposition 210
Benefits 211
Strategies Of Copywriting 214
Testing 218

TOOLS
Digital Marketing Tools 220
SEMrush 222
Keyword Research 222
On-Page SEO 224
Local SEO 225
SEO Competitive Analysis 226
Rank Tracking 227
Other Features 228
HubSpot 230
Attract Attention 231
Converting More Leads 232
Report & Customize 234
MOZ 236
Keyword Research 236
Rank Tracking 238
Site Crawl and Audit 239
On-page Optimization 240
Link Building 241
Ahrefs 243
Site Explorer 244
Keyword Explorer 245
Site Audit 246
Rank Tracker 247
Content Explorer 248
Alexa 250
Content Research 251
Competitive Website Analysis 252
Target Audience Analysis 253
Keyword Research 254
SEO Analysis 255

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 CHAPTER ONE

GOAL SETTING AT A GLANCE

Goal Setting involves envisaging an outcome, and working with set plans to
ensure that the envisaged plans are accomplished. Goal setting is very
important for every individual and business, because without set goals in
place, you will seem directionless. In a game of soccer, there is a goalpost,
getting the ball into this goalpost is the target of each team. Without these
goalposts, then the twenty-two football players on the pitch will just keep
running around, without a target, aimlessly like a headless chicken. Your goals
as a person or a business are the things you want to accomplish, and your
objectives involve the process of achieving this, how soon you want to
accomplish it, and the methods you will employ in achieving it. In a game of
soccer, the manager may come up with different tactics, to ensure that they
put the ball beyond the reach of the opponent’s goalkeeper into the goal. The
manager may tell them to play it short, or long, play crosses, and everything
that can give them an advantage to get the ball into the goal within the
period of ninety minutes. If a soccer team decides to play it short, it is
therefore clear that the goal of this soccer team is to put the ball in between
the goalpost, and the objectives of this team is to play it short in other to beat
their opposition, and get the ball in the goalpost within ninety minutes.

From this, we can say Goals are the set targets of an individual or a corporate
body, while objectives on the other hand are the approaches and processes
involves in reaching a target. As you can already imagine, there is no objective
without a goal, and no goal can work out successfully without an objective.
Hence, the importance of Having goals and objectives.

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From the example above and the definitions, If I have a poultry farm, I could
say my goals are to ensure that I produce 50,000 eggs. My objectives will
make it clear to me that I need to ensure that I breed more of layer fowls than
broilers while increasing their egg-producing stimulants to ensure that I hit
the 50,000 egg mark in three months”. Like I said in the previous paragraph,
setting a goal is important, but having matching objectives are also equally
important.

Personal Goals and Business Goals

As a business owner, you may have your personal goals, which involves
self-development of yourself, to discover your strengths and weaknesses, in
order to know what attributes to build on. As an entrepreneur in any field, you
don’t necessarily need to be the most skilled person to excel and achieve your
set goals. You however need to discover yourself to know what you can
efficiently do. Honestly identifying these strengths will enable you develop
them in order to achieve your business goals. Personal goals are major targets
that you set for yourself as an individual. Although, these targets may be
useful in achieving your business goals.

An example of a personal goal is this. I am a website owner, as you are on my

blog right now, imagine that I know the basics in programming, but I have
employed an expert to handle the backend of my website, to debug, ensure
website security and so on. I may decide to get a detailed course on
programming, and upon the completion of my course, I can now
professionally audit the programmer that works for me.

Developing myself in this regard has added something into my life; a skill
important for me, which I may use within or without the scope of the
business. That is why it is “personal.” It is your skill, and you can use it in any
regard that you please.

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A business goal on the other hand, is the effective strategizing of ideas, and
organization of staff to ensure maximum productivity and hence, profit.
Whether your business offers services or involves the sale of products, your
goal is to make profit, and to make profits you need to make sales of
products, or render services to clients. To make maximum profit, you need to
ensure the organization of yourself and your employees, to enable them work
in the direction of your goals, the way a football coach will direct his players
towards the goalpost. We are naturally wired to solve problems, and when
there is a specific destination, the bushy path will be cleared, till the
destination is reached.

For entrepreneurs, whether established or a small business owner, it is

important to set goals and objectives when planning a business. It is
important to remember that you must have clear objectives to achieve your
goals. Many businesses have failed today, not because of a lack of goal, but
because there was no clear direction or plan actualization to get there. A
business goal that has clear objectives will make it possible to have a
direction, even offer motivation, and a metric by which you can judge your
progress. For example, if you have set out an objective to help an e-commerce
website generate 100 clicks within a week. Your objectives will give you a
metric to judge yourself, on the third day, if you aren’t getting closer to 50,
then you may need to intensify your efforts, or change your approach. This is
unlike where there are no objectives and you just say “I want to increase the
number of clicks for this website.”

As I said, every business needs a goal. Even if you have just a few part-time
employees or contract staff, what is important is for you to identify what you
aim to achieve, and work a realistic way to get there. It is commonly said that
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Forget about the size of your company, or
business and focus on your goals, and you can even expand your business

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with time. Every successful business across the world set goals, you even see
many companies writing their vision and mission statements where
everybody can see it. Some others go as far as training their employees
mentally, to make them see things in the line of the company’s goals.

If you are a new business, or a small business, you will most likely find yourself
tackling issues as they come, making you struggle to be intentional about
doing anything specific. This may cause you to spend your first few years
fixing situations and getting into new ones. This approach of solving
problems “as they come” is an effective approach at problem solving, but if
you do not consider the future of your business, and your goals, you will only
keep solving problems for the present. You will b good for the present, but
your business’ future will be bleak. It is important to start out a business with
a clear goal, so that even when you are solving problems that are unplanned
for, you will keep progressing. I have found this common amongst start-ups
and relatively new businesses that do not have clear goals or who do not have
objectives and their excuse is that “There is still a lot of problems we need to
solve before moving forward.”

One thing I always tell people, whether business owner or not is that “There
will always be problems”, and that “your problems will not get easier, it is you
who will grow tougher”. You have to see challenges as normal for you to grow
and edge closer to your goals. Hence, before you get started at all, define your
goals. Forget about handling the initial challenges of business, have a target
for that business with a specific timeframe to meet those targets.

As I said, there will always be challenges, even when you get to the peak of
your business. You will find some unpalatable situations that you have to deal
with. Therefore, don’t make your problems more important than your goals.
Have clear goals and objectives, and solving those problems will naturally
come along with accomplishing your goals.

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You had probably envisaged an outcome when you planned to start your
business. This outcome will only be possible if you have a route that will lead
you there. Goals make it possible to attain this anticipated growth because
your goals and objectives explicitly tell you want to do, and how you want to
go about them – giving you a clear path to follow and helping you avoid
routes that will only cause you a longer journey.

Like I said, in business, the goal is to be profitable, and there are many
objectives that can be involved to make that happen. It can even be as simple
as employing highly-cognitive staff to ensure that all staff have a
problem-solving ability and can offer meaningful input, outside the direct
scope of his job. Successfully achieving these goals elevates the level of
employees, and brings the business owner to success, making it a win that
everybody celebrates, like football players do after scoring a goal.

Why You Have Not Succeeded At Goal-Setting

In setting goals it is very admirable to be ambitious, but it is also good to set
goals that aren’t vague. You should not set too hard targets for yourself so
that you can easily achieve them. A 2 month old baby who can barely sit
properly on his back would be setting an unrealistic target for himself if he
aims to start walking when he is six months. Many times setting unrealistic
targets will make our goals difficult to achieve and then as a start-up or a
relatively new business, you look back at your business performances for the
entire year, do you feel proud? Do you feel like you should pat yourself or the
back? Are you happy about the numbers you can see? If your answer to these
questions is “no,” then your goal setting has something wrong. It is true that
you have set goals, you know what you want, you may even know how to go
about them. However, you still struggle to meet your goals. Some of these
reasons are:

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Lack of Commitment to Goals: Many people think about several things daily,
and in the end, they achieve nothing. It is important to note that thinking of
your goals in your head without making an active commitment to ensure
that it happens is just a waste of time. In the end those goals will just become
random thoughts that come in now and then, and no substantial effort will
be taken to ensure that they play out the expected way.

It is important to write down your goals in detail. You are thinking of a lot of
things at a time, you could be thinking of some personal issues, family, and
some other things that are on your mind. This could make your mind get
crowded and you may miss out on some fine details. When you write things
down, either in a physical book, or a digital planner, it helps you compile a list
of things in the form of a checklist. Hence, you look at everything you want to
do at a glance, add more if necessary, and you can strike them out as you
meet each objective leading to your goals. You may pin this notebook on your
wall for easy access, or you can pin them on your computer’s desktop screen
or even as a widget on your phone for it to remain in your subconscious. This
way, it will give you a conscious reminder that you should be doing
something- which you are not; hence, a reality-check occurs to let you know
that you are lagging.

Face the reality, you are not a computer, you need to document your goals to
foster organization. There is no better way to begin a business like
documenting your plans and looking back at them to see achievements. If
you start your business haphazardly, with no clear plan, and looking to handle
responsibilities as they come, you will end up being very disorganized. This
will make your foundational years very unproductive, which will be a very
poor foundation for the future. Writing down your goals will give you the
opportunity to factor in all constraints and hence determine if a goal is
achievable. If your timeline is in a year, you may have other constraints that

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may not allow all goals get feasible in that time frame. So writing them down
will give you the opportunity to have a scale of preference based on the
importance of each goals. And then, the forgone goals could be fixed in your
next sequence of goal setting. When you are deeply in the process of
achieving these goals, it gets very challenging to reorganize targets; this is
why the best time to organize your goals is before you begin. You will marvel
at your productivity.

Unclear Goals: It is very important to ensure that your goals are obvious and
realistic. It must be something you can visualize and not just a wish. Your
written goals must be more than just mere dreams or items on your wish list,
they must be specific, and the objectives must be realistically achievable. It
may not be easy (I don’t expect them to be), but you must see it as something
clear and realistic. One common way of setting clear goals is by using the
SMART model.

Using the SMART goal model was institutionalized by Arthur Miller, George
Doran, and James Cunningham in 1981. Since then, it has become a textbook
approach for individuals, entrepreneurs, and even corporate bodies to assess
themselves to see if they are on the right path of goal setting.

SMART means: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely

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● Specific: You need to be specific about your goals; you need to know
exactly what you want to do, the exact persons you want to bring on
board with you, when you want to begin, where you want to begin. Ask
yourself the “Who, What, Where, Why, When” Questions. It will help you
be more specific to your goals. And instead of coming up with a goal
like “I want to increase my sales considerably,”. You set goals like, “I want
to have a 50% increase in sales in the next six months”.
● Measurable: It is very important that your goals can have a metric to be
measured. Immeasurable goals are vague and will be unclearly defined
to you. Rather than saying, “I want to improve my skills this year,” set
goals like “I want to move from a novice level in python programming
to an expert level before the end of the year” You can see the way this
goal is specific and measurable. Python programming language is the
“specific” focus. And the goal is to move past a novice user, past the
intermediate stage, and be an expert user by the end of the year.
Measurable goals make it possible to remain focused and monitor
progress at various checkpoints before the end of the set period.
● Attainable: Check out your abilities, evaluate your skills, take a look at
your tools and equipment, your employee size, your general
environment, and ask yourself if you can actualize this goal. It is very
pointless to have a goal that you don’t have the framework to actualize.
If you are a new start-up in an e-commerce business, your business goal
should not be overtaking Amazon in a year or two – it took decades of
hard work and commitment to get there. It will be more attainable and
realistic if you plan to have 10,000 subscribers that are maybe
converting at a 20% rate monthly. This isn’t easy either, but with a bit of
hard work, you may be able to achieve it. When we say make your goals
attainable, it isn’t a shot at settling for less because you want your goals

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 to be realistic. Let them be goals that will occupy you and make you feel
like you are working, but do not go plain unrealistic.
● Relevant: In goal setting, we have long-term and short-term goals. Your
short term goals should be majorly subsets of your long-term goals.
Short term goals are goals that you need to achieve quickly and usually
in line with your other goals. Your long term goals are your major goals.
It is the most important thing you need to place your focus on as an
entrepreneur. It is what the management of mega organizations are
fixed on. They show the direction of a business or a firm, and they
usually have well-defined objectives to achieve them.
● It is important to note that your short term goals are relevant to your
long-term goals. As I said, the short-term goals are subsets of the long
term goals, so they should be in sync, if you have a long term plan to
have five email lists of 10,000 subscribers each. Your short term goals
should directly align with this long term goal.
● Timely: It is important to have a set timeline for achieving your goals in
order to maintain routine checks and even ensure that you can properly
measure these goals. Visualize your goals, imagine the end, then make
a reverse plan to enable you to see things you didn’t see when you were
planning forward. This will enable you to account for everything that
will consume time. Your timely goal will appear like this “I want to
establish a new branch at another state in the next five years” rather
than “Very soon, I will create a new branch.” Timely targets will allow
you to be more specific and they will enable your goals easily measured.

These SMART goals enable you to have clarity on what you aim to achieve. It
gives you a clear direction on where to face; hence, removing the vagueness
from your goals.

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Unrealistic Goals: As I said earlier, your goals should give you a wake-up call,
it should shake you slightly, but it must be something realistic. You don’t want
to waste your time and that of your employees by aiming for what is simply
not possible. Be ambitious, but do not be unrealistic. In other words, do not
be fine with mediocre, but do not aim for what is just not feasible. If I set a
goal to begin a business, to start-up with $100,000 and I expect to break even
in a month. I may have just set something unrealistic.

Unrealistic goals do not do anything more than dampening your spirit and
the spirit of your employees. If you try to climb a hill and you fall at your first
attempt, you will be discouraged and may be very skeptical about trying it
again. For your good, it is advisable that you set what is realistic. I have read
many goal-setting books that advise people to set goals beyond their reach,
lofty heights that seem unattainable. While this advice is soothing,
convincing, and refreshing, it is plainly a bad piece of advice. Have great
targets, but ensure that they are attainable.

Poor Evaluation: Evaluation is one of the most important parts of goal

setting. If you are going on a journey to a distant place, you periodically check
your fuel gauge to ensure that you have enough gas to complete the journey.
If you find out that it is running low, then you take a stop to the gas station
and refill. You maintain this check at intervals to ensure that everything is fine
with your vehicle. In fact, you may need a refill of water in your radiator to
ensure that your vehicle develops no fault from overheating. In the same vein,
you need to perform regular checks on your goals and objectives. Keep track
of them, communicate to your team members anything you feel is off, ask for
their opinions, and evaluate your stand together.

Examine your daily activities intricately; ensure that they are in line with your
long term goals. If they are not, then you have been wasting a whole lot of
time on frivolities. Minutes make hours, and day makes weeks. If your daily

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tasks aren’t in line with your goals, identify them quickly, and readjust
yourself. Periodical evaluation helps us stay on track and not lose sight of our
goals. It could be weekly, monthly, or anyhow you please. But ensure that you
always maintain checks on your goals.

Failure to plan Daily: Daily Planning is very important in achieving goals. As I

said earlier, smaller chunks of time accumulate to become bigger ones. To
achieve your long term goals, you must be able to achieve what you have set
out daily to do. Utilize the night before each day and prepare a list of what you
aim to achieve the next day. You could do it after the close of work for the day,
or you could do it as the last thing before you sleep. This sharpens you
mentally, and you will be mentally ready for the next day. You will wake up
feeling refreshed and not bothered about what next thing you want to do.

Recognize your most active hours in a day and set your most important tasks
in that time frame. This is usually called the “primetime” - where your
productivity peaks. This helps you ensure that you utilize your time properly
and ensure that your daily targets are met. Time management is the most
important key in maintaining your daily plans, if you don’t manage your time
properly, you will always have leftover tasks into the next day, and if this keeps
recurring, then you may not be able to achieve your daily goals, and by
extension your long term goals.

After the day’s activities, review what you have done, note the things you
weren’t able to achieve, and identify the reasons; set new targets for the
following day. Ensure you always do it before you sleep so that you will spend
the very first minute from waking up accomplishing plans, rather than using
that first hour to think. As I have said earlier, nothing beats planning in
advance.

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 CHAPTER TWO

Keeping track of your goals

As a business owner, you need to keep tabs on your progress in order to see
your mistakes, correct them, and ensure that your journey is on the right
track. Tracking your goals will also keep you motivated, gives you the drive to
do better and to do more, and bring you closer to accomplishing your goals.
Of course, the SMART approach, which we discussed earlier, is a way of
ensuring that your goals are clear and attainable. But there are a few other
things that you should consider to ensure that you keep moving forward.

● Ensure That Your Goals can be Quantified: As previously said, an

immeasurable goal will give no room for evaluation. It is important for
your growth and progress that you set goals that you can quantify. This
will foster clarity, and you won’t work in darkness, you know what you
want to do, and you know how you want to do it. Then you won’t stray
away from the focus. Therefore, you will be able to tell if your current
progress is quick enough to achieve your goals or if you need to
intensify your efforts.
● Share Your Goals: As an entrepreneur, you are your own boss. You don’t
have any superior to hold you accountable for anything or to penalize
you when you are lagging. Hence you work at your pace, you are your
own boss, you set all the rules, and you break them all. It is usually very
helpful to “employ a boss.” This means that you should find someone,
maybe a fellow entrepreneur, maybe a friend, or family, that you should
report yourself to, if it is a fellow business owner, even good. You check
in on his progress, and the same is reciprocated to you. This makes it
possible to be accountable to each other, and this will eradicate laxity or
laziness; knowing that you need to report to someone and impressing
that person will require that you put in more effort to ensure that you

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 do better than the last time, every time. It is commonly said that two
heads are better than one. This is entirely true in this case, and sharing
your goals with someone who will work with you to identify your
weaknesses and shortcoming is a great move.
It is important to share your goals and their progress with someone
who will be honest with you. Family, friends, and employees may want
to remain in your good books. Hence, they may just pamper you and
not tell you the truth about your failures. The goal is to increase your
drive and motivation, not to make you even more relaxed.
● Appreciate Your Little Wins: You will get to several milestones if you
have set objectives for your goal. If your goal is to get 10,000 new
customers in a year, and you have only 4,000 in the sixth month, you
will be tempted to scold yourself, beat yourself up, and will even want to
return to the drawing board as fast as possible. You should calm
yourself down. The fact that you have even set out to achieve a goal and
you are working towards it is an extent of success. Appreciate your
efforts, even if you are behind schedule; appreciate the effort that got
you 4,000 out of 5,000. Mark the 6th month as successful, reward
yourself for a job well done. You have definitely spent money, time, and
expended mental efforts. Therefore, taking a few minutes to celebrate
these moments won’t hurt. In fact, they will give you a sense of
calmness, and you will come back stronger, invigorated for the goal you
have set, and you will be spurred to be better. Nobody can show you
appreciation the way you will show yourself. Consider yourself
important, celebrate your little wins, and they will lay a foundation for
more.

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 Common Goal-Setting Problems and Their Solutions
Many individuals, business owners, entrepreneurs, and CEOs usually struggle
with setting business goals. It is well worth it to note that many plans require
extraordinary efforts to achieve. Many goals are only partially achieved, and
there are many that are flushed down the gutter.

Achieving your business goals has proven quite difficult, not because you
don’t have realistic goals or you don’t have the right set of objectives. The
problem with achieving goals is usually heavily dependent on personnel. You
need to ask yourself if you have the right set of staff. You need to ensure that
the people working with you are motivated to achieving your goals. When
you cannot transfer your business goals to your employees, the business will
suffer.

You Should Have A Focus: Consider the size of your firm, weigh it side by
side with your goals. One big reason for failure is that there are too many
things on your plate. If you have too many goals to achieve in a short period,
you will most likely try to balance everything. Hence, you will be trying to
partake in different types of objectives simultaneously. You are human, and
you are not working with robots either. It is better to abandon the four, five
huge goals you have set for yourself and work with one or two; this is the
concept of focus. It is better to excel at one thing than to be mediocre in five.
If you are a fashion brand, do not rush out your products. Release them one
after the other and channel all your marketing energy to one product at a
time. If you release a lot of products in the same time, each of the products
will have a smaller reach and you won’t get maximum revenue. Focusing is
very important in goal setting, and you cannot focus on too many things at
the same time, just the way you cannot look towards the sky and look down
at the same time. A lack of focus will only stifle your plans, and each one will
struggle a lot to get to fruition. It will also skew your evaluation statistics; you

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will arrive at a distorted report because you haven’t put in the maximum
effort for each of your plans; instead, you have shared the effort across a huge
number of plans.

Blogs that have a particular focus are usually more successful than those that
try to do everything at once. This is a practical example of the benefits of
focus. Approach your goals, one at a time, and be determined to achieve
them. If you have a large organization, you may have a slightly higher amount
of goals, and you can split your company into various departments, each
department having its own targets and objectives. However, there are some
targets that need more than one department to achieve those goals. There is
strength in numbers, and if you have a huge staffing capacity, you have the
leverage to set different targets at a time. The ultimate goal is to ensure that
no matter the number of targets you set, there shouldn’t be excess workload
on any staff.

Identify What Costs You Money And What Makes You Money: As a
business owner, you must be able to identify what is responsible for making
you profits as well as what is responsible for the losses you have made. The
optimal way of ensuring success is to participate in fewer activities and
increase productivity. It is important to know that, being busy is not the same
as being productive, you can have your team work all day ad have very little to
show for it, this is why it is important to spell out what has contributed
immensely to your productivity. This is a huge step at evaluation, and
successfully identifying where you should intensify efforts will only push you
closer to your goals. Remember, the ultimate goal of every business is to be
more productive.

If you are a manufacturer making several products, whether tangible or

virtual products (e.g., applications and computer programs), you need to
examine all data of each product extensively. You need to note the one that

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generates the most traffic on social media, you need to know the ones that
have more conversion rates, the ones that have been the most purchased;
analyze these data, and you will have a broader insight as to what product
you should channel more energy into, and maybe products that you should
discontinue. As a business, you are dependent on your customers to stand,
and if your audience doesn’t appreciate one of your products, there is no
need expending energy on such a product. You may also view your products
with respects to your competitors; if there is a product that you clearly edge
out your competitors, you should pay attention to it, give it more focus, and
you can slowly begin to boost the other products to be up to par with the
competition and even get better.

It is also important that you identify your major customers as they are your
source of income. In my business experience, I have learnt that “all customers
are not equal” There will always be a bias and preferential treatment given to
premium customers for being premium. Identify the customers that drive
more sales for you; if your business is a B2B business, you may need to
prioritize who to supply and who you need to remove from your supply chain.

Ensure that you aren’t judging these things with your personal bias. You may
be too attached to a product or a customer to tell yourself the truth, work
with a team, use facts and figures from the data you have employed; your
opinion may be distorted, even without you knowing. Biases are normal for
humans.

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 Best Practices for Goal-Setting
There are a few practices I encourage you to employ in your goal setting. A
few of them are:

Anticipate Problems: This may sound weird, but as I have said, problems are
inevitable. This is a practice of doing a “pre-mortem.” This assumes that there
has been a failure, and works backward to identify potential causes of
problems and what could cause failure and works to prevent them. These are
things you may not notice when making your business plan; a pre mortem is
usually effective as it prevents almost every possible problem that may occur.

Align goals With Your Employees: It is important that you set your goals and
ensure that your employees are aligned with them. Make them feel like a part
of your project; ensure that you have similar goals. This will make the progress
of the firm very rapid; it is easier to arrive at a journey when everyone has a
similar destination, unlike when everyone has different destinations. It
increases communication and makes everyone maintain a high level of
transparency. This fosters teamwork, as similar goals will make everyone
accountable for a general goal rather than individual goals. Employees will
not work as individuals but rather as a big unit. This will make the overall
goals of the business easily achievable with greater focus.

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 The Objectives and Key Results Methodology (OKR)

Objectives and key results (OKR) is a popular goal-setting methodology that

has been in use since 1970. It is a goal-setting methodology that focuses on
outcomes rather than tasks. It’s result-driven nature usually encourages
Accountability and transparency with clear metrics for evaluation. It was
founded by Andy Grove in 1970, who worked with Intel. Although John Doerr
is responsible for the effective and popular use of the methodology.

The OKR methodology involves ONE CLEAR OBJECTIVE and three to four
expected KEY RESULTS to judge the success of the objectives. For optimal
results, it is advised that your best rate of achieving these results should be
around 70%. If you achieve 100% of your key results, then you have probably
set targets that are below your capacity. A 70% success will encourage you to
push harder. If you achieve 100%, however, you should return to the drawing
board and re-evaluate your expected key results. OKR encourages businesses
to set ambitious goals, as is obvious from the 70% metric, and achieve
different OKRs every three months, dividing the year into four quarters.

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Because there is an expected outcome, during the course of the tasks, it will
become glaring whether the objectives are on track or lagging and at risk of
not completing them. Thankfully OKRs are flexible and can be adjusted to
meet new needs (within that particular three-month period). An example of a
typical OKR for a software development firm could be

Objective: Create A New Software That Retrieves Corrupt Video Files

Key Result 1: Product design and User interface must be completed after one
month

Key Result 2: Quality Assurance Testing and Beta Testing must be done at
the 6th week

Key Result 3: Bugs should be fixed and All Issues Detected from testing must
be fixed and the product redesigned by the 10th week

Key Result 4: Final Testing is done, and the product launches on the 12th
week.

It is worth noting that these Key Results that have a particular timeline will
spur the staff to work even faster and smarter to achieve these aims. However,
in the end, the target may not be met. Because you have set out to achieve a
project in a very short period, you may not be able to finish at that particular
time, but if you have achieved 70% of your goals, you are good to go. This is
the flexibility that OKRs offer. Although, you must strive to have the best
possible success rate that you can boast of.

Why OKRs Are Important

Objectives and Key Results can be used to set your goals. It gives you a solid
foundation for goal setting, ensures that you have a metric for calculation,
and makes the evaluation process relatively easy; it will enable you to know if
your actions are bringing fruition to your goals.

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OKRs are one of the most effective strategies for goal setting, especially when
planning for the long-term. It gives a real-time update of what is going on
within your team in a transparent manner. Remember that one of the
reasons for setting objectives is to enable evaluation; hence, OKRs show
progress at every level in a transparent manner, helping you make decisions
to stick with a plan or to move to a plan B. Decisions made on the Basis of the
OKR methodology are usually well informed. Helping you see why some
things are not working out and why some things will – With reason, of course.
In fact, this methodology makes it possible to anticipate possible problems
and tackle them, even before they arise.

OKRs enable you to have a clearer shot at your goal. It brings about a great
focus by helping you see your objectives from a different perspective,
because of its demand for Results. The OKR methodology spurs you to work
twice as smart. And the focus will only bring you closer to achieving your
goals by taking you and your staff away from time taking unproductive tasks
that offer no value to the business.

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 CHAPTER THREE

Key points for goal-setting

The importance of goal setting is now pretty much obvious to you; you
already know how it helps to keep your employees motivated and helps avoid
activity without productivity, fostering communication, and transparency
within an organization. All with the aim of improving the business
performance and by extension making more money.

Below is a list of hands-on approaches to improving your goals and ensuring

that they are actualized and do not just remain “dreams.”

● Rewrite Your Vision and Mission Statements: The vision and mission
of any organization have to be directly in line with the long-term goals
of the business. The Vision statement of a company indicates where the
company aims to be in the near future (the company’s) goals. In
comparison, the mission statement of the company defines the
objectives and approach to reach those aims. The vision and mission
statement of a company is a representation of the company’s core
values. The terms may be used interchangeably many times, but it is
clear that the Vision and Mission statement is just another way of
highlighting “Goals and Objectives.” Identify the core beliefs of your
company, your purpose, what you do, and how you do it. Rewrite your
vision and mission statement, and ensure that it contains your targets
for the next five years, well articulated. Place it in obvious places at work
so that every employee reads them as often as they can, let it register in
their subconscious, and be a form of a daily reminder of the goals to
achieve.

This will serve as a source of inspiration and motivation to the

employees and will bring you closer to setting your long term goals.

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● Practice Visualization: There is a popular saying that says, “Rome
wasn’t built in a day.” Well, for obvious reasons, the statement is correct.
In fact, a building cannot be built in a day, talk more of a city. When
there is a building construction project, it starts with a building plan,
which is usually the blueprint for the civil engineers, builders,
mechanical engineers, and every other person to work on the project.
This plan will give an insight into the expected outcome, making the
workers see the end from the beginning and work towards what they
see. This is the concept behind the visualization. Visualization is similar
to the pre-mortem analysis; it enables you to see things that you didn’t
even think of in your planning process, giving you a mental picture of
what you want to achieve. In the end, you have clear expectations, and
upon evaluation, you can make further improvement by noting where
you did above expectations and where you couldn’t do enough, and
you fell short. This makes you see your strong points and where you
need to improve.

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● Give Feedbacks to Your Employees: Communication with your staff is
a great way to meet your targets faster. You should relate well with your
staff and ensure that you work as a team, despite having responsibilities
in different capacities. This will allow your employees to genuinely open
up about what they feel is wrong or unrealistic about the goals and
objectives you have set. They have made several observations, and their
experiences working elsewhere may prove vital in re-strategizing these
goals. Ask for their inputs and give them feedback on them; this will
show how much you value the opinions of your staff, and they will even
give better and more honest advice, ensuring that you edge closer to
your goals. It will also propel a very healthy working environment and
boost the morale of your staff, and goals will be easily achieved when
there is happiness within. For the successful accomplishment of set
goals, it is very important that your staff remain happy!

● Use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Key performance indicators

are present standard metrics that are data-dependent. They have
figures you can track to see if you are in line to achieve your business
goals. The most common way of measuring whether or not you’re on
track to achieve a business goal is to set KPIs. As it has been mentioned
severally in this guide, evaluation is very important in goal-setting. You
need to always take a double check to see if you are still on track. Your
KPIs are standard measuring yardsticks that would have been in
existence from the point that you set your goals.
You will have different KPIs for the entire business, as several segments
of your goals will have their key objectives; hence, different yardsticks
for measuring progress.

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● Judge Employees By Productivity, Not Activity: You may have your
business hours set from 9 am to 5 pm, or 8 am to 4 pm. However, it is
important that you don’t see these working hours as a metric that says
your staff is doing enough or not. Let there be a personal goal for each
employee to meet within a particular time frame. This will bring about
an increased rate in productivity because they aren’t working to pass
the time; they are working to meet their targets. Let every individual
face a personal challenge, and all staff will work well with minimal
supervision, unlike when they have to wait for the next instructions
from a team leader, giving them room for excuses. You might be
tempted to reward staff members that are doing well with incentives,
but this may not be a good idea. It is important to keep your staff
happy; however, they shouldn’t be incentivized. Instead communicate,
and let employees know when they are doing well. Attaching some
form of incentive to performance won’t produce honest work; it will
only bring about employees who want the benefits and will just go at
any length to get it.
● Hire only the cultural fit: During recruitment, the company core
values, mission, and vision should be shared with potential employees,
and communicate with them, be sure to ask questions that will help
determine if they key into the company’s goals. If you hire people who
do not key into your goals, you will have a huge hill to climb if you really
want to achieve those goals. Ensure that teamwork is an attribute
present in all employees, including yourself. Everyone must be able to
share ideas and align with the ultimate company goals and avoid
prioritizing personal goals.

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 CHAPTER FOUR

Organizational alignment
We have talked about aligning one’s employees to goals and ensuring that all
staffs play an active role in the business. Aligning all employees to your goals
fosters understanding and ensures that the least ranking staff shares the
general goal of the company and is willing to support it. When this occurs,
the productivity is usually massive because the workers have found
satisfaction and a driving passion for the job, making them put in 101% to
ensure that the business goals are achieved. No matter the way your
remuneration structure is compared to your competitors, having this deep
connection with your employees will make them feel purposeful, and they
will have the motivation to do extraordinary things for your business.

Important Tips on Organizational Alignment

Align Vision and Mission: We have already discussed what a vision and
mission statement is – A broader view of your company’s Long-term Goals
and Objectives. Aligning employees to your mission and vision is essential,
and the most basic way to do that is to get them to remember easily. Make
your vision and mission statements concise; let them be easy to remember.
Use yourself as the beta-test, “how long did it take you to lay it into memory?”
then judge the scenario or others and try to make the statement concise,
short, and easy to understand. Also, you could engrave them into the walls
just after the entrance of the company’s building. Let them be reminded
when they resume work every morning; you could also frame it and place it in
the lobby and in work areas. Ensure that it gets registered in the
sub-conscious of your employees.

Become A Facilitator: For success in an organizational setting, it is important

that you reach out to your staff one-on-one to help their weaknesses. Be more

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than just an employer, be a life coach. If your organization is too large for you
to connect with each staff one-on-one, then you should assign team leaders,
ensure that the weaknesses of your staff are catered for, let them know the
reasons why they have been selected for a particular duty, and how that duty
helps the company achieve its goals. Let each staff know his importance to
the mission and vision of the company.

Keep them motivated when they have been discouraged by tasks, deadlines,
setbacks, and failures because these things are bound to happen. Issues from
home may even affect productivity at work. However, if you are their coach,
you can know about this beforehand and remind them about their great
importance to the company to enable them to keep pushing.

Encourage Your Employees: In addition to coaching, one way to align your

employees to your goals is to keep them motivated. As I have said earlier,
ensuring that your staff share your enthusiasm about your goals is very
important. You must employ astute management techniques to ensure that
you are keeping your employees motivated. Do not be a selfish employer in
your one-on-one discussions with your staff, ask questions, understand his
needs, try to take care of them before putting forward the targets of the
business and the Key results expected. If there are issues with your
management style, and there is dissatisfaction, address it quickly and solve
the problem before it spreads like wildfire. Ensure that you treat your
employees in the best possible way, and this will naturally give them the drive
to go the extra mile for you. Don’t be rigid in your approach to motivation;
there is no “one-size fit all” strategy for motivating your employees. They are
all different people; therefore, you need to approach them differently.

The human brain usually gets tired of routines. Quite unfortunately, most jobs
have a specific pattern in which they employ. So your employees may simply
lack motivation because they are bored; they need a new challenge. You may

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find yourself discussing the goals for the third quarter of the year, and you
don’t get the energy you expect because they have gotten used to the roles,
and it no longer excites them. So, how do you solve this dilemma?

You must be able to nurture your employees to maintain the high level of
momentum that they started with, with specific techniques, to ensure that
the productivity remains at its peak and the drive to achieve these goals do
not die.

Calls, Meetings, And Conferences: Ensure that you stay in touch with your
employees and keep them motivated with meetings, calls, and conferences.
Let them know the effort the company is making to achieve those goals, let
them know the setbacks, let them know the wins, and more importantly, let
them know how important they are to the firm and how their efforts have led
to huge wins. This will imbibe some sense of responsibility in them, which
they will like to maintain. This is the biggest key to make an employee remain
committed. Make them feel part of the business and not a dispensable
employee, and they will be challenged to put their best every time.

Conduct Surveys: Draw up a list of survey questions, use it to ensure if your

employees really understand the vision and mission of the company. Ensure
that each staff knows his role and his duty. If your staff is just performing tasks
“as they come” without any real understanding of their role, there will be no
feeling of responsibility. You must ensure that everyone understands their
role, why they are appropriate for that role, and why that responsibility is
crucial to the company vision.

In your surveys, leave room for feedback. Ensure that you weigh in the
opinions of everyone, and ensure that you allow them to know you did. Their
lack of motivation may be a result of fear. They feel like it’s too challenging
and may not be able to pull it off. Rigidity isn’t encouraged by business, so if

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you discover what can be changed to make the goal easily relatable with your
staff, then you should make that change.

Create Workshops and Skill Training: One method that works is to ensure
that your staff do not remain at a level of learning. Encourage development,
both personally and professionally. The fact that they can learn new
approaches and skills that can be employed in their daily work may just be
enough motivation to move on. Encourage your employees to develop
personally and professionally as part of your overall management strategy.
Learning takes away your team from the boring daily routine, it gives them
something entirely different to do, and they may just rediscover their passion.

Failures in Employee Alignment

The main cause of failures in employee alignment is poor communication.
When the employee doesn’t get adequate information and engagement
about a task, he’s on to. Then there will be a disconnection from the company.
This mental disconnection will lead to a lack of motivation, as the worker is
just eager to close for the day and go home. Rapidly looking forward to the
end of the month to get his pay, caring less about whether or not the
company has goals, talk more of accomplishing them.

It is important to keep a high level of communication among your employees,

and in the 21st century, there are many digital and social platforms for this. You
can reach your employees across the world, even if they work remotely. Share
all important information including organizational updates, product updates,
executive updates, training and workshops, educational tools, and marketing
tools, get their suggestions, inputs, and even constructive criticism

Ensure that your mode of communication can be accessed on mobile, let

everybody be accessible on the application “on-the-go” many people usually
check out instant information from their phones to see emails, and latest
news, catch up with loved ones and see if there’s any information from work.

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Ensure you can carry everybody along, let everybody actively contribute, and
don’t let them miss out on crucial information. This will lead to a strong bond
and will make it easy to align your employees to your goals. Ensure that
communication never lags.

However, as much as you want to be very transparent with information, you

need to ensure that you are sharing the information with the right team. It is
quite unreasonable to share all information with everybody. It will become a
boring overload, and they may never pay any attention to the information
that is specific to them. Ensure that your staff are not oversaturated. Ensure
that they can engage with it. For example, there is some information that you
will relay to the sales and marketing team that will get them very excited, but
these goals may look so ordinary or even quite confusing to relate with for
people in the design group.

Ensure that the information you share is standardized. Don’t overload staff
with information that are of no importance to them. You may even segment
your staff’s digital communication platform based on their responsibility and
roles and the information that will be meaningful to them and nothing else.
Communication is only valued when it carries important information.

Remember that communication is a two-way thing. You want to talk to them,

and they want to talk to you. People get uninterested when they cannot
participate in discussions. Endeavour not to just send updates. Ask for their
inputs suggestions, and, encourage them to react, give comments about
them. Let them ask questions and given observations, and It will even lead to
discussions where you can just sit back and observe and write down
important things.

Apart from your segmented platforms, you may create a general platform
where all segmented goals are discussed to see how progress is being made
to the vision and mission of the company.

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 Achieving Your Personal Goals as an Entrepreneur
As a business owner, you definitely have a target for starting a business,
which must be achieved. However, as I mentioned earlier, all your personal
goals are hinged on self-development. I have read many books from
best-sellers on their concepts of personal development and their various
methodologies. It would be best to acknowledge that there is no “one size fit
all” approach. There is no rigid path to fulfillment, if I was going into the US
from China, and if you were going into the US from Germany, we would all
arrive at the US successfully, flying through the air, but we will take different
air routes, and we will get there at slightly different times. Forget about the
“instructions” you have received and the “killer tips” on becoming the best in
the business. The truth is, only you can discover the most successful method
to use.

We are all endowed with different natural skills and abilities, which we need
to discover in order to achieve a purpose. You may be endowed with
organizational abilities, making you a natural leader, and some people do not
possess leadership abilities but are very skilled in convincing people, hence
making them very good negotiators and sales representatives. In all, as an
entrepreneur, you must discover what you can do, build on those strengths,
and you will still be a success at your job.

Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs in the tech space, in many Mega
companies in the United States, including Apple, Pixar, Disney, NeXT, and so
on. Despite being so successful in the tech space as an entrepreneur, he
didn’t have programming skills. It is said that “Jobs never wrote a line of
code,” unlike Mark Zuckerberg, or Jack Dorsey, who are also successful in the
tech space but are very good programmers and computer software pros. Jobs
was primarily a good entrepreneur with unrivaled marketing skills. The
co-founder of Apple – Steve Wozniak, was the innovator, the engineer, and

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the inventor. Jobs understood his strengths and utilized them properly to
achieve his goals as an entrepreneur.

If you have chosen to open a business in a particular industry, I believe that it

is because you have a ton of things to offer the industry, which will, in turn,
fetch you money. Therefore, it would be best if you identify your strength and
the value you offer, rather than following the crowd, because “that is how they
do it”- If you join them, you cannot beat them. Therefore, you need to observe
your outstanding attributes and make them the front in your entrepreneurial
journey. Identify your strengths, make them a foundation for yourself, and
build on them.

You may also pay some attention to your weaknesses and improve on them.
However, if you evaluate yourself, and this weakness has no direct effect on
your business, you may treat it like it doesn’t exist because your goals do not
recognize that particular weakness. Therefore, be sure that you work in
capacities that will utilize your strengths, don’t pay attention to your
weaknesses, and don’t assign yourself roles that will demand it. Avoid them as
much as possible. However, in situations where you cannot escape from
those weaknesses, take the conscious effort to improve them. If it’s a
temporary situation, you may just cover up and rough your way through it; if it
remains permanent, then you should work to turn your weaknesses into
strengths.

This is the reason why you must focus appropriately on employing staff that
solves a problem in your firm to enable you to have fewer reasons to use your
weaknesses. It is very important that you walk on your clear, familiar path to
reduce your chances of getting into these situations as much as you can. You

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are an entrepreneur, not a machine; you cannot do everything on your own.
Ensure that your employees can save you from getting into a fix.
Even as an entrepreneur, you cannot do everything on your own. That is why
you need employees to help you out in situations like these.

You may decide to just learn a particular skill that you find important for your
job, but it will rip you of time that you can use to do other productive things.
Even if you are a one-man business, you don’t need to do everything all by
yourself. Focus on the tasks that can bring out the best of your productivity,
and outsource other tasks to contract staff. You will save a lot of time, which
can be invested in more important things than working on a task that isn’t
your area of strength.
Time is infinite, but it is limited in supply. You only have 24 hours every day,
and the average human being can only be productive for a maximum of 10
hours daily. Therefore, to ensure that you reach your goals the way you desire,
then you must use your time judiciously.

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 CHAPTER FIVE

Understanding the Basics of E-Commerce

E-commerce, which is a short form for Electronic commerce, may be defined

as a business model that involves buying and selling physical products,
services, and digital products between several firms and individuals over the
internet, without the distance posing a barrier. It also involves the electronic
transfer of money to execute these transactions, without buyers meeting
sellers. E-commerce, usually conducted over mobile devices and computers,
tablets, is also referred to as an online version of catalog shopping, like you go
through the Mallmor stores, pick a product you want, pay for it and check out
with your credit or debit card.

Nearly every product and service you can imagine is available through
e-commerce platforms, including books, plane tickets, perishable items like
food, digital goods like online courses, and even financial services such as
stock trading and investing.

E-commerce has helped many businesses establish a more prominent

market presence. Since the internet isn't limited to physical buildings,
someone in Toronto can render a service to a customer in California without
meeting the person. A seller in Asia can sell to a buyer in Europe. Due to the
limitless nature of the internet, it enables efficient distribution channels for
products or services.

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American-owned Amazon and Asian-owned Alibaba are examples of the
largest e-commerce businesses, and their rise has inevitably reduced the
importance of physical stores.

Advantages of E-Commerce Businesses over Physical Stores

E-commerce businesses reducing the importance of physical stores is

inevitable because of the great convenience experienced in online shopping.
Physical stores need customers to leave their homes, go to a store, searching
catalogs and departments, and even deal with the possibility of not finding
the item in the said store and having to settle for another product or going to
another store. But since the massive adoption of e-commerce, customers sit
in the comfort of their homes, use a search box to search for items they want,
pay securely online with debit or credit cards, and can even compare prices
with other online stores, pay a small fee for shipping and get it at their
doorstep. Convenience has been a crucial part of human evolution, as seen
from our devices, and applications; they consider the convenience of the user.

E-commerce businesses run 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, unlike many
physical stores that run for about 12 hours daily and 5 to 6 days a week. Online
stores also typically offer a wider range of products on their platforms
because they can have products from third-party sellers.

The growth of E-commerce has also increased employment in customer

service, digital marketing, website developers, logistics and courier services,
freelancers, and so on, and the continual rise of E-commerce will only mean
more employment opportunities.

Because of these reasons and many more, starting an online business

nowadays seems like an attractive idea for many young entrepreneurs. Before

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anyone explores the e-commerce industry, they need to understand the
technicalities behind it and what it takes to run a successful e-commerce
business.

Models of E-Commerce Businesses

There are 4 significant models of e-commerce businesses, classified based on

the participants of the trade. They are:

● Business to Business Model (B-2-B): This is a case where businesses

sell to other businesses, like wholesalers selling bulk products to other
businesses that will sell in bits or businesses offering business
optimization tools as a service to other businesses.
● Business to Consumer Model (B-2-C): This is the most common type
of model in E-commerce; as the name implies, it involves a direct
transaction between the business and sometimes a third-party retailer
with an online customer. Examples of this business model are Nike
store, Alibaba, Amazon.
● Consumer to Consumer Model (C-2-C): This is a model of business
where consumers meet directly with other consumers to trade with
one another, while the owner of the website makes profits from
commissions, adverts, traffics, etc. eBay and Offer Up are (Restricted to
the US) are examples of this business model.
● Consumer to Business Model (C-2-B): This is a business model where
individuals offer services or gigs to businesses, especially between
remote workers and employers, usually on a contract basis, platforms
like Fiverr, Freelancer, Upwork enables this business model.

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 CHAPTER SIX

Selecting a Niche

A niche is a specific area of a much broader range known to you or one you
can handle well. For something to be called your niche, then you need to
know a great deal about it.

A lot of E-commerce startups fill up their websites with a lot of products in so

many categories, without anything specific; this epitomizes a lack of identity
and focus. As an E-commerce business owner, you have to be known for
something; it makes no sense to be a "jack of all trades, and master of none."
Unless you have a very huge budget, you can't stuff up your platform with
thousands of products like Alibaba or Amazon. You need to scale down to a
well-known Niche to efficiently run an Ecommerce business.

Selecting a niche is a key step in opening your online business. It could be

wise to approach this process by identifying established companies that

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already work in your preferred space. At this point, you might be shrugging
within you asking yourself why you have to look for competition when you
can just look for a space with little competition for a business; the simple
truth is that, as lovely as monopoly sounds, for an online marketplace where
there are no limits, competition is key; if there is little of no competition, then
it is a pointer that such niche lacks people who are willing to purchase the
product or service. Although as much as we want competition, we do not
want to pick an overly crowded niche because it might seem herculean
breaking in into an already saturated market dominated by huge brands.

You need to have an identity. Know who you are and what your brand is, what
you represent, and quite importantly who your target customers are, you
need to know who you are selling to to effectively make sales.

Choosing and Sourcing for profitable Products to Sell Online

In choosing a Niche, there are certain things to consider to ensure the best
possible market for you, and in the end, make a profit – which is the end
game of any business.

● Make A Keyword Search: The concept behind Keywords – which will

still be adequately discussed in further chapters could play a vital part
in selecting a Niche, as we want to select a product category that
people want; it's not just about what you want to sell, it's also about
what people want to buy.

From the niche ideas that come into your head, identify the keywords,
and do a search. If the items related to your search have much traffic,
then it is likely an idea with a good market for a niche. Bear in mind that

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 we do not want too much traffic as well, so avoid overcrowded
keywords.

● Solve A Problem Or Meet A Demand: As an entrepreneur that wants

to delve into a particular niche and grow rapidly, you should sell
products that meet a particular need or solve a problem. One of the
ways to do this is to examine your chosen niche. Since it is a category
that isn't alien to you, check for products or services that were already
available but leaves a loophole with a particular problem you have
personally experienced. Remember that good user experience and
convenience is a significant determinant of how well a product will
move in the market. An excellent example of this is when mobile phone
cameras became a crucial factor in buying phones. Still, the initial
releases were quite expensive, if you can offer relatively cheaper phones
for sale with an excellent mobile camera, you will get a lot of customers
wanting to try it out, and if you can adequately solve the problem, the
first set of people to buy may leave reviews, even encouraging more
people to try out such product.

● Make a Market Survey: Remember, it isn't about you. It's about

potential customers. Therefore, one of the best ways to see if an idea
will be lucrative is to simply ask people for their opinions about it. Of
course, you can't just start asking a random set of people questions,
and you don't want to rely too much on the opinion of people close to
you because they may attach emotions to their opinions, which will
give you a skewed view of things. Objectivity is vital, so it is best to do a
survey with an organized set of people interested in the product. They
might even be your first set of customers.

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 What you need to do first is to identify people who might have an
interest in the product; you can meet them on social media networking
platforms like MeetUp or Smacktive. These people could become
potential customers; therefore, they are the people you should network
with to get constructive criticism since you'll be in the same business
environment as the people who might find a use for your idea. When
talking to people, get an adequate sample space, and talk to 20 people
about an idea. 14 people should be able to see the good in it, and it is a
sign that you can proceed.

● Engage in Prototype Survey: When you are sure that you have a niche
and products you want to sell, and more importantly, you have made
connections with a couple of people who you think will be interested in
buying your product, then go out with samples, your sample is meant
to be a yardstick to judge quality, to see if it matches the product
description, and also to judge packaging. Don't be afraid of getting bad
reviews since you haven't been properly launched. The reviews from the
prototype will give you a pointer to what you should look to fix before
hitting the market, especially if it is something mentioned by a lot of
people. Even if you have no problems with certain things, the potential
users do, and their opinions matter more than yours.

● Select A Brand Name: Having an identity is very important for product

selection, and this is the bedrock for branding. Your brand isn't just
limited to your name and logo, it also comprises of how your products
are packaged, your customer care relation, and every other thing your
business offers that make you stand out from others. Your target
customer base will unconsciously know you for certain things, and if

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 they can't get those things elsewhere, they will always come back. It
doesn't have to be exceptional; it just has to be unique.

When selecting a brand name, it is important to select a domain name

to go with it. Since it is the address for your website, a domain name will
help buyers find your business easily. It is advisable to use the same
name for the business as your domain name so that visitors who can
remember can just type in the website address at any time without
having to do a Google search. "Amazon.com" is a website – here,
"amazon" is the domain name, and ".com" is the domain suffix; there
are other domain suffixes like ".co," ".org," etc. But it is usually advisable
to go with ".com" as it is usually what comes to the mind of people first,
and even in computer auto-fills, ".com" is more likely to appear.

All these things exclusive to your business make up your brand.

● Trends: Often, certain products hit the market, and people love them,
even you as a consumer and not a business owner love the product, but
sometimes they don't catch people's fancy for a very long time, these
products are called trends. Trends are not advisable for a fresh business,
but when you are established, you can hop on trends – since it satisfies
consumer cravings. This will make you benefit from a product in
massive sales for the time the product is trendy. Be mindful though,
jumping on trends when the demand is starting to wear out may just
leave you with overstocked items with little sales volume.

We have discussed criteria for choosing a product to offer the market, but
another thing to consider is how to source them. As an e-commerce business
owner, you are most likely not going to manufacture your products by
yourself. You will need a manufacturer.

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There are two types of manufacturers where you can source for products,
which are: Local and International. As a business owner, you should weigh
them side by side to determine what is best for your business and fits your
financial constraints.

● Cost: Local manufacturers are usually more expensive than

international manufacturers because of the higher cost of
manufacturing and even higher cost of labor in European or American
countries. Many Global manufacturers produce for cheap. But they
generally demand that you order many units, which could be a
challenge for new e-commerce stores.
● Communication: The majority of the top global manufacturers are in
Asia; the language barrier might be a problem to effectively
communicating what you want in your prototype, you may also be in
different time zones, and when you are free to efficiently communicate,
your manufacturer is at his busiest period. Local manufacturers are
much easier to communicate with, make corrections in the prototypes,
and have to do way less remodeling.
● Quality Control: If your business requires a lot of quality control, then
local manufacturing is probably the way for you, as you can ensure
consistency in the quality of your product because of the proximity
between you and your manufacturer. It is usually more difficult to
manage quality, especially for the first few times with an international
manufacturer.
● Time Factor: Local manufacturers will likely take more time to
complete manufacturing due to the relatively smaller scale of
production. In contrast, international manufacturers will complete
manufacturing faster but will definitely take a couple of weeks longer
to get your items shipped to you due to the distance involved.

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● Production Scale and Capacity: International suppliers can usually
produce on a large scale, unlike many local manufacturers. If you want
many units of products, for efficient production, it is advisable to
consider international manufacturers.
● Resourcing: Getting raw materials for production may be more difficult
for local manufacturers. If your projected product will be one with
scarce raw materials, it is advisable to go for international
manufacturers to ensure the best materials used for your products.
● Ease Of Finding a Manufacturer: It is quite easy to find a global
manufacturer for almost all products, but local manufacturers may be
scarce for a particular product. Even at times, geographical conditions
may prohibit the manufacture of some products in certain climes.
Generally, you'd find it easier to get a manufacturer for your product on
the global market than the local market.
● Importation: Importation can sometimes be unpredictable, as there
may be regulations for international shipping, causing constant hassles
and delays. It is vital to be abreast of the relationship between your
country and your manufacturers to know its effect on bringing in goods
to the country. If you are unsure, it is safer to go to a local manufacturer.

In all, there is no better one between local and international sourcing.

Still, as a business owner, you should understand your products and
adequately decide the better method of sourcing for a manufacturer.
Although it is important to note that as a startup, local sourcing is
usually more efficient, and eventually, you may be ready to move from
local to global manufacturing to get a higher volume of products at a
more affordable rate.

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 Searching for a Manufacturer
You can use Google and Bing to find a manufacturer. You can also try specific
business search engines like ThomasNet, also on Alibaba, you can find
manufacturers.
Once you find several manufacturers you might want to work with, it's time to
research them to know their track records and see reviews other businesses
have about them. Check also who they manufacture for, if they manufacture
for a well-known company, it may be a pointer that they will guarantee
quality.

Packaging: As earlier mentioned, your packaging is part of your identity and

your brand. No matter how great the product manufactured is, packaging
usually gives it aesthetics, making it more appealing. The packaging doesn't
necessarily have to be crazy. It only needs to be specific to your brand,
appealing and neat. The packaging is the very first part of the customer
experience because it is the first thing customers will notice when they get
your product, so it's important you get thinking about it, put yourself in the
position of the buyer, and look to impress yourself while being very critical. As

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I have reiterated, consumer experience goes a very long way in determining
the success of any business – online or offline.

To help inform your packaging decisions, it would be helpful to spy on other

sellers in your niche; you can order products from your competitors to allow
you see exactly how they package their products, see what they are doing
right, and take it as a pointer, critique what you think they are doing wrong,
and improve on it.

Search online for packaging ideas; Google and Pinterest are good avenues to
do this. Just search with your "product type" and packaging as the keywords,
and you have a barrage of results to choose from.

Things you need to know to effectively sell online

There are a couple of things you should bear in mind before you begin your
journey as a new E-commerce business owner. These little details sometimes
draw the lines between a business that sells effectively and one that doesn't

● Don't Focus Too Much On Premium Price Commodities: As a

startup, you should have a relatively low retail price range in mind as you
search for products. You should also not set your prices too cheap or too
expensive, to get good attention from the public. However, you should
not only consider manufacturing costs, but you should also consider other
running costs like advertisement, logistics, and so on. Although you want
to go cheap, do not engage in too cheap products as you may find it
difficult to get reasonable profit margins to make a profit or even break
even. You can set your minimum retail price at around $20, duly putting
your costs into consideration.

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● Sell Products with Good sales volume: During your market survey,
you should consider dealing with commodities that many people want;
note that products with high sales volume are not usually expensive or
luxury items. Sales volume is very important, If you are selling a product at
the cost of $20 with an estimated profit of $5. You sell 500 in a month,
then only one product has made you $2,500, unlike if you sell a product
worth $100 with an estimated profit of $15, and you can only sell 100 in a
month, that product will make you less money than the first product,
despite having a far greater profit. That is the impact of sales volume.
● Consider Products With Low seasonality: It makes sense to sell
products that will sell all around the calendar year, unlike products that
will sell in particular periods or seasons or holidays. Very seasonal selling
products will leave your business in a weak position.
● Judge Market saturation With Reviews: when selecting a product,
consider the number of reviews the top sellers get on global marketplaces
like Amazon. This will give you an idea of how much competition you are
likely to face. 100 to 200 reviews are good enough to get a customer base,
but above 200 reviews might indicate that you are going into a very
competitive market, which may not be good for a new business.
● Sell Products That Can Be Improved: You most likely will not be
the first person to think of a particular set of products. Many people would
have done the same; in fact, many people will create a successful product,
but you will only stand out among others if you create a superior product
achieved by regular modifications tailored to meet consumers' demands.
Therefore allow your customers to be the judge, encourage them to leave
a review. This will give you a hint on what they want you to improve.

● Sell Small and Lightweight Products: Huge and heavy products

will attract more shipping and storage; this is why going for small and

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 light products will keep your shipping costs and warehouse storage fees
at the barest minimum. And our most basic mathematics tells us that
fewer fees will give us more profits.
● Complexity In Manufacturing: You should avoid materials that you
sense will pose a couple of manufacturing challenges, resulting in great
customer dissatisfaction and more need for modifications, taking the
focus of your business from you. Keep it as simple as possible.

As I have previously mentioned, your customers are the most important; as

much as you want to sell something you love, you need to sell what will sell.
And in going into a competitive market, one thing that will attract customers
to you is your Unique Value proposition.

The Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is a sentence or phrase that explicitly tells
your potential customers what they stand to gain from shopping with you
rather than your competitors. How well your products can meet their needs
and solve their problems.

To efficiently satisfy end users, you need to think like them, put yourself in
their position, and make yourself see reasons why they should purchase from
you and not your competitors. If you cannot indubitably convince yourself,
then you cannot convince a customer.

You need to ask yourself, what benefits do the end-user find important?
What benefits can you give, but your competitors cannot? What benefits will
the target consumers easily understand? Is there something in your selected
niche you would like to buy online but can't find?
Your answers to this question will determine what unique value you need to
propose.

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Your Unique Value Proposition should be your watchword that even registers
in their subconscious. For example, Amazon's UVP is "Low price, wide
selection with added convenience anytime, anywhere."
This watchword of Amazon is what they follow, and it's what their customers
usually expect from them.

If you notice that statement, it is only a short sentence that passes a "this is
what you should expect" message to customers. That is how a UVP should be.
Precise, short, and concise.

In your market survey, you should note what holds a lot of importance to your
customers and make sure you offer them that exclusivity, and in no time, you
will be the benchmark in your selected niche.

Usually this UVP should be on your website and other newsletters you
publish. In constructing this short but powerful sentence, you need to be
unique such that you are difficult to copy and capture readers' attention, so
you should be careful not to use words difficult to understand.

Scaling
After doing all these and you have started seeing progress in your business as
you wish to, you will begin to have more demands than when you just started
out. To avoid being overwhelmed by these demands, you will need to expand
your business operations to meet the increased demand. This is what scaling
is all about.

You will discover that at certain points, your business becomes more stressful,
and you have started taking on too many tasks than you can handle, and

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barely have time for yourself. It is imperative to widen your operations and
bring on more personnel.

Even if you cannot fully employ staff, as you may feel it's too costly, you can
still outsource many things on a contract basis. Some tasks can be safely
outsourced to freelancers, especially things like a few administrative tasks
such as data collation and analysis, graphic design, marketing, copywriting,
and social media publicity. Although, as much as you want to outsource roles
and delegate responsibilities, you should take up roles that will directly affect
your business. It may not be wise to put control of your website in the hands
of some random person you met online. Instead, you can employ them on a
contract basis, build trust, and when you feel they can handle things on their
own, you may lend more backroom control to them.

Automation
Automation, which uses devices and software to reduce human intervention
in tasks, is another way to ease the burden of overloading yourself as a
business owner. Certain tasks you do manually can be automated to give you
more time to handle other things that need human intervention, to a good
extent, and even eliminating human errors.

Customer Service
Customer service is an important element for any business online or offline,
but it is key for E-commerce. Buying things online and the ease that comes
with it is very appealing, but there is always a concern about getting
substandard products or not getting what was paid for or even being
scammed. Giving reassuring and prompt assistance to customers will help
eliminate these concerns.

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Your customer service is part of your brand as a business owner; the way
customers report your customer service to non-users of your platform and
potential customers is part of who you are. If customers complain about poor
service about your newly growing brand, it could be a killer and a major
setback in your journey. Your accessibility to engage them and soothe their
grievances will go a long way.
Prioritizing your customers, for the umpteenth time, cannot be
overemphasized, they literally trust you with their money without knowing
you, and they deserve to be treated with utmost regard because they are a
business's greatest asset.

Things You Can Do To Improve Customer Service

● Set up a Customer Support Email that contains your company name,
e.g., support@ecommercebusiness.com
● Reply to Emails Quickly
● Write Email Templates to aid quick response
● Create a Chatbox on Your Website for live chat and a bot to handle
some part of it.
● Give Free Product to Unhappy Customers
● Save Repetitive Questions and Create Frequently Answered Questions
(FAQs)

Analyzing Competition in your Preferred Niche

It is important to identify your competition to understand their position and
how you can relatively place yourself to be at a vantage position, noting what
makes you similar to your competitors and what can make you stand out.

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Analyzing competition also helps you discover a few strategies your
competitors use to make their website rank well.

Steps Involved In Competitive Analysis

● Identify your competitors: To do a good competitive analysis, you need
to first know who you're up against. A keyword search is a good way to
do this. Identify websites doing well in this niche; competitors focused
on more than one niche but doing well in your selected niche are not
your biggest rivals. Rather, your strongest competitors are those in just
your niche. In searching keywords, as a fresh company, it is better to use
low competition keywords at first. When you have successfully
launched and have a rank, you can go for higher competition keywords
to make your rank even better.

You can also extract your competitor's keywords with tools like "Ahrefs"
or "Ubersuggest" or many other tools online.

● Watch Their Social Media: It is also a great idea to see how your
competitors are doing on social media, how their promotion and Ads
go, across several social media platforms, Twitter, Instagram, and
Facebook. You should see a pattern, which will help you identify their
objectives. You should duly note the kinds of content they upload on
these platforms and content people engage more. This will give you a
hint on where to channel your energy. Checking from several
companies and combining results for yourself will help you move faster.

On your social media, you need to get high traffic, and users of different
social media apps respond differently to different content. To identify
the content that engages twitter users, differentiate it from Facebook,
and eventually apply properly in your case.

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● Note their Unique Value Proposition: You need to know what
exclusive thing your competition offers, and you should offer something
catchier.

● Analyze Competitors Websites: Visiting your competitor's website will

help you understand how well they have optimized their web page to
please customers. Design themes used, content management,
customer engagements, frequency of posts, and many more things are
worthy of note. In essence, combine your strategy with some of your
competitor's best strategy and apply it to your own website to stay
ahead from the perspective of the customers.

● Analyze Content: It is important to note the type of content your

competitors are generating, their visual content (i.e., Images and
Videos), how they use it to breakdown their content, whether they
choose to give more information or seek to regularly dialogue with their
customers, discover what is not good enough and improve on it. Note
how deep their content is; you should give better-detailed content,
more information, and value your customers get from you will make
them rank you better.

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 CHAPTER SEVEN

Understanding the Concept of Dropshipping

Dropshipping in simple terms is getting supplies from a third party, listing

the products on your website without keeping products in stock. When you
get the order from a customer, the sale is passed to the third-party supplier,
who then ships the order to the customer.

Dropshipping appears for many as an easy way to make money because you
aren't faced with the problem of manufacturing and warehousing. However,
in reality, dropshipping is not a way to make easy money; when you factor in
all the problems, obstacles, difficulty in quality control, and the potential
negative ratings it could give your website, it's far from easy.

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 Benefits of Dropshipping

Dropshipping has a few benefits, which makes it ideal for consideration in

certain situations

● Reduces startup risks: Your market survey as a startup may not be

accurate, so actively spending on manufacturing these products, which
customers do not really fancy, will make it difficult to recoup capital and
profit early enough, which can be frustrating. Dropshipping will absolve
you from the costs of production, so if customers do not like it, you may
decide against selling it in the future.
● Lowers production costs: Since you aren't involved in manufacturing,
your costs are very minimal.
● Eliminates warehousing and logistics costs: The third party supplier
usually handles warehousing and may deliver to you for shipping or
handle shipping as well. But generally, the storage cost is reduced.
● Flexibility: The low risk involved in product selection offers fresh
E-commerce businesses flexibility in product selection.
● Protection from overselling: The market and demand may fluctuate in
ways that you don't even envisage. Rather than overstocking to meet
demands that aren't likely to come, having a dropshipping supplier as a
backup saves you money without losing those uncertain sales.
● Reducing Costs Even When Expanding Business Scope: One
unavoidable effect of an expanded business is expensive shipping. The
farther out you get from your region, the more shipping fees you'll
incur. Exorbitant shipping fee is a turn off for consumers. Dropshipping
can be the perfect solution for some problematic locations that fall
outside your profitable regions. Especially when you think that the
storage costs in setting up a new warehouse isn't financially viable. You
can also use dropshipping to determine the market demand in a

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 particular region, and if it's high enough, you could set up a warehouse
there.
● Better Handling Of High-maintenance products: Some products cost
more money and facilities to stock and ship than others. It is usually
better to Dropship these products than to store them yourself, to save
cost.
Examples of High maintenance products are large products that take a
lot of space, heavy products that are difficult to move from place to
place, Fragile products that must not be broken or destroyed, valuable
products that their loss could lead to a huge debt, and products with
special conditions (i.e., some food items that must be kept frozen)

Important Factors for Dropshipping

1. Research what products would fit well with your strategy, market, and
customer base.
2. Research how your competitors are selling the product, namely pricing.
3. Find the best supplier
4. Finalize a fulfillment process that works for both of you and incorporate
it into your system. Depending on your sales management software,
this could be easy or require ironing out some wrinkles.
5. List and promote your new product. Be sure to specify any special
conditions, such as changes in shipping times or locations.

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 How To Effectively Handle Third-party Suppliers and Quality Control
Third-Party suppliers are the most integral factor in the success of
dropshipping. They can ease your business or become a burden and cost you
resources in money, administration, and performance.

To avoid scenarios like these, quality control and assurance is vital in ensuring
that your business is eased and not worsened, and you should consider these
steps in selecting a third party supplier.
● Develop A supplier list: Every e-commerce business should have an
approved supplier list sorted hierarchically by metrics of performance
concerning cost, quality produced, and efficiency of delivery. Sorting
your suppliers will give you a first choice and subsequent choices for
different products at a time and add varying levels of importance to
individual suppliers.
● Quality Audits: Supplier quality audits are very important in ensuring
that the products from these third-party suppliers to be dropshipped
meet the pre-agreed quality specifications. Since you have a list, you
should audit for importance, scrutinize those suppliers that you know
are more critical to the product's availability and quality, and ensure
more frequent on-site audits to ensure that they have adequate quality
controls and measures. Also, ensure audits are an avenue to let the
supplier know what you have learned from the market survey and what
you feel should be scrapped, added, or improved.
● Keep Suppliers To a Minimum for Better Quality Control: The popular
phrase "the more, the merrier" doesn't apply in this case, as it makes a
lot of sense to keep dropshipped products at a minimum. More
products to be dropshipped will mean more suppliers are needed,
which will amount to a more challenging and costly avenue to monitor
quality. Like mentioned earlier, Dropshipping should be a means to aid

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 your business, do not enter your business around dropshipping. This
process of supplier rationalization enables you to develop a better
supplier list.
● Estimate Supplier Performance: You can easily measure supplier
performance with a couple of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such
as Delivery time, Response time, Defect rate, Inspection results, and
audit results

Managing your third-party supplier quality is not just about avoiding costly
customer backlash, bad reviews, or poor website rankings. When quality
control is adequately ensured, it generates great value for your business due
to overall standard product quality, boosting your company's reputation, and
bolstering high-quality business performance.

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 CHAPTER EIGHT

Digital Marketing as a Tool for Business Growth

Digital marketing uses the internet and other online-based digital

technologies, mainly with computers, mobile phones, and other digital
media and platforms to promote products and services for better reach.

The importance of digital marketing in modern-day businesses cannot be

overemphasized as it g helps your business make use of contemporary
techniques and strategies that will attract quality traffic to your business for
better engagement and conversion from interaction to purchase. Digital
marketing also makes it possible not to fly blind into the world of
advertisement. It helps to measure every click with analytic tools, which will
assist you as an e-commerce business owner in drawing up patterns that
consumers exhibit, which may influence buying. It also helps to give detailed
insights about the best way to reach your target audience so that you can
channel your energy in a particular direction due to the amount of data that
you can gather with the help of Digital Marketing.

There are many channels of digital marketing, some of which include:

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 ● Paid search marketing
● Pay per click (PPC) marketing
● Social media marketing
● Content marketing
● Search engine optimization (SEO)
● Affiliate marketing
● Email marketing

Paid Search Marketing: The paid search digital marketing is an

advertisement method that generates traffic from paid adverts on various
search engines. It may also be called search engine marketing (SEM). Paid
search campaigns can be run on Popular search engine platforms Google
Adwords, Yahoo Ads, and Bing Ads.

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing: Pay per click (PPC) digital marketing is a type
of advertisement where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad, or per
thousand Ads. Facebook Advertising and Twitter promotions are examples of
this.

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Social media marketing: This type of digital marketing encompasses all
advertisement you run on social media, such as Facebook, YouTube,
Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Twitter. It is one of the best ways to gain
exposure for your business and engage with your customer base on your
business' social media account; marketing your business on social media
without promotions takes a lot more time and effort, but if you hop on proper
trends and discussions, in the long run, it can deliver good results.

Content marketing: Content marketing involves any digital marketing

activity that uses content assets like eBooks, blog posts, images, infographics,
videos, etc. to engage customers' awareness, which will eventually lead to a
higher amount of clicks, and eventually sales. Your content should be one
that encourages feedback, interaction oriented, and a source of solution to
capture adequate attention.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): This digital marketing technique involves

the effective arrangement of content and keywords on a website as well as
the structure of your website to improve rankings in search engines, as
customers are unlikely to go to page two after a search, so you need to rank
as high as possible, even on the first page. SEO can be applied with a couple
of more non paid marketing strategies, as its aim is to ensure that your
content surfaces as many times as possible to ensure a higher ranking. This
strategy will be discussed more with more details in chapters to come.
Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing basically is paying a third party (a
person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website.
Rather than pay for clicks, you pay a commission to that third party for traffic
or sales that have been referred by that website.

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Email Marketing: Email marketing is a much-underrated part of digital
marketing because it is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing; however,
it is still one of the most effective digital marketing methods. Virtually
everybody checks their emails daily, even when they don't have enough time
to actively go on their social media applications. Sending email updates,
promos, freebies, and special offers, etc. to a list of subscribers can be a great
way to keep up contact with your existing customer base and also give
skeptical potential customers reasons to make a purchase.

Challenges of digital marketing

● Keeping Up with Web Trends might be difficult because it will require a
huge amount of online presence to know what people are talking
about. As a new business, you may not have the capacity to employ a
full-time social media manager.
● In a highly competitive digital space, content creation professionals will
be needed to create content that will Generate Traffic and Leads, and
not just generating them. Still, it must be able to have a high
conversion rate. You may decide to contract out your content creation,
but it cannot be as effective as having a content creator who knows the
nooks and crannies of your business and the content to create in that
regard. But funding for an increased salary structure may be a barrier.
● Sometimes getting a new set of customers via marketing overwhelms
E-commerce businesses that they tend to neglect the old ones, which
should not be so because your customers are your greatest assets.
● Budgeting the amount you want to use for marketing may be difficult,
especially when you use pay per click channels; as much as it is
advisable to be prudent with spending, slashing your marketing
budget may not allow it to yield proper results. The budgeting decision
sometimes becomes a herculean task.

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 ● Determining the returns made from marketing will require a lot of
communication with your customers; you need to know what
marketing channel is making enough conversion from clicks to know
where to focus your energy. It is easy to determine the number of clicks
you get, but if you are using more than one marketing channel, it
becomes difficult to know which clicks gets the most conversion.
Organizing surveys for new customers to ask how they heard about
your platform may help you handle this challenge.

In this age, Prospective customers are typically almost on their smartphones,

surfing the internet, devoting a ton of attention to it, so effective digital
marketing must mean that it can grab the attention of internet users by
communicating things that are in sync with your target audience. However,
Keeping in mind that different marketing channels take different times for
results is usually nice to merge various channels to properly target your
audience.

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 CHAPTER NINE

Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Out of the entire digital marketing channels and strategies listed above, you
must wonder why search engine optimization is the one being specifically
highlighted. Well, the reason isn't farfetched. Search Engine Optimization is
one of the biggest channels in digital marketing because people do trillions
of searches yearly, often with the intent to find information about products
and services they want to purchase. Search is often the primary source of
digital traffic, and almost all other marketing channels are one way or the
other dependent on it. Higher ranking in search results than competitors in
your niche will make you more visible. It will definitely have a direct impact on
your generated traffic, and SEO is tailored to do just that.

Search engine has been proven by many surveys and studies to be the
biggest traffic driver to websites, even more than social media. It is also
cheaper than social media because after you make the first set of payment
for tools (some tools can even be gotten for free), you do not pay recurring
fees; you just need to put in the effort to ensure that you remain high at the
ranks. That's the summary, cheap digital marketing with high conversion
rates.

Optimizing your website means that you want to create the best possible
result for your major keyword. Google and other search engines' goal is to
rank search results in a hierarchy of results that answer all of the searcher's
questions so well that they don't need to do another search for further
answers.

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 How to effectively utilize search engine optimization for the growth of
your online business
There are a few but important steps to take, which you need to pay utmost
attention to in effective utilization of SEO for boosting an e-commerce
business. They are:

● Keyword research
● Optimizing your website architecture
● On-Page Search Engine Optimization

Keyword Research
Keyword research is one of the most vital parts of SEO to ensure you target
keywords that are quite easy to rank for, have a reasonable search volume,
and likely have a high conversion rate.

However, choosing keywords is more than just considering how easy it is to

rank or how well it is being searched. But to choose the best keywords
possible, buyer intent should be factored in.

Buyer intent in simple terms is how decided an internet user is in their

decision to buy. For example, internet users who search for "beautiful kicks"
are probably most likely in a debate within themselves or with others; they
most likely aren't ready to buy. They could be comparing products, checking
reviews, etc. Well, I'll say you should leave those for the critic pages. But if a
user searches for "Nike air vapor max plus," they are most likely shopping
around for that particular pair of shoes looking for the best prices they can
get, which indicates an intention of purchase.

There are three ways to go about E-commerce keyword research to identify

search volume and buyer intent. They are;

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 ● Using Amazon for keyword research
● Using Competitors for keyword research
● Using paid SEO tools for Keyword research

Using Amazon for keyword research: Amazon is probably the largest

E-commerce business in the world, visited by hundreds of millions of people
daily, and also makes hundreds of billions in dollars yearly. Which shows that
it is a website having high buyer intent. People do not just go there for
sightseeing, they visit to buy.

Amazon Keyword Tool helps you to generate useful keywords using the
Amazon search suggest function. When you input a "seed keyword" (any
product you can think of in your selected niche) in the Amazon search box,
you will start seeing search suggestions predicting the best matches for the
entered words. Then, Keyword Tool pulls all the keyword suggestions
generated by Amazon and presents it to you in a concise manner, mark all
the keywords and add them to your list, then save that list of keywords for
your personal use or even download into .CSV or .txt files. One drawback of
this method is that Amazon doesn't provide search volume for keywords,
which is very important in our keyword selection. However, you can use other
paid SEO tools to get finer details, which we will examine shortly.

Using Competitors for keyword research: looking at high ranking

competitors in search results can be a good idea as you can use them to get
keyword ideas. It goes in two directions, however. You could;
i. Steal your competitor's keywords to compete for rankings in the same
search results.
ii. Find and begin targeting keywords that have not yet been targeted by
competitors.

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Although a competitor outranking you doesn't necessarily mean that they
have better keywords. They may have a higher domain authority than you,
giving them priority in searches.
Before looking for competitor keywords, you should know what keywords you
are already ranking for. A free SEO tool, e.g., Google AdWords, will help you to
see what kind of pages are generating the most attention for your website.
Then you can proceed to analyze competitors. Your competitors aren't every
business that sells a similar product or renders similar service to you. Instead,
you're going to be focusing on the businesses that already have a good rank
in the keywords and phrases that you want to rank for.

Your research will hopefully give you a list of five to ten competitors in your
industry that is ranking for the kind of terms that you want people to use
when they're searching for you. Now that you have that list, the next step is to
look for keywords that those competitors are ranking for that you're not. SEO
tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush can help you discover important areas that your
content does not cover. This will enable you to develop proper contents to fill
up this gap with your next digital content. There's usually a lot of keywords
related to you, so there is a good chance that you won't be able to rank very
high in all, so develop a list of keywords in order of importance to create
preference.

Using paid SEO tools for Keyword research: Using Pro SEO tools can help
you speed up and even automate your keyword researching, making it easy
for you to target keywords for your e-commerce SEO. Although you can use
free SEO tools like Google keyword planner, Ubersuggest, Google search
console to aid your keyword research, there are additional features you will
get from pro tools. And the great deal is that majority offer free trials, so if you
feel they aren't advanced enough, you can easily opt-out.

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A few examples are Keyword tool pro, SEMrush, Ahrefs, KWFinder, Jaaxy, and
many more.

Some of the special functions you can get from pro SEO tools is the Quoted
Search Result (QSR) tool, a function that highlights how many websites are
trying to rank for a particular keyword you searched. If competition were too
high, it would be advisable to use other keywords, as extremely high
competition will favor the best sellers. Jaaxy offers this special function.

Keyword difficulty (KD) is another function most pro SEO tools offer.
KWFinder and Ahrefs keyword research tool are some of the pro tools that
offer this function. KWFinder, by default, shows a Keyword Difficulty score
next to every keyword, so it absolves you of the need to click on each keyword
to see the difficulty score. Although this style can be vague and not specific
enough. Ahrefs, on the other hand, tells you the exact amount of backlinks
you will need to rank among searches on Google's first page.

Search Volume helps to know how many people are searching for a
particular keyword; too low searches probably mean there is no market, while
extremely high searches mean that the market is already oversaturated. Pro
SEO tools like Jaaxy, Keyword tool pro gives data on search volume to ensure
that you pick a keyword with an optimal amount of searches for good click
rates.

Competitor Analysis is a very special function that can be gotten from pro
SEO tools; Keyword Tool Pro especially offers you this. You basically just need
to input a competitor's website, the tool will generate a list of keywords based

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on the website content, and you can see what makes your competitor rank
higher than you.

SEMrush also shows you keywords that top businesses related to your search
already rank for, not just showing you keyword ideas; this will give you a path
to focus and help you streamline the keywords to work with. You only need to
enter your competitor's domain name, and you'll get the top 5 keywords that
your competitors are ranking for; you have the option to see more, and you'll
get a list of all of the keywords that the site or URL ranks for in their order of
ranking.
Some pro tools are relatively cheaper than others, and SEO at this point may
seem to not be your thing, but you can always hire SEO experts to tailor your
needs according to what you want. Surely, this book has opened your mind.

Optimizing your website architecture

Site architecture represents how your website is sorted into categories and
sub-pages. An optimized website is very important for search engines. A good
site structure makes it easy for search engine bots and crawl spiders to
navigate each page on your website.
If pages aren't properly linked together, these bots may not index them, or if
they are hidden, they may not find them, which is contrary to the ideal nature
of making every single page on your website readable by search engines. If
your structure is very good, in fact, your site links will regularly appear in
search results.

Apart from search engines, visitors to your website will also likely stay on your
page if your website has a good structure because of the ease of navigation it
offers them. All pages are interlinked such that users can reach each page

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with the least possible amount of without having to keep going back over
and over again; better user experience (UX) translates to more sales.

Website architecture is vital for e-commerce businesses due to the high

number of pages on your website, ranging from hundreds to thousands,
especially upon expansion – adding new products and categories; your site
structure gets even complicated.

Restructuring a website can be very messy even for professionals if it doesn't

have a standard architecture from the start.

When working on your site architecture, it is important to note that:

● Your structure is kept simple and scalable
● No page takes more than 3 clicks away from the homepage
● Have short URLs that humans can easily understand.
● Use high quality and attractive images; your product photos can appear
in Google image search, essentially doubling your exposure.
Website Speed: Your website speed plays a huge role in SEO because it
contributes greatly to the user experience on your website. Nearly half of
internet users expect a page to load in 2 seconds at most, and if it takes
longer, they tend to close the page or just open a new browser tab. One of
Google's ranking metric is User experience (UX), which is your website speed
is a major part of your SEO.

To optimize website speed, you need to know your current site speed.
Google's PageSpeed Insights is a good tool to see how fast your site is.
Several reasons could cause a slow website ranging from slow hosts and poor
server response time to very large images, crawlers, redirect issues, and many

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others. You should watch out for these and ensure they aren't affecting your
website.

Mobile-Friendly Websites: Google also uses mobile-first indexing, meaning

your site rankings will depend on mobile performance because more than
half of all internet traffic goes through mobile devices as more sophisticated
mobile devices are being manufactured. So it is important to see that users
enjoy the best mobile experience to maintain a high ranking in Google
searches.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization

On-page SEO refers to all the measures you can take within your website to
ensure that it ranks high enough and generates higher traffic in search
engines. Some of the things to watch out for on-page SEO are;

Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs are small text-arrow paths, usually at the top of

a page; they serve as secondary navigation. It allows users to know the exact
location where they are while navigating your website. Knowing where you
are on a website, plus the added ability to go to a previous page or category
enables a better User experience (UX). Google also loves breadcrumbs
because it helps to figure out how your website is structured. Breadcrumbs
can also appear in the search result.

Secure Connection: Having a secure (HTTPS) connection is very important

for ranking your e-commerce site. Your site security is important to Google
before directing users to ensure encrypted browsing and safe navigation,
preventing hackers from stealing personal information like passwords and
credit card details.

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Run a full SEO audit: E-commerce websites usually suffer from technical SEO
issues due to many pages on a website. These issues can hamper
performance and, in the process, give a poor user experience.

Things you should check out for when running an SEO Audit
● Avoid duplicate content as Google might not index such pages.
● Make sure you implement redirects properly to avoid slow performance
● Poor redirects can also cause indexing issues as they lead to orphaned
pages (pages with no links pointing to them), making it difficult for bots
and crawlers to access them for indexing.
● Avoid broken links, as Google will lower your rank if you usually have
"error 404" because of your unreliability for searchers and the poor user
experience it brings about.

Work On Link building: One of the strongest pointers to how well your
website is optimized is the number of external links that point to it (backlinks).
Without backlinks, it's really hard to rank in a competitive niche. Backlinks are
the most difficult part of your whole strategy as they drive traffic to your
website. Although many business owners just buy backlinks from sellers to
rank well in search results, it is important to try and make them organically, to
save cost, and because it usually lasts longer than when you buy from sellers.
Also, bought links can be bad, which will harm your website instead of
ranking them higher.

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 Essential Pages To Have On Your Website

● Shop: There should be a separate link to your store, even if you have products
for sale on the home page. You should have a store where you will further sort
products into categories.
● Shipping/returns: Provide necessary information on the way to go on
shipping, your return policy, and your money back policy all next to each
other in a quite obvious position on the website.
● Contact/help: There should be clear customer support emails and social
media handles.
● Frequently Asked Questions: As you engage customers with their issues,
you'll start getting a certain set of questions several times. Instead of just
emailing the same several times, you should compile them on a "Frequently
Asked Questions" FAQ page.

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 CHAPTER TEN

Becoming Profitable as an E-Commerce CEO

Being profitable as an E-commerce CEO is, in reality, a combination of

gathered information and knowledge, including everything listed in the
chapters above and even things not listed.

But first, after making all necessary market surveys, niche and keyword
researches, adverts to make a buzz on social media about your opening, you
need to keep in touch with your potential customers. How can this be
achieved?

Create A Landing Page: A landing page is usually created weeks before the
official opening of your store. You drop your website link on your ads, and
potential customers go there, and to everyone that visits, the landing page
comes up with a lead magnet (freebies you offer potential customers in
exchange for their details). You can offer them free shipping on the first order,

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or a 10% discount on all items or something else you think can be enticing
enough to make the potential customer drop their email address. The
submitted email addresses are collated into an email list, where you can send
a reminder newsletter upon your launch.

Maintain Social media Presence: You should be on social media well before
and even after your store launches. You can use influencers on Twitter or
Instagram to push campaigns that will make you on every mobile phone,
before, during, and after your launch – you want to stay fresh in memories.

Learn To Maintain Good Customer Relations: One way to grow your

e-commerce store is to make your few regular customers. This is even easier
than finding new customers altogether. Because of some level of trust
already built, you are more likely to easily sell to an old customer than to a
fresh customer. Offer discounts for returning customers, or for cheap items a
"buy one, get one free" coupon. You could also give customers another item
related to the first item they bought at a cheaper rate.

For example, "you just bought a new Apple Macbook pro, would you like to
buy a new laptop bag at a 10% discount". This will, of course, seem appealing
to the buyer, and even if he didn't have it in mind before, he would definitely
consider it.

Communication: As this book has mentioned several times, your customers

are your biggest assets. Communicate with them as you care, and they will
return the favor. And vice-versa.

Keep Tabs On Data: Tracking key statistics and data for your store can help
you maintain organization, save money, and help you avoid mistakes. Pay

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attention to performance indicators, and you will run a business that will yield
optimal profit.

Be Ready To Face Challenges: You are your own biggest challenge; the
moment you can overcome the pessimism within yourself, despite
understanding how challenging E-commerce can be, you should be ready to
face many challenges at the beginning, and even after you are off and
running. As you grow, you will become stronger against challenges.

Mistakes are a Part Of The Business: You definitely cannot have it all figured
out initially. You have to be fine with making mistakes, and learning from
those mistakes to build experience, so that you won't repeat similar mistake.
When you take a wrong step, return to the drawing board, analyze your
failures, re-evaluate and form a new strategy, to make progress.
I wish you good luck as you embark on your fresh journey as an E-commerce
CEO.

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 What Email Marketing Really Entails

Email marketing is an underappreciated digital marketing medium that

involves the strategic sending of emails from a company to prospective and
existing customers. When correctly done, email marketing converts skeptics
and prospects into customers and turns one-time buyers into lifelong loyal
customers.

One preposterous take from digital marketers, especially those who work
with social media, calls Email marketing outdated because it is an old digital
marketing method. As old as Email marketing is, it is still one of the most
effective digital marketing methods because it directly reaches the audience.
Nearly all internet users have an email address, and virtually all persons check
their mails daily in the modern age, especially with the growth of technology,
which enables all internet activity on mobile just as much as desktop. A

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simple notification at the top of a person's screen shows a preview of the
message, just like every other instant messaging apps. Such a person can just
check immediately; even when the person doesn’t have time to actively
check through social media, they still have a very high (almost impossible)
tendency to check their emails. So calling email marketing “dead” is a rather
outlandish conclusion, as it is one of the best ways to communicate with an
audience, promote your brand, even with a low budget, and consumers like it.

Email marketing helps you directly connect with your leads, just like texting
your friends, keeping up with them, and making them attached to your
brand, beating your competition. It is also customizable, as you can create
several emails for several segments of your list. Because you own your list, you
are sure that you can keep total control of it if you lose your Facebook, Twitter,
or Instagram account; however, you can lose communication with your leads.
Like I said earlier, email marketing has been a relatively underappreciated
channel, especially with the rise of social media, but you can derive optimal
use from it for your business. Generally, for every mail you send, on average,
you are likely to get a 20% open rate. It could be more or less, depending on
many factors, including your content appeal, your niche, and your cordiality
with your audience.

Addressing your potential and existing customers by the first name could
make people pay more attention to an email, as it sounds personal (This will
be discussed further as we progress). So if you have 10,000 people on your
email list, with a 20% open rate, you should be expecting nothing less than
2,000 website visits, especially when you have a call to response protocol. As I
said, it could be more, and it could be less. This guide thoroughly examines
the dos and don’ts of email marketing to ensure you get the best value for
your marketing.

Building an Email List

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An email list typically includes a list of names, email addresses, and perhaps
other data (like company name or income level). There is a trendy phrase
about email marketing that goes; thus, “the money is in the list,” which
means that the better your email list is, the more leads and clicks you are
likely to get from it.

Even as a beginner, it is never too early to create an email list; in fact, it is one
of the very first things you should consider; your list should grow alongside
your website. If you have a brick and mortar store, you can start with the list of
people coming around, but if you have an online store, you have to build a list
from the very first visits to your website and even from among your offline
connections.

One shortcut that many business owners get enticed with is the idea of
buying an email list rather than going through the laborious yet rewarding
method of organically creating a list. It looks like a way to cut corners and save
time, but this is wrong and fallacious; in fact, it is a massive waste of time and
money, and you will never get the actual value of email marketing. There are
a few reasons I will highlight as to why buying a list is bad, and you should
totally avoid it! They include:

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● Poor Quality Lists: People who sell email lists aren’t obliged to be
honest with you, you want a list quickly, and they want money just as
quick. Of course, they will make several claims about the authenticity of
the list, but you cannot verify it, and it likely has a lot of problems, some
of which you may not even discover. For example, inactive email
addresses, you definitely do not want to send your mails to ghosts, and
these bought lists will give you a high number of “ghosts.” It is also
possible that the data is false; the names and other information about
people on the list could be wrong, making you address people wrongly.
There is no shorter route to abandoning a mail than that. If you receive
mail that was wrongly addressed, you will most likely report it as spam
for fear of fraudulent activities, and you definitely do not want this to
happen to you if you buy Email lists.
● Illegal Collection Of Emails: The Email addresses on a bought list are
usually illegally gotten from the internet randomly. Obviously, nobody
has chosen to be on your list if you bought them, so it’s going to be
worthless because nobody has asked to be on them. You could also
face legal charges, as much as tens of thousands of dollars per email
you send illegally. Like the CAN-SPAM Act of the United States, several
countries and regions have their email policy with different charges and
penalties for illegal emails.
● You’ll Be Spamming: According to Oxford, Spamming is “sending
unsolicited messages indiscriminately to a large number of internet
users.” If nobody has chosen to be on that list you have, sending emails
to them is tantamount to spamming. I’m sure you personally detest
receiving unsolicited emails, almost everyone does anyway, and you
probably delete those emails, mark as spam, and probably unsubscribe
since you never asked for it. You may believe that your email content is
well packaged and catchy with credible information. Still, the recipient

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 only sees another company spamming their way into his/her inbox and
will most likely not pay attention to the content.
● Other Companies Use The same List: As mentioned earlier, the
individual or organization that sells you a list owe you no loyalty or
exclusivity, as they want to make quick money. There is the possibility of
selling the list to another company. People typically unsubscribe to
emails and even pick the option of “not receiving emails from similar
companies,” Your messages will go directly into the spam box. Even if it
goes into their inboxes, you have lost the touch of exclusivity and
owning your list, and you are now in competition with other companies
for the attention of your audience.
● It Is Against the Policy Of Email Service providers: Many Email service
providers (the companies that send out your emails) have terms of
service that considers buying email list spamming, which is against
their terms of service. It could lead to your account's closure, you could
get fined, and even some email providers may file legal charges against
you.

This will be triggered if too many of your messages get marked as spam,
and you will quickly get your account flagged. You’ll quickly get on the
wrong side of your email service provider.

● Poor Open and Response Rate: Upon several research and data, it has
been found that a reasonable open rate is usually not less than 20%,
and a response rate of 5-10% is usually considered adequate. Open rate
is the number of people that open an email you sent out of everyone
who receives it (not everybody will receive the emails you sent), while
the response rate judges the number of people that respond to your
emails. If you have an email list of 10,000 names and send out an email.
An excellent open rate will guarantee you that at least 2,000 people will

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 open your emails, and out of those 2,000 people, 500 to 1,000 people
click on your links, you will have about 500 to 1,000 purchases of your
new product. A $50 product could fetch you between $25,000 to
$50,000, which is an excellent sell rate.

If your list, however, comprises of people who do not want to be there, it’s
just as good as shooting yourself in the foot because the majority will not
open, not to talk of following the links. You can have an open rate as low
as 5% and a click rate even worse; you may as well sell nothing.

● It’s Bad For Brand Reputation: Apart from the fact that your email
service provider can file serious charges against you, getting you in the
spotlight for all the wrong reasons, even worse repercussions can be
encountered from buying email lists. People on your email list can
interact with one another on Twitter about how your company violates
privacy rights and illegally collecting details to send emails. These can
even appear on Google’s first page when the name of your company is
searched for. This is a red flag for potential customers and people who
aren’t even on your list. You could also be tagged as fraud by an angry
online mob who feels that your offers are unsolicited and could be
fraudulent. Reputation is crucial online, and you will need to spend a lot
of money and effort to fix a destroyed reputation online because “the
internet never forgets.”

Now that you understand the importance of building your list yourself and
not just buying any list from a random individual or online body, you must
learn how to properly build a list. The first thing to achieve this is knowing
who you want to sell to.

Understanding your target audience is essential, as you need to know who

you are targeting before you start building an email list. Understanding the

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buyers’ perspective is usually helpful in delivering content to them. If you
understand what a person likes, it will be easy to make attractive offers. You
should have a marketing persona – a virtual character representing your ideal
customer by having data of the primary characters of a group of your
potential customers, to design the best content and user experience for
them. A market persona, in short, will help you have an idea of who these
people are, helping you understand them and hence improving your services
and offers to them.

Having lists is vital, as you already know by now, but having an engaged list of
subscribers is more important. This epitomizes the interest of people in your
brand and what you have to offer. To grow your email list while ensuring that
you get a list of people interested in your service, you need to consider a few
things. They are:

The sign-up form: The sign-up form on your website is the dialog box where
your visitors submit their email address to subscribe to your emails and get
your offers. The most important information is the email address. Still, these
forms usually have other information like location, interests, and other details
that allow segmentation of the email list (This will be elaborated as we
proceed). Sign-up forms typically appear during a session when a visitor is on
your website as a pop-up covering the entire screen or takes part from the
side or from the top.

A sign-up form is where you must convince your website visitors that your
emails are worth signing up for. An alternative to Sign-up forms are landing
pages. However, I recommend using them together with information while
offering freebies to entice the visitor to submit details, called lead magnets.

Landing Pages: A landing page is a page where a visitor “lands” following an

ad or alternative clicks, containing information about your product and what
you want to offer. The important thing on the landing page should focus on

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what you want to offer, possibly painting it as a one-time offer; a “take it or
leave it scenario” that probably boxes the visitor into a corner, making them
subscribe as they anticipate some value in return. There are many approaches
to go about landing pages; in truth, one isn’t better than the other, but
depending on your niche, product type, and prospective customers, some
approaches are usually more appropriate than others. The simplicity of design
(optimizing fonts, images, texts, and colors) and their overall appearance. A
bad landing page will ruin the collection of emails for your list in ways you
don’t anticipate. If a visitor lands on your page, and it is poorly designed, there
might be hesitation in trying out your lead magnet because the eyes are the
most sensitive sense organ, sending signals to the brain more times than any
other sense organ. So working on perfect aesthetics is never a waste of time.
It should not be overloaded with information as you don’t want to bore out
the visitor; you only need to get their details, so use a proper lead magnet and
make your landing page have as little information as possible. Some Landing
pages work better with specific lead magnet, so you may need to try out
different approaches to help you choose the best possible landing to click
conversion ratio.

Lead Magnets: Lead magnets are freebies you give away as bait. To get
people’s details for your email list, they could be free videos, e-books,
coupons, discount offers, and generally things that entice a visitor to make
them subscribe. But your lead magnets need to be attractive and offer value
to your prospects. Your prospective customers must be able to see that you
are giving them something valuable – worth reasonable money for free. In
fact, it must be something they will be willing to pay for. Just like a magnet
that was built to attract metallic objects in its field, if it is bad, it won’t attract
any metal, or metals that even get attracted will not stick. Hence your freebie
needs to hold value, otherwise you risk losing out on potential leads, and even
if they have initially subscribed to your email list, poor content can make

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them stop checking your mails or worse – unsubscribe as they are
uninterested in the preview they have gotten.

If your giveaway item, on the other hand, is very attractive, your new
subscribers will be on the lookout for more of your mails because they believe
in the inherent value. Even paid items will appear to them as a bargain. So
you shouldn’t feel you are giving too much as a lead magnet because in the
long run, you will definitely make gains from it.

It is possible to integrate a sign-up form into a landing page, Usually signing

up isn’t the first thing you’ll see on a website, but with a landing page, you
can incorporate sign-up form, especially if your product or service needs more
information for email list segmentation. With extra details provided by the
sign-up form, you can effectively optimize your email list.

There are different types of sign-up forms, based on how they appear on a
User’s screen. Some of which include:

● Static sign-up form: These are static blocks of form that appear when
an internet user visits your website. Usually located anywhere on the
page. It can also have a specific dedicated page for users who will follow
clicks and backlinks to your page.
● Pop-up form: Pop-up forms appear on a webpage, especially when
reading a blog post, often after the internet user has settled in and
absorbs information. Usually, a little less than a minute after landing on
the page, the pop-up form will show. Usually, the content in the form
and the lead magnet will relate directly to the blog post or piece of
information being consumed, further enticing visitors to input their
details. Pop-ups usually boast of high conversion because the content is
directly linked to the form; Internet users are intrigued and probably
want to try it out, especially when the lead magnet is almost irresistible.
Although it is worthy to note that if the visitor hasn’t consumed enough

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 information, the pop-up may seem like a distraction, and he will just
close immediately, thereby ignoring the form. This is why the timing of
the pop-up is very important.
● Notification bar form: A notification bar form is less intrusive than a
pop-up form; it comes from the top of the page, catching some
attention while giving the user permission to keep reading. However,
because it offers no form of hindrance to the reading of the article or
blog post, the visitor may forget to check out the notification. This can
be a very common situation as human beings have low attention spans
● Slide-in form: A slide-in form is also less intrusive than a pop-up form
and can be more effective than the notification bar form. It is also a
good way to incorporate sign-up forms into web pages with a lot of
content. Because the visitor would have consumed very little
information within the first one minute, it is important to wait until a
very sizable part of the information has been gotten. A slide-in form
usually “slides in” from the lower corner of a page. Particularly the
bottom right, so Users would have almost exhausted the content before
getting the slide-in form. Because they have good information and
valuable content, they will sign-up if it suits their demands. However,
sometimes users aren’t patient, and they may not even get to the end
of the post, probably after gaining the needed information from earlier
parts of the web content. Making you miss out on some potential leads.

Your form should give the visitors explicit information on what to expect from
you; this is important as it will ensure that the people who are signing up to
your list are the exact people you want to make the quality of your list very
high. Making your emails stay further away from the spam folder. The form
should clearly explain what users stand to gain by signing up for your list and
how frequently you'll be sending (i.e., daily, weekly, twice a week, fortnightly);

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explicit information on all these will mean that the subscribers are fully aware
of what they have signed up, increasing the chances of a very good open rate
and avoid being in the “spam” discussion.

Other important things to note about your form are;

The call-to-action command: If you have registered on a website before, you

probably would have seen different Call-to-action (CTA) commands. The
call-to-action command is usually at the completion or submission stage of
the sign-up form. Where after inputting details, you need them to submit.
Here, you should get creative rather than using the normal cliché “sign-up”
command; you can use more catchy phrases like “Get my free eBook now” or
“I want to try out new product offers up to 30% discount”. Get creative and
draw your readers in; it’ll really help to get more people to submit their details.
It also serves as a reminder of the lead magnet and helps the visitor consider
the offer.

The location: Many websites focus their sign-up forms on only their
homepage as they believe that it is the first place that visitors will encounter
before going anywhere else, forgetting that some people will visit the website
via search engines or other backlinks to the website. The sign-up form should
not be limited; it should appear on nearly every page that users will get the
tiniest bit of information. The aim is to grab attention, and your blog posts are
even more likely to get visitors attracted than your homepage. It is also
possible that different locations have different types of forms to ensure
optimization and the best possible User Experience. User experience is very
important as it is a factor considered by Google in ranking websites. In
conjunction with other factors, User experience determines your website
rankings on search engines.

The design: Create simple designs that make information easily processed
and maybe a color that matches your website or in sync with your brand

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identity. You can use more than one color to show emphasis on important
things, and a very bright, catchy color should be used for the CTA command.

Other Channels to Build Your List

Social Media: Reach out to your social media audience if you have one and
encourage them to subscribe to your email list, of course, by using coupons
and bonuses or other valuable lead magnets. This will expand your reach and
expose you to a potentially higher number of visitors. Share intriguing or even
controversial posts from your blog, which will make people get snippets of
engaging content, making them interact and follow up on the links. If you
have a Facebook business page, you can add a sign-up form to it, and voila!
You get email addresses from your own followers. In other social media
platforms like Twitter and Instagram you should have your bio link, make
promotional posts, and direct them to your bio.

Collect subscribers offline: Interact with people from several events, telling
them about your products and services, and if you own a physical store, great!
Send a Google forms link to your customers; this approach ensures
one-on-one interaction, and you can even convince them better, no matter
how small the audience is.

Email Marketing Strategies

Planning is the first step that should be considered before taking any form of
decision to enable you to remain in line. Before you begin collecting emails,
you need to have a plan with clear set goals. You need to understand what
you want to achieve, how well you expect your sales to increase, how cordial
you want to be with your subscribers, how email marketing can fit in with
other marketing strategies you want to employ, and the effect on your overall
marketing income. Because of the dynamic nature of humans, these goals
will be updated as you go, but it is important to know what you want to do
first while making sure that they can be achieved. These goals may change or

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evolve over time; it's important to consider the purpose of your emails and set
goals that are both measurable and attainable.

As previously said, it is never too early to begin to plan. This will help you grow
faster, as you have a plan and enough time to dedicate to ensuring the
success of the plan. Some of the strategies to consider include:

Quality Blog Content: The most common strategy in building an email list is
creating a blog, delivering quality content, which drives traffic to your
website. If people love your content, they are likely to subscribe to receive
updates on future content and exclusive offers related to the content they
have just consumed. Content creation may be demanding in terms of time
and personnel, but it is definitely worth it, as people are always looking for
answers online to numerous questions they have. Give them answers to these
questions, especially those linked to your niche, and try to get a few
information from them to give them more content. The email address is the
most important detail to get, but you can get a few more details. Your
content must be valuable. In any marketing strategy, you want to apply,
content is key. No matter how you water a bad seed, it won’t germinate
properly, but if you water a good seed appropriately, you will get the desired
plant. For visitors to turn to subscribers, they must love your content.

Engaging Email content: It is important that the content in your email is

conversational; your content should be aimed at getting the recipient to open
and engage. This will foster goodwill as your audience will interact with your
website. Ask what they think, let them share opinions. This causes loyalty and
gets the emotional part of them, causing attachment to your brand.

Use Irresistible Lead Magnets: As you already, lead magnets are enticing
offers that provide value for free or cheap. To ensure optimal effectiveness of
your lead magnets, you should ensure that;

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 ● It is easily exhaustible; people get bored easily, so if you are offering a
free guide, you should keep information concise for easy consumption.
If your audience does not consume the lead magnet, then it has lost its
purpose.
● Your lead magnets should be applicable and effective. When the free
product has reasonable effects, people won’t hesitate to pay for
products.
● Ensure that your lead magnet is relevant for your target audience. If you
use a lead magnet for the wrong audience, your efforts will be futile.
Remember to have a well-defined market persona.
● Make sure it is readily available; you don’t want them to forget about it.

Utilize Sharing: Social sharing is a great tool; adding a “share” call-to-action in

your email content can double your click-through rates. Sharing is not limited
to getting more clicks and engagement; it should also increase your
subscriber list. If your offer is valuable, and someone shares with his contacts,
if they profit off it, they are likely to stay subscribed to get first-hand
information about future offers. Sharing is a great tool for exponentially
increasing brand awareness.

Personalize Email Content: Cordiality is something you want to achieve, and

personalizing the content of your emails is a great approach to achieving this.
The emails will make more meaning to them. Personalization goes beyond
addressing subscribers by their first name but giving content that will
exclusively be beneficial to each of your subscribers. This can be achieved by
segmenting your list of subscribers (Discussed in the next chapter).
Segmenting your list has a lot to do with giving exclusive offers and
information to people on different lists, helping you build a better cordiality
with your subscribers.

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When they have the knowledge that they are receiving exclusive content
tailored to suit their needs, you will get loyal subscribers.

Utilize Urgency: Humans naturally have an inclination to procrastination or

second-guessing situations, but if your emails add a sense of urgency, you will
convert more subscribers to customers. “Only available to the first 100 clicks”,
“grab your spot now,” “Hurry,” and other similar words and phrases can put
your subscribers under pressure because they do not want to miss out.
Because of the inclination towards procrastination, a push to hurry will be
effective to ensure they click as soon as they is a limited-time offer or
limited-customer offer.

Use cliff-hangers: A cliff-hanger is a suspenseful and intriguing ending to a

plot that makes you interested in what happens next. Just like in movies, and
novels or even Television shows, where cliff-hangers keep your mind fixed on
the next episode or chapter. They can also be useful in emails sent to your
subscribers. They should be excited to open your new email because they
want to see the new content your email brings. It is a good way to make your
subscribers anticipate and get cordial with you. Cordiality is important in
keeping your subscribers loyal because humans can easily get bored with
routines.

Avoid Excessive Call-To-Actions: You should avoid clogging your email with
several Call-To-Actions, let every email have a target, request just one action
from your subscribers because multiple CTAs make conversion difficult.
Subscribers have different options of actions and often get lost in the process
of deciding what to do, in the end, they may as well do nothing. It is better to
have one clear CTA per email, which can be repeated a few times because
people may forget easily.

Aesthetics Matter: It is important to ensure that your emails are pleasing to

the eye. No matter how great your content is, if it is not pleasing to the eye, it

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may not even be read at all. The eye is very sensitive to colors, the beauty of
design even more than text, which can be an influential factor to determine if
your subscribers will enjoy reading your emails.

Your email marketing service provider will likely provide you with templates,
pick cool colors that are easy on the eye yet catchy enough. It is also
important to pick a color that is in line with your brand. Avoid clutters of
colors and designs as it can make the email look really terrible, especially for
mobile users. It is important to note that the majority of subscribers will view
their emails on mobile. Strategically place images in between large texts to
make the texts better processed as readers will largely skim through; long
texts are usually tiring and may be avoided. Some catchy images in between
can help break up the texts. It is also important to avoid clogging emails with
texts and images, blank white spaces between texts and images – where
appropriate, helps the eyes read them better. Blank space in your emails
frames your content nicely, which helps increase readability. Use catchy colors
for your call to action and ensure the command is large enough to attract
attention. Always have it in mind that your content will be viewed on different
types of devices. Hence keep them simple.

You can format your emails in a text or HTML format. An HTML format gives
you the liberty to have special characters, colors, and text processing to bold,
italics, etc., while plain texts allow only text, no images, or extra formatting is
allowed. If your HTML link is broken, it can totally distort the output in your
subscriber's device. Still, fortunately, many email marketing service providers
usually have a default option of displaying text only if the HTML link is broken.
You should use tools like “Email on Acid” to get a preview of how your email
will look on different devices to ensure you’re getting it right.

Properly Schedule Emails: Timing is important when sending out your

emails to ensure that people are reading them and taking action on them.

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There is no specific time this guide can recommend for you, but you should
make a market survey of the modal send times of emails from companies in
your niche. You can also employ a trial by error method with the use of
analytics. Send at different times, and see what works best. You should also
have a steady send schedule. Your subscribers should know what day(s) of the
week to expect your emails, be consistent with it.

Email Marketing Service Providers

Email marketing service providers are supposed to provide you a platform to

send broadcast emails and autoresponders to your leads while ensuring
proper segmentation, analytics, templates, and properly obeying commercial
email regulations so that your emails won’t end in the spam box.

A few good examples are Constant Contact, Drip, Send In Blue, AWeber,
Convert Kit, Get Response, and Mailchimp.

The Types of Emails You’ll Use in Email Marketing

In pushing your business with email marketing, there are three types of
emails that you’ll rely on. They are Transactional emails, Relational emails, and
Promotional emails.

Transactional emails are sent to your customers to confirm transactions they

have made on your website. They include;

● Order Confirmations: When customers place orders, confirmation

emails of such orders are sent to the customers. These emails have high
open rates because the customer has just spent money, and wants to
be sure that there is no mistake. If there are no issues, the customer is
probably happy with the purchase and waiting to receive, you could
seize this opportunity to suggest related items. If the customer orders
equipment, you could recommend additional accessories that can

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 enhance that equipment's usage, and even if the customer doesn’t
order immediately. He will have it in mind.
● Purchase Receipts: Just like order confirmations, these emails are
usually frequently opened because people definitely want to see their
receipts and need a call-to-action button to make a complaint if
something is off. Here you can throw them a survey about the user
experience on your website; they may be happy to give this information,
to help you serve them and others better.
● Shipping Notices: This email is probably one that will be opened more
than once as they want to grab hold of their shipping and tracking
details. You should give a link to your website for tracking items; there is
a huge chance they will navigate your website again and see other
items they are interested in.
● Return Confirmation: When customers return your product, then they
are definitely disappointed and unhappy due to the fact that they have
spent some time waiting for the order to get shipped and they have
gotten something they don’t want, and they have to wait for a couple of
hours or even days for a refund. This is a time to offer coupons and
offers to persuade them to try you out once again. Even if they don’t
take it, your excellent customer service can help salvage your
reputation.

Relational Emails are used to engage subscribers and customers and keep
your relationship with them intact. A few examples are:

● New Subscriber Welcome: This email should be sent immediately to

every new subscriber, telling them that they have signed up as
subscribers to your updates, let them know what to expect and the
value they will derive from being on your list. You should do the same
for users who newly created an account with you, provide them login

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 details. You can give them a link to frequently asked questions or other
things that can make it easier to understand your services.
● Lead Magnets Delivery: You have most likely collected the details of an
email subscriber by promising to give a free item of notable value.
When you deliver this item, you should utilize survey tools to ensure
that after consuming the freebies, they can say how helpful it is for
them. This will always help you improve on your content to deliver the
best available offer.
● Newsletters/Blog Articles/Events: Whenever you create content or
host events, you should inform your subscribers in simple,
straightforward messages, providing links to it. Backlinks to your
website will improve your website authority and improve rankings for
search engines.
● Support Tickets: Support tickets give you an opportunity to discuss a
customer's grievances, with several follow up emails to ensure
customer happiness and satisfaction. If it costs the customer time or
money, you can attempt to compensate with coupons.

Promotional Emails are used to influence customer decisions to generate

sales. While they can fetch you a lot of money and clicks, they should be used
alongside relational content, personalizing the email to subscribers and
customers, keeping them engaged, and they may just want to check out your
promo. Some examples are:

● Promotional Sale Announcements: Human beings naturally like free

and cheap things, so an announcement of promotional sales will fetch
you a lot of engagements because of the lower prices they anticipate
from it. An example is the black Friday sales, announcing this will
generate a lot of traffic and engagement to your website. People would
love to seize the opportunity to buy items that were too expensive

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 before that time. This also turns your customers and subscribers into
marketers for you as they will be eager to tell their families and friends
about the cheap deal they are about to get from your website.
● New Product Release: Be quick to let your subscribers know about a
very anticipated product, and even give the first few people a coupon
or a discount. Make them anticipate the release as well, from a month
to go, two weeks to go, a week to go, a few days to go, and the launch
date. This action keeps interested customers on their toes, and they will
make their purchases almost immediately.

Methods by Which You Can Send Emails To Your Subscribers

You can either manually send emails to your subscribers via broadcasts to
your entire list or a segmented part of your list. These are usually done for
relational and promotional emails, although there are templates provided by
your email service provider to make the process less stressful. You can also
have templates to achieve this yourself.

You can automatically send emails to your customers and subscribers via
Autoresponders, which are programmed to send an email when a customer
triggers an action. For example, when a customer signs up and gets a
confirmation link in his email address within seconds, it is a result of
autoresponders. You can automate some relational emails. If your templates
and algorithm are properly set, it won’t even look like an automated email.
For many email marketers, the larger parts of their emails are automated.
Autoresponders are created in advance to ensure that you send emails to
customers at the appropriate time, walking your subscribers and customers
through necessary processes and helping them make decisions.

Creating an Effective Autoresponder

It is possible to over automate or under automate your processes; you don’t
want to over automate so as not to make the subscriber feel like they are

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communicating with a robot, though they are. You also do not want to be
tagged as a business with a low response rate. To ensure the optimal use of
autoresponders, the following strategies should be considered.

● Send new subscribers an onboarding/welcome sequence. A welcome

sequence is a set of emails sent to the new subscribers that brings
them through a journey where there is a clear goal (like learning
something new) and a clear action they’ll need to take (perhaps being
your premium products). This is one of the most important moments,
to show your new subscribers your competence, what you offer, build
trust and showcase your products. In this phase you can make the most
and create a great first impression to give a head start to the
relationship with the potential customer.
● If your business offers services or you have an online store, you could
use autoresponders to automate sales. After you offer free lead
magnets to people, in the form of exclusive links of web content and
blog posts, which you can attach with an automatic coupon for those
who follow that link. So you do not have to send a new series of emails,
and you make sales with the automation of your emails.
● All transactional emails are automated, and with the proper use of
autoresponders for order confirmations, you can suggest similar
products for the customer. Some relational emails, too, can be
automated if you have segmented your email list. (Email list
segmentation is discussed in the next subtopic) it helps you sort your
customers and subscribers by criteria that make it easy for you to make
personalized offers. In your emails, there should be a segment that
highlights “Other items you may like” based on that purchase.
Autoresponders can also be used to ask for reviews, If a customer buys a
new product from you, it should trigger a “leave us a review email”
automatically sent a few days after the delivery when the owner must

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 have tested the product, and if the call-to-action isn’t followed then, the
emails can be scheduled to keep sending a couple of more times to
encourage the customer to leave a review.
● Automation also helps balance promotional emails and relational
emails. Your subscriber’s cordial relationship is important to you.
Therefore you need to send more relational emails; with your already
preset templates, automation will make this easy. In reality, a larger part
of your emails should provide valuable content to keep subscribers
attached so that your promotional emails will not be too regular to
balance the books and to ensure that it holds value when you choose to
offer promos.
● Outline your email to figure out your email sequence. Your email
sequence is the number of emails you want to send in a particular time
frame. There is no specific figure for how long it should be or how many
emails it should contain, but it is recommended that it is as short as
possible so you don’t bore out the subscriber. But long enough to cover
all the necessary parts of your campaign. Therefore your sequence will
vary for different campaigns.

In your sequence, you need to set a cadence (the intervals between two
successive emails). There are times when twice a week is fine for blog
posts and information emails, while you need to send more frequent
reminders for a promo that will soon elapse, depending on your goals.

Your sequence could follow the following pattern.

● Thank your subscribers for subscribing and let them know what you
intend to offer, highlighting the problems you discover and how you
intend to solve them.
● Remind them of previous discussions and mention the launch of your
product or service.

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 ● Send a couple of reminders with the cadence becoming more frequent
when the launch date is almost set.
● Launch your product, and add a sense of urgency to drive-up traffic.
● Send reminders to customers who haven’t purchased to let them know
how much they are missing out on. If you have made a decent amount
of sales, share the statistics. Everyone likes to jump on a moving train.
● The last few days before you’re the end of your campaign, send more
reminders with words that spark urgency to make other skeptics try out
your offer. Also, remind them of the problem your product or service
intends to solve.
● After your campaign ends, send an email to customers who purchased
thanking them for their support and telling those who couldn’t
purchase that you will inform them of other opportunities in the future.
If you are proud of your figures, share them as social proof, and these
numbers will encourage skeptics to try you out some other time.

Writing the content of the messages in your autoresponders can be quite

strenuous; you can outsource it to freelance copywriters ensuring that the
copy addresses their problems and possible solutions to their problems, not
just focusing on throwing you products into their faces. When you make it
about them, they will pay attention to you.

Email List Segmentation

Email list segmentation is the process of dividing your subscribers into
smaller groups for better-personalized emails. Rather than sending the same
email to all your subscribers, segmentation will foster better engagement and

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hence better click rates. In all, segmentation will help improve the
effectiveness of your campaign.

Upon segmentation of subscribers, your automation will work better, as you

have different autoresponders for different segments of your audience.

Segmenting your email list starts when the users submit their data. You need
to know why and how they got on your list, their names, location, and lead
magnets that attracted them to your list. This will enable you to personalize
emails to them that will trigger their interest.

15 Segments to Break Your List Into

● New subscribers: Send new subscribers a series of welcome emails

during, and after sign-up.
● Preferences: subscribers who want to hear about blog posts vs. those
who only want sale notifications.
● Interests: Purchase history of subscribers are an indication of interest.
Send customers recommendation emails about related products.
● Location: When you have events happening in a location, you should
notify your subscribers who live in that area about the event, they may
not be able to attend, but it helps you build goodwill. Also, if you have a
physical store as well as an online store, you can inform customers
about their closest walk-in store for promotions that are in-store only.
● Open rate: Reward subscribers that engage your emails with special
offers to maintain their loyalty.
● Inactivity: Let inactive members know what they have missed since
their last activity; using analytics on how more people are benefiting
from your offers may just remind them of how much they are missing
out on, and they get active again.
● Lead magnet: Send content to your subscribers on their lead magnet
preference. Different people have their choices for consuming

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 information. Some subscribers may put in for more than one lead
magnet, so it is important to include them in separate lead magnet lists
so that they can get information for all new information.
● Shopping Cart Abandonment: This is quite common for E-commerce
businesses as some customers will fill up carts without checking out
due to many reasons best known to them. It is important to remind
them to complete their purchase and to offer a freebie if necessary. E.g.,
“complete your purchase and get a 15% discount off your next
purchase”.
● Abandoned Form: Some visitors will appear on your website but will
not complete their registration. It is important to make their email
address the first detail you will ask for so that if they don’t even
complete the sign-up, you can always reach out to them some other
time. You can also use WordPress’ WPForms Form Abandonment
Add-on to save emails even if they don’t submit.
● Customers Who Didn’t Buy: You might have launched a product with
limited quantity, and your visitor missed out on the opportunity to buy.
You can try to compensate them by offering really valuable offers to
them that salvages your relationship with them.
● Segment by Purchase: Treat customers who purchase large amounts
by offering them appreciation coupons or free gifts that will make
them attached to your brand. Also, customers who have returned to
make more orders – say 3 times, have shown some sort of loyalty and
you should reward them by giving them cheaper offers on their next
few purchases. You should also take note of certain purchases that are
seasonal. If a customer purchases a weatherproof jacket for the snowy
period, you should be able to suggest lighter cotton clothes in your
promotional emails during the start of the summer season.

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 ● Change in Purchase Pattern: If you have a virtual product or service
where you need the customer to regularly subscribe, if they stop
suddenly, you should check in with mails to ensure you aren’t doing
anything wrong. Always ensure to conduct a survey on why the user
canceled as it will help build user experience for other subscribers.
● Segment by Reviews: Testimonies of your customers can never be
overestimated, as they propel other skeptical users to make their
purchases. Sometimes customers are too lazy and selfish to drop a
review, but constant friendly reminders with targeted emails can do the
trick and boost your brand reputation.
● Segment By Website Activity: You can monitor your visitor’s activity
on your website to know what exactly what they are looking for, using
tools to extract their browsing data and sorting similar users together
to create personalized offers and products for them just as if they are
inside of you.
● Segment by Gender: If your business sells separate items for men and
women, most notably fashion, you should segment your subscribers by
gender to exclusively give them relevant updates. You definitely do not
want to update women about men’s clothing and vice versa.

Cleaning Your Email List

Email lists usually encounter an inevitable decline with increasing time, for
many reasons. Some people will simply lose interest in your products and
services, some people will forget their login details and just easily create a
new email address, and even some people will die, all reducing the quality of
your list due to the depletion over time. If you build a list today, in the next 6
months, it will be worthless, and even far less in a year. Hence highlighting
the importance of cleaning your email list. Cleaning an Email list in simple
terms is the process of “removing subscribers who do not engage your

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content” so that you can market to people who engage, showing a clear
indication of interest. If you do not periodically clean your list, then you are
wasting a lot of money and effort on marketing to people who aren’t
interested in your business or to abandoned accounts.

It is important to clean up your email list once or twice yearly. Usually, you’ll
notice when you need to clean this list from your statistics and analytics,
seeing a sizeable amount of reduction in click rates, open rates and an
increase in unsubscribe rates, and a lot of spam reports is a huge sign that
you need to clean your list and add new sets of subscribers. This is why the
collection of email addresses for your list should not stop; you should
continue to collect from time to time.

These declining statistics are a huge matter of concern because if your

analytics has taken a nosedive, your conversion rate has definitely gotten
poorer. Then you’ll be having reduced sales, and as expected lower revenues.
Hence, cleaning email lists can help compensate for the deficits.

Some of the obvious benefits are:

Better Open and Click Rates: When you clean your email list, it means that
you leave only interested subscribers on your list. Hence, you are assured that
the people who get the emails will open and click through your call to action.
If you clean your email list of 10,000 people and you weed out 4,000 people, it
means that you will have 6,000 people on your list. 6,000 of 10,000 people is a
success rate of 60%, while 6,000 of 6,000 is a 100% success rate. After weeding
out the unneeded subscribers, you can add a new set of subscribers to your
list till you decide to clean your list again.

Reduced Spam Complaints: Cleaning your email list helps ensure that you
rid yourself of subscribers who mark your emails as spam because in the long
run, many spams complaints from your website will get email vendors like

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Gmail and yahoo mail to send your emails straight to spam, even from users
who haven’t reported you hence losing the potency of your list.

Cleaning your list helps to avoid situations like this because it is a very
common occurrence. Some people who subscribed for your content may not
be interested again, or for some personal bad mood. They can just mark your
mail as spam without your knowledge, of course. To a large extent, many
email marketers suffer from this, and the deliverability rate declines quick.

Fewer Bounces: When an email bounces, it means that it doesn’t get

delivered. An email bounce could be because of wrong email addresses,
misspelling email addresses, or just random errors like typing “gmial.com” the
inbox of the recipient may also be filled up and rejecting new emails.
Bounces affect your reputation just as much as spam complaints. Your
analytics and statistics can tell you your bounce percentage, and upon
cleaning, it will definitely reduce. When you discover bounces on your email
list, it is worth giving them a second trial. As you now know, emails could get
bounced for a barrage of reasons. There are two types of bounces: Hard
Bounces and Soft Bounces

Hard bounces are caused by permanent errors that cannot be traced, and
your message will never reach the recipient, while soft bounces, on the other
hand, are temporary issues that can get fixed.

Hard bounces happen because of wrong domain names, inexistent email

addresses, and delivery blockage by the email server.

Soft bounces can happen due to a mistake, or typographical error in an email

address, maybe when you are editing or collating the list. Multiple
occurrences of soft bounces will lead to hard bounces.

Most email marketing service providers will give you options to correct
mistakes that could have led to the bounce because they are quite obvious

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and easy to correct. You just need to edit the subscriber's information, and
you’re good to go.

Reduced Cost: Your email marketing service provider will charge you
according to the number of emails you send, probably per 1,000 emails sent,
or according to the number of subscribers you have, or even both. So cleaning
your email list helps you ensure that you are not spending excessively on the
emails you send, or better put, you are not spending money to send emails to
people who will never receive it. Every subscriber on your list that doesn’t
engage your content costs you reasonable money. Hence proper email list
cleaning helps to boost your ROI by spending less to achieve the same results.

Better Judgment: A properly cleaned list will give you accurate information
on how well your segmentation and other strategies are working. If your list is
full of inactive subscribers, your analytics reports will be skewed, and you
won’t be able to accurately judge your strategy success. Cleaning your list can
really help you to judge your strategy progress with accuracy, and when you
are sure that a very large percentage of your emails are being delivered, you
can find out what you are doing wrong to have low clicks. But if you have
many inactive subscribers, your strategy may be working, but you won’t even
notice.

Email Lists You should Clean

You probably have a couple of lists upon segmentation, and you want to
prioritize the email lists you should clean. Yes, this is recommended because
certain lists will drive conversion and leads more than others. These are your
most active email lists, and since it brings about better engagements, you
should pay attention to them.

Another list you should consider paying attention to is older lists because the
older your list, the more you will have uninterested subscribers who will

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engage less. Although it is recommended not to allow your lists to get too old
before you clean them. Two to three times in a year is fine.

Email Marketing Analytics

Email marketing analytics is a tool provided by your email marketing service

providers; it uses numbers and statistics to track the progress of your
marketing strategy. You definitely do not want to just market and hope for
returns without monitoring it. To know whether your strategy is working, you
need to check the numbers, and usually, the numbers don’t lie. Your email
marketing analytics will enable you to discover your open rates, click rates,
delivery rate, unsubscribe rates, among others. This will help you filter your list
for proper cleaning.

Open rates: Your open rates, as the name implies, give you a report of how
many people opened your email and when they opened them. The main
factor that determines your open rate is how catchy your subject line is. If it
isn’t intriguing, people may not be compelled to take a look at the content, or
you send your emails at a time that isn’t the best for your audience.

To improve your open rates, you should ensure that;

● Your subject lines are catchy, drawing their attention and giving them
an insight into the content of the email.
● You do a proper market survey about your audience and other
companies in your niche to determine a good send time and send
cadence.
● Your content should be valuable so that people who open once will
definitely open your mails subsequently.

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Click Rates: After opening your email and reading through the content, your
subscribers are following your call-to-action. The amount of people who click
on your CTA accounts for your click rates. The content of your email and how
much value they can get from it is a huge determinant of whether they will
take further action or just close it. This is why this guide never gets tired of
reiterating the importance of valuable content.

To improve your click rates, you should ensure that;

● Your content quality remains very high to engage your subscribers.

● You properly segment your audience to adequately personalize useful
content to each segment.
● You should remove links that have very low clicks, as your audience
probably doesn’t want it, and you should find a way to strategically
repeat links that people like for more people to see it in the future.

Unsubscribe Rate: No matter how valuable your email content is, some
people will unsubscribe. However this becomes alarming when the rate is too
high, then you are doing something wrong. People unsubscribe because they
do not get what they want or because they feel choked by your email
frequency.

To reduce this rate, you need to;

● Have an autoresponder that communicates with every subscriber that

unsubscribes with a survey. This will give you a hint as to what you are
doing wrong.
● Ensure that you are sending valuable messages to each segment of
your subscribers. If they don’t find the content they receive useful, they
might as well unsubscribe.
● Reduce the number of promotional emails you send, and relate with
them with increased value.

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Delivery Rate: Your delivery rate is the number of emails that successfully
gets to the recipient's inbox without bouncing. Bounces are the major causes
of reduced delivery rate, and to improve your delivery rate, fix your soft
bounces. It is also important that your email marketing service you use
adheres to the regulations of your region. In the United States, it is mandated
that all commercial emails must include unsubscribe buttons, clearly show
the sender's postal address, avoid deceptive subject lines, and many more.
These regulations differ in different regions.

Complaint Rate: Complain rate is the percent of emails “marked as spam”

out of the total emails sent. If your complaint rate increases, it will affect your
deliverability to others who didn’t even complain, as email vendors will
consider it spam. To reduce your spam rate, clean your list regularly, and
remove subscribers who have marked you as spam.

Proper email analytics will also give you an insight into how much money
your list makes you. If you have a list of 10,000 people and from your email
marketing clicks you earn $50,000, you’d definitely know that not all 10,000
people have fetched you that money; you need to remove the spam
complaints, unsubscribes, bounces to get an idea of how many people made
you that money. Then you can carefully add more subscribers, and you’ll
watch your revenue grow.

In conclusion, if you have ever been in the school of thought that Email
marketing is dead, you are wrong, and it is time to backtrack on that. With
proper strategy, it is one of the best digital marketing approaches available to
business owners, big or small. So get started today, let your subscribers enjoy
value from you, and take some of their money in return. Good luck!

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112
 Influencer Marketing At a Glance

An influencer is a person who has some compelling power over a large part of
your target audience. It could be due to personality, popularity, or knowledge
about subject matters in your niche. This pull they have has made them
useful to businesses for digital marketing, and this approach to digital
marketing has grown immensely with the rise of social media. Musicians,
Footballers, Reality show participants, Actors, and many more celebrities are
used in influencer marketing, not necessarily because of their knowledge of
the subject matter, but because of their popularity, viewers will take a minute
to see what they have to say. Non-celebrity influencers also exist from social
media popularity, due to their knowledge on subject matters, and sometimes
due to their online personality, which ensures their posts have many
engagements.

Before the rise of social media, celebrities were used by companies to

advertise on the mainstream media; Radio, and Television. This method was
quite expensive and less efficient than social media influencing, which is a
huge factor in why the influencer market has risen proportionally with social
media, really helping smaller businesses that can’t afford the luxury of the

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traditional mainstream media advertisement, thus, giving internet celebrities
a career.

The increase of social media influencing has also helped measure marketing
statistics. Mainstream media have really bogus statistics, and you really
cannot know everyone who has seen or listened to your advert. Still, the
efficiency of Social media influencing has really boosted the analytics.
Influencing audiences via Television and Radio is still a thing, as social media
influencing isn’t the ultimate, bigger companies with large budgets achieve
success with marketing via mainstream media.

Influencers, therefore, in recent times have become important to the world of

digital marketing. If properly handled, it boasts of numerous benefits, such as
increased brand visibility, greater customer appeal, and it helps manipulate
customer decisions as well, especially seeing that someone they look up to
speaks highly of a product or service.

Although exploiting the digital marketing medium can be exhilarating

because of the attention to details you need to have a successful influencer
campaign, it is important to know the types of influencers that exist to guide
you.

Types of Influencers

Mega Influencers: Mega influencers have a lot of pull power due to their
large audience. They may have very little knowledge about the subject, but
they can publicize your product or service to the reach of millions in seconds.
Celebrities are major examples of Mega influencers. Cristiano Ronaldo, for
example, has 200 million followers on Instagram, and in a minute, his post
can generate a million engagements. Mega influencers are only hired bytop
companies because they are usually expensive to approach. Even if the
company has an ambassadorial deal with the celebrity, it still costs money to

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maintain that relationship. Ronaldo is a Nike ambassador and may not collect
any money to post adverts for Nike, as his ambassadorial duties may include
that, but to get that deal signed, he would receive benefits in cash and
in-kind. Mega influencers, despite their reach, do not target specific
audiences. In all honesty, a post from Cristiano Ronaldo may reach 30 million
people, but how many of these people are really your target audience? Well,
you can’t tell. Mega influencers, despite their reach, aren’t the best for all
campaigns, and if wrongly used, it can cause very huge losses.

Macro-influencers: Macro-influencers also have very large audiences on

social media, typically between a few hundred thousand to a million followers.
Unlike actual celebrities that got fame through sports, music, or other forms
of art, Macro-influencers are usually popular as a result of the internet.
Popular Bloggers, Vloggers, Podcasters, and the likes fall into this category.
Bloggers usually have knowledge about the subject matter, even if they are
not professionals of that field or niche, they have enough information that
they feed knowledge-seeking internet users who visit their blogs because of
the valuable content that they publish regularly. They also utilize their large
volume of social media followers to promote their blog content.

A good example is Pat Flynn, the Owner of the blog “Smart Passive Income”
boasting of a verified Twitter account with 158,000 followers; he also runs a
podcast and a verified YouTube channel of 268,000 subscribers. On his blog,
he mainly teaches easy techniques for running E-commerce businesses and
harnessing passive income opportunities. If you have a useful service in this
field, such as SEO tools, Pat Flynn can dedicate a series of blog posts to
discuss this topic, or a YouTube tutorial video while recommending your tool
for use with several backlinks to your own website. He can also discuss you in
his podcast as he has several ways to reach his audience.

Macro-influencers are the best bet when you want to reach out to your target
audience based on your subject while ensuring that you reach out to many

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people, especially in the awareness stage of your campaign. Bloggers and
Vloggers can work wonders for you due to their loyal audience, which looks
up to them for information because they have found them trustworthy over
time.

Pat Flynn is a rare one, as he engages in blogging, Vlogging, and Podcasting.

But many Macro-influencers use just one medium of sharing content with
their audience. Macro-influencers help you re-strategize content, boost your
brand awareness, and you can find them for almost any category you want,
fashion, gaming, technology, music, and so on.

Micro-Influencers: Micro-Influencers usually have followers ranging from a

few thousand to 100,000 or, on some occasions, slightly more. They are
typically more invested in the subject matter and closer to the target
audience because of closer interactions and engagement via social media.
They aren’t necessarily the best for awareness, but they are good for
promotion campaigns. They also work with cheaper and less flexible budgets,
making them affordable for businesses with tighter budgets. They also
receive payments in different methods, cash, products, free services, and
many more.

Some of these people are well-known professionals in their fields, and their
followers see their recommendations as professional advice without
appearing as a means of promotion at times. A micro-influencer can be a
dietician who gives expert advice on what to eat to improve certain things in
the body or even lose weight. A company in the food industry can adequately
get promoted by such a micro-influencer through recommendation. The
dietician could recommend pleasant sugar-free edibles for diabetics, and
companies who produce this can get huge promotions from this. The trust
gained from these people due to expertise makes them ideal for promotional
campaigns as they can drive a large percentage of their relatively small
audience to consume a product. A lot of times, these micro-influencers are

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usually ignored or less prioritized. This is, however, a wrong move because
each level of influencers has their levels of engagement, and different stages
in marketing require different approaches.

Nano Influencers: Nano influencers usually have a similar or slightly smaller

range of followers as Micro-influencers, but they do not possess the
knowledge and the professional touch of the micro-influencers. They are very
vocal with their advocacy for a brand and very convincing too. Nano
influencers speak about a brand positively at any chance they get, jumping
under Twitter threads or social media posts that criticize or bring up a bad or
wrong image about a brand to defend them publicly.

Because of their less professional approach, however, they might come off as
controversial. Still, they usually have loyal supporters who would take their
words as it comes, because they believe these nano influencers do not see
the posts as promotional, they see it as an honest opinion that they should
follow. They are also relatively cheap to deal with.

Mini Influencers: These influencers are usually respected people due to their
knowledge of the subject matter like micro-influencers, although not
necessarily professional, have a good online reputation, and they are known
to recommend your product or service to their followers and anybody who
cares to ask. Because of their reputation, their recommendations are usually
followed.

Some of these categories can be mixed together to achieve good results. You
can have a celebrity post a new product you have while running a side
campaign with bloggers to make reviews on it, with a backlink to your page.
While the celebrity’s post is doing rounds on social media – reaching millions
of people in no time, the macro influencer can do a YouTube video comparing
a product with other trendy products, highlighting and focusing on yours,
making both campaigns effective the same time.

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At certain times the influencers' works will go so deep that even users of your
product will join these influencers in promoting your product or service
(provided it suits them), becoming a loyal customer, hence amplifying the
jobs of the influencers on social media. They are a very good source of social
proof easily acceptable.

Locating Influencers for Your Campaign

After deciding on the type of influencer you want for your campaign, you
need to locate them to pitch your brand to them, briefing them about what
you want to do, how you want it done, your expectations, and the metrics by
which you will judge their performance.

Mega influencers are the easiest to locate; all you need to do is go to the social
media page of the influencer that fits your brand and check his/her bio.
Usually, they have many direct message requests from numerous fans, so it is
best to get their email or business contact information from their bio. This
way, you can easily get in touch with their managers to schedule an
appointment.

Macro-influencers, too, are not difficult to find, as they are relatively small
when compared to other micro and nano influencers. Since they are typically
Vloggers and Bloggers, it may be a good idea to do a YouTube research on
topics that you find enthralling to your target audience, note the Vloggers
that present them and check their subscriber count, from suggested videos
and related videos too, you will see similar Vloggers, this will help you locate
the Macro-influencers in your niche, and you can easily contact them from
links in their bio, most notably an email address.

You can also reach out to blogs that rank well on Google for your preferred
content. Search for a series of words you think people who need your
products/services will probably be searching. Certain websites will show up
repeatedly on Google’s first page with different keywords searched. These

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blogs have a good ranking, and users will likely visit these blogs when finding
answers to their questions; simply visit the blog and locate the contact
information from there.

Looking for Micro-influencers and Nano influencers can be herculean. There

are several hundred thousand of these on Instagram and Twitter, and
selecting at random isn’t a good idea.

Hence it requires a more dedicated type of approach to locate these

influencers.

It is important to know what has been trending online for a while and the
people who create these contents. Buzzsumo, Content Studio, SproutSocial,
and HootSuite are good examples of tools that can help scan several social
media websites, even with a streamline to your location, and understanding
in general what content will work best for pushing your brand. Some of these
tools can also help you discover the people who get the most attention on
these social media platforms, giving you a lead on who you should check
their profiles. Upon checking their profiles, you will find details on contacting
them. They don’t have overcrowded direct messages like influencers, so you
can briefly engage them with a direct message to know their availability and
see if they would love to be a part of your campaign before you proceed to
send a brief via email. Some popular micro-influencers do not manage
themselves, and you need to get in touch with their management to pitch
your brand. Other ways to locate micro, nano, and mini influencers include:

● Conduct a survey with your audience, asking which social media

platforms they use the most, and focus on prioritizing your influencer
hunt from there.
● Check LinkedIn for professionals who have a large following on other
social media platforms, especially Twitter and Facebook, where
interaction is high.

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 ● Check Twitter’s “trending” for hashtags and see the leading influencers
from those tags. It is also a current indication of how active they are –
you don’t want an inactive influencer to run a campaign for you.
● Engage in competitor analysis to know the people your competitors are
partnering with. Obviously, you cannot partner with those particular set
of people, but it should give you an insight into who you should be on
the lookout for.
● Use Famebit (a platform on YouTube) where you can find influencers for
various niches; Famebit makes it easy for micro-influencers to sign up
without asking for any fee and collects 10% of the fee the influencer
gets, hence there are thousands of influencers on that platform. Using
Famebit, you can sort through influencers by different demographics
like age, follower count, impressions, and engagements. Famebit gives
you an easy way to connect with micro-influencers, especially for long
term partnerships with different influencers for your products.

Whether you’re in the fashion industry, beauty, technology, etc., there is

always a pool of influencers for you to select from.

Choosing an Influencer for Your Campaign

After knowing the channels to locate influencers for your campaign, you need
to choose one that properly fits your goals and objectives. There are a
thousand influencers available in your pool, but not all will be appropriate for
your campaign. There are general goals for influencer marketing to increase
brand awareness, thereby increasing sales and revenue. However, each
business has additional targets that they aim to achieve with influencer
marketing. Some really want to reach out to their customer base in a
particular age group or expand their reach from a certain sector, so you must
be able to identify your goals, to adequately help you determine your choice.

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Influencers can reach targeted audiences, so properly defining your goals will
help you streamline your search and ensure you pick the right person for your
campaign.

Below are steps you need to take in incorporating your choice with your goals
and objectives.

1. Research: During the research phase, there are many decisions you
need to make, depending on your brand strength, your audience, your
budget, and your preferred means of remuneration.

● You need to conduct a survey about the social media platforms your
current market is well-populated to give an insight into where to focus.
As a beginner in influencer marketing, it is recommended to start with
a channel, even if there is no clear indication as to where you should
focus. For example, fashion, beauty, and lifestyle really excel on
Instagram because of the opportunity to regularly use pictures to
publish content. Technology, gadgets, and mobile trends largely excel
on YouTube. There is always one influencer or the other doing a review
or comparison of certain gadgets and what the specifications mean; if
you have built a game, then twitch is the best place to get your
audience as it is exclusively for gamers.
● You should also look into the type of influencers that will suit your
campaign before selecting one. If you want an awareness campaign to
reach millions of people without necessarily targeting a specific
audience, then mega influencers is the way to go. On the other hand, if
you want some high level of awareness in a more targeted audience,
then you could use macro-influencers. Perhaps, you want a smaller
reach, in a largely targeted audience, you should consider using
micro-influencers and nano influencers. Your budget will also be
determined by the type of influencer you decide to employ for your

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 campaign, so you should look around, do a market survey of how much
each of these influencers charge, and you should know what your
campaign can afford. It is, however, important to consider your product
type and how much money you can generate per item on average. If
you sell very cheap items, it is unadvisable to select expensive
influencers to enable you to get your returns quick.
● Ensure that the influencers on your shortlist are “legit” – they haven’t
amassed fake engagements and followers. Check through their posts
painstakingly to see their follower-to-engagement ratio. Someone with
10,000 followers shouldn’t struggle to get 100 engagements; if they do,
it could be a red flag of poor content, fake or inactive followers. The
comments shouldn’t also be stereotyped like robots. If all the
comments you see on an influencer's posts are short and identical, it
could be fake or simulated. There should be a proper flow of interaction.
● Check out the influencers' previous campaigns, what brands they have
worked with, how similar those brands are to yours, and how successful
the campaign turned out to be. Also, check out their posts and be sure
they can communicate about you to their audience without sounding
excessively promotional. You need interactions, not a robot.

2. Look for an advocate: Many influencers just want to make money

from campaigns, and so they don’t put genuine effort into the
campaigns; they just want the campaign to end as soon as possible, so
they can get money from other campaigns. This is usually dangerous to
the campaign's success, as there is usually little creativity in terms of
content. This is why the influencer you choose must be ready to
dedicate effort to ensure the campaign's success, rather than just make
random posts about your product or service. From previous campaigns
of an influencer, you will get an insight into how creative he is with
campaigns. If you can ensure that your choice influencer can advocate

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for your brand, you will totally win over his audience, and it will be
evident in your sales and revenue.

3. Choose according to your business scope: If your business scope is

small and not even beyond your country, maybe in just a few select
states, it is advisable to use micro-influencers because of their closer
interactions with people who form your target audience. Even if you
feel like you can afford the celebrities, there will be little effect as those
influencers have a much larger scope than your audience. If you have a
brick and mortar store in Just one state in a European country, it might
be out of scope to contact a celebrity as their fans are people all over
the world, and many people won’t travel down to patronize you
because a celebrity they like is talking about you. However, mini
influencers, nano influencers, and micro-influencers can reach out
more specifically to people within your scope. As word spreads locally,
the number of customers will increase, and from there, you can think of
expansion to other states, probably based on requests of people who
engage posts.

4. Consider many engagements: Before committing to an influencer,

especially micro-influencers and below, it is important to know how
well they get their audience engaged. As previously said,
micro-influencers usually engage with their audiences more, so there is
evident goodwill, but this engagement should be well measured in
terms of percentage. An influencer with 100,000 followers but has an
average engagement rate of 10,000 likes, comments, shares, retweets,
etc., is doing worse than an influencer who has 30,000 followers with an
engagement rate of 7,500. So when making decisions, it is important to

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 properly consider followers considering engagements, don’t just
choose an influencer because they have a larger audience. How well
influencers’ audience engages their posts is a testament to how
valuable their content is, and hence how useful they can be to your
campaign. Ideally, the average engagements for posts on social media
should be from 3% to 5% to ensure that you are dealing with a loyal set
of followers.

5. Select from your niche: You will see many influencers with
impressive numbers and previous campaigns that look good, but be
sure to select from your niche for two main reasons.

You want to be sure that they can provide useful content for your brand. In
the past, their content might have been great because of the knowledge they
possess about the niche of those brands. But if they don’t know much about
your niche, you greatly risk a failed campaign due to poor content.

It is also possible that the influencers have gained their target audience from
posting things that their followers are conversant with. The majority of that
audience followed them because of that campaign. If your choice influencer
brings up a strange topic, it might be difficult for them to relate, and they
altogether ignore it.

6. Your target audience: As a business owner, you could be selling

directly to consumers (B2C marketing), or you may target other
Businesses (B2B marketing). In choosing an influencer for your
campaign, it is important to know the influencers that are already
popular with brands. Such influencers that are popular with brands are
great for B2B marketing. If you target businesses as your customer
base, your influencer must be reputable. A reputable and well-known
influencer can be appropriate for this kind of campaign because fellow

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 businesses will trust them better. For individual campaigns, several
influencers can be used, even relatively new ones, as long as there is an
audience and the influencer can create quality content.

7. Type of remuneration: It is important to determine whether you

want to give out cash, products, or both to your choice influencers for a
successful campaign. If you render a service, you can show past jobs
and services you have rendered to your influencers to critique and see
how much knowledge they can garner about your brand because
audiences will have a lot of questions. You definitely do not want your
influencer ignoring them. You can also give out new products for them
to use and have an honest opinion about it and look at the product
from a customer perspective; that way, they will relate with the
customers better in their posts. Commissions are also ways to get your
influencers well invested in your campaign, you just have to reach a fair
agreement with the influencer, and if you are using more than one
influencer, you can make use of dedicated links for them so that each of
them will have a collation system for leads that were gotten through
them. Influencers are sometimes skeptical about using commissions as
the sole form of payment, but it can be mixed with other means of
remuneration. If you are paying cash only, you need to ensure that you
are not promoting an entirely new product. Products already in the
market but have dipped in demand can be promoted. Hence there will
be fewer questions, and even fellow consumers can have the answers to
the questions of others.

Pitching Your Brand

After getting a shortlist of influencers you’d like to work with, you need to
make great offers that are inspiring to the influencer while meeting your
goals and in line with your budget. If you keep making offers to influencers

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without success, then there is a good chance that you aren’t properly selling
yourself. Make the influencers know what your brand has to offer. People who
are good with their craft won’t promote you across their channels if you are
unclear about your offering because they want to maintain credibility and
influence within the social space. It is also possible that your brand has had
some negative reviews in time past that makes people skeptical about
associating with your brand. This is why you have to pitch your brand
properly, with an influencer brief to make them see your offers, expectations,
guidelines, performance indicators for judging success, and many other
things that the influencer needs to know. If you have had a difficult
reputation in the past, the first part of your campaign may be to give out
freebies, giveaways, contests and get your name on people’s lips. A human
largely have a bias towards recent things, so make your intention and plans to
regain your image known, and if you can achieve proper clarity, you would get
influencers willing to work with you.

An influencer brief is a set of documents that you send to influencers to pitch

your brand after gaining their attention. In this document, you are expected
to “brief” the influencer about your project, how you want to partner, your
expectations, and the metrics by which you’ll judge success. Disclaimers and
clauses are also expected to be part of the brief, as the influencer needs to
know his task from the very beginning. This will summarize everything that
will be explicitly outlined in the contract; hence clarity is important to avoid
confusion and foster a smooth working relationship.

A brief also makes it easy for you to judge a campaign's performance before
even considering analytics. Since you have properly outlined goals, an
evaluation will be straightforward as you only have to review your objectives.

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 What your Influencers’ Brief Should Contain

● Basic information about your brand and what you offer should be the
first thing in your brief. You must state your values and what you aim to
achieve, the products or service you’d like to focus on, and why you are
contacting them.
● Give the influencer a lowdown of your projected campaign, explicitly
describing what success means to you; if they are popular amongst
several platforms, be sure to be specific with the platform you’d prefer
for the campaign. You should also include the duration of the
campaign hashtags you want your campaign to be associated with; if
you have one, make sure you let them know if you want your handles
tagged and even followed by their audience.
● Be sure to indicate your website, links of landing pages you want
people to click on, etc.
● Give specific information about all details, and while you should give a
guideline, you shouldn’t be too rigid, as influencers need a bit of
freedom to be at their creative best.
● Remuneration type is a very important topic; the influencer should
have information on how much he will be paid, what products he will
be getting, etc.
● Indicate where you want to claim legal access to content, probably for
use in other marketing mediums. Reusing content that you don’t have
authorship over may cost you some legal fees.

Tips on Maintaining a Good Working Relationship with Your Choice

Influencer

Allow them to express their Creativity: The ability to work without pressure
is important for influencers to create their content with much flexibility from
the brand. Too many Dos and Don’ts make it more difficult for influencers to

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show their craft, which is important to their portfolio as an influencer. Their
relation with their audience is already on the backbone of some sort of tone
and communication, and a deviation from this to fit your standards might
just backfire. So it is advisable to keep instructions simple and allow flexibility.

All Deals Must Have A Legal Binding: To avoid misunderstanding, you

should involve a legal body to review your influencer contract to explicitly
define the job description, the expected timeline for a delivery, type of
remuneration, and the period to make the payments. Although if you have a
good working relationship with your influencer, you may never need to review
the contract. However, you’re working with humans, and disputes could
occur. Everything needs to be spelled out. In the end, it is better safe than
sorry to avoid confusion,

Advantages of Working with Influencers

The importance of influencers is very high in today’s digital marketing space

because of the frequent use of social media. They offer direct access and
engagements to the audience of all kinds of businesses, from mega
blue-chip companies to small growing enterprises. Recommendation
alternatively called “word-of-mouth” is bolstered by influencer marketing
because they actively engage consumers to talk about brands they represent.
This is usually very powerful as the factor of doubt in a product is often erased
if a trusted person recommends it. This fosters a great connection between
companies and their target audience when properly done, and the
advantages are limitless. A few are highlighted below;

● Influencer marketing helps a brand penetrate an existing audience

because the influencers already have gained the trust and loyalty of
their followers, who believe in the authenticity of the influencer. If an
influencer with 100,000 active followers represents your brand, then you

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 already have increased your brand awareness by 100,000 people. The
engagement is present already, and the content just flies
● Influencers help boost your brand credibility, and they believe you to be
legitimate and your products authentic, just because they believe in the
credibility of the influencers they follow.
● Improves customer relationships: Strengthen relationships with your
customers through the intimate existing connections influencers have
with them.
● Working with Influencers improves search engine optimization due to
increased engagements and more clicks from generated backlinks.
Eleven constant interactions about a business online can appear on the
first page of Google. “See what people are saying.” Hence leading to
better search rankings.
● Influencers also sway the purchase decisions of people online. If a
product or service gets a lot of social media traffic, many people will
want to try it out and see for themselves how well it is worth the hype.
● Recommendations and “word-of-mouth” is greatly valued by many
people, even more than advertisements, and Influencers really help to
make your product/service the talking point on people’s lips, making it
impossible to ignore their importance to brands.

Influencer Marketing Strategies

All digital marketing medium requires strategizing as an essential for

marketing success, and influencer marketing is no different. It is not enough
to locate influencers, choose, and properly pitch your brand to them. You
must pull together a string of strategies to ensure that your hard work in
identifying appropriate influencers for your brand won’t be a waste. Some of
these strategies are discussed below.

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● Appeal to the Emotions of Your Audience: As much as humans love to
be in denial, we favor emotions more than logic in many of our
purchase decisions. Influencers can appeal to the emotional side of
their audience, telling your brand’s story and how inspiring it is, going
from the bottom to a great stage, and even gunning for more
greatness. If you have properly gone through the arduous process of
selecting an influencer for your brand, then you must have gotten a
creative influencer. The creativity and uniqueness of your influencer can
do a lot for you in this regard as they will be your storyteller. They will
present your brand's story in an inspiring way that their audience will
want some sort of connection, defying logic if need be. Business
owners must learn to exploit emotions a lot because it largely accounts
for purchase decisions.
● Freebies and Giveaways: Another way to pull attention towards your
brand is through giveaways and contests. People love free things, even
if they are in a good financial position to purchase that item multiple
times. If they could, they would rather get it for free. Don’t you like free
things? Contests with hashtags can be held to win certain products,
audiences can be made to do a video of them saying or doing
something related to your brand. If you run an online pizza outlet, you
can make a contest, asking users to mention all the types of pizza
available in a video with a hashtag “#PizzafestivalWithYourBrand,” and
you will select at random, a few. This will generate a lot of traffic on that
social media platform, even beyond your audience. Since it’s free, as
many people as possible will participate, they have nothing to lose.
Contests are usually good for awareness campaigns as many people
will get to know about the product you sell or the service you render,
even if they don’t really care about it. Giveaways can be targeted to a
more specific audience to reward their loyalty. It could also help

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 increase the followers of the brand if there already exists a social media
page. Although one major drawback of giveaways and contests is that
because of its huge reach, it could attract many people who aren’t your
target audience, thus giving you a wrong metric to judge success from.

It is important. Of course, your giveaway item should be valuable to

attract people to the campaign; if it is not, you risk a huge waste of
money and effort.

● Use multiple Influencers simultaneously: After your research and you

come up with a list of influencers for your campaign, you can use a
couple of influencers within the same niche to promote your product at
the same time. This strategy works well because of the multiple
audiences you can reach at the same time. It is, however, important
that despite taking influencers from the same niche, their content
must be distinct. Because they are in the same niche, their posts may
talk about the same subject matter many times, but the distinct
approach of each influencer will get him his own separate followers.
Although the followers of different influencers may intersect at some
point, uniqueness will ensure that the level of audience repetition is
small. When a campaign is run by multiple influencers, it feels like your
brand is everywhere at the same time, hence doing a proper job of
awareness for you.
● Use Influencers who already like your Brand: A good strategy to
approach the world of influencer marketing is using influencers who
already have a thing for your brand. Collaborating with those
influencers makes them an official brand advocate because they will
speak in your favor even more, and because they have been doing it
slightly before, it won’t seem like a forced plan. The question now is how
to find influencers who already make posts about you online. You don’t

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 want to be combing through the entire internet for that, so you can use
social monitoring tools like HootSuite or brand watch to see who has
been talking about you and what they say about you. Choose one or
more, and watch the increased growth your brand will experience.

● Use Hashtags: Hashtags are very important in influencer marketing for

a couple of reasons. Your hashtag should be so unique that it catches
the attention of people when they see it. Apart from the fact that it
gives your campaign an online drive, probably hitting trend tables if you
are organizing a contest, it gives you an avenue to monitor your
influencers if you are using more than one for a campaign. When you
search for your hashtag, the results will contain all influencers' posts, so
you can see whose posts are gaining more attention, indicating who is
doing something right.
● Reviews: Reviews from people, is a very good way to achieve excellent
social proof. People love to feed off the experience of others to make
decisions, they use this as a means of looking before they leap. A review
gives the perfect opportunity for this, and if it comes from a trusted
figure like an influencer, even better. Reviews are important for new
businesses because your products haven’t really been tested by people,
and they may be skeptical about trusting you with their money no
matter how great your offer seems. Giving your influencers a few
products to test and give honest reviews is a great strategy, as they see
exactly everything with the product, and they can capitalize more on
the exceptional things your product has to offer that are different from
others. This will inspire a number of their audience to try out the
product or a firsthand experience of the product, thereby giving you a
whole new customer set. I need not emphasize the importance of

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 making unique products because if there is nothing special about your
products, it will make the task of selling your brand to an audience a
difficult one. It is important to note that when you create review
content, it shouldn’t sound too promotional, consumers can smell it a
mile away.
● Sharing User-Generated Content: User-generated content is a
collection of content posted by your audience rather than your
influencers or your brand account; because this content does not come
from your affiliated account, they are usually very powerful and will
probably boost your reliability far better than your own contents.
Getting your influencers to interact with these posts and bring up some
engagements around posts like that is a great strategy at improving
social proof. User-generated content is very useful because this content
comes from fellow users of the product. Typically, we do not want to
miss out on any trend, so properly harnessing these contents will boost
your brand's credibility on social platforms. Hence, positively impacting
purchase decisions towards your products.
● Adequate Knowledge of the Brand: Any influencer needs to be in the
business of promoting you to have deep knowledge about your brand.
The influencer would be communicating with a wide audience and
may need to clarify or answer questions. The influencer mustn’t
assume. Instead, he makes decisions based on facts and figures
because one message communicated wrongly can harm the entire
campaign. It is imperative to properly lecture them about your brand
and products, simulate questions that people may ask to make sure
that you are prepared for nearly all scenarios. Information you let out on
the internet is almost impossible to retract, so your influencer mustn’t
relay the wrong information to your audience.

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● Co-create content with your Influencers: While you pay influencers to
run a campaign for you, it is important that you just don’t leave them to
“do their job.” This is a mistake that many businesses make. Although it
is important to give the influencers freedom to ensure the best of their
creativity for quality content, it is also just as important to work with
them to share your ideas to ensure that they are properly handled from
start to finish in your campaign. Two good heads, they say, are better
than one, so a collaboration between you and your influencer will
improve your working relationship and help you develop better
strategies.
● Competitor Analysis: check out businesses in your niche, study their
influencer strategies, and the type of influencers they employ, identify
what works for audiences that your niche pitches to. This helps you
avoid ineffective methods and focus on things that will produce
maximum results based on the insights you get from your analysis. It
also gives you a metric to judge your campaign and know how well
you’re doing.
● Stay in touch with your Influencers: You must keep the influencers
working on your campaign updated about the latest happenings
within your company to ensure that they give their audience firsthand
updated information, increasing their credibility and getting their
audience more attached to them, making your campaign and
subsequent campaigns successful. You can offer them incentives and
coupons for their audiences to remain in their good books and help you
properly connect to their audience. Staying in touch also improves the
relationship with the influencers, making it easier to relate with them
and even foster better negotiations for future campaigns.
● Use Calls to Action: Calls to action are usually one-button command
prompts. After sharing your link via your influencers’ posts, you should

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 have some set of phrases, very conspicuous and short. In your link, you
can add a command that says, “I want to benefit from a 20% discount
bonus”. You want to make it easy for the people from your audience
who love your influencer’s posts and want to know more about your
company to have a one-click method of doing that, even better if it
comes with a discount or coupon code. This can also boost your website
authority for search engine optimization.
● Respond to Comments: Good customer service is a universal tactic for
a business that works every time. If you have a brand social media
account on your favorite social platforms. It is important to request tags
in posts of the influencers and adequately get your social media
manager to respond to a select few. Thank people for positive reviews,
promise to render better service to those who have complaints – good
customer service often makes customers attached to your brand. This
will keep you in a cordial relationship with your audience and boost
your business’ reputation as a trustworthy one.
● Product Demos and How-To Tutorials: If you have released a new
product for public usage, especially one that could be technical or
involving some sort of setting up. Making your influencers educate their
audiences, especially on platforms like YouTube, can bring about very
high engagement. Especially showing special features that they never
thought of, or even easier handling methods that is different from the
regular method. This is a very useful tactic in the technology and
gadgets industry. A video’s title could be “5 things you didn’t know
about your Brand Earbuds” would do. Because it’s a video, they can see
a live and easily digestible representation of how that equipment or
gadget works. Even if it’s not just your product that has these special
unknown features, because you have content about it by an online
authority, it will shape the decision of many to buy your product. You

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 mustn’t go all out listing how great your product is because most
people will get bored with that. It is better to show them content that
will intrigue them and draw their attention. The high number of
engagements generated from it is a great boost to your online
authority.

How Influencer Marketing Can Boost Your SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) involves the use of content, links, keywords,
and any other technique that can boost website authority to ensure that
when a keyword is typed in the search box on a search engine (Google, for
example), it lists a business or company as high as possible on the first page.
Google is one of the most effective digital marketing channels due to the
gazillion number of searches on the internet every minute. Internet users
search to find out information about products and services they would like to
purchase, and they are unlikely to go to the second page after a search.
Search engine optimization is concerned with improving rankings in search
results for the major keywords of your business, such that your website stays
as high as possible on Google’s first page, thereby directing more potential
customers to your website.

Due to the amount of traffic generated by the search, many other digital
marketing strategies are amplified when merged. Influencer marketing can
also immensely boost your search engine optimization, in turn boosting your
overall market technique; some of the mediums to improve your SEO with
influencer marketing include:

1. Driving Backlinks to Your Website: Your link profile (including

backlinks and internal links) constitute a vital part of your search engine
optimization. Search engines, most notably Google, regularly update
their algorithm to filter out unnecessary posts, prioritizing posts that
offer value to the internet user consuming that information. If a few

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 popular websites frequently make references to your website – with a
URL linking back to your website, of course. Google will see your
content as valuable. But Influencers can also have this direct influence
on your website authority; if a couple of influencers with quite a huge
following have your URLs in their posts, it could have a similar effect as
when popular websites link back to you because of the level of
interaction and engagements with the posts as visible to Google, it is
seen as valuable content. Your backlinks are important to your link
profile, as it is will consequently determine how high you will rank on a
search engine. To achieve this, your content on social media must be
rich in content and contain links that boost your link profile. When an
influencer creates content with your link, with a good amount of
interaction, you earn a new backlink, making your SEO even better. You
can also ask bloggers to make posts about your business on their
website; if it is a reputable macro influencer, the generated backlinks
will be highly valued by Google.

1. Creative Content Creation: For any digital marketing strategy, your

content is your most valuable asset. Hence the popular phrase “Content
is King.” Content that is valuable to your audience will attract many
interactions, shares, likes, retweets and what have you. This is why your
choice influencer must rank well in creativity. Even if you are running a
blog for your business, you could run out of content at some point, and
the more recent content you produce, the more valuable Google’s bots
consider it. It is also important to ensure that your influencers
strategically place your keywords a few times in the content shared to
enable it rank high enough when searched on social media. It is
however worth noting that you should make your content readable and
not stock up with keywords. It is recommended that the keyword
density in your content should be about 3%. In fewer words, campaigns

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 bred from influencer marketing are a good way to help your content
even without posting on your website.

If you render a service, creating a forum is a good idea, Users of your

platform can air their displeasure and learn how to fix their problems
with quick solution even typically from the experience of others, hence
making it possible for your brand to be talked about more frequently
Boosting keyword search and maximizing backlinks for link building as
the forum is still part of the website.

2. Facilitating Engagement and Better Reach: Influencer marketing

via social media makes it possible to increase engagements as users
can discuss at length on campaigns, even from different influencers.
Unlike blog posts (the most used form of content marketing) that gives
room for very little engagement, the engagement from social media
influencing increases traffic to your website which is important, as
Google’s crawl spiders and bots can recognize when there is a trending
topic and a barrage of people discussing it. It helps prioritize such
products or brands when related keywords are searched. The better the
engagement rate you have with your audience with the aid of your
influencer and social media handler, the more traffic your website will
get, and consequently, the better your SEO will be.

Micro-influencers and Nano influencers are very important because of

the level of interaction and engagements they foster with their audience.
Unlike Mega and Macro-influencers that depend on reaching a high
audience with content, micro and nano influencers engage their
audience a lot more than those with much more audiences. Realistically
if you note Cristiano Ronaldo’s page, after he makes his post on
Instagram he may not even respond to the thousands of comments he’d

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get as long as his post can reach millions of people. Pat Flynn may reply
some of the people who make comments on his YouTube channel
without deep conversation. At the same time, the Nano and
Micro-influencers will discuss with their audiences like friends, build up
high cordiality and hence improve SEO. Typically; the higher your follower
count, the lower your engagement rate.

3. It helps to Utilize Social Media: Social media has been the hallmark
of influencer marketing, currently Facebook posts, YouTube videos and
tweets can show on Google’s search page. If your content is good you’ll
enjoy the features of social media. One good social media tool to use is
hashtags. Hashtags help centralize your campaign and makes it easy
for the search engine bots to locate a pattern, helping you gain visibility
and hence helping engagements, shares, and making it also easy for
Google bots to rank you high.

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 Influencer Marketing Analytics

Analytics is the efficient use of numbers and statistics to monitor the success
of your marketing strategy. After putting your strategy to the test, you need to
see how well it is working; if the numbers say something different from your
expectation, and then you can re-strategize or identify what you are doing
wrong and improve on it.

For proper analytics, it is important to know what you are measuring, and this
cannot be achieved without properly defining the goals for your marketing
campaign. Generally, the main goals for influencer marketing are to increase
engagements, increase reach, improve brand reputation, hence, boosting
revenue. Still, for more detailed analysis, you need to properly define your
business’ objectives so that you can appropriately judge success. Some
examples of these objectives are traffic driven to the website, reaching a new
audience, engaging an existing audience, and increasing your brand
awareness.

There are different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track your goals, and
each KPI says something different about your campaign. A few of these
Indicators are:

Engagement rate: One of the most important metrics that says a lot about
your campaign's various aspects is your engagement rate. The amount of
engagements your influencer gets has a great influence on brand awareness.
The more engaged it is, the more people can see it. Social platforms, in fact,
have an algorithm that frequently displays highly engaging content on the
timeline of users – even beyond your target audience.

Engagements can be monitored through social media tools like BuzzSumo,

HootSuite, and a few other tools that will track the engagements of your
choice and give you a detailed summary of how well your campaign is

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engaged by your audience. However, you can manually check specific
engagement numbers to see how well your campaign is performing.

Metrics for judging engagements include Likes, Reactions, Retweets, Shares,

Comments, Clicks, and Views for a video, traffic, etc.

● Likes: Likes are on almost every social platform. Instagram, Facebook,

Twitter, YouTube, and almost anything you can think of. They are the
most common form of engagement. More likes will increase the
visibility of your influencer’s posts about your brand, especially for
people who haven’t seen the post, enabling further engagements for
such posts, hence reaching a wider audience. Retweets and Reactions
also have the same effect as likes. Retweets are specific to Twitter, and
Reactions are specific to Facebook, where you can give a different
reaction other than “like” to a post. It usually gives the same effect as a
like.
● Comments: Typically, social media engagements will involve fewer
comments than likes or retweets because many people would rather
observe than contribute, despite enjoying the content. It, however,
doesn’t speak less about the importance of comments. Though they
are less common than likes or retweets, they are a clear indication of
how well the audience accepts your content because comments can be
inquisitive, positive, or negative. Comments will indicate whether your
product or service is acceptable or not, or people don’t know enough to
give an opinion. Either way, it creates a string of discussions, and your
campaign attracts attention.
● Clicks: If you have a CTA in your influencer’s posts, it is important to
measure clicks; this will indicate how many people found the posts
special enough to see what extra thing you have to offer. This indicates
a willingness to purchase. If your offer is compelling enough, they may
just be your next customer.

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 ● Shares: When your content is widely shared, then it is an indication that
people found value in your content and feel it will be useful for their
audiences, even on other platforms. This is a good indication that you
should enjoin your influencer to publish similar content as it is highly
valuable.

Reach: Your Influencer’s reach tells you how well your content was circulated
on social media. This is an important metric to note if you are a new or
relatively unknown brand to increase your popularity. This can be analyzed by
the amount of impressions your influencer’s posts have (most social
platforms provide this information as only visible to the account owner). You
can request this data from the influencers you are in partnership with.
Whether a person likes, comments, share your post or not, as long as it
appeared on the person’s screen – indicating that he or she saw it. Your
followers are also a good determinant of how far your reach will be. If you
have 1,000 followers and they all share your post, it will still have fewer shares
than a person with 10,000 followers and 30% shares from its audience. So for a
good reach, it is optimal that you have a sizable amount of followers. You can
also measure impressions on your website through Google Analytics, which
enables you to track the new visitors, returning visitors, time spent on the
website, more especially when you are actively running the campaign. If
awareness is your main goal, then reach is the most important metric for you.

Conversion Rate: Conversion simply means the rate at which people will buy
your product or use your service due to your campaign. You want to
appropriately convert advertisements into sales. One of the primary reasons
for influencer marketing and other digital marketing efforts is to increase
sales. It is important to track how well your sales have improved during this
period, the conversion rate indicator is the right one for measuring that. To
know-how, it is important to take accurate data of your sales before, during,

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and after the campaign, and observe the how well you have converted traffic
into an engagement. You can get more accurate data on your conversions by
using affiliate links for your influencers. This will help you perfectly know the
exact amount of sales you have gotten through each link. By observing the
difference in sales per visit, you can only observe a general change, but these
links will give you specific numbers. This can also be beneficial as it allows you
to identify your most productive influencers if you are working with more
than one, making you decide who to engage for future campaigns.

You can also measure other things with the conversion rate metric. If you
have a Call to action that can be traced from the influencer campaign, then
you can calculate conversion for that particular action, ranging from signing
up on your website, subscribing to be on your email list or newsletter, or
probably streaming or downloading a particular content. These are called
non-sales conversion metrics.

Referral Rates: Like conversion rates, referral rates let you know how many
people have patronized your business due to the campaign. Conversion rates
may not give an accurate representation of your campaign success because it
will only tell you how many people patronized. Still, referral rates will give you
a figure of the total number of visits to your website due to the campaign,
whether or not they patronized you. A prospective customer may love your
content and really get attracted to it on social media but not purchase for
many reasons. Like the inability to ship to that location or the prospective
customer not getting a color or size variant they want. To monitor why people
visit your website but end up not buying items from you, you really should
have an on-site survey to ensure you set things right to get better conversions
from subsequent campaigns. To monitor your referrals, you can use the same
affiliate links and coupons to track them whether you are using one
influencer or work with a team of influencers.

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Audience Growth: Audience growth – like reach, will let you know how well
your content circulated. It is similar to reach and awareness, but reach only
tells you how well your content is circulated. Audience growth gives you extra
insight into how many more people you have been drawn to your brand due
to your campaign. The amount of new fans you gain is important to your
campaign’s success. Even if they don’t buy at that moment, they can always
return in subsequent campaigns, some don’t even need a new campaign to
patronize you. To monitor your audience growth, you can monitor the rate of
increase in followers via social media analytics only available to you. You
should also check for that of your influencers as they are the main people
publishing your content. Check your sign-ups, subscriptions during the
period of your campaign, and you will get an insight into how well your
audience has grown.

Using your analytics, you could get even more detailed statistics about your
expenditure, income, and Returns on Investment from influencer marketing.
A few common ones are;

Cost per Engagement: Your estimated cost per engagement is the number
of charges you have incurred for every engagement you have. If you have paid
5 influencers $100 each for a campaign, and you eventually get 50,000
engagements from the campaign, then you have incurred a cost of $0.002 or
$2 per 1,000 engagements.

Return on Investment (ROI): Your return on investment is the percentage

increase from your total campaign cost to your total campaign revenue. If
your total campaign cost is $1,000 and you get revenue of $3,000, then you
have a ROI of 300 percent.

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 Key takeaways

Generally, influencer marketing is a lucrative marketing channel due to its

direct contact with the audience. It boasts billions of dollars, and it is perfect
for increasing revenue and increasing brand awareness if proper strategies
are applied. On every successful influencer marketing campaign, an average
of 500% ROI can be made.

Influencer marketing utilizes recommendation, the popular word-of-mouth

marketing model, which directly convinces people to use a product or service
based on other users' experiences contributing to the huge success of this
medium of marketing. So, erase your doubts and get your influencer
marketing campaign started. Good luck!

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 CHAPTER ELEVEN

What Podcasting Really Entails

Podcasting uses audio files to share information to a target audience through

digital devices, from mp3 players to iPods, Smartphones, and computers.
Podcasting, on its own, is an enterprise to share information for the sole
purpose of profit-making. Like YouTube channels, Video blogs (Vlogs) and
podcasts are also created for audience followership when the host delivers
quality content.

Businesses, especially E-commerce businesses, can also use podcasts to

share information about their products and services, their company, and
generally as a form of advertising in the digital space. Digital marketing with
content creation is becoming a saturated space, and unless you are doing
extra or something special, it will be more difficult for you to get noticed.

Podcasting as of 2020 is a relatively smarter approach to go into the digital

marketing space because it isn't too saturated; it gives you a chance to stand
out without having to do too much work and risk harming other vital parts of
your business. Considering the growth of podcasts in the last decade, there is
a possibility that podcasting will become less exciting in the future. Still, for

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now, as a business owner, you can get the best possible leverage from it and
boost your business.

Audio files make it possible for you as a podcaster to relay information and
your ideas to listeners with a tone that shows originality, laying proper
emphasis where necessary, which is sometimes not achievable via written
words. Your enthusiasm and your authoritative words as a podcaster can be
convincing enough to make a listener purchase a product from you, or at the
very least, check out your website. Listeners are prospective customers, and
showing them how well you understand your niche boosts their confidence
and earns you their trust, even without seeing you.

As a podcaster, your audio will be streamed or listened to by individuals. So it

feels like a one-on-one discussion where you are talking, and the other person
is listening. They become accustomed to your voice, and you no longer feel
like a stranger to them, thus creating a connection.

Do you listen to the radio? Do you have a favorite show? If you do, then you'll
understand how much you can get accustomed to the voice of a presenter
without having any idea what they look like. This connection is better than
whatever you can create with blog posts and other written content. The
connection makes them regular listeners, thereby keeping your company in
their minds, as long as you give quality and accurate information and useful
ideas.

A podcast from the listeners' perspective is fantastic because, unlike reading

written articles and blog posts, listeners are more flexible with how they
choose to listen to your pod. With their headphones and Smartphones, they
can listen while taking a walk. Or they can multitask, and even without full
concentration, they can get a grasp of the critical details of the information
you want to relay.

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As previously mentioned, a podcast is relatively easy to produce. Yes, as you
progress, you can get more sophisticated with your equipment to improve
audio quality. Basically, all you need is a computer (which you probably
already have) and a USB microphone to pick up the audio. You will have to
install a software program on your computer to help edit audio files, cut out
unnecessary parts and mistakes without having to start over upon every
instance of an error.

Podcasting is also cheap; you can do it yourself, or if you feel you aren't
comfortable speaking (although you do not need to start as a world-class
speaker – you will improve over time with practice); you can get one of your
employees to handle the task of podcasting for you.

As much as podcasting is easy, like other techniques to content creation, it

will likely be rough at the start; you probably have to create the first few
episodes before you start getting into your groove. But you must begin; if you
do not start, you won't improve.

Podcasting as a Digital Marketing Medium

Digital marketing uses the internet and other online-based digital

technologies, mainly computers, mobile phones, and other digital media
platforms, to promote products and services for better reach.

Digital marketing entirely utilizes technology to trump traditional advertising,

Television adverts, Radio adverts are now out of vogue. You most likely have
gotten major news updates from the internet than a newspaper; you will
most likely spend more time on social media than on television. So digital
marketing is the latest platform for advertisement in this century, and the
great news? It is generally cheaper and more effective than a traditional ad.

Podcasting can be categorized as a digital marketing strategy because it uses

a computer, a computer plug-in, and the internet to reach its audience. As a

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business owner, analytical tools help you monitor your audience by providing
information on the pods that have been listened to the most, the most
engaged ones. With such tools, you can tell what your audience wants.

In business, customer satisfaction is the most important thing; therefore, you

need to know what your listeners want before creating them. Hence you will
know what to develop and not take shots in the dark.

Benefits of Podcasting

● Podcasting is cheaper than other pay per click or paid social media
advertisements, although you will need promotions to get your pods to
a broader audience, as well as a few recording items.
● Podcasting helps you broaden your horizon as a business owner. As a
new set of potential customers look you up, check out the products and
services you have to offer, they become aware of your business and can
go on to place their order.
● We value our privacy a lot. A podcast with the outlook of a one-on-one
discussion appears like a sincere conversation between you and your
audience (this is why originality is advised in podcasting; trying to put
on a new personality can get easily picked out by people, and you'll be a
turn off). This perceived interpersonal honest relationship will earn you
real engagements, unlike when people see promotional posts and
adverts and probably just scroll past it because it seems to invade their
space or privacy.
● The idea of broadcasting exposes your brand for exposure cheaply. Any
topic you discuss accurately will earn you new followers per episode,
willing to share your brand and business with friends. You could even
become a guest on other podcasts on shows, making your brand even
more significant than it already is.

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 ● Although you will need to put in substantial effort to ensure the success
of any digital marketing system, you do not need any expertise in
sound engineering and no special certificates in public speaking to
make a good episode. Creating a podcast is relatively easier than other
digital marketing media.
● Podcasts help you produce your content in multi-medium, your target
audience has their preferred way of getting information, some prefer to
read, others to watch a video, some others just want to listen. So
podcasts can help you reproduce your written content into an audio
format, to the pleasure of your audience.
● Apart from promoting your business via your pod, you can have
sponsors, advertisements, and other deals that will fetch you some
more income. It is, however, only advisable to do this when you have a
very high number of listeners. Ads ruining the pod at a beginner level
will turn away the audience.

Creating Your First Podcast

Like I have said before, and I'll say again. Podcasting is relatively easy to
venture into, but you should not be afraid of making mistakes. You will get it
wrong before you get it right. Disasters sometimes come before people
become masters. You might probably think, "I'll keep practicing and get
comfortable before starting out," but in reality, learning has no limit, and as
you keep publishing, you keep getting better. If you want to feel very good
about your first publication, you may never have one, So the very first thing to
do is to be ready to begin.

To begin, you need to plan. You can have a role model and somebody whose
style you like. But remember that originality is key for your audience. You
need to create your own style because if you are a beta version of someone
else, you lose the unique touch. This is very important in nailing down your

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audience. Incorporate your business experiences, get your groove and your
own vibe, be natural yet classy. In no time, your audience will grow.

Satisfying your audience and telling them what is pleasing to their ears is
essential in business and digital marketing. Being enjoying what you do is
also important, because a podcast isn't what you just do once and drop it.
While thinking of your first episode, you should consider the long run. Can
you do it again? You have to keep going, as it isn't a sprint, but a marathon.
Assuming you release an episode weekly, is the gas enough for 52 weeks?
Those are important questions to ask yourself in the planning stage.

Now that you know what you want to do, we must highlight some
information you need before publishing the first episode of your Podcast. Sit
tight.

● The Value You Offer: The value of your Podcast is simply what your
content is. You need to ask yourself what you will do differently that
makes your Podcast worth listening, and not feel like a waste of time.
This will guide you in selecting a topic to stick with. In your line of
business, you need to know the information that you can exclusively
offer the topic. When people see that they are gaining valuable
knowledge without a charge, they will hold you in esteem. You should
understand your target audience (as it is a business you already know
the nooks and crannies). You should understand what curiosities the
public has and that your Podcast will answer their many questions.
● Your Show Title: Your show title is an equivalent of a door to a building.
Before your Podcast is listened to, the listener will see the title. Even if
the content is exactly what they wanted, if the title doesn't come across
as captivating, they will probably listen to something else. If you wanted
to rent an apartment and the entrance is awful, you may not even take
a step before moving on to other apartments. That is the same effect

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 your title has; your show title must be simple, appealing, and as natural
as possible.

I will talk about search engine optimization, keywords, and Podcasts in

chapter three, but before then, it is essential to know that your title
shouldn't be excessively stuffed with keywords as your pod may be
removed.

● Your Podcast Description: The next thing on the list in your podcast
description is to write an attractive Podcast Description; this will further
influence the prospective listener on whether or not the Podcast is
worth his time. Here you can use more words; unlike the title, which is
limited to 50 or 60 characters, the description has about 150 to 160
characters to make sure you can elaborate on your topic while
maintaining simplicity. Here it is wise to add a few keywords, as some
listeners will locate you via search engines, and appropriate keywords
will help your podcast rank high enough in search engine results.

As much as you want to add keywords, however, you should create a

description easy to read and understand. People need to understand
your description content. As much as you want your Podcast to be seen
in search engine results, it must be understandable for humans, robots
will locate your keywords and do not need understanding, but humans
do.

The first line of your description should be something that highlights a

benefit for the listener because there is usually a preview available before
the prospective listener clicks to view the remaining part. If your
audience loses interest from the first line, they might as well just close
the entire thing.

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 It's also all right to sell yourself properly, but don't oversell or short sell
yourself. You only need to make your audience feel you are worth their
time. And from your description, your Podcast should tell exactly what
you do. "I am listening to a new podcast on poultry farming; it really
sheds light on the reason the mortality rate is higher in the United
States." This statement is a sample statement I will tell a friend who asks
what I am watching or listening to. And as short as that message is, it
passes all necessary information; that is precisely how your podcast
description should function.

● Go Solo At The Start: If you listen to podcasts, you will agree with me
that many pods have guests coming on the show, almost on every
episode. This is very good as listening to just your voice can get cliché,
and no matter how well your opinions are, someone bringing things to
light from a different angle sometimes is the difference you need to
make. But it is good to start alone, you're a new podcaster with little or
no experience, and you need to understand your show's rudiments
before calling other people. Organizing yourself first is essential; else,
everything will seem like nonsense. When you go solo at the beginning,
you let out authority and build goodwill with your first set of audience,
keeping them somewhat attached and anticipating more episodes. It
might feel crazy talking to yourself for 30 minutes or whatever the
length of your pod, but with time, you'll get in your groove. I think
intuition will let you know when you are comfortable enough to allow
guests on your show.
● Short Length or Longer Length Broadcasts: There is no general rule of
thumb for this. However, your Podcast should provide quality content
for people to come back for another episode or even listen to the end.
Some podcasts will do well in longer broadcasts than short ones
because of the amount of information you need to let out at a time, but

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 it is essential to note your audience; you don't just want to talk; you
want people to listen.

Breaking your pods and serving a reduced length is good as it enables

you to have an easy next episode, hence making your job easier.
Although, when breaking your pods, you must ensure that every single
one of your Podcasts holds practical information, no matter how short it
is. If listeners feel that they have wasted their time, they will never come
back, and they may even give you bad reviews, so make their sacrifice of
time worth it.

From experience, no matter how attractive a topic is, people get bored of
routine, so you need to keep out extraneous information, allow your
Podcast to hold more of the necessary information; this will enable you to
save time and keep your episodes from being too long. The bottom line
is keeping your episode optimal, long enough to contain vital
information, and not too long to bore the listeners.

● Consistency is key: When you create a podcast, you create an identity,

and you need your audience to know who you are. If you are going to
do short length pods, you need to maintain it that way; the same thing
if you decide to go long. The intervals between subsequent releases also
need to be consistent. Once a week for 52 weeks in a year, fortnightly
for 26 times a year, daily, for 365 days in a year. Whatever your choice is,
you need to be consistent. However, for a beginner, I recommend that
you adequately space your pods to have ample time to sort out other
things in your business while preparing a quality podcast. If you are
inviting guests too, you'll need some time to look for the perfect fit for
your episode and know the person's availability. If you know the person
won't be available for that episode, you should have enough time to
contact a substitute (who you must have already listed).

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 Keep it consistent, but remember that the lesser the interval, the more
broadcast you have to create. You don't want to get burned out, do you?

● Sort All Work Of Graphics: Graphic design works are the aesthetic
value you add to your Podcast to show a touch of class and to depict
some sort of distinctiveness. Your artwork and your logo, just like the
title of your name, will make a huge first impression, albeit an
aesthetical impression; make sure that the resolution of your cover art is
1400 × 1400 pixels, in JPG or PNG format for better image processing.

A podcast logo is equally important; it can help your regular listeners

easily identify your Podcast, amongst many others. Make it unique,
distinct, and classy. If you already have a designer in your team, that's
perfect, but if you don't, you don't need to employ someone; there are
many good freelance designers you can patronize; just check out their
portfolio and make a choice. Your logo and artwork should be your face;
make sure you look beautiful.

● Setup Recording Equipment and Software: As I mentioned earlier,

you don't need to be a disc jockey or a sound engineer to produce the
best audio quality. The most important thing for the start is to make
sure you can record clearly, with little background noise. If your
audience can hear you properly, your audio system is fine. As you get
bigger, you can use more sophisticated recording equipment, but I
really advise modesty in this, as you aren't about to open a radio station;
you only want to amplify your business. Hence, I really recommend that
you buy something good enough to give clear sound quality, not
necessarily expensive. Be sure that your recording equipment doesn't
need mixers and amplifiers. Something simple and not complicated to

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 use, with a good output. If you are buying online, please take the time
to check reviews, so you will be sure to get the exact thing you need.
● Write: That's right, I know you want to record, speak, and not write, but
you must have a script of your episode to ensure that you don't get lost
in the middle or skip important points. When writing, though, you don't
need to write everything you want to say and start reading. You're
making a podcast, not reading the news. Note your introduction, your
key points, and your conclusion in the exact order you want them to be.
It will also help reduce the nervousness and anxiety in your voice; it's
only normal to feel nervous; you're not a robot. But with time and
consistency, it gets better.
● Record and Edit: Now that you have all the basic information, you need
to know to create your first Podcast. The next step is to record; it may
feel terribly weird at first, you alone at your office space, or your house,
speaking to a microphone, giggling at some point. It is perfectly
normal, but if you need help, you can call one of your staff to pose as
your audience, giving gestures to make you feel like you are seeing your
audience. Or just imagine that you have a couple of people talking to
you and responding, either way, it is important to maintain your
composure till the end of the Podcast. You will make some mistakes
during the process of recording, and you definitely do not want to start
over upon every mistake; this is where the quality of your software
comes to play; you must be able to cut out certain parts and merge
with other parts, to reduce the error count in your release.
● Remember To Be Distinct: You're in the recording phase, so It is
important to note that for you to gain ground and make an impact,
your content needs to be unique. Talk about new things, or talk about
old things in new ways. You may also decide to use the textbook trick of
being controversial, make strong unpopular opinions with facts and

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 figures to back it up, your critics will watch out for you, and your fans
will love you dearly because you seem to air their controversial opinions
in ways they cannot. The bottom line, be distinct but do not force a
personality that is alien on yourself; your audience will pick it very easily.
Be original.
● Publish Your Podcast: Yes, you want the whole world to listen to you,
but it has to leave your computer for you to achieve that. To publish
your podcasts, you need a host where you upload your pod. It requires
you to fill in details about your Podcast, and it creates a unique podcast
feed for you from which you can submit your Podcast to streaming
platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, and many more.
You can't upload your Podcast to Google; however, as Google likes to
search for it, but in further chapters, we will discuss how you can
optimize your content to be easily discovered by Google.

After you upload to your host, you need to locate your RSS Feed Link on
your host's website, copy and submit to any streaming platform(s) of your
choice.

● Always Appreciate Everybody: After you release your first episode,

thank every person who makes a comment on your Podcast, note all
the criticisms no matter how harsh, and promise to return with better
content. When you start having guests, too, appreciate them for
accepting, and after the successful interview, appreciate them again.
They are providing you a great help, and you must be on good terms.
● Make Requests Kindly: always politely ask your listeners to take time to
rate and review you; for you to serve them better, make it about them,
and they will be happy to do it. However, provide them high-quality
content to ensure more positive reviews, as too many negative reviews
will turn away prospective fresh listeners. Even if your audience is small

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 initially, the engagement from reviews will be a reference point for
other new listeners to make their judgment. Higher-ranking reviews
also increase your ranking on streaming platforms, making it easier to
locate you. As you cannot do this all by yourself, it is important to always
ask for reviews, politely, of course. Also, provide content worth 5-star
reviews; the higher the frequency of good ratings, the better your
Podcast's discoverability.

Your Podcast Launch

Launching your Podcast is no trivial thing, and you want to treat it as such.
You want to make people anticipate it, make people's mouth water to get
them to view as soon as it drops. There are several methods of making an
announcement and keeping your potential listeners in the loop. They include:

Existing Subscribers to Your Blog: If your business is an E-commerce

business, a blog post is a great way to announce to your subscribers that you
will be creating a podcast, asking for their opinions and making it possible to
reach you by email. They can reach you with topics and products they would
like you to talk about, upon your request, of course, and you can also ask
them to mention guests they would love to have on the show. The onus is on
you to note all responses and sort out similar requests; you should prioritize

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topics or products that more people want you to talk about, with ample time
to prepare and get yourself ready. Remember to also send subsequent emails
to let them know that the Podcast is ready. For example, three days before
your pod, you can send a reminder mail to keep them anticipating your
Podcast, and on the release date, let them know that it is already available for
streaming. Your old email subscribers most likely have stuck with you from
the days of written content; since you offer them something they like, many
of them would love to hear you speak. They are a good audience for your
launch.

New Subscribers to Your Blog/Website: You can also get new email
subscribers to your website. To do that, you need to generate traffic to your
website; offering discounts on some products might just do the trick, this will
increase the number of visitors on your website. After this, you need a landing
page – a landing page is designed to bait visitors to submit their personal
details (email address) with the promise of an incentive. Now you already
directed them to your website with the promise of a discount, make sure that
the lead page pops up before they can continue anything, let them know that
you will be airing subsequent podcasts on more products coming in at
bargain prices. You should get 20% of your new visitors to submit their email
addresses. In digital marketing terms, the "bait" or incentive offered to visitors
in exchange for their details is called a "lead magnet."

It is important to note that your landing page is well designed, not overloaded
with information. Instead, it should focus on the information you want to pass
across. The simplicity of design is important. Your lead magnets as well must
hold value; yes, you are giving a discount or a coupon or other freebies, but
make sure it's something that holds value; it'll help convert more visitors to
subscribers.

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The details you get from your new subscribers should be distinct from your
old blog subscribers to adequately sort mails to them. Ensure to keep them
posted about the launch progress of the Podcast.

Your Offline Network: The support you can get from your friends, family,
colleagues at work, and school is important. It can go a long way to
publicizing your Podcast. Just like your email subscribers, keep them updated
about the podcast release, let them see you, and the first thing they can
remember is that you are launching a podcast, and inform them when it goes
live. It is very important, and if your personality is a great one, it makes it even
easier.

During launch week, thank every person who comments on your Podcast.
Ask them to leave a review and share it with anyone they know who might
find it valuable. Interact. Even if your audience is small to start, the direct
interaction can feed your energy level and offer valuable feedback for your
future podcast episodes.

Social media: If you have an active and large social media page for your
business, it is a good place to make an announcement for your followers and
even non-followers to see. However, if you don't, you can make use of
personalized campaigns with the assistance of social media marketers,
creating hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to draw attention and
traffic to your website. Don't just make posts or campaigns. Interact with
them and let them give feedback. It keeps your business in their minds.

You can also make a live announcement, as you can go live on almost all
social network platforms. In fact, you can spice it up by making a live video,
probably showing you with your laptop and microphone about to make a
recording. Make it look great, and your subscribers will treat it as such.

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These approaches and channels will help make your launch gain traction, and
if you can do something decent on your launch, you will keep many of them
around.

Your Subsequent Podcasts

Upon a successful launch, you have set a foundation for your Podcast, you
already have listeners from different places, and your new responsibility is to
make them stay. You can work on further publicity, but it is important to focus
on satisfying your current listeners; you'd naturally grow if you do that. The
value of your Podcast to your listeners is dependent on content; if your
business deals with selling cars, making reviews and comparison of two cars
that look alike with facts and figures, to help listeners narrow down their
choices when buying a car. You are definitely providing them with some
value; you cannot just come on the show and list the specifications of the cars
you want to sell. That holds very little value to your listeners. Ensure you're
providing some sort of "classified information," and your listeners will hold you
in high esteem. This is why it is very important to perfectly understand what
you'll be talking about. Make sure it is a product you are very familiar with, do
extra research, and have the answers to questions you think they will ask.

Now you don't want to totally abandon your website after launching your
Podcast, you should regularly make references to your website; let people
check some things out there – although you need to make it easy for them to
locate it. Make them regular visitors to your website; their attention may be
drawn to something you haven't even talked about. It is also important to
create a short recap of your Podcast in written form on your website so that
listeners who missed out on a particular episode will see what they missed. If
it is an important topic or a product they are interested in that was talked
about, they will go back and search for it.

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 Inviting Guests to Your Podcast

Having guests on your show can be really appealing to your listeners because
it brings some sort of dynamism, it takes a diversion from the regular voice
that may start sounding boring to them, it also helps you relay knowledge
and information you don't have to your listeners, as well as stories and
experiences peculiar to your guest. Because you are a beginner, you don't
have a lot of people reaching out to you, telling you how they'd love to be a
part of your show, but either way, you need to land your first guess, So what to
do?

The most important thing now is your professional network. You must have
made a couple of contacts since you began your business; this is the first
place to look for a guest. If you have anyone from your personal relationship
that has ample knowledge about the subject matter, it is totally fine to bring
them on as well. Being a loner never works as a business owner; you need a
good professional network to learn new approaches, gain knowledge, and see
things differently. When trying to land a fellow professional in your business
line, if the person has no personal relationship with you, you can identify
similar interests that you have, use it as a basis for your discussion, and easily
get in bed with your guest.

Your guest is your benefactor; he's offering you a lot by agreeing to come to
your low-populated show, as it offers little value for them, especially
considering that you won't be paying them. You need to make it easy for
them by putting the following things into consideration.

● Work with Their Time: It is a good idea to research your guest, to know
their schedule as everybody is busy with one thing or the other; take
time out to know their timing details; this will help you fix your session
in a time that will be convenient for them.

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 ● Get To Know Them: Although your first set of guests are people most
likely known to you, you need to know more about them and what to
expect so you can select a proper approach for the interview. Listen to
public speeches they have delivered, podcasts they have been on,
books they have written, and even their social media to get a feel of
their general outlook and personality. This will aid in your interaction
with them and in the interview, as you now know deeper details about
them. If there is anything you want to know about that you can't find
out on your own, ask nicely.
● Identify What Specific Thing They Can Offer: Before selecting a guest
to be on your show, despite their wealth of experience and knowledge
in your business line, you need to know specifically what you want your
listeners to gain from them, and you need to be sure that the guest in
question can give them the exact value they hope to add. It helps the
guest not waste their time, go straight to specifics, and it becomes a
win for all three parties; you, your listeners, and the guest.

It is very important to always back up your interview sessions and recordings

to a drive or cloud storage facility; in the eventuality that your computer gets
damaged or missing, you can access your files easily. Telling your guest you
lost the recording isn't proper, and it'll take a lot of sacrifices to recreate time
for you.

Your guests are not only an avenue to increase the number of listeners you
can get, but they can also be useful in publicizing your show with their own
networks, hence increasing your reach.

Be sure to stay in touch with your guests, showing your gratitude at every
point in time. After the interview session, send an appreciation email; a few
days before it goes live, send another email reminding them of the release
date and politely ask them to promote for you across their channels because

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they have probably done a good job and promoting your show is mutually
beneficial to them, they will most likely oblige your request. On the d-day,
when it goes live, send another reminder email with streaming links and
humbly remind them to promote your show. This also indicates a great deal
of courtesy as it shows that you value their effort, and they will be willing to
return another day or even share other useful contacts with you.

As your Podcast gets bigger, better, and more popular, more guests will
continue to knock on your door, offering many things, and you begin to have
several ideas (even different from your original plan) for your next set of
episodes. At this point, you need coordination. You may need more members
on your team to help out with editing, uploading, and handling your blog and
social media, leaving you to focus on your potential guests, reviewing
background information on them, and selecting the right episode and
subject to talk about for each guest.

Coordinate your staff by assigning specific duties with incentives and

deadlines so that you will always submit before your release time.
Coordination will help you maintain your standard and not alter quality
because you don't have time to filter out many things. Manage it properly.

Coordinating and managing yourself has a lot to do with scheduling and

planning. Using an organizing software like Calendly will help you be better
organized, sorting episodes and episodes to come just the way you want, on
their supposed release date. Organizing your already preplanned episode
titles can be strenuous if you don't even know what you want to do next. You
need to plan so your releases are orderly; you don't want to talk about "A,"
then "Z" before coming back to talk about "B." It makes sense to move
progressively rather than talk about one thing and then totally move to
something different before coming back to talk about the related topic.
Organizing with good software will save you the stress of brainstorming, and

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reduce the task of creating a new episode, keep you mentally fresh and allow
you to produce output in other parts of your business.

Picking the Best Possible Host

A podcast host is a directory designed to help you store and distribute your
Podcast's audio across streaming platforms, using a uniquely tailored RSS
feed just for you. Podcast hosts also provide analytics (performance statistics)
and other tools to make it easy for you to publish your Podcast and also
ensure that your listeners have the best possible experience.

You probably thought that you could make a recording and simply upload it
on your blog, no! You cannot just record time after time on your website, as
your blog host will not want to handle such data. Moreover, it won't have the
reach you targeted in terms of increased customers. Remember that you
need your Podcast to bring traffic to your website and not your website
bringing listeners to your Podcast.

Unlike regular web content hosts, podcast hosts usually offer a few services
that are more than just the regular that aid the growth of the Podcast. Some
of these services include large bandwidths, analytics, the recreation of
content into transcripts or videos, and monetization. Some of these hosting
platforms include Buzzsprout, Podbean, Captivate, and Blubrry.

These Podcast host service providers offer services ranging from free
packages – which are usually not good enough because of the very limited
amount of content you can record in a month. Worse still, your podcasts will
get deleted after some time, which is ultimately bad for business. Some do
not offer free podcasting services but offer free limited trials for a couple of
days or weeks to test the waters and see if they are good enough for you.
Their paid options, however, are much better as they give you more leverage
and room to record while ensuring that your Podcast never gets deleted and

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old episodes can always be referred to. These prices range from as small as
$10 to $15 per month on a basic plan, $25 to $40 on advanced plans, and even
up to $99 per month on more advanced plans. As your audience grows, you
can level up on your subscription to ensure the best services rendered to you,
and in turn, your audience. All the podcast services listed above offer Analytics
and monetization support, but not all of them offer transcripts, which are
important for search engine optimization (discussed in chapter four). But in
all, you want to choose a host that answers most of your questions while
being scalable for your budget.

The Perfect Edit

I talked about editing in your first episode, but it goes beyond the first
episode; you have to properly know how to edit. Every Podcast you know that
sounds so perfect and appealing has undergone some good work of edit,
because humans record, not robots. There will be a lot of mistakes, which will,
however, reduce as you progress.

However, as a beginner, you will pause a lot, repeat many sentences, delete
many parts and repeat. The beauty of editing is that it will be perfectly fitted
together that your listeners won't be able to tell that you have cut out things
and added other things. Background noise can also be reduced from editing.
And it all stays between you and your computer!

However, to reduce the time spent on edits, you need to reduce your
mistakes. This can be achieved by outlining every single episode. Just like you
do when writing a book, you outline topics and subtopics and how you'll
move from the base topic, highlighting the purpose of the episode, what you
want your listeners to take away, what do you want to make references to?
Previous books, podcasts, or even posts on your blog, interviews, the way
you'll direct your guest to answer possible questions from your subscribers,

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and the order in which they should be arranged. These finer details will make
your Podcast a classy one.

Releasing the first episode in your Podcast may seem like a whole lot of work,
but it's nothing compared to the fact that you have to release new episodes
consistently weeks upon weeks with guests and staff.

Podcasts and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a digital marketing technique that involves the

effective arrangement of content and keywords on a website, as well as the
optimal structuring of a website to improve rankings in search engines, as
internet users are unlikely to go to the second page after a search, making it
imperative for a website to rank as high as possible, even high enough on the
first page.

People make trillions of searches yearly, often with the intent to find
information about products and services they want to purchase. Search is
often the primary source of digital traffic because it predicts the searcher's
intent, and almost all other marketing channels are in a way or the other
dependent on search engines.

Higher ranking in search results than your competitors will increase your
discoverability and will definitely have a direct impact on the traffic you
generate. SEO is built to do just that. Optimizing your website means that you
want to create the best possible ranking for it when your major keyword is

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searched. Google and other search engines' goal is to rank search results in a
hierarchy of results that solves all of the searcher's problems so well that they
don't need to do another search for further answers.

Keyword research is the backbone of SEO; it is imperative to ensure that your

target keywords are quite easy to rank, have a reasonable search volume, and
likely to have a high conversion rate (that is, you don't just want them to see it,
you want them to click and come on your website).

In choosing keywords, however, buyer intent is an important factor. An

internet user who searches for "best android phones in 2020" is probably
most likely in a debate within themselves or with others and do not know
what they want to buy yet, unlike a user that searches for "Samsung Z flip
versus Samsung S20 Ultra", such internet user already has an idea of what he
wants and is past the debate stage. Showing an intention to buy such an
item, therefore keywords should be tailored around buyer intent so that clicks
become money

Podcasting is a great tool to complement the digital marketing of a business

as it has a lot of SEO benefits. Optimizing your website using your Podcast
begins with your podcast title; it is your first keyword. Although you won't
appear as the top rank of a Google search just because your keyword is
embedded in your title, it's a lot more than that. You need to consider your
content, what you intend to offer, and the best word to describe it as though
you want to search for it, however, in a subtle manner.

If your business involves sales of clothing online, you don't want to develop a
Podcast title such as "The best Chinese clothing brands of 2020", rather a
more subtle title like "Fashion trends in china" will be more appropriate. Your
podcast description can contain more keywords, say "This podcast discusses
the latest trends of clothing brands in China, especially on products made by

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the Shanghai Tang, Bosideng, Gujin, Xander Zhou, and how many people
worldwide have adopted these dressing methods."

This has subtly incorporated keywords such as "fashion" into the title, as well
as "clothing brands," "dressing" into the podcast description, and even and
listed several top brands. These are likely things that will be included in
internet user searches, and you have managed to properly input them in your
title and description without stuffing them.

Keyword stuffing is when you try to play smart and shove up your keyword in
your title and description as many times as possible. For example, a podcast
title that says "all about fashion: the pod about fashion, for fashionable
people." It's become too obvious, and Google, as well as apple podcasts, can
notice this and remove your show. I'm sure you don't want that, do you?

Google recommends keeping keyword density at a level of 1 –2%. It is also

important to note that your keyword should have a high search volume and
low competition; Amazon keyword tool, keyword tool pro, Ubersuggest, and
many other SEO tools can suggest keywords for you.

There are many other places in your Podcast that you can input keywords for
SEO, apart from your title and your podcast description. I recommend that
the description of each new episode contains a keyword, each one different
from the last so that one doesn't eat up others.

In all, the important thing you want to do is get people interested enough, so
they want to listen. Make the titles and descriptions appealing, keeping in
mind that creativity and understanding matter the most.

Earlier in the year, Google started showing podcasts in search results, unlike
in times past. People can search for a podcast and even find some of the
episodes as part of the search results.

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Shortly after, Google's algorithm improved to listen to the Podcast and even
pick up keywords in audio. Good news, but it is important to note that you are
creating a show for consumer satisfaction; people definitely do not want to
listen to a show where you drop your keyword every second. Always go
natural, allow your flow, and definitely mention things that Google will pick
up.

Google's technology is so improved that it can automatically make transcripts

of a podcast to use the content as metadata, thus helping people find more
specific information not just about the Podcast but about individual episodes
when they search. Although it is important to know that Google's
transcription isn't perfect yet, so you may decide to transcribe by yourself,
ensuring that the transcript for each episode is on your blog or website.

A transcription of your episode can help search engine bots and crawl spiders
understand your Podcast better, hence improving the episode's
discoverability by proper indexing of keywords and the general content of the
Podcast. Podcast transcription is quite a tedious process, and you may need
extra hands for that or just allow Google to do it for you.

However, it's worth the stress if you really want to build an audience for your
Podcast, as your transcript for each episode will have keywords from your
audio that will direct people right back to your website. This is the time for
anyone interested in Search Engine Optimization to understand that with
Google's support, podcasts importance in authority building cannot be
overemphasized; they are as important as other content sources and will only
improve from there.

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 Optimizing Your Podcast for Google

Unlike other platforms like Apple Podcast, Spotify, and the likes, you can
simply submit your Podcast by submitting your Unique RSS feed on their
platforms, you cannot do the same for Google.

Google prefers to locate things itself due to the level of sophistication of its
algorithm. As we know, it likes to find things itself, so it crawls the web with its
bots and spiders, looking for your show rather than you submitting it. So you
have to make yourself discoverable for Google by tying all loose ends in the
backend of your podcast host so that Google can find your Podcast. There are
a few important things to note when optimizing your Podcast for Google.
They include:

● Quality Content: Quality should be a priority for your Podcast, every

other thing you'll do have their success hinged on the quality you offer,
In audio, and in content. If these aren't in place, your SEO will be an
absolute waste of time. As previously highlighted, find a creative topic,
something new to people, or present topics in unique ways people
haven't heard of or previously thought of. Also, pay attention to your
audio quality, and make sure that it is standard enough even without
the best facilities. These things will naturally give your Podcast a high
authority, helping it rank better on Google, even without the influence
of SEO. Good content is important for SEO to work.
● Use Social Media: Social media engagement is a factor considered by
Google in ranking your content. This makes it important to backlink
your Podcast to your website and also link your website to your social
media. Sharing your episodes on social media will generate more

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 traffic, more likes, comments, retweets, and shares your content has.
With time and the increased popularity of your Podcast, your website
will attract more citations and backlinks. Hence improving your domain
authority and making it easier for your site to rank. Authority is vital for
Google SEO because it portrays your website as one that knows its
onions. In fewer words, the higher your authority, the better your
ranking on Google.
● Optimize your RSS feed: Your RSS feed contains all the information
about your Podcast, from your title to your description, your graphic
files, audio files, and every other piece of information that your Podcast
needs to be distributed outside the hosting platform to your streaming
platforms. To optimize your RSS feed, the first thing you need to
consider is having a higher level of control over it, to manage, move,
and customize your feed the way you want it. You can also redirect your
Podcast's feed (owning your feed) so that if you decide to change your
host, you won't lose listeners who are subscribed to your old feed.
Losing your listeners will mean that your engagements and authority
will take a huge nosedive, affecting your rankings.

Another thing worth noting in your RSS feed is the size; the higher the
size, the more data it will consume, and the slower your content will load;
a general internet rule of thumb states that small things download fast,
and large things download slowly. You do not want your RSS size to be
large. It makes the streaming process more tedious and expensive for
your listener; consumer satisfaction is the most important thing to
consider in any enterprise.

Your RSS size is based on the number of characters (as it is majorly lines
of codes). More characters bring about more lines of code, and even
rich-text characters – bold, italics, colours, hyperlinks increase the

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 number of backend characters. So it is advisable to use simpler text
formatting and even summarized texts to keep the RSS size small. The
sizes of images and audios do not matter because the RSS feed code
only links those assets but doesn't embed them. RSS feeds can be
compressed with GZIP – an open-source algorithm for file compression.
Some hosts automatically compress the feed for optimal performance
anyway.

● Utilize Your Guests: Your guests can also be a form of organic

marketing for you by sharing your show on their website and social
media. Publicizing their own impact and making it a win for both
parties. This can be very effective if your guest is high profile with huge
followership or a high ranking website because it'll have a massive
boost on your rank by giving backlinks to your Podcast, thereby
increasing its authority for Google bots and spiders, for a better ranking.
● Use Tags and Categories: Pick the right categories and tags in your
podcast description; this is important for search within streaming
applications where the Search engine optimization is not as advanced
as Google. The best way to pick a podcast category is to properly define
your show; you need to answer the questions "what do viewers stand to
gain from my show" "what do I want people to have in mind when
searching for my show?" consider your potential audience and what
they will likely search to discover your Podcast. This will make it easier
for you to determine an appropriate category to place your show. If
your show isn't easy to define, look for the best fit of categories and go
with the one with the least competition, as you'll have a higher chance
of making it public from there. Tags are also useful for your Podcast.
They are keywords that allow people to discover podcasts when
searched in streaming apps, several tags can be added, but they must
be relevant to your Podcast context.

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SEO and podcasting are mutually beneficial to each other, Podcasts can
boost authority for better Search engine optimization, and proper search
engine optimization of your website can promote your Podcast's visibility.
Therefore, SEO is proven to be a very important part of digital marketing via
podcasting.

Creating a podcast takes ample time and effort. However, the effectiveness of
podcasting for your SEO will definitely please you, as you'll notice better
visibility and discoverability, increasing revenue, and building a better
reputation for your business.

Other Ways to Monetize Your Podcast

As a business owner running a podcast, the primary means of income

through your Podcast is to generate traffic to your website, boost your
website's authority and make money from improved sales caused by more
website clicks. But if you want to make more money from harnessing other
avenues, it is possible. Like I said earlier, podcasting is business on its own;
without a business, many podcasters still make a living from several other
means. They include:

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing basically is a digital marketing model that businesses

employ, which involves paying a third party (a person or a business) to
promote their products and services on their website, blog posts, Vlog,
Podcasts, and other content creation, and rather than pay for clicks, the
business pays a commission to that third party, for traffic or sales that have
been referred by that third party. In this case, you are a third party. You can
advertise for businesses that render services related to your Products. For
example: if your Podcast reviews cars you sell, you can be an affiliate partner
with an auto repair service provider. Everyone who books a session with them

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using your unique link gets some sort of discount when they visit the auto
repair. Now, the way you can make money from this is on a commission basis;
on every person that visits their shop, you get a 4-5% of the revenue
generated, or you just get a fixed amount, depending on your deal with the
business owner of course.

You can also be an affiliate marketer for goods that you do not personally sell,
maybe because you do not have a manufacturer for it yet. You don't just want
to add it to your portfolio for many reasons, you can decide to sell via affiliate
marketing. If your Podcast talks about fashion – which of course, should be in
your line of business, you can have an affiliate link for selling clothes, shoes,
bags, and other fashion items from websites like Amazon that reward you for
driving sales traffic to their website.

On websites like Amazon, you get a specific link tailored for just you, which
ensures that as long as the customer follows your link, you will get the
commission for the sale, even if the buyer closes the browsing session and
resumes later, as far as the buyer doesn't clear his internet cookies. Cookies
are small bits of files on your browser that holds tiny bits of data usually
specific to the website, accessible to your computer and the web server.
There are a million products on Amazon. If you want to do affiliate marketing,
select a product that matches your podcast topic.

Advertisements

This is also a popular way to make money off your Podcast, although it is
something you should consider only when your Podcast has grown to a
sizeable level because adverts ruin the pleasure of the Podcast. It can get
annoying when you have to lose your small listeners because of adverts,
hence putting the real reason you started the Podcast (your business) in
jeopardy. Companies also typically contact podcasts with many listeners and
subscribers for advertisements as it will give them a better reach due to a

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larger audience. In today's market, an advertisement can make you a
minimum of $70 per month on a weekly show if you have 1,000 listeners; of
course, this number grows exponentially with more listeners, so you can
make over $700 in a month if your weekly show can boast of 10,000 listeners.

There are three kinds of adverts that you can provide on your Podcast. They
are:

● Pre-Roll Ads: These ads, typically 15 seconds long, are usually played at
the beginning of a podcast. Standard rates are worth $18 per 1000
downloads
● Mid-Roll Ads: These ads, typically 60 seconds long, are usually played
midway through a podcast; it can sometimes be annoying to the
listener. It breaks the flow of information, especially when the listener is
not interested. Although the listener is interested, it easily catches their
attention because the listener is deeply listening with almost no
distraction, increasing the chances of the ad to stick. The standard rate
for a mid-roll Ad is $25 per 1000 downloads.
● Post-Roll Ads: Typically, 30 seconds long, these ads are played at the
end of a podcast. They are worth $10 per 1000 downloads.

The counting system typically works with downloads; whether or not the
episode was played after the download doesn't matter; as long as that
episode has been downloaded, it makes a count.

Sponsorship

Sponsorship is a mouthwatering way of monetizing your Podcast, as there are

thousands of potential sponsors looking for a way to increase their reach. The
difficult part is looking for a sponsor that fits in the narrative of your Podcast
and, at the same time, strike a deal good enough for you. Sponsors always
want to ensure that they don't give you money and products without getting

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any tangible increase in revenue in return. Sponsors can come on your show
at any time. Still, it is usually better for you and the sponsor to have a decent
amount of audience before inserting adverts from your sponsors to your
show, as it could cause a U-turn in the entire monetization goal.

There are a few ways to get sponsors for your Podcast, some of which include:

● Actively selling yourself to brands: As a small podcaster, you most

likely will not have sponsors knocking around your door, looking for
advertisement opportunities. Instead, you can pitch yourself to them,
showing them statistics from your Podcast, which tells them that you
are a growing brand, and in no time, you will be bigger than you are,
which is why analytics is an important service podcast host needs to
render you. This will help you convince the brand that investing in you
holds financial value and will not be a waste, with statistics to back you
up
● Podcast Networks: You can join a podcast network that links up
sponsors with podcasters, which exposes your content to more brands,
and the ones who love your content and feel their services are a fit for
your audience will reach out to you. Although you have to split your
earnings with the network.

Key takeaways
In conclusion, as a business owner, the main focus of making money from
your Podcast is by making sure your content aligns with your products and
services. As a podcaster, you are the chief advertiser of yourself, and while you
can make money advertising for others, your business should be your priority.
It is also important that your content is qualitative, as every other thing you
hope to achieve with your Podcast is hinged on that.

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 CHAPTER TWELVE

What Is Copywriting?

Writing a copy is the art of crafting catchy texts to persuade a particular

demographic. “A copy” is the written content aimed at converting
impressions to clicks and converting clicks to high sales. Any form of writing
that persuasively requests an action from your audience is called copywriting.

Many companies, firms, and establishments venture into copywriting to

persuade their existing customers and potential customers by delivering
content that, first of all, catches their attention before anything else. A good
copy will attract the audience’s attention, and it will keep it throughout to
ensure many people finish reading enough to take the necessary action
required.

During reading through the copy, it appeals to the audience's emotion while
justifying the price and making the potential customers understand that they
are getting the best available deal (even if they are not). This appeal to

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emotion is significant as many purchase decisions are influenced by
emotions rather than logic, and copywriting helps exploit this weakness in
humans.

Copywriting is an art; it requires a lot of creativity to carefully combine words

to grab attention while sounding natural and pressing the right emotional
buttons in your audience, taking them beyond the stage of doubt without
sounding like a robot.

Copywriting is used in various content types as you can reach out to people
via several digital means. Through video scripts, YouTube video descriptions,
Blog posts, Social media Flyers, Billboards, Email marketing, podcast
descriptions, Website Homepage, Landing pages, “about” page, and many
more media. It will bring about more impressions, engagements, conversions,
and hence more revenue when done correctly. A well-written copy can
improve your sales by more than 500%.

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 What Makes A Good Copy?
1. Correct Grammatical Construction: Whether you write your business
copy by yourself or employ a copywriter to do the job for you, it must be
error-free, and the grammatical construction is almost flawless. Your
business copy is an image of your business, and you do not want to
portray the wrong idea to your audience. Mistakes might be inevitable
for humans. Still, it is excellent to double-check documents for
grammatical errors, if possible with software. It will be a huge setback if
you portray your business in a bad light rather than persuading your
audience.

2. Persuasive Tone: With the brilliant combination of words, it is essential

to persuade your audience and convince them that you stand out, you
are unique. Know the right buzzwords to use, and you will be able to
win them over to yourself quite easily. Words like “We’re not just a travel
agency that takes you around the world… we bring the world to you”.
Use sentences that make them convinced about your ability to deliver,
and boom! You’re in their head.
3. Clear call-To-Action: One mistake common to many brands and
businesses is that they do not indicate what they want their audience
to do. You have successfully convinced them about what you offer, you
have convinced them about what you can do, but what do you need
them to do? Your copy's goal should be clear as crystal to whoever is
reading it so that they take the necessary course of action in the end.
Using words like “Learn more” is quite a cliché; why not use more
expressive words like “Register now with You ‘n’ Me and Start
Chatting with friends.” CTAs are what drive conversions. You should
avoid making the mistake of leaving your audience to wonder what to
do or want to “make awareness.” If your post is just for awareness, you

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 may request your audience's email addresses to remind them when
you launch or go live. People have many things on their minds, and if
you can steal their attention for a while, you should milk as much as you
can. Every single lead is important; hence have a clear Call-To-Action to
get the necessary conversions. One CTA per copy is fine; aim at getting
your audience to do just one thing. If you try to get them to do too
many things at a time, they may end up doing nothing.
Ensure that your CTA button is clear, as it is usually the last step that
precedes conversion, ensure that it is large enough and could even be
of a different colour or text format.
4. Make Clear Points: You don’t need to dilly dally. People are busy, and
they will most likely scan through your content. You don’t need long
talks; go straight to the point. Use short sentences that carry weight
and highlight the importance of your copy. Short separated sentences
will make the reader pay attention to each line, and hence you can

easily pass your message across in just a short period. Lengthy

sentences may bore the reader or take too much of his time, so he may
only take a very quick scan at the copy without really understanding

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 your offer. And if your audience fails to get the information in your copy
accurately, they won’t take the necessary action.
This is an example of a clear Call to action in an email copy. It clearly
highlights the benefits of “amazing discounts” with a clear CTA with a
deeper shade of the green colour to enhance clarity.
5. Write Conversationally: You must sound very natural to your audience
as they will primarily be reading in their head. Format your texts such
that it will appear as if you are talking to them. Use exclamations where
necessary!!! – Usually, to indicate a loud tone and CAPITALIZATION to
indicate emphasis, you can also use bold texts and italicized texts
where necessary. This special text-formatting is easily caught by the eye
and makes the reader pay attention to why those texts are specially
formatted, and even in their mind, they read aloud the texts with
exclamations. Hence you are making them see the content, the exact
way you wrote it.
6. Use Catchy Leads: If you want to write a high-converting copy, you
must have attention-grabbing leads. Use irregular words, figures, facts,
or statistics that will intrigue the reader. When you capture the
attention of the reader, then he can read the first line. If the reader
reads the first line, they will most likely check out the rest of the copy.
Your copy will be a failed one if the first line cannot captivate your
audience. There is a rule called the 80/20 rule. “Put in more efforts to
your headlines, sub-headers, and your introductory phrases – which is
usually the smallest part of your copy” If you can get them to read the
first 20%, then they will most likely read the remaining 80% of the
content.
7. Write To A Specific Audience: Your copy should not be aimed at
targeting everyone. That’d be an own goal in reality as it will hardly
capture the attention of any demographic. Identify your copy's purpose,

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 select the target audience it would be best for, and write for them. If
you write a copy for email marketing, don’t send your existing
subscribers the same messages you will send to convince new
subscribers. They have already moved past the stage of convincing
them with your brand story. Instead, let them know the brand new
offers you have for them that are better than what they have previously
gotten. This will help generate conversions better as it feels like the
email is tailored for them, rather than something that may not catch
their attention because it is directed to everyone. “If you write to
everyone, you write to no one,” and you won’t appeal to the attention of
your audience. Any copy that doesn’t grab attention is a failed copy, no
matter how great the content is.
8. Avoid The Use Of Professional Terms: Your audiences are not your
colleagues, so they may not understand your profession's technical
terms. If you offer the best cosmetic surgery services, you don’t need to
write a copy filled with professional medical jargon. It is unnecessary to
say, “We perform the best processes in abdominoplasty and
liposuction.” Use simpler words, easy to understand for the most basic
of readers. Some may not even have English as their primary language,
so just keep it simple. A more appropriate sentence would be, “We
know how excess fat ruins your body shape, and we are specialists in
giving your body the perfect shape you desire.” It is also important to do
away with unnecessary abbreviations, acronyms, informal words, and
slang. Not everyone is familiar with you, and just one non-relatable
word may make the whole copy irrelevant for your audience. Hence use
clear, highly comprehensible words that even a child will easily
understand.

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 How To Appeal To An Audience

As I have mentioned in the previous sub-topic, It is important to utilize the

combination of words to persuade your audience and appeal to their
emotions to get them to complete the needed action. The following methods
highlighted below will get them engrossed with your content and its
message, thereby driving engagements and conversion.

1. The Headline: Remember the 80/20 rule? Yes, it comes into play here.
Your headline is the first thing that your audience sees before the rest
of your content. It is synonymous with an entrance to a room. No
matter how big a room is, the door is usually very small. But you cannot
access the room without the entrance. If your headline is poor or cliché,
it will appear to your audience like a broken doorknob, and they won’t
be interested in reading the rest of what you have to say.

Utilize buzzwords, figures, facts, numbers, and every other thing that
can make them curious about what you have to say in the rest of the
copy. Also, ensure that your headline text has a different format from
the body. It should be BOLD AND CLEAR, making it stand out from the
remainder of the text for easy identification.

2. Use Short stories: You must convey your message in a relatable way to
your audience. You want to present a product or a service to them, so
tell a story that portrays their need and how your product or service will
meet that need or solve that problem. A great story will not only
highlight the importance of your product/service, but it will keep your
audience glued till the end. However, ensure that your stories are short
and concise. If your product is one that has a lot of technical terms, then
a story is great. That way, you avoid the use of technical and
professional terms that will rather confuse your audience. You

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 understand your technicalities, but they don’t, so write them a story
that they will understand and easily relate to.

3. Have A Unique Offering: Your audience has seen various digital ads,
even more than you can imagine. So it will be unwise to do what
everybody else is doing. People love trends, but people love pacesetters
even more. So rather than copying the approach of others. You should
be able to create your forte, stand out from among your competitors,
and show your distinctiveness.
Uniqueness isn’t limited to your writing style. It is also essential for your
products and services. Take a market survey and look at what
everybody is doing; while you’re at it, take another look at what nobody
is doing. Be a pacesetter and offer something unique; let your audience
know why your product should be used rather than your competitors'.
Convince them about your unique offering, and their emotional appeal
to purchase will be shunted towards you.

4. Always anticipate: We have highlighted the importance of setting

trends rather than going cliché. But it is important to understand that
you cannot set trends if you are not a visionary. Before Twitter, there
were few social media apps in existence, but most of these apps were
centered on Desktop use. Twitter came and focused majorly on mobile
platforms. Making it an on-the-go app. According to twitter’s blog, they
say, “We like to say that Twitter was born mobile. After all, the 140
character limit of Tweets was based on text messaging or SMS
constraints. That means our platform was actually designed to
allow anyone, anywhere to read, write and share Tweets”. Now
today, all social media applications are mostly used on mobile rather
than desktop. Being mindful of technological advancements,

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 environmental changes, demand and supply, and other factors will
allow you to identify what to do differently to make a difference. In
2006, the Unique Value proposition of twitter would most likely have
centered on the fact that you can tweet on-the-go. You don’t have to
get home first, improving the social media experience of people.

5. Be Willing To Take A Risk: To do something different from others, you

must be willing to take a risk. Shake up things proactively, create
market instability, and your idea will be the go-to thing very soon. All
outstanding copywriters take risks to go against the norm, and they
have reaped the dividends.

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 Write For Your Customers
You render your service or sell products to people, and not yourself. So the
first thing to do is to understand the demography you are looking to
persuade. If your product is an existing product, you need to know many
things, including the general public's perception of your product or service.
What they like and what they do not like.

If you have a fashion brand and you discover that people complain about the
fact that your clothes are too light and a machine wash will ruin them, you
know that you should increase the thickness of your clothes. If your brand's
name is “Michael,” your copy headline on your website homepage can be
written as “NEW IMPROVED Michael’s Apparel at the same old price.”

Showing your existing customers that you are giving them an improvement
based on their complaints, with the cool option of retaining the old price.
Knowing your customers is not limited to knowing what they want or do not
want. It also includes your knowledge of what better value they can get
elsewhere; hence, competitor analysis. You need to keep all your customers
loyal to you. Draw their attention; let them know the best possible thing they
are getting elsewhere - in a subtle manner, of course. And from here, you can
pitch your offer to them (and no one needs to tell you that it must be better).

A few methods of identifying what your customers want are,

Understand Your Product

This may sound weird as you believe you own your business and know what
you make, but you must understand every little detail about your product as
though you were the end-user – without manufacturer bias. If you will be

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outsourcing your business copy to someone else, ensure you understand your
products so that you can communicate properly.

This is very typical with tangible goods because services cannot be rendered
to one’s self. Using your product is an excellent way to understand your
product. You will see your product from the lens of a consumer and not a
producer. Hence, you can identify flaws, where it lacks, and what gives your
competitor an advantage. As a copywriter, you hold the responsibility to erase
these fears from your customers and provide a practical solution to how your
offering solves these problems. Also, combine this with the knowledge you
have gathered from your customer survey, and you will be able to write a
copy that speaks to your audience.

Social media interactions

Consumers tend to show their displeasure in things from their interactions
on social media, in discussion threads, in comparisons, and other critical ways.
Unlike Instagram, which showcases products in the most graphical forms,
and Facebook, which is more concentric on pictures than words. Reddit and
Twitter are very critical platforms with various threads of discussions, and they
are very useful platforms to judge your customers' satisfaction or displeasure.

Reddit: There is a Reddit thread for almost any topic. If your brand is well
known, you will definitely have a few threads dedicated to your products. But
if your brand is relatively unknown, then you may use general terms that
apply to your brand to see what people are saying about the category where
you fall, and you may be lucky to see a person that mentions your brand
name in his/her comment, and there will be a couple of replies which will
either be in disagreement with the comment or Corroborate it.

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On Reddit you can sort replies by "Old", "New", "Top", "Controversial", "Best",
"Q&A"

As their name implies, you can see the most recent comments, the older
comments via the old and new buttons. You can also sort to Q&A, which
means “Question and Answer” to see comments that are conversational.
There is usually a right balance of praise and criticism in these comments
sorted as Q&A because these comments are from people who want to
discuss their experiences without actively praising or criticizing. Take some
time to read out these comments, and you will have a thing or two to take
home.

The “controversial” comments are one you should pay attention to. They are
laced with all manner of criticism, and while some are unfounded, some are
genuine. You should note frequent complaints and be prepared to work on
them. When your next content addresses it, it will spark a high conversion.

The “Best” comments are usually full of praise for your product or service.
Although you already know the value you offer, you should check out these
comments. There might be a couple of minor things that you ignore that
might have caught your customers’ attention, and it will be wise to improve
on these things. Announcing an improvement in a minor feature will attract
attention from your existing audience.

Twitter: Twitter is relatively easier to navigate than Reddit. However, Twitter

users are just as blunt and honest with their opinions as Reddit users. You can
find out what people are saying about your brand and your products by a
simple search. Search for your brand and product in the search box and
navigate tweets and replies to see what people have said. Dedicate time to do

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this, and you will see many things people have been saying about you. Search
for your products in different ways. SONY is a brand, and the PlayStation (PS)
a product. I can search for “Sony,” “PS5”, “PlayStation,” “Play Station,” and
other ways people may address your product - Not everyone will spell it
correctly, so search with different terms.
Like I explained for Reddit, locate the criticism, and the higher its frequency,
the more serious you should consider it.

Amazon Reviews: Amazon is the largest online marketplace in the world,

with millions of users. The interesting thing about these users doesn’t hold
back, and they dish out praise or criticism in a well-detailed manner. If you
sell products on Amazon, then it is a good place to analyze your product copy
reviews. Using the same formula as you did for Reddit and Twitter, Identify
your most common criticism and work towards changing it.

Search for your product on Amazon and if you have gotten any reviews.
Check what people are saying. Click on the stars, and it takes you to the
review page, where it analyses your percentage of reviews from 5 stars to 1
star. It is advisable to do this on your computer or a desktop version of your
mobile browser.
An example of a product is given below. This manufacturer produces earbuds,
and while having many positive reviews, there were many negative ones.
Although one common for all was that “right ear just stopped working.”

The product has almost 90% positive reviews, but there are
a few negative reviews, less than 10% of the total feedback.

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This is one of the reviews that talk about the right earbud that stopped
working.

This is another review that talks about the same issue of the right-sided
earbud, and there are a few more reviews that had this same complaint.

You may address this issue with your copy. Imagine coming up with a video
ad that starts with a person using those earbuds while experiencing difficulty

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with one ear? It shows that you have paid attention to your product's faults
and have made an improvement; your existing users will be very interested in
what new thing you have to offer. Your script in the video may be based on
showing off all the prevalent faults in the old model and showing an
improvement in a newer model, and you will get your users on your side
again.

Apart from your old users, new customers need a lot of convincing to buy a
product. Therefore you need to ensure that you address their potential fears
about the product, even before they mention it, and when they can no longer
think of any concern, they are inclined to purchase.

Customer Surveys
Customer surveys are usually helpful in judging your product's position, and it
is a pointer at what you should improve or what new product you should
make. It is also a tool in writing a copy that will speak directly to your
audience based on what they want.

When you conduct surveys, ask specific questions, they are probably busy
and need to get other things done, but have decided to spare two to three
minutes to give you feedback. Hence, be direct.

● “Thank you for choosing our product. What particular features made
you prefer this product?”
● “How did you discover our product?” – Give a multiple-choice here for
ease of answering. As I said, the customer has limited time to spare.
a. From a friend or family
b. From online recommendations
c. From social media ads

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 d. From personal research
e. Other (specify)

“Compared to the products of other brands you have used before, how would
you recommend this product.”

a. Strongly Recommend
b. Recommend
c. Undecided
d. Do not recommend
e. Strongly do not recommend

Give an option for them to state their reasons above if they want to.
“What do you think can be improved in this model.”

These questions and more you may construct yourself will summarize what
the customer has in mind about the product. From a statistical conclusion
after the survey, you should discover the most frequent complaints and fix
them. Remember that it’s not only your customers that see your reviews,
potential buyers also see reviews, and if they are not satisfied, they will not be
inclined to purchase. Make them feel at ease.

Customer Interviews
Customer interviews are magical; you may schedule an interview session with
a select few of your customers over the phone. You can strike a balance by
choosing to call very frequent customers, as they have used your products
well and have a ton of experience with it. Or one-time customers – who
probably didn’t return because they didn’t have the best possible experience.

Hence, you have an idea about what people like and what useful qualities you
can make better and bad features that have chased one-time customers
away.

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Customer interviews help you get the tone at which your customer is
speaking. You can also attain a deeper reach if a customer obliges an
interview. Questions answered will lead to further questions, even outside
your scope, that will broaden your horizon and make you see why you need to
fix certain things.

Employee Interviews
You should also relate to your employees and have a great relationship with
them. They go out and see things that you do not see. They use products
from other companies, and they may have some ideas about what you
should add or remove from your products. It is crucial to have a solid
relationship with your employees so that they will always relay truthful
information to you about your products and not give you a false view to boost
your ego.

Analyze Analytics
If you have been running ads before on social media especially. It would be
best if you took the time to look at the numbers. This will give you an insight
into what you have been doing right or wrong. Posts that people can easily
relate to (which is the goal of copywriting) usually get more engagements,
impressions, and interactions, unlike posts that they cannot relate to. So
check out the campaigns that have been doing decent numbers, look at the
copy's content, and use it as a benchmark for your future copies. However,
you should always ensure that you improve on whatever is already done as a
stereotype may quickly get boring to people. You should also analyze your
past sales of different products with respect to the reviews and the

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advertisements. This will give you an insight into what people love and what
they do not fancy.

In all, you need to conduct well-grounded research about your products. Put
yourself in the buyer's position, and you will understand their grievances and
help you make a better product for them.

It is worthy to note that you cannot make a better copy if your product stays
the same way. You need to improve your product first before working on
improving your copy. You will fast gain the reputation of a scandalous and
lying business if you improve your copy by promising to do a couple of new
things, and you fail to accomplish them.

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 Monitor Your Competition
You must know what your competitors are up to, the strategies they are
using to infiltrate the market, and what they offer customers that make them
stand out. That is not the only reason businesses monitor their competition
anyway; as much as you want to know what they are doing right, you also
want to know what they are doing wrong. If you can leverage what they are
doing wrong and provide a better alternative, you will win over some
customers to your business.

In monitoring your competition, there are many things you need to note. A
few of them are:

● Keywords: Keyword monitoring will help you identify your competitors'

terms in their social media campaigns and other content created on
their blogs. You can monitor your competitors’ progress on search
engines like Google, Bing, and yahoo; you can also monitor their social
media keywords to know the words they use on their e-flyers that gain
so much attention. Some keyword monitoring tools will give you the
opportunity to identify the rankings of yourself with respect to your
competitor daily, thereby monitoring your progress and that of other
competitors. You will see some of your competitors moving up the
rankings quite rapidly – indicating that they are doing something right.
Pay attention to their keywords, and you will identify what they say that
appeals so much to the audience in your niche.
There are many tools for keyword search and keyword monitoring.
Some are free, some are cheap, and some are quite expensive. But
keyword monitoring usually brings results as it will definitely improve
the content of your copy. Some examples of keyword search tools are
SEMRush, KeywordCompetitor, KeywordSpy, iSpionage, and many
more.

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● Backlink Influence: A backlink, in simple terms, is a link to your website
from another website. They greatly influence website rankings in search
engines, making them have an easier route to customers. After all, if
people can’t see your content, how will they relate to it? Therefore you
need to judge how many backlinks your competitors get, as well as the
backlinks you get. Assuming I give a product description in this article
and give an Amazon link to purchase it, Amazon will have a new
backlink from m\y website. Backlinks amplify your well-written
keywords by making your website rank high in search results. Backlink
tools can give you information on external links and anchor texts (an
anchor text has a hidden URL, where you can click to visit another
page). So you will be able to identify the exact content that is driving a
lot of backlinks. Then you can focus on content like this and ensure that
they are ever-present in your copy. Tools that you can use to check link
popularity include Majestic Site Explorer and UberSuggest. Both free
initially with the option to go premium at reasonable amounts.

● Advertisements: In my experience, I have discovered that different

content works for different demographics. It will be unwise to blindly
move into creating content for marketing purposes without adequate
research about what will be appropriate for the audience. Monitoring
your competitors' advertisement strategy is a very effective way to
market research for advertisements. Advertisement monitoring tools
can help you identify all the ads that your competitors are using; they
also offer the incentive of testing multiple iterations of their ad copy to
see if the ad is performing at its optimal capacity. Manually doing this
can be very tedious, so these tools offer a great route to do this. Some
tools even allow you to monitor ads for a certain number of

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 competitors, and in your research, you may even discover new
competitors. Your competitors are one of the easiest ways to learn the
ropes, so you should continuously monitor them to see what they are
doing. Some tools for monitoring Ads are AdBeat, AdGooroo, and many
more.

● Web Ranking: Many tools will help you identify how well people
interact with your competitors’ websites showing ranks and relative
ranks, hence giving you a list of competitors to steal ideas from. Many
tools enable this, but you will need to splash the cash to get a full
in-depth analysis on this. Some of these tools are Alexa, Compete, and
SimilarWeb. They provide a wide range of data highlighting website
interaction, an excellent pointer at online consumer discretion.
● Social Media Monitoring: Social media monitoring has one
straightforward aim: to monitor what people are saying about your
competitors and what they are saying about your brand online, as
explained in subsections above. Although manually doing it will
produce better results, it can be very tedious and time-consuming,
depriving you of the time you need to focus on other parts of your
business. But there are many tools online with cheap access fee that
you can use to monitor your competitors’ mentions.
You can get information on their follower demography, and you can get
real-time alerts of searches on social media apps. You can even monitor
your engagement rates or that of your competition with simple
third-party apps, and you can as well have real-time alerts of news, blog
posts, podcasts, videos, and forums that talk about your competitors. All
these will give you an insight into what you should do, what you
shouldn’t do, the audience to target, and the keywords to use in
targeting them.

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 Structure Of Your Copy
We already know that the copy must be designed to get the reader's
attention from the first word in the first line till the end of the copy, keeping
your audience engaged and transfixed on the copy till he absorbs the
message, gets convinced, and take the necessary action.

The message must be clear, short, and concise to enable easy

communication. Like I said, excessively lengthy texts will only bore out the
reader rather than impress them. You are not writing a paper for your college
professor. In this chapter, I will thoroughly explain the perfect structure to go
about writing your copy.

The Headline
Your headline is the most important part of your copy, no matter what you
are writing for. Even if it is a video, it is the headline that will determine if the
audience will be inspired to watch or not. Your headline is similar to seeing a
beautiful lady or a handsome guy; you already like what you see before
talking to this person. However, you may eventually have a conversation with
the person and realize that he/she isn’t a fit for you. But if you meet a stranger
looking rough and tattered, even if he has the highest IQ in existence, you
won’t bother to find out because the person's outlook isn’t a pleasant one.
This is the same effect that your headline has on your copy. If it isn’t catchy or
attractive, no matter how detailed and rich the body is, very few people will
read that. The 80/20 rule is fundamental, as it reminds us to focus the bulk of
our energy on our headlines. If we can get 80% of the audience to read the
first 20% of the copy, they will most likely read the remaining 80% of the
article. “Put in more efforts to your headlines, sub-headers, and your
introductory phrases – which is usually the smallest part of your copy” If you

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can get them to read the first 20%, then they will most likely read the
remaining 80% of the content.

A poorly written headline could throw your entire copy in the bin, your
potential customer is ready to spend, but if he doesn’t get convinced by your
headline, he will definitely spend his money – although not with your
business. If you employ a copywriter who charges you $100 for a copy. Ensure
your headline is worth $80, based on the 80/20 rule; because that is where
the majority of the value of a copy lies.

There are many tips on creating a highly converting headline, but I will
outline a few in this guide. They are:

● Be Specific: You do not need to beat about the bush. Your headline
should be specific; let them know what they are signing up for in a
simple sentence. Hit the nail on the head, and make it as short as
possible. After reading your headline, your audience should have a clear
expectation of what to expect. You can utilize numbers. This forces your
content to be very specific and looks sure of your offering. This
confidence is passed on to your audience, and they are inclined to get
interested in your offer.
● Capitalize On Emotional Words: Emotional words in copy headlines
pass on the emotions in your text to your readers’ brain. Your audience
will typically read your words in their minds, unconsciously
emphasizing these emotional words. If you are a travel agency and you
want to write a blog post as a content driver, say you want to write
about the best honeymoon locations around the world. You could go:
“10 AMAZING Honeymoon Destinations That You’ve Never Heard
Of.” This is quite a catchy topic for a potential traveler as it lets the
reader understand your emotions that these places are amazing.

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 Eventually, the reader may open the blog post and discover that he has
heard of them before, but you have gotten him to open your post. You
probably even included a few CTAs that give him information on the
cheapest available flight tickets; this could make your reader a
subscriber to your newsletter. Whenever he decides to travel, I can bet
you’ll be the first agency on his wish list as you have already created a
bond with him using your copy – and it all starts from the headline.
Apart from “Amazing,” there are a thousand emotional words to use in
headlines. Moderation is essential, so it is very OK to use just one per
headline.
● Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO): You can utilize the application of FOMO
to your headline strategy, although only at strategic times. You need to
ensure that the product is one that is in high demand. You may
introduce a price slash and make people rush the product because you
have ensured to let them know that there is a limited amount of stock
available. Nobody wants to miss out on the bumper deals, so they will
be inclined to buy these products quick before it becomes unavailable.
If you sell an online tool, such as a VPN and your premium offer is $9.99
per month, you could announce via social media and to email
subscribers that you will be doing a 50% price slash for the first 100
people to subscribe to your VIP package.” Many people probably want
the premium package but are unwilling to pay that amount for it. But if
they can see that they only need to pay $4.99 for that same value, many
people will jump on the offer because they do not want to miss out on
the moving train. This headline strategy has worked a lot of times, and
because Internet users make a lot of emotional purchase decisions, it
will always work.

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As you can see from this copy, this website has created a sense of urgency
with a very irresistible offer. We only have 9 hours to go, and the audience will
gladly accept this offer as it’d be a cheap bargain

● Offer Irresistible Benefits To Your Readers: One key strategy for

creating specific headlines is offering irresistible benefits to the
audience. Your headline should highlight the benefits he will get, how
soon he will get it, and a clause to overcome his objections. For
example: “Enjoy Unlimited Access To Keyword tools, beat your
competitors at their game in a month, 100% money-back
guarantee”. This offer is an irresistible offer to your potential customer
who may be skeptical about being a premium subscriber to this tool.
Still, as soon as he sees the 100% money-back guarantee, he is assured
that it will definitely work for him, and if he doesn’t, he will get his
money back. In the copy, after the headline, you should list the
conditions that will make the money-back guarantee valid, such as “not
using any of the premium tools” and many more.
● Uniqueness: You should avoid copying the headlines of other people.
Remember, your audiences are all over the place, and they know what

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 they have seen before and where they have seen it. Don’t base your
copy on plagiarism. Create something unique, and you will grab the
attention of your audience.

There are dozens of tips on creating outstanding headlines, but the summary
of it all is that you should be able to get the reader curious from the headline
such that he will be inspired to read the remainder of the copy. Also, offer
clear benefits to your readers, let them know what to take away from reading
the headline, and ensure that your benefits are guaranteed to be enjoyed as
early as possible.

You may also input your headline into a free headline analyzer, the “American
Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer” to determine the strength of your
headline.

The Lead
After your headline, your copy starts with one very important sentence, called
the lead. The lead is almost as important as the headline, and you need to
make it compelling and attractive to keep your readers attached. Your lead
should spice up the remainder of your copy and make it look irresistible. Your
lead is like a mini-headline directly addressing the needs of your audience
and getting them to read the second sentence and the third sentence till the
end of the article. Like your headline, it must be short and compelling,
making the content easy to digest.
Your lead is the beginning of a chain of sentences that will link each sentence
to the next till the end of the copy, ensuring your readers don’t lose interest at
any point. The best way to do this is to ensure that you don’t deviate from the
message and ensure that your content is about what you have put in your
headline; you don’t want to make it seem like a waste of time.

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Writing A Compelling Lead
I have covered the importance of a killer lead or opening sentence, as you
may want to regard it. Writing a compelling lead entails one key ingredient:
keeping a conversation in your reader's mind. You don’t just want to talk, talk,
talk, and keep talking. You want the reader to read what you have to say and
give a response in his mind; although you don’t even know who is reading,
you are in his mind conversing with him.

Look at these two opening sentences A and B for a hotel copy, and let us be
the judge of the more interactive lead.

A: “Our services ensure that you get the most comfortable stay away from
your abode with the most professional services, to ensure that you feel at
home…”
B: “Have you ever imagined home away from home? Comfort and peace in a
serene environment that makes you contemplate your real place of abode?
Imagine yourself in a new home with the best culinary services that you won’t
get anywhere else…”

It is evident that lead A is quite attractive and appealing, but lead B gets the
reader more interested in the copy, as he is subtly forced to answer questions
in his mind, thereby propelling a conversation within him. This is one killer tip
of a compelling lead. This conversational start may also be regarded as a
hook. Well, for obvious reasons, it keeps your audience hooked to the rest of
the content of the copy.
Here are some typical “Hook” templates that you can use in your opening
sentences.

● “Have you ever heard that…?”

● “Have you ever imagined enjoying your…without [regular approach]…”

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 ● “We all know the feeling when… Or don’t you?”
● “Research has made us discover that…”
● “For several years, I was unable to… Until I”

Although not all of these Hooks ask a question, all of them will spark a
conversation in the reader's mind because it makes them curious about the
ending of what you’re telling them.

You can also use mini-stories to write an opening sentence. Stories are also
forms of hooks because they keep the reader engaged, and they keep
reading. Although you need to remember that your lead must be short and
concise, meaning that you don’t have a lot of room to tell a story. So it would
be best if you told them something brief and relevant, not a blockbuster.

Your mini-story has one job, which is complementing the headline. Use the
headline as an attention grabber, and draw them in, while you spark their
interest. This tactic is called the AIDA strategy.
Attention >>> Interest >>> Desire >>> Action

This strategy is usually used to generate conversion for sales. It utilizes the
audience's interests, taking advantage of their thought processes, answering
their unasked questions, and overcoming their objections right from the
beginning of the copy.

Attention (A): Typically, this is the place where the attention of your audience
is drawn, telling them what is in for them and what benefits they can
potentially gain. As you can already imagine, the headline is the place to
attract this attention. Remember that I told you to capitalize on emotional
words and make irresistible offers to your audience. This grabs their attention,
and you can move to create interest.

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Interest (I): At this point, you can now apply the mini-stories we’re talking
about in the lead; after gaining the necessary attention, then you will use
these short stories to make your reader more interested in what you have to
offer.
Remember, the goal is to grab their interest, so the stories must be short so
that you won’t lose them at any point along the line. So from there, you can
take it to the desire and then the action.

As we proceed, we will talk about the Desire and Action, the “DA” of the
“AIDA” strategy.
The summary of the opening sentence is, to begin with, a conversational
opener, which sparks a conversation in your reader's head. Keep these
sentences or stories short, and appeal to their interests firmly.

Unique Value Proposition

After writing your opening sentence, you should incorporate your Unique
value proposition into your copy. Your UVP is the exclusive feature or benefit
you offer to your customers. It could be anything at all. If you offer a service, it
could be “100% pay after satisfaction”. It could be a time factor offers. Say
you provide a service that reviews CV. Your UVP could be “Get a revamped
résumé in 24 hours”. This makes you stand out from every other person
offering that service, as your unique offering is the ability to deliver in 24
hours. Your slogan could also be your UVP, as it automatically gives your
audience what to expect from you. Kroger, one of the biggest grocery stores
in the United States, has a clear slogan “Fresh for Everyone” which signifies
their unique offering to provide food items and groceries that are fresh. This is
also their UVP, and it can be incorporated into the copy quite easily. Therefore
you should identify your UVP. Know what you offer or want to offer that

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others don’t. It could be locally manufactured; it could come with 12-month
free support and many more. Just ensure that it is unique.

This brings us back to the AIDA formula. After you have successfully gained
attention and have sparked your readers’ interest, highlighting the benefits
of your unique offering will appeal to your audience's desire.
Desire: You have said a lot already, and you have made your UVP clear, so we
are at the third stage of the AIDA strategy, which is to attract the greed of
your audience by highlighting your benefits and how they will be of
importance to them. Although you must have mentioned a few from your
headline and your lead, you must make them clear and leave your audience
with wet mouths.

Benefits
After you have been able to get your audience's attention with a compelling
headline, and you have been able to get them interested in the unique thing
you have to offer, it would be best if you talked about the benefits. Do not
make the mistake of assuming your benefits are clear enough from your
headline, lead, or your unique value proposition. You need to spell out the
benefits for them in a short summarized form, preferably in a bulleted format.
The services you offer and your unique value proposition are part of your
benefits, but you need to make them know that they are benefits. Do not
assume for your audience.

Your lead could go thus: “Have you ever imagined home away from home?
Comfort and peace in a serene environment that makes you contemplate
your real place of abode? Imagine yourself in a new home with the best
culinary services that you won’t get anywhere else…”
However, you can list out a couple of benefits here in a bulleted point to
reiterate your points and to also make it more transparent,

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A list of benefits based on that lead would be

● You will enjoy a cool, serene environment with the best outdoor
relaxation services
● You will have access to a wide range of continental dishes and classic
cocktails
● You will enjoy great hospitality, as our staff are seasoned and well
trained for your comfort

Now, these were all mentioned in the lead, but the benefits section made it
more explicit. More so, it reiterates these features and makes them appear as
benefits rather than mere features. When your audience sees features as
benefits, it converts them into customers more efficiently.

Remember to use bulleted points to highlight benefits; that way, the reader
can digest each of the benefits one at a time. Keep it short, with fewer full
stops and semicolons to ensure that the reader digests the content at once.

There are two major types of bullets used in copywriting: Blind bullets and
Open Bullets.
Blind Bullets gives readers clear information about the benefits they stand to
gain from the product or service, but it doesn’t tell them how. This deliberate
concealing of little information keeps the reader curious to see how he will
enjoy these benefits. Open Bullets, on the other hand, give all the details
available at once, starting like a blind bullet by telling them the benefits but
ending the sentence with how the reader will access these benefits.
Both bullet styles can be used in copywriting, as they both work. They may
even be mixed at times to make sure that your copy is very engaging.

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After your audience has seen what they have to gain and are already
convinced, you can make this happen. Then you are at the last stage of the
AIDA strategy, which is the action stage.

ACTION: You have said all you need to; you have been able to hook your
reader with a solid lead and drive them down to the point of taking action.
Don’t forget your clear CTA. It would be a waste of effort to walk an audience
down to the end of a journey without asking them to do anything. Like I said
in the first chapter, have one clear CTA, just one! It could be buying a product,
ordering a service, making a subscription, and many more. But always ensure
that your copy has a clear CTA to ensure that all your hard work and effort will
not go down the drain.

When writing your copy, write active sentences, using more verbs than
adjectives. Verbs show action, and the reader imagines something very active,
unlike adjectives that seem very passive. More importantly, write in the active
sense than in the passive.
It is also important to ensure that your copy is easy to read. Make your points
and transit from your lead to your UVP to benefits without making it look
herculean to read. Ensure you check your copy over and again. If possible, ask
someone else to check for you and read aloud.

It would be best if you also remembered to focus your copy on what it can do
rather than what it is. That is the primary key to a good copy structure. Tell
your readers what your product or service can do differently; nobody is
interested in your history.

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 Strategies Of Copywriting
There are many strategies for copywriting. As you already know, copywriting
aims to appeal to your audience's emotions and get them to take the action
you need them to. Feelings and emotions influence many purchase
decisions. These emotions can be triggered by psychological strategies. A few
of these psychological strategies are outlined below.

Reframing: This is quite a simple psychological strategy that has huge effects
on consumers. It is synonymous with calling six chairs “half a dozen chairs”
when, in reality, they mean the same thing, although they are interpreted
differently in the mind of the reader for different reasons. One popular
Reframing method companies do reduce the price of a product by a penny.
Rather than call a product $10, they call it $9.99. Of course, the difference is
infinitesimal, but consumers have a psychological sense of viewing $9.99 as
cheaper than $10. Hence, reducing the amount by a penny or two to call your
prices “.99” or “.98” appeals mentally to the user that the item is cheaper.

Crazy right? But it works crazy, too; many stores had reported a significant
increase in sales when they reframed their pricing as such. Reframing is a
very effective strategy that allows you to manipulate an item's actual value
without telling a lie. Instead, it focuses on the reader’s mentality.

There are other ways by which businesses reframe their products. Many
companies would set prices for their annual packages at $480, which may
seem to people a huge amount to pay at once. But it looks pretty much more
comfortable to pay $40 per month because you have made it look cheaper.
Asking the buyer to pay $480 will come with a bit of reluctance, unlike $40,
which is quite easily affordable, whereas they are the same thing. Some may

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even prefer to pay $1.50 every day because it is incredibly cheap and
affordable for them.

Therefore, the business known to produce a yearly service subscription of

$480 may come up with a newsletter with a headline that says “GREAT
NEWS! You can now gain VIP access to our XYZ product for as low as $1.50.”
This will make a lot of sense to people, and it will generate a lot of clicks and
conversions because it seems “cheaper,” whereas it is more expensive than
buying at $480. After all, after 365 days, a daily subscriber would have paid
$547.50, $67.50 more than the person who made a one-time yearly
subscription at $480. But who cares? You have reframed, and you have made
your profits on the Psychological loophole in your audience.

This website has a weekly and monthly package, but they choose to make
their daily option the front of the advert. Looking at it, 8 cents is a super great
deal. But in reality, nothing as changed. It’ll, however, help boost conversion

Social Proof: Social proof is another thing that propels the purchase decision
of consumers. People want to learn from other people’s mistakes many times;
hence, they resort to using social proof when they’re unsure what to do next.

Social proof is handy when a potential customer is on the fence. You have
convinced the reader about your unique value and the benefits you offer, but
you have not succeeded in overcoming his objections. Hence he needs proof
from others. If you sell a product on a third-party platform like Amazon, the
easy way your potential customers will get social proof is by combing through

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your reviews. But in cases where everything happens on your website or
domain, you need to include social proof yourself.

Many social media networks and instant messaging apps, dating sites, and
the likes utilize social proof to pin down skeptics. They may write on their
homepage that “We have 1,002,785 registered users; 347,238 are online now”.
This is to convert the skeptic to complete his registration and be a part of
their community, and the good news is that it works like magic because the
social proof available helps overcome objections. The potential subscriber
may be skeptical because it is not a popular dating site yet, but seeing those
numbers, he is more than encouraged to join up and even chat with one of
the 300,000+ users online.

Many other businesses also include their results and testimonials in their
copy. As you often see them leave featured comments and testimonials in a
section of their homepages, they pull over to themselves the skeptics on the
fence. However, Social proof is paradoxical because you need to have made
sales to have evidence to show your audience. If you are a new business
owner, ensure that your items are cheap at the start to generate sales. Speak
nicely to your customers to leave a written review to select the best of the
bunch as your social proof.

If you offer a service rather than a product, you could make the basic service
free for a select number of people at the start, and the premium service at a
substantial discount, maybe 50%. This will give you a considerable sample
space of people to provide testimonials about your service, and boom! Social
proof stands.

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You could create a list of potential objections; this makes you think ahead of
your audience. Create the objections he could probably have before he does
and squash them. I call this “The First Attack Approach.” Rather than deceive
yourself that you are good to go and there are no objections, identify the
objections before your audience, because if you don’t do that, your readers
will eventually identify complaints. Your conversion won’t hit its peak. The
objections could be “Price,” “Season,” “Personal doubts, i.e., will this work for
someone like me,” “I already have a product I am loyal to, and I’m not willing
to switch,” and many more. Bring everything up, and remove these concerns
by yourself, and you have your customers on lock.

Use Irregular Numbers: Another way of exploiting the mentality of an

audience is to use irregular numbers. Irregular numbers are numbers that
aren’t round figures.

“50% increase” is a round figure, “100 subscribers” is a round figure. One

proven way of exploiting the human mentality from experience is to use
irregular numbers, which are more believable than rounded figures. Well, I
also agree that it is easier to believe that 978 people subscribed to your
premium package offer than when you say 1,000 people. This is because it is
quite common to get irregular figures than rounded ones.
As I have mentioned previously, numbers help give specifics, which is very
important for a copy, but you should ensure that you use irregular numbers
than rounded figures. From the dating site example that I gave in the last
subtopic, we can see the use of irregular numbers.

“We have 1,002,785 registered users; 347,238 are online now”. This is a lot
more believable than saying, “We have over 1,000,000 registered users;
about 350,000 are online now”. Although both statements are correct, one

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looks more honest than the other. And this loophole is a great one in
appealing to the psychology of humans.

Reduce Price Objections: Another psychological approach to convincing

your audience is to reduce price objections. This simply means that you want
to reassure them that they are not overpaying for a product. You must often
have seen a business’ copy that says, “Get Access to this product for a small
amount of $5”. You might look within you that it is an unnecessary repetition
because it is quite clear that $5 is small. But it doesn’t work that way in
copywriting. It would be best to emphasize that the amount you have called
is cheap and help them overcome their objections.

A headline example is: “Get lifetime access to eBooks and learning materials
on graphics designing at a bargain $59.95” The word bargain removes the
price objection from the buyer at this point because, in his mind, bargain
signifies to him that if he wants to get that lifetime access, he would be
paying much more.

Beyond the headline, in the copy, you could emphasize the cheapness by
reminding the user that a monthly fee is $3.49, which means that the reader
could have lifetime access to the product, rather than paying $3.49 for 18
months. This sounds like a steal, and it will get the reader inclined to purchase
the product.

Testing
After combining knowledge with strategy, the next thing you need to do is to
test. There is no rigid or hard and fast rule to copywriting. Test your strategy
with different leads, different psychological approaches, and even mix
strategies to get your copy's best possible performance.

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This is an example of a headline that has mixed three strategies! “Hurry now,
Register with Us And Boost Your Website Impressions by 14%”. This
example has added the strategy of urgency and a specific number while
using an irregular number. You can even mix more strategies in the content
of your copy, depending on your creativity.
Testing will also make you understand what design makes your copy convert
better, the emotional words your audience seem to key into, and even the
point at which you lose your readers. This can make you tweak and improve
your copy till you get the best. It could be strenuous, but once you get a hold
of your perfect strategy, you will enjoy the best conversions and better
revenue for life.

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 Tools

Digital Marketing Tools

The business world has always been cruel to small businesses. Enterprises
and multinational corporations more than often cut down on our profits and
make it difficult for customers to give small businesses a chance. On top of
that, the increasing number of new businesses opening up every day is not
making things any easier. In the United States alone, there are 28 million
small businesses. With a number this big, it becomes very difficult especially
for new businesses to come on the radar of their potential customers let
alone make a sale. Business owners already have a lot on their plate from
managing employees to sourcing products etc. Now imagine spending an
arm and leg to hire a marketing agency to promote your business. This is
where marketing tools come in; they are an easy and cost effective way to put
your word out there.

In this article, we are going to discuss some of the most popular,

comprehensive and easy to use marketing tools that every business owner
should be aware of and in the end give you a comparison and help you
choose your ideal weapon for when you go to the market and face the
competition.

The tools that we have shortlisted include;

1. SEMrush
2. HubSpot
3. MOZ
4. Alexa
5. Ahrefs

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Let us now discuss each one of these in detail to develop a better
understanding of what can be done with these tools at your disposal.

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 SEMrush

SEMrush is one of the most popular digital marketing tool trusted by internet
marketers all over the world. With a massive database of over 46 million
domains and 120 million keywords, it is the go to tool for small and large
businesses alike. Companies like Philips, Forbes, Hyatt and Paypal are
amongst its top users. It is an all-in-one tool suit for not only improving your
business’ online visibility but also discovering marketing insights that can
help you make better decisions regarding your marketing spend. SEMrush
mainly focuses on areas including SEO, SMM, PPC, Keyword Research, PR,
Content Marketing, Campaign Management and Competitor Research. All
these tools combined is all that there is to digital marketing, so if you are able
to fully reap the potential of SEMrush, your business would be set for bigger
things.

Let us now take a look at these features in detail;

Keyword Research
If you know even the ABC of the world of digital marketing, you would be
aware of the fact that keywords are of immense importance and successful
keyword research can be a game changer for any business. With the SEMrush
keyword research tool, you can easily outperform your competitors. There are

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a number of ways in which the keyword research tool facilitates your business
and gives you a competitive edge over others. The first one being keyword
overview, which lets you find out the potential value of any keyword. From
instantly judging the keyword on set parameters such as estimated value and
the competition that the keyword has to discovering how the keyword
actually fits your goal, the Keyword research tool does it all. It also helps you
analyze a complete list of your competitor’s organic keyword rankings and
pages. This way you not only discover the best performing organic keywords
for your niche but you can also target each of those keywords individually and
find new ways to win SERPs. The Keyword Research tool also has a database
of over 20 billion keywords, which it lets you surf through a friendly and
streamlined interface. The integrated keyword manager helps users analyze
up to a 1000 keywords at a time and see changes for a keyword in the search
engine results in real time. Finally, the keyword research tool also allows you
to compare your keyword profile with that of your competitor and device new
strategies for launching more efficient SEO campaigns.

SEMrush Keyword Research Tool

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On-Page SEO
The term on-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing your website’s
individual web pages in a way as to rank higher and earn relevant traffic
when a query is made on a search engine. On-page SEO is relevant to
applying all the SEO best practices to the web content as well as the html
code in order to boost your page rankings. The SEMrush on-page SEO tool
lets you analyze your website's health by checking the interactions that it has
with Google, thus providing you with fresh ranking ideas. The on-page SEO
tool lets you run a complete audit of your website’s pages with the help of a
high-speed crawler in a matter of minutes, which then recommends easy
fixes for all the issues that plague your website. It also gives you an exhaustive
list of ideas to improve your website’s rank by applying tips related to content
writing, link building and SERP feature targeting. Finally, it helps you analyze
log files of your website’s interactions with Google crawler to help overcome
any hindrances that there might be due to both structural and navigational
issues in your website.

SEMrush On-page SEO Tool

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Local SEO
Local SEO is a digital marketing strategy for a business that has a physical
store or location and serves a set local geographic area. Thus, local SEO gives
you the tools to promote your product in your own locality when people
search for it on the internet. SEMrush local SEO tool can sculpt the perfect
strategy for your small business. It has a multitude of features such as listing
management, which puts your business data into the most authoritative
directories automatically and follows your ranking progress on your locality’s
zip code level while monitoring reviews in those directories. The Local SEO
tools also makes the use of position tracking feature to track your daily online
performance by monitoring device types, keywords and keeping an eye on
the competition in the area. It also does an on page SEO check for your
website as compared to your local competition by analyzing their strategies
and trends in your area. Finally, it also lets you enhance your social media
performance allowing you to harness the full power of all those sales
channels.

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 SEMrush Local SEO Tool

SEO Competitive Analysis

In business terms, competitive analysis is a strategy in which you identify all
your major competitors and then research their marketing strategies, sales
and products inside out and then devise strategies on top of what your
competitor is already doing. SEMrush competitive analysis tool lets you
analyze your competition in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is enter
your competitor’s domain name, and it will show you everything from your
competitor’s organic search rankings and position changes to all their
keywords that they are ranking on. Using this same tool, you can also see all
of their backlinks and thus find all their referring domains and by applying
the right filters, you can uncover unlimited new opportunities to find new
backlinks for your website. The competitive analysis tools lets you analyze up
to five competitors at a time, uncovering the gaps in the keyword strategies
that you can put all your focus on. Similarly, you can do this same gap analysis

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for backlinks as well, find out which domains link your competitors and not
you, and then reach out to them to build your own backlinks to those
authoritative sites. You can get all of this information in the form of
comprehensive SEMrush reports that you can share with your team to work
on and devise better strategies.

SEMrush competitive analysis tool

Rank Tracking
Another useful tool that SEMrush incorporates is called rank tracking which
helps you monitor your performance on Google’s SERPs and then develop
your SEO strategy accordingly. The first technique is the one we discussed
earlier called position tracking which helps you track keywords, competitors
and domains on Google as well as your own campaign progress, spot and fix
cannibalization and then taking the next steps accordingly. Similarly,

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SEMrush also allows you to track the volatility of different search engine’s
SERPs based on daily changes that occur in them. Lastly, it allows you to
narrow down on domains that have higher rankings globally with the most
organic visibility, similarly the ones with paid visibility and traffic to give you
an idea of what you need to do even to achieve a fraction of that traffic.

SEMrush rank tracking tool

Other Features
Since we are focusing on the marketing and more specifically the SEO aspect
of it, we discussed all the major tools that SEMrush houses that help websites
build their SEO strategy. However there are a number of other tools that
SEMrush comes equipped with that we think are worth mentioning here.

1. Content – In the content category, SEMrush has a wide variety of tools

and features including content marketing, content creation and
distribution, content optimization and last but not least content
marketing analytics.
2. Market Research – SEMrush also helps businesses carry out market
research with tools such as competitor analysis, market analysis, paid
advertising and competitor PR monitoring.

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3. Advertising – In the advertising niche, SEMrush facilitates its users with
tools and techniques such as PPC keyword research and website
monetization.
4. SMM & SERM – Lastly, it also helps with social media management.

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 HubSpot

Founded in 2006, by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot is much

more than just a marketing tool. It is in fact a one-stop shop and a complete
CRM platform with all the tools and integrations that your business is ever
going to need. Whether it is that you want to accelerate your sales, increase
your marketing efforts, streamline your customer service or just build a power
website, HubSpot does it all. The CRM platform is made up of four major hubs
named;

1. Service Hub
2. Sales Hub
3. CMS Hub
4. Marketing Hub

The service hub is a customer service software that helps business owners
connect with their customers, helps build brand loyalty turning those
customers into promoters who help grow your business. Similarly, the sales
hub is primarily a CRM software, which helps you automate all the boring
tasks, gives you deeper insight into your potential clients and helps you close
deals faster. It comes equipped with features like advanced CRM, quotes and
meeting scheduling options. The third one is a content management

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software, which helps you create a website that leaves a lasting impression.
With tools like drag-and-drop editor, SEO recommendations and a multitude
of themes, you are bound to give your customers a personalized and safe
experience. Finally the one most relevant to our cause is the marketing hub,
which entails a marketing software which helps you do a ton of things to
promote your brand online. Since today we are only talking about digital
marketing, we will go into the details of tools and features that the marketing
hub of HubSpot is equipped with.

The HubSpot Marketing Hub is actually a marketing automation software

designed to help you reach out to the right audience, convert your website
traffic into sales and run effective and inbound marketing campaigns at a
scale. All of this is done under a single roof using the powerful yet easy-to-use
platform. The major functionalities of the marketing hub are divided into
three parts and each part comes loaded with features;

Attract Attention
The first and foremost focus of the HubSpot marketing hub is at creating
content that your potential customers are looking forward to, and is
impossible to miss. Marketing hub helps you publish content that helps your
site get discovered in search engines, social media platforms and beyond. By
adding calls to action, it converts readers into customers. Similarly, the SEO
tool helps your website build its search authority to outrank competitors. The
SEO tools integrated into the platform not only help you plan your content
strategy but also optimize your content as you type.

The Ad tracking and management feature helps you cut down on your ad
spend. You no longer have to struggle between Facebook, Instagram,
LinkedIn and Google ads, instead you can run ad campaigns, manage and
track them right inside HubSpot. It also lets you see which ads are turning
prospects into actual sales. The integrated social media management

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platform lets you do everything else as well such as publishing on social
media platforms, the same ad campaigns you created using HubSpot. It also
helps you monitor each and every interaction with a customer on any of your
platforms. HubSpot also supports video files by storing them right inside
HubSpot and embedding them on your website or social media platforms
when needed and as needed. Finally, it lets you connect with your customers
in live chat and uses bots to qualify leads and save you some precious human
hours.

HubSpot – Creating Content that your prospects crave

Converting More Leads

The second major functionality that HubSpot focuses on is converting leads
into actual customers with personalized strategy. HubSpot carries out a
number of carefully curated actions to convert those leads into prospects. The
first one is the design and launch of an appealing landing page. It lets you
choose from pre-configured templates, which you can customize to the exact
needs of your business, or you can always start from scratch. An appealing
landing page is the key to retaining customers. The tool also helps you build

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easily customizable forms, which you can add to your website to convert your
anonymous visitors into leads.

HubSpot: Lead Conversion

The best part of all is that it completely automates all these processes not
only saving you time but also helping you scale up your efforts on things that
matter the most. When cross-functional operations are automated and bulk
data is being managed, you can work on nurturing leads and personalizing
emails. Email marketing is an important aspect of digital marketing. HubSpot
lets you create mobile-optimized email campaigns that look the same as a
professionally designed email and gives you the window to personalize the
message as per each recipient. This helps you build deeper relationships with
your customers and utilize collaborative and intuitive account based
marketing tools for your highest value targets.

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Finally, with lead tracking and management, you are always on top of your
lead game, getting a full picture on the status of every lead in an integrated
database. Then you can proceed to segment leads based on the data
available and nurture each one of them at a different pace.

Report & Customize

Finally, the focus is on customizing your platform in order to give marketing
the credit it deserves. HubSpot is equipped with built-in marketing analytics,
reports and dashboards, which help you make smarter, data-backed
decisions. Based on these decisions, you can then customize your platform in
a way that it is in coherence with what data indicates and indirectly what the
customer wants.

HubSpot - Marketing Analytics

Lastly, given that HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform, it allows the

integration of Salesforce for bi-directional yet faster sync, thus allowing you to
send all this lead intelligence to your sales team so they not only have the

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information about who is your prospect customer but also the complete
context on how to approach them.

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 MOZ

MOZ is another popular all in one suite of SEO tools. One of the best things
about MOZ is that it is very easy to use and you do not have to be technical at
all to navigate the platform. As said earlier, it is an all in one suite and thus
packs all the essentials for devising effective SEO strategies. MOZ has six
major tools, which further have multiple functionalities; however, we are
going to focus on these six tools for now;

1. Keyword Research
2. Rank Tracking
3. Site Crawl
4. On-Page Optimization
5. Link Research
6. Custom Reports

We will go through each of the six one by one starting with Keyword
Research.

Keyword Research
As discussed previously, keyword research is of immense importance to
devising any SEO strategy. MOZ has developed one of the best keyword
research tools, which takes the hassle, bad data and busywork out of the
process and improves the process of discovering the best keywords to work
on and target in a short amount of time. The keyword research tool by MOZ

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allows you to create, add and manage keyword lists all inside MOZ. You can
then compare, categorize and prioritize any given number of keywords and
phrases in order to choose your target keyword and fine-tune your content
strategy. The main purpose that the keyword research tools however serves is
the opportunity to find even better keywords with the help of MOZ’s intuitive
suggestions and comparable keywords for which other sites are ranking.
These keywords are collected from a high quality keyword database, which
only contains fresh SERP data of age two weeks or less. Finally, I think what
makes MOZ keyword research stand out from many other tools is that it
provides many important metrics about the keywords in order to better
gauge its competitiveness and estimate click through rates. These metrics
include difficulty, Organic CTR, volume etc. that helps assess the right
keyword for your content strategy.

MOZ Keyword Explorer

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Rank Tracking
The second most important functionality that exists on MOZ is that of rank
tracking. In the digital marketing game, everything is about getting your
website to rank higher, but how does one know where they stand on a search
engine’s SERPs. That is where rank tracking by MOZ comes in. It helps you
track your website’s keyword ranking and visibility on Google SERP. That is
how you know which strategies are working and which ones need changing.
It also helps you track your competitor’s movement on the SERP, thus
allowing you to find gaps in their SEO strategies and build upon that.
Customers have over the time shown different search behavior on different
devices i.e. desktop and mobile devices. MOZ helps you compare your website
rankings across different devices and shows you the gaps upon which you
can improve. All these strategies combined together lets you uncover
competitive advantages over what others in the same field as you are doing
and thus push your rank higher on the SERPs.

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 MOZ Rank Checker

Site Crawl and Audit

If you already have an intact website and are not building one from scratch, it
is important that you find out all the areas where the site lags and what
structural and navigational hindrances are hidden in the code. MOZ site crawl
and audit tool can help you detect these technical issues which might be
impeding your website from receiving high quality traffic, rank of being
indexed by the search engines. Through this tool, MOZ monitors a multitude
of issues including missing title tags, broken redirects and many more. The
best part is that MOZ crawler works fast and efficiently, since it keeps track of
the new and recurring issues thus making them easy to detect. The results of
the site audit then show the issues in the form of categories and colorful
charts depicting the trends, opportunities and the severity of the issues. MOZ
site audit tool also explains each and every issue in detail, with its potential

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impact on your site’s ranking and traffic as well as recommends a possible
solution. Then you can take the next steps, as you deem appropriate. Finally,
an important feature of the MOZ site crawl tool is that it automatically crawls
your website after set time periods and informs you of any new issues that
might be lurking in your site.

MOZ Site Crawl and Audit

On-page Optimization
After you have successfully ranked your website and applied all the useful
strategies, it is important that your content be worth reading. Otherwise, the
visitor may come on your site, but they would not stay long if finding
information is difficult, thus decreasing your retention rate, which could
directly lead to a drop in sales, if you are a business. MOZ makes sure that
does not happen with its on-page optimization page. MOZ gives you a list of
recommendations along with easy to follow steps to ensure that your page

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content is optimized to meet the search engine’s retention requirements. An
important metric called page optimization score helps you identify the
ranking potential of every single page on your website, so you can quickly
identify improvement opportunities on the pages with highest ranking
potential. On top of that, MOZ on-page optimization tool also gives you
suggestions and new content ideas to make sure that your website becomes
the authority in your niche and whenever a customer enters that specific
keyword, it is your name that pops up on the top.

MOZ On-page optimization tool

Link Building
Finally, MOZ can give you insights about your website’s authority and ranking
by measuring the link juice of your website. The amount of backlinks, linking
domains, anchor text and most valuable pages decide for the most part as to
how high your website ranks. What MOZ does is compares your link profile

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with four of your competitors and identifies the gaps that exist between the
domain authorities of the two websites. You can then carry out similar efforts
to increase your site’s domain authority. MOZ also provides you with a link
tracking list that can be utilized to set goals, track and analyze your link
building progress.

MOZ Link Explorer

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 Ahrefs

Ahrefs is another popular SEO software suite that comprises many useful
tools for link building, keyword research and other SEO related tasks. Ahrefs
was originally launched in 2011 as a tool to analyze backlinks but over the
time, the number of tools that it contains has increased and stands at about
20. Ahrefs is most well-known for the scale of operations that they are
carrying out. The ahrefs database for backlinks is updated every 15 minutes
and the crawler processes up to 8 billion web pages every day. That is more
than a third of what Googlebot does, so you can imagine the scale of
operations, which for an SEO tool is enormous. As discussed earlier, ahrefs
now consists of some 20 odd tools to help digital marketers; however, our
focus would be the five major tools that are related to SEO. These tools
include;

1. Site Explorer
2. Keywords Explorer
3. Site Audit
4. Rank Tracker
5. Content Explorer

Let us now discuss each of these in detail;

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Site Explorer
While most other tools have a lot in common, in my opinion, this particular
tool stands out the most and might give ahrefs a competitive advantage over
other software suites. The site explorer tool in ahrefs is a culmination of three
powerful SEO tools in a single interface. These three tools include organic
traffic research, backlink checker and paid traffic checker. While these three
tools might sound ordinary, but combined together, they form the most
comprehensive of all SEO tools, the ahrefs site explorer.

The site explorer tool works in a way that all you need to do is type a domain
name whether it’s yours or your competitor’s, ahrefs will show you everything
there is to know about the domain. From how many keywords the website is
ranking for, to what each keyword is and how much traffic each keyword is
bringing. This is what is known as the organic search feature of the site
explorer tool. Similarly, it also helps you dissect a website for its backlink juice.
Repeat the same process and click on the backlink profile section and ahrefs
will provide you with everything there is to know about a website’s backlinks
from its world’s biggest index of live backlinks (over 14 trillion links). Finally,
ahrefs will also show you if your competitors are buying PPC ads or any other
kinds of ads and if so, what keywords are they bidding on?

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 Ahrefs site explorer

Keyword Explorer
Ahrefs keyword explorer is while similar in nature to many other SEO tools
such as MOZ or SEMrush, it does however operate differently and more than
checking a keywords competition and other important metrics, it works in a
way to generate new keyword ideas. By making the use of appropriate filters
on the keyword explorer tool, you can have access to any set or combination
of keywords from the world’s largest third-party database of keywords with
almost 7 billion keywords in it. The cherry on top is that these keywords and
the database is not limited to the US like in the case of most other software
suites. Instead, the database comprises data from 171 countries around the
world, so no matter what locality you are targeting, ahrefs has got you
covered with keyword ideas and effective SEO strategies. Similarly, the
database is also not limited to Google or any other single search engine;
instead, it supports 10 different search engines including YouTube, Amazon,
Bing, Baidu etc. Apart from all these competitive advantages, ahrefs also

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shows all the important metrics including accurate search volumes collected
using clickstream data, keyword difficulty score, clicks, and other advanced
SEO metrics such as clicks per search, % of clicks and more.

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer

Site Audit
The site audit feature in ahrefs provides an overall SEO health score of your
website after crawling every single page that is publically available on your
website. It also visualizes key data in charts, and flags all the potential issues
and on top of them provides recommendations to fix those issues.

The site audit tool is pre-set to check websites for 100+ pre-defined SEO
issues. These issues include performance (slow pages, too-large HTML or CSS),
HTML tags (missing, duplicate or non-optimal length of title tags, H1 tags and
meta descriptions), social tags: (twitter cards and incomplete or missing Open
Graph tags), content quality (unconsolidated duplicate pages, low word
counts), localization, incoming links (detecting orphan pages, issues with
nofollow links), outgoing links (broken pages, detecting links to redirects),

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resources (JavaScript, CSS and issues with images), external pages and many
more.

Ahrefs Site Audit

Rank Tracker
The ahrefs rank tracker tool is built to help you monitor your website’s ranking
on the Google SERPs on desktop and mobile across 171 different countries.
Rank tracker is an important ahrefs tool and analyzes your SEO efforts as
compared to those of your competitors and helps you identify the gaps in
your strategy. The rank tracker gives you a history of visibility i.e. what
percentage of the clicks on your website are from organic search traffic. It
also records snapshots of your progress over time. The rank tracker utilizes 13
unique features on the basis of which it ranks your website against that of
your competitor. These features include;

1. Sitelinks,
2. Featured snippet,
3. Top stories,
4. Thumbnails,

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 5. Image pack,
6. Adwords top,
7. Adwords bottom,
8. Knowledge card,
9. Shopping results,
10. Knowledge bottom,
11. Tweet box,
12. Videos and
13. People also ask.

Ahrefs Rank Checker

Content Explorer
The content explorer tool of ahrefs is also of a very unique nature as it helps
users generate new content ideas as well as helps them get access to the
most popular articles on any given topic. You can apply all sorts of filters to
narrow down your research for example; organic traffic, referring domains,

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domain rating, traffic value and social shares. So once you have applied any of
those filters, you end up with the finest articles on top and using those
articles not only can you generate new content ideas but also get first-hand
knowledge on your product. Once you have gone through their content, you
can identify their keywords and reverse engineer the content strategy being
utilized by your competitors.

Ahrefs Content Explorer

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 Alexa

Alexa is another software suite and online platform to meet all the marketing
tool needs you will have. Alexa is a part of the world famous Amazon.com and
given their experience with cloud and web services, Alexa can be thought of
as a worthy competitor to all the above mentioned tools. Alexa focuses on
delivering the most meaningful and richest analytics tools for their users.
Amongst, digital marketers Alexa is most known for the quality of data
analytics and the way they represent these results. Therefore, if you were
working in a company with a non-technical management, Alexa would be
your best bet to explain key metrics to the management in a simple yet
concise manner. Like HubSpot, Alexa is also an all in one tool for marketers,
agencies and businesses alike and comes equipped with a wide variety of
tools. However, we are going to focus on the marketing related solutions
provided by Alexa. These include;

1. Content Research
2. Competitive Web Analysis
3. Target Audience Analysis

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 4. Keyword Research
5. SEO Analysis
6. Check Backlinks
7. API

Content Research
Alexa’s content research tool helps marketers channel their content in a way
that it rises above all the competition. By helping you find the most shared
articles on social media platforms about your niche, Alexa gives insights that
help you discover unique angles in order to create new content. The content
research tool can do everything from helping you discover successful content,
finding high engagement topics, finding competitors top content, identifying
keyword gaps, identifying content leaders to improving share of voice and
developing domain experience.

Alexa Content Research

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Competitive Website Analysis
Alexa’s competitive website analysis tool helps you outperform your
competition in everything that is significant in the world of digital marketing
from traffic and ranking on SERPs to backlinks and keywords etc. It helps you
benchmark your sit against your top competitor, find gaps in your strategy,
identify their strengths and weaknesses and then work on those to quickly
replace them. The competitive web analysis tool does a multitude of jobs
from finding the top competitors in your niche, comparing your website’s
traffic with theirs, comparing your content with theirs, comparing share of
voice, competitor’s keywords to finding their backlinks and carrying out
detailed analysis of their websites to identify their strategies.

Competitive Website Analysis

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Target Audience Analysis
Alexa’s target audience analysis tool is a very unique solution to
understanding your audience. No other SEO software suite offers a similar
tool or functionality since audience analysis for the most part has been
overlooked as a significant metric to increase your website’s rank and
resultantly increase your sales revenue. Alexa’s target audience analysis tool
helps users identify new and interesting ways to engage the audience. By
using this tool, you not only focus the most searched keywords etc. but also
focus on what customers actually want and what kind of content they care
about. Target audience analysis is extremely important in increasing your
website’s retention rate as we discussed before that blindly chasing keywords
does no good as long as the content does not fulfill user needs. The target
audience analysis tool covers all aspects of audience analysis from finding out
your target audience, reaching them, engaging you audience, converting
them into customers, increasing share of voice to identifying industry leaders
and finding unknown competitors.

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 Alexa Target Audience Analysis tool

Keyword Research
The keyword research tool integrated into Alexa helps you find powerful
keywords both for SEO and PPC, in order to drive more traffic and make your
research strategy more fruitful. Keyword research helps you identify your
competitor’s ranking keywords, find out which one of them have high-value
buyers and then find gaps in your keyword profile based on the results. The
keyword research tool also helps you find easy to rank keywords, find your
SEO competitors, compare your share of voice and search traffic and analyze
site keywords.

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 Alexa Keyword Research Tool

SEO Analysis
The SEO analysis tool like any other SEO software suite helps you optimize
your website’s organic traffic and elevate your website’s rank in the SERPs of
whatever search engine it is that you are working with. The SEO Analysis tool
can help your website with important tasks such as checking technical SEO,
finding and prioritizing keywords, optimizing on-page SEO, evaluating
backlinks and analyzing search traffic.

The two other relevant tools integrated into Alexa include a backlink checker,
which analyzes the backlink profile of your and your competitor’s website and

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the API, which is a vast repository of web traffic information available to
developers.

Alexa SEO Analysis tool

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 Key takeaways
Now that we have gone over each of the five tools in detail, discussed their
features in detail, it is time we settled on one of the five as our go-to. However,
it is not that simple. The reason that all five of these tools made it to our list is
because they were all very good at what they do, which is providing a
comprehensive package of digital marketing tools that a business might
need.

However, we will still try to weigh out the pros and cons of each of the five
and then leave the rest up to you to make a decision. Right off the bat,
HubSpot is out of the race as compared to the other four, not because it is a
bad software but simply because there are too many tools consolidated into
one. HubSpot's main reason for popularity is also its CRM platform and not its
marketing tools and while it does a very good job at being an all in one
platform, it loses the attention to detail that SEO marketing needs.

Secondly, talking about Alexa, it has some amazing tools and some very
unique functionalities, especially its vast repositories of websites where it has
indexed a large number of websites and have given them a rank based on
their traffic, SERP ranking and a number of other factors. The Alexa Rank tool
is very popular among digital marketers and is considered a key parameter
when analyzing a website. Other than that, the tools that Alexa comes
equipped with are not as widely used as the remaining three platforms that
we discussed.

Finally, talking about the top dogs, ahrefs, MOZ and SEMrush are all excellent
at what they do and equally popular amongst the digital marketing
community. However, each one has their own set of pros and cons. Talking
about SEMrush, while it does have a free version, the pricing can be a bit high
for the paid version especially if you are using their API access. SEMrush is also
great for competitive research, content marketing and keyword research but

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the data can sometimes be slightly inaccurate. SEMrush also lacks a technical
audit tool and while it tries to make up for it by the technical analysis module,
it is just not enough. Last but not least, the backlink analysis is just not that
good in SEMrush.

MOZ on the other hand makes up for many of the above explained issues. It
has an excellent technical audit tool as well as an exceptional backlink
explorer. The only cons associated with MOZ is the extremely high pricing,
which also varies by location making it difficult to use for agency use. I also
think MOZ lacks a little bit in terms of functionality and efficiency.

Ahrefs in my opinion is the best when it comes to link index, it is an excellent

idea generator for new keywords with its massive keyword repository. Ahrefs
has amazing community support and also comes as a free chrome extension
toolbar. The only con is that it is expensive to use and has a relatively weaker
API.

So now that we have broken down each of the tools with respect to their
features, pros and cons. I think it becomes very much clear as to which one
suits your business needs the most because at the end of the day, it is going
to be you who will have to make the compromises since none of the tools are
100% perfect. You just have to choose which compromises you are willing to
make.

In the end, I would however like to say that you cannot go wrong with any of
the five tools. They are all amazing at what they do and many successful
companies utilizing these tools are a proof that each of them can work in
their individual capacity. But hey, if we were in an ideal world, and money
wasn’t an object, I’d recommend making use of each one of them to make
sure no leaks remain unnoticed and your SEO strategy is at its top game.

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