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Successful business owners understand that marketing is the livelihood of their business. After all, marketing brings in new customers, profits, and long-term benefits for the business.

When thinking about how to market your business, you may have many questions, here are 3 of the most common:

-What’s the difference between online and offline marketing?
-Is one better than the other?
-Which is the better option for you?

These are all important questions, and this article post will guide you in making a decision.

What Is Online Marketing?

Online marketing involves promoting your business, product, or service on the internet via your website, online ads, or social media.

Benefits of online marketing include:

1. You can see, track and measure the engagement of your content and promotions. With social media platforms, you can physically see what your audience thinks of your brand and marketing. If you’re seeing lots of likes and shares of your content, then surely, you’re doing something right!
2. Track your return on investment (ROI) in measurable steps. You can track clicks and sales when using ads online, so you can easily see which ads are the most profitable for you. This will help you to make smart decisions regarding future marketing strategies and campaigns.
3. You can laser-target specific demographics. With online marketing, it’s possible to drive specific types of people to your offers – people who are more likely to buy your products.

There are also some negatives to using online marketing, such as:

1. Digital advertisements can be annoying. While it’s certainly clever that advertisers can target ads specifically to you, showing you ads for products that you searched for days previously, they can be highly annoying and even drive you away from a brand.
2. The ads are fleeting. Unlike a billboard, an online ad can easily be missed or ignored. It’s easy to scroll past an ad and click to the next page without even taking notice.
3. Online marketing is constantly evolving. Whether it’s the latest social media platform or a change to the search engine algorithm, there’s always something new to learn. If you don’t keep up with important trends, you may find yourself being left in the dust.

What Is Offline Marketing?

Offline marketing is anything that does not involve the internet, so any magazine or television advertisements are good examples of this type of marketing.

Benefits of offline marketing include:

1. It can be impactful and easy to understand. A billboard or TV commercial will often become part of a person’s daily life, so it will usually be easy to understand and digest.
2. Printed marketing materials are often permanent. Unless a magazine is recycled or put in the trash, then the advertisements found within will be permanent, so they can still work weeks, or even months, after first being published.
3. They are memorable. Many offline ads are memorable and likely to be remembered much better than an Instagram ad for example, which is almost instantly forgotten. Think of all the popular Super Bowl ads and other commercials that we all know so well that they become part of our culture.

Offline marketing also has some negative aspects, such as:

1. It’s difficult to measure the success of a campaign. There are ways to measure the success of a campaign, but they are not as in-depth or accurate as those available for online marketing.
2. Typically, offline marketing can be very expensive. Even a small run in your local newspaper or a single 30-second spot on TV can set you back a considerable amount.
3. Little feedback from your audience. After running the marketing campaign, you can rarely gauge the reactions from your potential customers.

Which is Better for You?

Both online and offline marketing have their pros and cons.

Offline marketing is seen as more traditional and will be better aimed at the older generation, while online marketing is generally a better option for the younger generation. However, these are only generalities and might not apply to your business.

Plus, you don’t have to choose one over the other. Perhaps a combination of online and offline marketing will work best for your business.

You will need to understand what you want to achieve marketing-wise, what your budget is, and most importantly who your target audience is. Study your audience and go with what you think will work best with them, keeping your budget in mind. This will get you started.

Then, track what you can to determine which campaigns bring you the greatest profits. Run new campaigns and track those. Experience is the best determiner. Analyze as you go and stick with what’s working the best for your company until you find a new campaign that drives even greater profits.

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Smart business owners know how important search engine optimization (SEO) is for their business website or sites.

SEO, when done effectively, will help to increase a company’s website visibility on search engines like Google, Bing, MSN, and Yahoo.

This means that their website will show up in the top search results when someone searches for a keyword or phrase that applies to their business.

Being in the top results can send thousands of targeted prospects to your website and get you sales hands over fists.

In fact, smart SEO can help your business in many smart ways!

Consider these benefits of SEO:

1. You will see an increase in traffic hands down. As your website becomes more optimized over time, it will rank higher in the search engines for various search terms. As this happens, you should see a spike in traffic, or prospects viewing your website. Which ultimately means sales.
2. It will increase the credibility of your business. Your customers are conditioned to believe that the best businesses are those ranked at the top of the search engines, whether that is true or not.

When you rank highly, your prospects perceive your business more favorably, which leads to an increase in sales, conversions, and brand recognition.

3. SEO can lead to long-lasting results. Radio, print, and billboard ads produce short-term rewards. SEO, on the other hand, helps to deliver long-term rewards because the content stays live on the internet bringing in subscribers and customers regularly.

By investing in SEO, your online presence increases, resulting in a more profitable return on investment (ROI), getting you the ROI you deserve!

4. You are in control of the cost. Whether you are building backlinks, creating a social media presence, or creating blog content, you will know how much it will cost beforehand. Once you know what each service will cost, you can determine which you believe would give you a better ROI.
5. Your website will become more user-friendly. A good SEO expert will be able to look at your website and optimize it not only for the search engines but also for your users too.

Improving your website’s user experience includes many aspects, including how quickly your website loads, how easy it is to navigate, and whether it is mobile-friendly.

By improving the user experience of your website, you will see an increase in conversions, plus you should see an overall ranking increase in the search engines, as this is one of the known ranking factors.

6. SEO helps encourage users to visit a local store. It has been shown in numerous studies that having an online presence can also increase visits to your offline premises. If you have a restaurant, for example, a potential customer could check out your menu or customer reviews before making a reservation.
7. Your social media following will increase. As your search engine rankings increase, more visitors will arrive at your website. Even if they do not immediately buy from you, they may still end up checking out your social media platforms, follow them, and then become buyers later on.

These new followers can also share your marketing messages, leading to an increase in social traffic and sales.

8. SEO helps put you ahead of your competitors. As you integrate SEO and various other online marketing techniques into your business, you will move ahead of those competitors who have not implemented these techniques.

SEO is incredibly important nowadays, and if you are not implementing it in your own online marketing activities, you are limiting your results, sales, and profits.

Study what your competitors are doing and see what you can do to rise above them. It will be worth your time and effort.

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To become successful in online marketing, one must develop the necessary skillsets and knowledge to produce the best results or a kick-ass ROI.

This will take hard work and patience, but the good news is that you do not need to attend a college or university to learn rocket science to get these skills.

In this valuable guide, you’ll discover some “self-taught” methods you can use to learn online marketing at home just like I did. In fact, you could become an expert yourself in no time!

Search Engine Marketing aka (SEM)

SEM is a major part of online marketing and is split into two defined areas: search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC):

1. With SEO, you’ll learn how to optimize a website so that it ranks higher in the search engines’ organic results, ultimately helping to drive targeted traffic to your website.

SEO is a discipline that changes continuously. Because of this aspect, you’ll want to monitor the major players in SEO to keep up with search engine algorithm changes, so you can adjust your own methods accordingly as the changes and updates happen.

Subscribe to my blog for daily SEO tips and I’ll be sure to send you tips, updates, gifts, and a bunch of other cool stuff.

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click marketing, will enable you to send traffic to websites with targeted advertisements. This can get expensive but the returns come faster.

Google Ads is still one of the most popular PPC networks, which will show your ads on Google properties and websites that have the AdSense code included.

You can learn PPC easily online and relatively quickly. There are numerous courses you can take, including ones that will allow you to gain a Google Certification for PPC ads.

Once you’ve gained this accreditation, create some PPV (Pay Per View) campaigns of your own to gain the necessary experience you’ll need to get your own clients.

If you’re looking for a couple of golden resources (free and paid) to learn online marketing please visit https://www.udemy.com/ and https://academy.hubspot.com/

Social Media Marketing

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without social media. Millions of people visit social media websites each day, which is why learning how to market on these platforms is so important.

Social media marketing has many advantages, such as:

-You can market your website for free by engaging your social media audience.

-You can buy effective advertising campaigns for as little as $5/day.

-You can highly target the audience that you want to show your ads to.

Luckily, there are online courses available on these platforms themselves that will help teach you how to market to the millions of users that use these platforms daily. From paid campaigns to getting your content to go viral, if you want to learn about something, there will be a course available that can help.

Email Marketing

Don’t listen to all the lies out there, email marketing is still one of the best ways to market online and rake in some serious profit.

The first step is to build an email list. Offer something valuable aka a premium, such as a free report or discount coupon, that is related to your products or services in exchange for their email address. In this way, you can build a list of people that opted in to receive your emails.

To run a successful email marketing campaign, it’s important to clearly understand your audience and what they want. Once you understand what they want, you can tailor an offer that will be attractive to them and then make your offer in an email and shoot it to your list.

In order to build your email list and send emails to them, you’ll need to use an autoresponder.

There are many autoresponder platforms on the web, and many of them are free to get started.

My personal favorite and the one I currently use is Mailchimp in case you need a free solution.

With an autoresponder, you can also track your ads and their effectiveness.

To learn more about email marketing and how to effectively use an autoresponder:

Pick one and start using it, take action. All autoresponder platforms out there pretty much have numerous guides and articles about how to use them to run successful marketing campaigns.

You can also find YouTube videos that teach how to run email marketing campaigns with your chosen autoresponder.

Or you can do an online search for a course that teaches you the information you need.

Do Your Research and Take Action!!

You can research online marketing tips at home and find out what techniques are working for others. Simple.

You can then take these ideas and use them yourself since it’s already converting, why re-invent the wheel? Many techniques you learn may not be successful, but you will soon learn what works best for you and what does not. Test everything.

You can become one of these experts yourself and do your own online marketing for your own company or offer your services to others. You could make a nice side income this way!

You’ll learn your most effective way of working and which area of online marketing you prefer to focus on. Not everyone can be an expert at everything, which is why many successful online marketers consult with a team of experts who each specialize in their own area of online marketing.

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There are many ways to get higher search engine rankings.

This list will include page optimization on your website, keyword research, building backlinks, and more.

Although search engine algorithms (which determine rankings) change quite often, tried and true SEO methods that are proven to help you rise higher in the rankings throughout these changes and weather the storm.

Here are the Top 10 best practices for awesome SEO success:

1. It’s very important to ensure that your website is secure. Most people today are concerned with the privacy and security of the websites that they visit let alone do business with. Consequently, this is also a crucial ranking factor in the search engines. A secure website will always rank higher than one that isn’t secure!

Discuss with your web host or web manager about the type of security that is most appropriate for your website. On mine, I have a security certificate that ensures that the content I publish for you guys is delivered by SSL (secure socket layer).

With SSL, your website will start with an “https://” instead of “http://” and the little lock icon will show up next to the web address in many browsers.

2. Add your main keyword early into the content. Including your keyword early on lets the search engines know what your content is about. Additionally, sprinkle the main keyword throughout the rest of your content too.

This will tell the search engines that this term is important, which will help you rank well for this term.

3. Use unique titles, descriptions, and content. This lets the search engines know that your content is fresh original material and can add further knowledge to the other information that can already be found on the internet about your topic.
4. Optimize your title tag for SEO. Always include your main keyword in the title tag for your website, and if possible, put it at the start of the title. This will give priority to this keyword.
5. Ensure that your website loads quickly. It’s important that you make your website load as quickly as possible. Especially with the advent of smartphones, loading time is an important ranking factor in the search engines.

Compress the size of images, remove any unneeded code, and consider using a content delivery network (CDN). If you use a CDN, your website will be able to serve images and other media from servers that are close to your audience, thus cutting down on the loading time.

Many web hosts now use CDNs to deliver content for their clients’ websites. Talk with your web host or your web manager about this priority.

If you have a WordPress site, there are many plugins that help you speed up the loading time for your website.

6. Optimize any images. You can do this by giving the filenames descriptive names. Using image alt text is also recommended so that the search engines can understand what images are present on your website. Properly optimized images can boost your website rank.
7. Use internal linking. The key here is to link to your main pages. So, any smaller pages can link to a larger, authoritative piece. This will help to increase the rank of the more important page.

Try to use the main keyword, or a variation of it, in your internal links to ensure that the search engines know what the page is about.

8. Create amazing content. Write high quality content that answers questions that your readers might have about your topic.

If you can answer a question in less than 1,000 words, that is fine. However, it’s worth noting that it’s important to be thorough with any answer, so you may want to write considerably more than this amount.

Many of the highest-ranking pages include longer, authoritative content.

9. Build backlinks to your website. Despite what you may have read online that backlinks are no longer important, please note that backlinks, when done properly, are still very important. They show the search engines that your content is valuable enough for other webmasters to link to.

When you first start your website, you may want to go slow when building backlinks. After a few months you’ll be able to ramp up your efforts.

With this strategy, you want to obtain links from other important websites in this field. Links from low-quality websites that accept advertising from anyone to any website are likely to hurt your search engine rankings.

10. Look at the user experience. If you find that visitors are struggling to navigate your website or that you have a high bounce rate, which is when people leave your website after just a short time, take a close look at your user experience.

Perhaps your visitors aren’t finding the answers that they’re looking for, or maybe your website is broken in some way. See what you can do to improve the overall experience of your visitors.

Following these Top 10 SEO best practices will enable you to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. The higher you rank, the more traffic you should be able to achieve, and ultimately the more sales you will be able to make.

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I’m sure we will all agree that getting our business out in front of potential customers is a necessary part of making sales or having any kind of business in today’s world.

The issue with traditional “old school” advertising, such as newspaper, radio, and television ads, is that they cost an arm and a leg and may produce little or even no return on investment.

Doing all your marketing and advertising online may be a better option.

You can track the effectiveness of each advertisement, do side by side comparisons and adjustments to increase your ROI.

Then, once you have it down to a science you can focus your marketing strategies on the techniques that are the most profitable.

Here are some free online marketing methods that you may want to take a look at for your business:

1. Partner up with another expert in your field. Network to consider joining forces with another brand. You can then offer a more valuable product together than either one of you could offer on your own.

In addition to offering immense value, you’ll automatically get the attention of both audiences, resulting in more sales and adding more leads to your email auto-responder.

In the future, these new leads can drive more sales of another one of your products.

Partnering, even it’s on one marketing campaign, can bring long-term benefits to both of parties involved.

2. Find a way to build, nurture, and encourage user-generated content. If you can get user-generated content by having engagement with your audience your website will grow without you having to create your own content. This type of content also increases your website visitors. Enable comments on your website and contribute to the discussions.

Always allow visitors to submit their own articles and encourage guest posts from other experts in the field.

3. Introduce affiliate marketing to the mix. When you create an affiliate program for your business, you will be getting other experts in your field and the public to send business your way. This can be mutually beneficial, and you will only be paying commissions (after the sale) if the affiliate makes a sale.

As with the partnering strategy, a number of these new website visitors will sign up for your email list, even if they don’t buy something their first time they visit, bringing you long-term benefits and sales.

4. Be social! There are millions of users visiting the various social media platforms daily, so it makes sense for your business to have a presence.

Share funny or interesting memes, images, or videos that are relevant to your niche or business.

Here are 4 quick guidelines:

• Post insights and valuable information.
• Let your audience know when you have a sale on your products. Give your social media followers coupons or discounts.
• Encourage engagement by participating in discussions. Ask questions and answer theirs.
• Run a survey, poll, or contest.

In turn, these will then be shared by your followers, increasing your reach and ultimately resulting in more sales of your products or services.

5. Use free online tools. There are plenty of tools online that can help your business. You can sign up for websites that will enable you to create free surveys, or you can use a free online service to send emails to your customers. You do not have to pay a premium to receive top-notch service.
6. Change and reuse old advertisements. Rather than going through the expensive route of creating new articles with every marketing campaign, try reusing parts of an advertisement that worked well. This will save you time and expense.

Plus, keeping consistent brand imagery through every ad will help with brand recognition too.

7. Build an email list. If people are visiting your website, chances are good that they are interested in what you have to offer. Make a form available for them to join your email list and be kept in the loop about future product releases or special offers.

Once they’ve signed up to this email list, you can send emails to these prospects with news and further information about your products. Let them know whenever something goes on sale.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to drive sales. Treat your list members like gold, because that’s what they are to you and your business.

8. Create some video content. Video content is incredibly important nowadays as the younger generation would rather watch a video than read a blog post. If you can create interesting videos, you’ll create interest in your brand.

It’s certainly possible to do online marketing without spending money. Some of these methods might take some time and effort to implement, though, before you see profits.

For example, it can take a while to build an email list. However, once you have a list, making sales can be as easy as sending out an email to your list. Once you’ve built a social media following, making sales can be as easy as making a post on your social media accounts.

If you want to see an immediate ROI, like for a special promotion, you may want to consider paying for ads online. But if funds are tight, be patient as you put these free strategies into place, and soon you’ll have plenty of ways to make immediate sales for free.

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Contrary to what you may have seen lately online from various experts in the field, it is most certainly possible to rank your website without backlinks.

The following techniques will focus more on a strategy called on-page SEO, creating valuable content (of course), and a few off-page mentions. 🙂

So, what are these techniques? …

Content is King. Create valuable content!

1. While creating/curating organic content on the web, post answers to any potential search query thoroughly, this way you’re giving your readers and the search engines exactly what they are looking for.

–This will in turn cause 2 things to happen: you increase user engagement on your website, which ultimately informs the search engines that your content is valuable and of quality. Consequently, the search engines will rank your website highly for that search term because of search relevancy.

–For the highest rankings humanly possible, go more in-depth than your competitors in a given niche topic, provide clear answers, and provide graphics or illustrations to help your reader understand the content crystal clearly.

2. Try to rank for longtail keywords. These niche-specific keywords have very little search engine traffic. The reason why you will be aiming to rank for these terms is that there is less competition, and it’s easier to rank highly for.

–Plus, if you rank highly for lots of these terms, your overall traffic will increase. At this point, you may be able to consider ranking for more competitive search terms.

3. Get customer reviews. With local businesses, reviews submitted about your website online can affect your search engine rankings as well.

–For many reasons, it’s worth your time and effort to ensure that you always provide world-class service for your customers. This will lead to reviews, referrals, and more customers!

4. Copy your competitor’s on-page SEO strategy by clicking here. Visit your competitor’s website and study its content.

–You may think that creating longer forms of content is best when it comes to ranking. However, this is not always the case. Check whatever pages are ranking for each particular search term.

5. Build internal links. For each of your longer, authoritative articles, link smaller supporting articles on your website to this main page. This will help your longer page achieve higher rankings.

6. Ensure that your website is easy to navigate. If your website isn’t easy to navigate, your visitors will just click off your website and go somewhere else. This can lower the time spent on your website and increase the bounce rate. These are both negative SEO factors.

7. Get a mobile-friendly website. These days, customers will more than likely access your website through a cell phone or mobile device.

–If your website doesn’t look or act right on a mobile device, this will have a negative impact on user experience, rankings, and sales. So, be sure to optimize your website for mobile devices as well as desktop.

8. Increase your page speed. Page speed refers to how fast your website page loads, and this affects your rankings.

–A faster-loading website improves the user experience of your visitors. No one wants to be waiting for a website to load. Chances are if they have to wait more than a few seconds, they will leave the website entirely.

9. Get an SSL certificate for your website. Studies have shown that having an SSL certificate on your website increases your website rankings.

–Search engines these days will warn its users that a website without this certificate is not secure, which will result in a user leaving the website faster than a NewYork minute. This harms your rankings and possibly your reputation as well.

If your website is still new and has yet to establish any authority within the niche, or if the competitors in this particular niche have very few backlinks, then it is certainly possible to rank highly for various search terms using these strategies.

As your website becomes more competitive, then building backlinks will certainly help you to continue to rank higher.

But in the meantime, don’t lose sleep over the back-links, they will come in due time.

Draw your visitors to your secure, fast-loading website and provide reliable, quality content that they’ll want to engage with and share with others because of it’s value.