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We all want to achieve success in life. Whether you are an affiliate, an entrepreneur, a freelancer, an employee or just a regular person, success is or should be our topmost priority. However, as you get older, you notice that you could have become much more successful if you hadn’t listened to certain individuals, including you, who have LIED to you.  

Yes, these lies that no one dares to talk about, are the main reason most of us become unsuccessful in life. If you want to be a winner, you need to become aware of what other people are saying to you and of what you are saying to you. You need to pinpoint those lies and remove them out of your life once and for all.

Without further ado, here are the three biggest lies you hear on a daily basis that can prevent you from attaining success.

 1. I Have Tried Everything, Still I can’t Succeed

No, you haven’t. This lie is so common that we don’t even realize we are lying ourselves, or that someone else is lying to us. You might think that you are just born with who you are, with flaws and all, and that no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to get over your limitations. Let me contradict you here.

As a flawed guy, just like you all, I was always predisposed to gaining weight. Everyone else seems to be happy with that, except me. Everyone told me not to worry, that it is in my genes. However, deep inside, I knew that I could somehow lose all those extra pounds. Of course, I tried every diet possible, but nothing worked. However, once I started changing my mentality and I began believing in my power to change, my body literally began to shape as my mind would say.  

From my own experience, and from thousands other experiences, you can change your body without any secrets or tricks. Much of it is about psychology and about correct thinking. Even though the medical issues come as a barrier, once you remove them, you will be able to change your body and be that person you’ve always wanted to be.

 This doesn’t apply just to losing weight, but also to getting that promotion you’ve been struggling to get for years, that new luxury car, that position, that girl, that man, and the list goes on. Remember, the world wants you plain, mediocre, just like most of them. Rise above the ordinary and start controlling the outcomes in your life.

2. I can’t Open up to People as I’m an Introvert

Being an introvert has nothing to do with being bold. This is one of the LIES that I’ve been seeing more of lately. People claim that they just can’t walk up and talk to a stranger, give a speech in public or dive deeper into a discussion. The problem is that this mentality of “introversion” prevents people from attaining success, both in their personal and professional lives. 

We live in a day and age where interactions are the cornerstone of any type of success. For instance, if you want to have success in your career, you need to be able to interact with people in real life, not just online. You need to be able to showcase your skills and establish long-term partners. The same goes true for entrepreneurs who want to land a good joint-venture, or for singles looking for a partner. 

Even if you were born as an introvert, keep in mind that studies prove that introverts PREFER quiet environments. That doesn’t mean that introverts can only thrive in quiet environments. If you struggle with this lie that introverts are not capable of interacting with other people, check out this amazing Ted Talk on the Power of Introverts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KYU2j0TM4.

3. I Don’t Earn Enough Money in Order to Start Saving at the Moment

You’ve probably had this too. Regardless of your social status, saving money is a top priority for most of us. Whether we’re saving for a bigger, better house, or just for that cheap laptop we can’t afford to buy at the moment, saving is quite a difficult task, especially when you deal with this common lie of not having enough money.

The truth is that EVERYONE can save money if they try. There will always be people who earn less than you and are still able to save money. It all boils down to prioritization. What do I buy? How much do I spend on my hobbies? What are my priorities in life?

As a business owner, saving money is even more important.

Without this skill, you will never be able to manage your business like a pro. Moreover, if you struggle financially in your personal life, chances are that will also struggle in your professional life. 

Of course, getting started might be difficult. No one expects you to save after just a few months of running your business or landing your first job. However, in time, your savings should go up, just like your revenues. Start with something, even if it’s just $10 a month. Put that money aside and add to it every month. After one year, you will notice that your savings account has grown quite big.  

Personally, I try to save around 25 percent of my revenues every month. As my revenue goes up, I will try to increase the amount I save. For instance, let’s say that you make $4,000 a month, and you are saving $1,000 at the moment. If your revenue increases to $5,000, try to save more than $1,250, which represents the same 25 percent. Even if you end up saving $1,500, you still have $500 more money left than what you were earning before the increase.

Starting an online business or growing in your career is definitely not easy

However, if you want to enjoy long-term success, it is imperative to remove these three lies from your life as of today. You can always reach your goals if you believe in yourself and in your power to save money, change your body, build long term connections and ultimately thrive in everything you do.

  The post Top 3 Lies About Success that May Hold you Back appeared first on Build100k.

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SEO can be compared to playing in a huge field full of competitors. There is a huge audience made up of fans whom you need to please. Only that, depending on your goal, this time, you may actually need them to convert. 

Despite the fact that the field is big enough for the competitors to play and appeal to their audiences, success is not assured for everyone. Success, which in this case should be achieving your SEO goals is only achieved by those who play according to the rules of the game. 

In SEO, the rules may not be stipulated, but like principles, their effect can be felt. Violating these rules is akin to disqualification from the game. 

You will not have set the rules since you are only a player, but you need to ensure that you play by the rules. Below we look at some of the mistakes that will result in your SEO efforts going down the drain:

1. Wasting time, money and effort registering with search engines

A long time ago, when the digital world had not yet evolved, submitting your website to search engines was not only standard practice but also a competitive advantage. In today’s more advanced world, search engines are more complex. You need not directly inform them that you have created a new website or page. 

As a small one man or woman agency, you should not bill your clients for submission of their sites to Google or any other search engine. In essence, this service is unnecessary, it is simply a waste of time and money. A site will show up in search engine result pages if, among others, it is well optimized, has good quality backlinks and relevant, fresh, and authoritative content. If you have a domain name, and it is more than a week old, your audience will find your site, no worries.

2. Leaving your title tags to fate

Another mistake that will turn your S.E.O. outreach into a nightmare is leaving Google to choose your title tags for you. 

Title tags define document titles. On search engines, they allow users to see a part of the page, depending on what they keyed in on the user query. Title tags are supposed to be accurate descriptions of the content on the page. 

On Google, title tags are usually 50 to 60 characters long. Sometimes they are longer, as the measure is usually a 512-pixel display. The best move is to keep your title tags below 55 characters. This way, at least 95% of the title will appear in search results. 

If a different title tag is displayed by the search engine, you need to change it to reflect your brand or anything else that you feel will communicate best to your intended audience while helping you rank higher. 

Using a title emulator tool is allows you to see what your title tags would look like on search results. You will enter your full title text, and a possible search query or keyword. The tool will then generate your probable title tag on search engines.

For instance, if your company’s name is “Colorado Advocates LLC” and your intended description is “we are a family owned law firm that is now in its third generation. Throughout the years, we have become better at our craft…” you will enter your company name, followed by a dash and your intended description. You could enter a keyword or user query like “law firms in Colorado”. 

The tool will give you the following result in your title tag: “Colorado Advocates LLC – we are a family owned law firm that i…”

3. Always trying to catch up with Google’s algorithms

Webmasters and SEO experts are always striving to find out what Google’s latest algorithms are and to ensure that their sites and web pages meet the requirements of the latest algorithms. Unfortunately, by the time you come to understand the algorithm and try to tailor your content to meet its demands, it is already quite late.

A better approach is to actually be ahead of Google. But how do you do this yet you do not work for Google? Well, it is easier than it actually seems. Below are some strategies that you could go for:

Base your SEO efforts on Google’s mission statement. After all, isn’t this the best way to know what any company or brand intends to achieve? Just like in any other company, Google’s algorithms will have to be in line with their mission statement. So, their mission statement is actually to organize information in the world, making it useful and accessible universally (paraphrased). 

What does that tell you about the algorithms that they will come up with? That they will work towards making it easier to:

– Organize information

– Make it more accessible

– Make it more useful (universally)

So, as you plan your SEO strategy, you need to include the other stakeholders’ wins, if you want a win-win with regards to SEO. When creating content, for instance, you will aim at making it useful. You could, for instance, bring several experts together and publish their views on a high-quality blog post, or record a YouTube video. 

So, if Google releases an algorithm that prioritizes websites with useful content, do you see that you will already be on the safe side? 

Another way to get ahead of Google is to again, based on their mission statement, dig deeper. If Google aims at making information useful, and relevant, then the consumers of the information are internet users. The implication is that we must study user behavior. Doing this will lead to conclusions like less robotic content full of keywords to try and rank higher in search results.

All in all

There is cutthroat competition in the online space. After all, everybody’s goals are almost the same: ranking high in search results, increasing your site’s traffic, or even conversion. However, remember that you only get to win if you play according to the rules of the game. Avoid the 3 above discussed mistakes and you will be on your way to achieving your SEO goals. 

The post 3 Costly Mistakes that will Shipwreck your SEO Efforts appeared first on Build100k.

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  As an entrepreneur, the title above should resonate with your deepest needs. People generally know that an entrepreneur is stressed and quite busy, but the reality is that the amount of stress we have to deal with on a daily basis can exceed the wildest expectations. If you’re anything like me, you are well aware of how hard and complex the life of an entrepreneur can get.

Once we get caught in the thrill of pursuing that big dream of growing our businesses, it becomes quite easy to dismiss even the simplest needs of life. We totally forget about our hobbies and about our current life, focusing solely on the future. Worry, anxiety and stress settle in, sinking their sharp fangs into our daily routine. Late nights, disastrous meals or no meals at all, junk food, no exercise and early mornings. There is no wonder that we always feel stressed about everything.

The good news is that you can put an end to this never-ending cycle as of now. The following 7 methods to de-stress yourself have been tested and re-tested, not just by myself, but by thousands of entrepreneurs from all around the world. Try to implement them in your regular routine and you will notice how your life will improve dramatically, and with it your success in business.

1. Get into a Workout Routine

Whatever your business is all about or whatever your physical location, a good workout routine can dramatically boost your mental and physical wellness. Nothing beats a good exercise training at 7 am in the morning or at 9 pm in the evening, in case you had a late morning after working all night at a project. Instead of burning your “mental calories”, try to burn your body calories.

Whatever you prefer, whether taking a hike, going for a walk, jogging, lifting weights at the gym or doing power training, a quick workout can do wonders for you. In case you are always on the run, you can find a good gym at pretty much any 3-star and above hotel.

2. Make Sleep a Top Priority

As a busy business owner, just like many of you, sleep is not a priority for me. I just want to remind you of that episode of burnout when you were incapable of doing anything for a full week. Maybe it were just a few days or a couple of hours, but most of us dealt with one. Without rest, we break down and we can’t function properly. Numerous research have proven that people who are well rested take better decisions.

If you want to take good decisions as a manager or entrepreneur, start getting at least 6 hours of sleep a night during weekdays and 8 during weekend. If you can’t get to this number, at least start by sleeping one more hour each night. You will definitely notice the difference after a few weeks.

3. Treat your Body Like a Holy Temple

When life gets hectic, which happens much more often for entrepreneurs than for regular people, we normally choose to take decisions based solely on the convenience factor. In your case, this might mean skipped meals, fast food choices over regular meals, drinking less water and more coffee, getting less sleep, and the list goes on.

Instead of becoming enslaved by those negative decisions, start to take control of your life and choose healthier food habits. Include fruits, veggies and those important proteins and carbs into your daily food choices. If you don’t have time to eat out, you can always order food at the office. Just make sure it’s nothing related to pizza or burgers.

4. Enjoy your Hobby

Something else you can do in order to be less stressed during the day is to practice your hobby at least once a week. Whether it’s taking a Jacuzzi bath, having a massage, driving your car with 90 mph or just reading, try to free 30 minutes of your day and do what you love. You will not just feel better, but you will also gain more motivation to complete all those stringent tasks. Trust me when I say that this minimum time investment spent doing what you love will pay off more than you’ve expected.

5. Simplify your Life

The mess-riddled areas such as studio, office, email or even garage need a proper clean-up if you want to de-stress and boost your productivity. Clean your desk, make room in the garage, put your secretary to read your inbox for you, etc. You will feel much better when everything is in its place.

6. Schedule Everything

I personally love to keep track of everything, from my revenues and expenses to the hours I sleep and tasks I need to perform next month. I use multiple calendars, both on my laptop and smartphone. Treat all of the tasks in your life, even mundane tasks such as shopping or going to gym, with the same level of importance as you would treat an important meeting. Schedule your day and you will end up saving at least 30 minutes in wasted time.

7. Think Big but Act Small

And finally, the jewel of the crown, the best thing you can do to feel de-stressed and to take all that burden off your shoulders is to think big, but act small. You should have big ambitions, bigger than most of your competitors or partners. They might even get to scare you at some point. However, to accomplish your ambitions, you need to act small, taking tiny, daily steps.

Your small daily tasks, such as eating breakfast, drinking more water, going to gym, sleeping more, enjoying your hobby, scheduling everything or even cleaning up your inbox, are the cornerstone of your ambitions. To reach your ambitions, start by doing these small things first. Tackle the tasks that are under your control and you will be able to achieve what is not under your control. Shape your future by influencing your present and your life will suddenly be less stressed.

The post Top 7 Methods I use to Feel Less Stressed as an Entrepreneur appeared first on Build100k.

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A privacy policy is an important part of any website. If you are not sure if you need a privacy policy, there is a simple question to answer if you should have one. ‘Does your website collect any personal data from the users?’ This does include email. If you answered yes, then you need a privacy policy.

In most countries, you legally need a privacy policy if you collect any kind of data from a user. Once you know you need one, how do you write one?

How To Write A Privacy Policy?

A privacy policy needs to be understood by everyone who visits your website. English is the best option, but if your website is in another language, you should have the privacy policy in that language. When you are writing the policy, you should aim for a 9th-grade reading level. This is a reading level that most people have and allows them to understand what is being said.

You should explain the information that you are gathering and why you are collecting the data. Emails and cookies are very common information to track, so there are a lot of great examples out there. If you are gathering information for any sketchy reasons, you should stop these practices instead of trying to explain it to your visitors.

The important information that you should include is if you are sharing information with anyone. This is a huge part because you need to inform the users where their information is going. In most areas, you do not need to list the exact company, but you do have state clearly that the information gathered is being shared or sold.

You should also have information about the laws and initiatives that you are complying with. Having this information is legally required in some areas, and you can face fines if this information is missing.

Depending on the information that you are collecting and what it is being used for, you should include information about how the users can opt out. Most email collections will have this information at the bottom of every e-mail, and somewhere on the host website.

If you are using Google or Apple products, you will need to include information about their services and about their privacy policy. In most areas, you can just post a link to Google’s or Apple’s privacy policy in your policy to be covered.

Do you have a privacy policy for your site?

Writing a privacy policy does not need to be hard, and you do not even need to write your own. There are tools like terms feed and iubenda that will make a privacy policy for you in minutes, and you can add it to your website.

The post How A Privacy Policy Should Be Written appeared first on Build100k.

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New business starters face a lot of obstacles on their way and often ask themselves: “Should I raise my rate?” Raising the rates can be a double-edged sword, both for the existing and new businesses. There are pro’s and con’s of raising the rates, but the biggest fear of all businessmen is losing current customers.

On the other hand, undervaluing the product or service, especially for new business starters, can be as fatal as raising the threshold too high. Here are the reasons why raising the rate is a good option for new business starters and consultants. On the other hand, some possible risks and solutions are provided as well.

The disastrous effects of undervaluing.

We will first analyze the fatal effects of lowering the rates in order to understand the importance of charging the proper price for your product or time. In consumer behavior science, there is a term known as anchorage price.

Simply put, once the customer buys a product at a certain price, he becomes “anchored” to it. More importantly, the client anchors the product value to the price he paid for it. Now, imagine undervaluing your product in order to attract customers.

We will assume you decided to undervalue your new digital product only for a short period of time. Your goal is to gain income as soon as possible and to spread the good news on your product. This is a legit aim. However, it should not be prolonged as your business will suffer some serious losses over a long period of time. Additionally, as previously explained, the new customers will become anchored to the low prices and, even worse, they will associate your product to lower class digital products, which is something you certainly don’t want.

This can have some serious consequences on the acceptance of the new prices of your product after raising the rates. Associating your product with higher class digital products in the start could be a more effective strategy.

A similar case known in the history is the breakthrough of black pearls on the market. In the beginning, this today very fashionable and exclusive product could not find the interested buyers. No one wanted black pearls! After placing them in the same league with the desired white pearls, the demand for the black ones abruptly increased. The new jewelry quickly became anchored to the precious and rare diamonds.

Should you raise your rates?

The answer to this question depends on the worth of your product / service. If you are sure that the service you are offering or the product you make is worthy, quality and deserves to be paid for, raising the amount you charge is a logical and beneficial decision. This might sound like a cliche, but when forming your price, ask yourself whether the amount you plan to charge is worth the time you invest in the production process or not. Answering this simple question will help you answer the more important question raised in this paragraph.

When is the best time to raise the rates?

You can raise the rates either in the beginning, anchoring your service or product quality to a high class and earning the true value for the worth of your product, or after the initial product launch and test phase is over. This depends on numerous factors, such as existence and strength of the competition, strengths of your product, opportunities in the market and consumers’ responsiveness to what you offer.

How much is not too much?

We talked about undervaluing the product / service and the consequences of such actions. However, raising the rates too much will certainly be counterproductive. Researching the market prior to raising the rates is the key step in forming the best rate.

Competition analysis is important as their prices are among the top price shaping factors for your product or service as well. Speaking of which, try to think about the strengths of your product. Competitive difference characteristic for what you offer can dictate raising the rates regardless of the competition.

When talking about services, consultants should know that including a total price and hours needed to complete the service is always a good option. In this way, both the user and the consultant will have a precise insight into the value and hours spent for consulting.

How to increase the rates?

Incremental increase of rates is proven to be the most effective way of raising them. This is especially relevant for new businesses who had already made the mistake of a serious undervaluing of a service or product in the very beginning. Abrupt rates increase will usually lead to rejection of the product or service by the potential clients.

Losing customers is something you certainly do not want. Set a rational period of time over which the rates increase is acceptable for the development of the business. Another important tip when talking about the best way of increasing the rates is being fair to your customers. Keeping them informed is rule No. 1.

Think about new customers.

After raising the rates, a certain number of your current customers will inevitably leave. It is easier to keep the old than find the new client. This is why many businessmen answer the “Should I raise my rates” question with “Not yet, I will lose my customers.” However, raising the rates and looking for new customers is better than sticking with the old ones and undervaluing your service.

Additionally, you can choose to test both the clients and the market. Keep the old rates and the old customers over a certain period of time and, in the same time, test the new customers with new rates. In this way, you will see what are the limits of your product and how responsive the customers are. Additionally, you will know whether the new rates are too high or not.

Constant rates revision rule.

After the kick off rates are set and the product is launched, the new business starter will know whether the rates were set too low or too high. Trial and error is allowed. Learning from mistakes is the most important lesson for new businesses. After testing your business success with raised rates, consider increasing them for true. However, once you find the perfect rates, don’t make the mistake of sticking to them for too long. Increasing the rates according to your product and service development is a logical path to follow. Each time you notice that your workload increased, consider raising the rates. This is almost always a sign that your product or service could bring you more profit.

In conclusion, the worst thing new business starters and consultants can do is undervaluing their work. Being paid less for a quality product or service will not pay off in the long run. Additionally, no one wants to be known as the cheapest one in the market, as the reputation built in the beginning will probably follow your business in the future. Therefore, the answer to the “Should I raise my rates?” question should be “Yes, in a smart way.”

The post New Business – The Issue of Raising Rates appeared first on Build100k.

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The largest section of Fortune 500 companies started of as mere ideas. Business ideas are hard to came across and your idea may be the next successful multi-national corporation. The simple business idea should be proven before execution as hardly all entrepreneurs succeed in the market.

An idea may appeal to you but will it eventually satisfy the market? Let’s explore this detailed checklist to confirm if you should execute your idea, change it or even forget it. This are the five steps of how to test your idea.

1. Is there any similar product or service?

Some times back in college, I remember my friend had an awesome idea. She wanted to transport the college students to an event. An hour had hardly passed before she was greatly discouraged due to the number of transport companies specializing in events.

In most cases ideas are usually thought out by another creative person or company. Try to Google a simple keyword that explains your idea. Search your idea on YouTube. Which forms of the idea is it implemented? How different is your idea from the rest?

If your idea is exactly similar as an already functioning product or service, please don’t continue implementing the idea but try your best to change it. These types of ideas may later spring up legal issues which may probably occur after successful launch of your product or service.

For a unique idea note down how the idea will help the market. Does it offer better service or a more quality product? If the answer is yes, it’s time to move to the next step.

2.What is the public’s view towards your idea?

A few years back Roslin Institute cloned a sheep, the unforgettable Dolly. This action raised hopes that humans may be successfully cloned. The public kept complaining on this grave matter. Scientists saw it as progress, the public declared it unethical and several protests created enough attention to stop any attempts.

All entrepreneurs believe in themselves and they assume all their ideas are great and awesome. Truth be told, some ideas repel the consumers rather than appeal to them. Seek the most trustworthy group of friends or even family members to give you their response on the idea. Ask for honest answers and avoid flattery or exaggerated responses.

If everyone refuses and rejects your idea, the idea demands transformation. Transformation may require only slight change of the idea. Effectiveness of these is well expressed by a certain South African designer who only dyed his collection black and sold every piece of garment he had, after his royal customers rejected the same white clothes.

Ideas that have received a substantial level of acceptance should be allowed to be verified in the following section.

3.Is the prototype working?

Now it’s the perfect time to build a Minimum Viable Product(MVP). This is a prototype that will be used to test the functionality of your product. Eric Ries describes an MVP as that product that allows maximum learning about the customer at very minimum effort. The MVP will thus be the real test of your idea using real objects.

For technical ideas such as creating mobile apps you may build a Facebook page and a short video describing how the app works to save time if the project requires long period of time to complete.Non tech ideas require a real sample. The sample should be working and be given freely to consumers.

Prototypes should be non profit and be aimed to collect the customers feedback. If a large number of customers pose negative feedback it’s advisable to start over and build the product according to the customers expectations. Good feedback illustrates that the customers are satisfied and the idea is awesome.

4.Is there a demand?

Great ideas solve issues in the society. Several problems result to demand of certain products and services. Several amenities are a must have and result to a great market.

With the now advanced technology verifying the level of demand is easy. To test if your idea has the desired demand first create a coming soon page. This is a landing web page that expresses the business idea as an already established idea. These page should enable you to verify how many people actually view the web page. The number of views is directly proportional to the demand thus high web page view high demand.

Creating a Google AdWords campaign on the keyword that well represent your product. Ads ensure reaching the consumer at their time of need and the higher the number of ads clicked the higher the demand. Utilizing Facebook ads may also help register the desired outcome.

Ideas in high demand should be implemented as chances of success is high. Low demand dictates time for converting the idea to solve the customers’ most troublesome issues.

5.How many clients can you get?

After comfortable product production obtaining royal consumers should be implemented. Getting your first clients is challenging but it can be achieved by the following ways.

-Offer a free starter service.

At first clients may end up not spending on the idea. Giving them a free and great experiences triggers their urge to spend to continue enjoying the services.

-Reach out to competitors

Teaming up with competitors will end up ensuring you obtain their surplus market. Serving this ready market increases the chances of getting the first clients.

-Get involved with your network

In most businesses the first clients were immediate family members or friends. These group of people may offer the first clients.

Getting clients ensures that the business idea is actually working. Obtaining royal customers implies that the business idea should be maintained while lack of clients after tough attempts to dictate the exhibits that the business idea should be discarded.

Your idea should pass all the steps to ensure it will serve the market well. These steps are however independent of each other and arguably obtaining a client is the best validation method.

Ideas are greatly increasing and passing today’s test doesn’t confirm relevance of the idea to the future market. Ideas should thus be gauged after a certain period of time as technology advances and constant revolution of a product will ensure it retains its place in the market. For ideas that failed the validation list starting over is cheaper than changing it.

  The post 5 Ways to Test Your Business Idea appeared first on Build100k.

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Quora is a highly underutilized marketing platform. Thus, it represents a gold mine for marketers who want to target their audiences and bring more customers to their websites. Using Quora’s simple question and answer format, you can easily determine what your audience really wants and you can discover how to meet their needs and be appealing enough to drive them to your website.

In 2017, Quora might be your best bet towards entrepreneurial glory. As both marketers and customers are looking for something new, they are slowly setting their eyes on Quora. Once this network explodes, expect to find your brand thrive like never before. Moreover, if you learn how to target the right people and you are able to reach your audience, your website will never lack traffic and your remarketing list will always be full.

Why Using Quora for Marketing?

If you are still reluctant to use this goldmine of a platform in order to drive targeted traffic to your website, you need to take a look at the astounding benefits of marketing on Quora. Here are some of the most vital for your business:

– Prospects can discover your brand

a vast and dedicated community such as Quora includes a lot of experienced, savvy users who know when to trust a source of information. If you get your brand out there and build a strong layer of credibility around it, you prospects will naturally want to connect and interact with you. All it takes is for you to demonstrate your expertise and establish a voice of your own.

– Quora feeds rank organically in search engines

you might have not known that, but Quora has a very high authority score and is considered very important by Alexa. Hence, it ranks very high in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. By ensuring that your questions and answers are relevant, and by adding some keywords here and there, you might appear as high as the first few results for important search phrases.

– Learn more about your target audience

Quora is not just a great place to bring targeted traffic to your site, but also a platform that allows you to get a deeper understanding of your audience. By knowing your audience, you will be able to focus on creating questions and giving answers that solve their problems, and this is the key to win them over.

– Connect with industry influencers

this benefit of using Quora is priceless. You can easily connect with the top people in your niche and learn from them. Connect with your niche influencers by commenting to their questions, replying to their answers to your questions, conducting an advanced search of profiles and then getting in contact with influencers and ultimately tag (or mention) them into your questions or answers.

– Drive prospects to your site

Quora is an excellent platform for getting all that valuable traffic to your site or blog. Discover how to do that by reading below.

How to Find and Target your Audience on Quora

You want to make sure that you target the right people with your answers and questions. You don’t necessarily want someone who is not interested in your products to access your website. In the end, you want to use Quora to grow your customer database and increase your profits.

Here are 5 unique methods to target your prospects and drive them to your website

  1. Do not Look like a Salesman

Prospects, especially in the digital world, hate salespeople above all else. You can’t pose as a salesman for your company and expect people to engage with your brand and access your website. As a marketer, you need to dissociate yourself from selling your products and services. Quora is not the place for that. Instead, try to look like a regular user interested in helping others and offering precious advice.

Share your knowledge without any visible interest and within months you will be approached by a good number of people for advice, Eventually, your relationship will move beyond the regular and they will become your website visitors, buyers and potentially partners.

Practically, try to never promote a service or product you own directly. Do that indirectly, through comments and suggestions that offer a solution. For instance, if you are a marketer for a hosting platform, in a thread like: “Do you know any good hosting companies around?”, you could say that: “I have worked with “ABC Hosting” (add your company name here) and they really rock. Almost 100% uptime, reliable customer support, etc”.

2. Establish Connections

If prospects connect with you through messaging, do not hesitate to respond to their questions and come up with your personalized solutions. On the other hand, do your own part and contact potential customers and then try to engage them by offering buying advice or unique products that would meet their needs. However, during all this process, avoid being salesly and remember that people do not want to be sold something, they just want their problems to be solved.

3. Ask Questions

The key to finding the right people to target is to know what your niche is looking for. Thus, ask a lot of questions about what your prospects actually want. Pick your topic strategically and try to engage with your niche by using the mention symbol. You see, in addition to mentioning people, you can use the “@” symbol to mention topics.

4. Refine your Search

Try to go where your prospects are going for answers. Once you know what they want, pick those niches and questions they are interested in. For instance, if you are selling PPC services, do a search on Quora using terms such as PPC marketing, PPC specialists, PPC agencies, good PPC server, influential people in PPC & SEM, SEM advertising, PPC & SEM tips, and the list goes on.

5. Establish yourself as an Authority

Lastly, but probably most importantly, define your specialty by showing your prospects that you are knowledgeable in your niche. As a leader in your field, you will be able to use your expertise and technical knowledge to solve people’s problems and drive them to your website to get acceess to a complete solution.

Want to learn more about Quora Marketing? Buy this book TODAY

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Most of Google’s algorithms are built around links. In fact, Google themselves confessed that linking to high-quality sites is a smart way to increase your rank in search results. What this means is that you should never overlook link building. Search engines are able to tell a site’s authority and credibility just from the sites it links to. Below we look at link building, important factors in link building and how to achieve effective link building:

Link building: A definition

It is a process that involves the acquisition of links from other sites to yours. It is very challenging. You need to be very creative, and sometimes even assign a budget towards link building. There are different ways to acquire links. Let’s look at that below:

Natural links

In this case, the sites that are interested in linking to your site will approach you and give you links to their sites. Of course, to attract such partnerships, you need to be creating great content and know how to distribute it (check our previous article on distribution).

Manual link building

This time, you are the one to reach out. You can, for instance, email bloggers or submit content to directories. You need to prove that linking to your site will add value to the other party.

Important factors in link building

  Site popularity

You need to get links from popular, informative sites. Such sites have credibility and authority, two factors that are vital in search results. A good example is Wikipedia.

Anchor text

This is where a particular word or phrase is actually a link to another site. For instance, “click here” could be anchor text to an article with more information about a particular topic. If for instance, you have a video talking about “the best outside catering services in Ohio”, you could include anchor text like “read more” which is actually a link to an article that talks about “what to look for when hiring an outside catering service in Ohio”.

Fresh links

You need to keep earning new links. This is because link signals decay and become stale as time passes by. Fresh links are deemed more relevant by search engines thus rank higher in search results.

Links in your niche

Links from sites within your niche are more important than those that are not from your niche. In our example, for instance, a link from a site that has recipes will be more valuable than one that talks about bow hunting.

Trust

Algorithms are able to determine how trustworthy a site is. You need to get links from trusted sites especially educational, government, and not for profit organizations. Search engines categorize these as trusted sites. It is, therefore, a smart move to have links to these sites.

How to achieve effective link building

You need to set the goals that you intend to achieve with your link building efforts. You then need to lay out some strategies to help you to achieve those goals. The last step should be measurability. Have the goals been achieved? A good example of a goal is “increase site traffic by 30%, in one month’s time”. Another goal could be higher ranking in search results. Note that the goals need to be SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. Below is how to effectively achieve link building in your SEO efforts:

Less is better

Note that unlike keyword density, we do not have something like “link density”. This means that you need not focus on acquiring a particular number of links to link back to your site. In fact, a link’s value decreases when there are other links on the page. This stands true even when looking for sites to link to your page or site. It is best to go for pages with few links.

Blogging

With a blog, you need to constantly create fresh content. It is also a good way to help you to actively participate in conversations, and get links from other blogs. In creating your blog content, you need to create a balance. Your content needs to be relevant, valuable, have some sense of humor. Sometimes, newsworthy content is the way to go. This could be achieved by a product release, controversial topics or statements, and giving away something for free.

Measurement

One of the best tools to determine whether your goals were achieved is your site’s analytics. One of our goals was “increasing traffic by 30%”. At the end of one month, your website analytics need to show you how much traffic has increased. They may not do the percentage calculation for you, but you should be able to see the increase and maybe calculate it yourself. If your site uses WordPress, you can also install plugins that will give you even more relevant information with regards to your traffic and where traffic on your site comes from. It could show you the referrer link too. This way, you will be able to focus on getting more links with those characteristics.

For instance, if you are in the outside catering niche, and most of your traffic seems to come from a recipes site, then you will need to focus more on getting more links from recipe sites of the same caliber.

An example of a plugin that you can install is Visitors Real Time Statistics http://ift.tt/1FDnT3R.

If you do not achieve your goals, you need to either get better quality links or change some aspects of your link building strategy.

Link building needs to become part of every SEO strategy.

It should help you to even build relationships with experts in your niche and influencers. This becomes very important. It becomes easier to get links and the influencer becomes your brand’s advocate too. Links will help to improve your site’s rankings, increasing your site’s authority and credibility. You, however, have to link to high quality, reputable sites. You must continually put efforts in link acquisition to ensure that your links stay fresh throughout.

To effectively achieve link building, you need to set SMART goals and strategies. You then need to measure to ensure that you indeed achieved the set goals. Link building takes a lot of work, but it is undoubtedly the best SEO strategy that you could use.

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For anyone who has their own business with a successful client base, there are always two questions that they are seeking to answer. They are, how do I get my existing customers to return to my website, and how do I get them to repeatedly spend money in my store? These questions do have answers, and all they need is attention in different areas in order to see a growth in your business and repeated return interactions from your customers on your website. Below we have outlined a number of different methods that you can employ in order to get your valued customers to return to buy your products time and again. Whilst you can incorporate all of these ideas at once, it is probably a better idea to try them one by one over a longer time period so that you can measure the success that each one has on your sales revenue. That way you will know what areas to focus your efforts on.

Create and use your dedicated email list.

Email lists are worth their weight in gold, and a customer who gives you theirs becomes something known as a captive audience. An email list is something that needs to be incorporated straight away if it isn’t something that you already do. If you don’t already have one – it’s really easy, at the checkout section of your website, include a section where the customer has to sign up in order with an email in order to complete a purchase. A good way to encourage them to sign-up is to offer some kind of incentive, like a discount or a freebie. If you already have an email list, then your captive audience is just waiting for opportunities to purchase again, given a good reason. Send them an exclusive previous customer only discount voucher that has a time limit on it, or offer them a free product if they purchase another related item. Or better yet, if you have a really valued section of your list with customers who always purchase from your store, offer them a complimentary product in exchange for an honest review of it on your website. Not only will this increase new sales to your store due to good reviews on products, but it will also make that customer feel appreciated. With appreciation comes loyalty, and they are far more likely to buy more regularly from your store, and tell their friends about you.

Let them know about finance options.

Many customers might want to purchase again, but don’t have the money readily available in order to do it. A good idea is to create a good quality finance option that you can apply, and have a special one reserved only for special’ customers. You can use the email list to let them know what you are offering, and they will be able to see if there are options that suit their budget. If the repayment terms (such as 6 months interest free) are easily affordable, it’s much more likely they will purchase an item straight away if you have good finance terms that they would otherwise have to wait to buy, and might end up forgetting about. If you can, incorporate a system that can marry up what customers have bought on credit with their repayment dates. Once the term has expired, you can contact them again with new, even better finance agreements, to keep them coming back over and over again.

Target customers on your site with one time only deals

If a repeat customer signs into your site and then abandons their shopping cart without completing the purchase, then you can follow up with a special one time only limited deal’ email that can knock an amount off the product(s) in question. Another option is to target them with a system that remembers what they last had in their basket when they log in another time. A remember this, it’s now on offer for you’ pop up that will catch their attention. This way not only will they possibly buy what they have come on to look for at that moment, but they might very well end up spending extra cash too. Both of these methods are highly effective at encouraging customers to return to your website, and spend more whilst there.

Unexpected rewards

Another very powerful tool and a good way to clear old stock lines is to send customers an email link that will make that product totally free. Whilst it won’t make you any profit, what it will do is make that customer feel an affinity towards your store, and also put your store at the forefront of their mind, making them more likely to want to shop with you again soon. If it is a cheap item, it won’t cost your business much, (especially if you only target a smaller number of customers), but will very likely yield you much higher returns in the long run.

Personalized emails

If you are sending an email to a customer, ensure that you tailor it to the individual. Granted you probably won’t know much about them, but you will know what they bought. If it was a pair of running shoes for example, ask if they have had an opportunity to hit the streets in them, or if it’s a computer, how they are enjoying getting their work done, or relaxing at night with it. Somewhere within that personalised email, add a return to store call, like a related discount, or free delivery offer. Also be sure to include their name and add in the name of the person running the company, along with a digital signature. A way to tie this all together is to take those email addresses and load them into the email of the company director or manager, so when it goes off to your customer it is a direct email, rather than a bog standard one. This will help it stand out from the deluge that they probably get on a daily basis, as well as giving it a massive personal touch. This might not seem like a lot, but very small personal touches like this can make all the difference to the customer in a world that often sees them as statistics. If you go that extra mile, they are much more likely to keep coming back to your store.

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs are highly effective at getting customers to return to your website. For every purchase that they make you can have points added to their card that will convert into monetary amounts that they can use to discount products when they reach the checkout. In addition, you can combine this with emails, where you offer limited double point periods, where the customer can gain additional loyalty points by purchasing during specifically set times, increasing the sense of urgency’ to purchase from your store.

Send out physical brochures

In a world that is increasingly moving online, the art of receiving post is a dying one. Therefore, a nice glossy brochure along with a personalized letter and a physical nice textured discount voucher is a powerful gesture. It is very likely that someone receiving these items will return to your store to make a purchase.

Produce consistent newsletters

Sending out a newsletter on a consistent basis (say once a month) is a great way to stay in contact with your customers and let them know what is happening with your company and what new products you are currently offering. They will also feel like they know your company better than others so will feel more of an affinity for it, translating into increased visits and higher repeat purchases.

Have blog posts

In addition to a newsletter, have a regular blogger who write posts on your website that customers have to login to read (also link this to emails so they know when a new blog post is available). Make the articles interesting and informative also related to the products that you sell in store. For example, if you are a bookseller, then have an article written about the best new books that have launched that month, or why a particular genre is popular at the moment. Find ways to tie it into the products you sell, such as linking to the books that were discussed in the post, along with a visible slight reduction. E.g. Get the new Stephen King book (such and such), for only $8.99 to instead of $12.99 for this month only!’ As the customer will already be on your site and reading the relevant post, they are far more likely to commit to the purchase.

Have good customer service

The importance of this cannot be understated. Having a good customer service team is vital to repeat purchases. If a customer has an issue with one of the products that they purchased from you and is received by a warm, friendly person at the end of the telephone who is willing to do everything in their power to rectify whatever issue it is that the customer has, then they are almost certain to buy from your website again. In addition, this adds to the previously mentioned feeling of a personal human touch, which is too often missing from your websites.

Have a social media presence

It is almost a given that any good your website must have accompanying social media presence. Customers like the personalized feeling of this type of communication, as many (such as twitter and Facebook) allow them to contact the company directly and air their views as well as get personalized responses. In addition, you can attract a massive brand following if you post regularly with interesting content. As people often work visually, social media platforms such as Instagram is a brilliant way to present your products in a really attractive way. If someone who has purchased from your website and connected to your social media platform sees a post that they like the look of, they are much more likely to return to your website than if you just email them. In addition, you can offer social media only specific discounts that those on the platforms can use on your website, increasing return traffic that way.

Use personalized marketing on your site

Get hold of software for your site that can use personalized marketing tactics on your site to specifically target your customers each time they logon. It can analyze what they have purchased before and select products from your lines that are likely to be of interest to them, whilst offering a slight discount. For example, if they have purchased a pair of jeans, then it might offer them discounts off a winter jacket or a shirt, which the customer might then decide is a good addition to their previous purchase. This isn’t just blind science either, a survey discovered that 75% of consumers felt more compelled to purchase when they received a personalized message on an your website. In addition, you can attract a massive brand following if you post regularly with interesting content. As people often work visually, social media platforms such as Instagram is a brilliant way to present your products in a really attractive way.To make it extra personalized, have the software use their name, so that the offers really appeal to them. Something like: “Welcome back Ryan, remember those jeans you purchased in October? We’ve got some special deals just for you on coats and shirts that we think would look great with them.” The power of messages like these cannot be understated.

These above are just a handful of examples on the many ways that you can reach out to your valued customers and entice them back to your website in order to make repeat purchases, and eventually become loyal to your company. As mentioned above, we suggest implementing them bit by bit so that you can track how successful they are, and highlight other areas that might need some attention so that you can continue to grow your business. Beyond this it is worth experimenting with other ideas as you might stumble on something that really works. Keep trying new ideas and your business will definitely boom.

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Today, majority of people use the Internet whenever they want to find a product or a service. They do this using devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets. This behavior is promoted by easy access to resources such as WiFi hotspots in shopping malls, restaurants, cafes, colleges and other locations of social gathering. If you are selling products or services online, you need to know how to get the attention of these people. You can do this by providing high quality content for your webpages and social media posts too. How can you ensure that your content is always eye-catching and attractive to readers? You can do this by using the A.I.D.A. copywriting formula.

What is A.I.D.A.?

This is one of the most commonly used copywriting formulas today. It is standard and commonly utilized for content marketing purposes. A.I.D.A. can easily be used for landing pages, sales pages, tweets, social media pages, social site posts and even direct mail. A.I.D.A. is an acronym that stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. These are further explained below.

Attention

Gain the attention of the reader. Use the words in your content to attract them and give you some time out of their busy lives. In the A.I.D.A. method, attention is where you use an interruptive medium to attract readers. It is the first activity to perform in this formula.

Interest

This is the second activity to perform in this formula. This is where you provide the reader with information which is fresh and interesting. It should appeal to them and encourage the readers to go to go through more of your website. This information should be counter-intuitive or unusual in nature. This makes it captivate the reader. Once you generate their interest, it is time to move on to the next activity.

Desire

This is where you move to capture the heart of your reader. This makes them want what you are offering. You can do this by indicating the benefits of your product or service. Moreover, you can prompt desire by posting testimonials which act as proof of your pledge or promise.

Action

In this step of the A.I.D.A. formula, you can proceed to ask your readers to perform an action. This can be buying your product or service. It can also be subscribing to something that you are offering in your website. This step in the formula is the last and most important since it makes the reader commit to you fully. It also generates some revenue or some other benefit for you.

Why should you use A.I.D.A.?

A.I.D.A. is a copywriting formula that always gives rock-solid results every single time. It is recognized as the traditional, standard method of attracting online readership and generating leads and revenue for your website. Before applying A.I.D.A., you should understand a fundamental factor on how to use it.

How to use A.I.D.A.

Before you generate some creative marketing content using A.I.D.A., you should first of all make sure that you comprehend your potential customer fully. You should direct the content of your posts and webpage content directly at the individuals who are bound to purchase your products or services. By doing this, you can increase the chances of success with A.I.D.A. If this formula is perfectly matched with your database of potential readers, customers or clients, then it will work perfectly. Thus, it is important to perform some research about your target demographic and analyze its psychological tendencies in terms of affinity for accepting offers from websites. Investigate the behavior of your target clients, define it and use it to guide the content and structure of your website copy or content of your social media posts.

Examples of how to use this formula

You can apply A.I.D.A. when you are coming up with advertisements for the products in you website. An example of such an advertisement is:

SEO Professional Suite

Boost the rank of your website in Google search engine results.

The SEO Professional Suite provides you with the tools, statistics, training and analytics which you need to optimize your website and make it rank much higher in the search engine results.

By applying this software suite in your website, you can stay ahead of your competition by attracting more viewers, gaining more revenue from the sales of your products or services and ranking higher in the search engine results.

Start a 30-day free trial to enjoy this software.

The advertisement above is developed using the A.I.D.A. guiding principles. It begins with the title of the product which is SEO Professional Suite. After that, it captures the Attention of the reader by telling them what the software does. In addition to that, the advertisement generates Interest in the product by indicating what it can do for the reader. The reader’s Desire is then generated through indicating the benefits that they will get if they invest in this software product. Finally, an Action is prompted by encouraging the reader to start a trial of the product.

The A.I.D.A. formula can also be used to create social media material such as tweets. An example of a tweet created using this formula is:

“Sneak Peek! The latest version of our SEO software is out! Get faster Google Analytics and dedicated customer service. Want to experience it? Click http://ift.tt/2m3KqXn;

The first section of the tweet gains the Attention of the reader by boldly informing them to take a sneak peek. The second section generates Interest by informing the reader that latest software version is out. The reader’s Desire is generated by informing them about the benefits of using this latest version of the software. Their Action is then encouraged using a prompt to experience the software by clicking on a link.

Conclusion

From the examples above, the A.I.D.A. formula is effective and versatile. Not only can you use it for advertisements in your webpages, it can also be utilized to structure some social media posts and tweets. The formula helps you to get the desired message to your target audience clearly. Due to is nature, it has a reputation for success and is recognized as a solid formula to use for content marketing today. A.I.D.A. is versatile. Hence, you can apply it in your website, blog, social media pages and posts too.

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Many people now have an idea of what SEO is all about. They understand that it is the use of the appropriate keywords, titles, meta tags and links to ensure that your content ranks high on search engine results. They also understand that high quality, relevant and fresh content that is useful to users is vital. Many brands have therefore invested heavily in content creation. However, there seems to be no strategy with regards to content distribution. Below we look at the importance of distribution in SEO, and how you can achieve it in your company:

If you write great content but have low domain authority, your site will not receive much traffic. Distribution is what will help your site rank high in search engine results.

Link building

At the core of distribution is link building. Link building is not always easy. If you link to low quality, spammy websites, you will get penalized by Google. Below we look at the various types of links and how best you can utilize them in your SEO distribution efforts:

Brand name links:

These refer to the name of the brand. The trick in using these links is that your brand name is unique, so you will always rank high for it. It is advisable to use brand name links at least 40% of the time.

Optimized links

These links are the phrase of the keyword that you are looking to optimize for. If you want to rank for ‘best sports gear in Ohio’, you can use a link that exactly matches the keyword. Strive to use this type of link at least 20% of the time.

Generic

These refer to links like ‘learn more’ or ‘click here’. Use this 15 % of the time.

Backlinks

Backlinks help your site achieve authority and credibility, something that Google’s algorithms are really looking out for. When authoritative sites link back to your site, Google begins to view your site as authoritative too.

External blogs

If you have a new site with barely any traffic, you need to reach out to larger external blogs in your niche. You can ask to contribute to the blogs. This way, you get insights and other perspectives that you can use to better your own content. The owner of the blog is a good source of these insights since he is much more experienced. His audience’s comments are also invaluable. Ensure that you have a topic or article that you will use to pitch. Review their guidelines first and understand them before pitching.

Local newspapers and media

Reaching out to local newspapers and media outlets gives your site a chance to become a reference point, even if just for quotes in your niche (for a start).

Other local businesses

A smart way to work with local businesses is to reach out to those that are related to your niche. You can then contribute to their site. For instance, if you sell sports gear, you can approach a local bar and request to contribute to their site by creating content around your favorite beer. This relationship is important: people talk about sports as they drink, and even more importantly, watch sports as they socialize in bars. A win-win.

Content Distribution Networks (CDNs)

Content distribution networks allow you access to bigger audiences that you cannot possibly reach on your own.

To succeed when using CDNs, you need to set specific goals. You need to know who your audience is, and whether they exist on these platforms. You also need to define your KPIs – key performance indices. What is success to you? Is it more traffic, retweets, more customers?

Note that different CDNs will meet different goals. Do your research and get to know the channel that will best suit your needs. Ask someone in your network what works for them. Get to know what content your audience loves sharing, and where they share it. After setting your goals, try different CDNs until you discover what works best for you.

Below are some content distribution networks that you could incorporate into your SEO efforts:

Medium – you need to build a readership first

List.ly – good platform to build a community and audience

Daily by buffer – this increases Tweets and traffic to your site too

Hacker News – great place for startup stories, investment and raising rounds. Difficult to penetrate, but when you do so, traffic to your site increases massively.

Product hunt – only post real products

Reddit – Posts will do great here. Do however only choose relevant subreddits.

Growthhackers – you need to be active in this community, comment, ask questions, give advice and share valuable content.

When choosing CDNs, you need to go for those with audiences similar to your target audience. You also need to know the trending content on the forums your target audience is on, the keywords being used and referral sources in Google Analytics.

Social Media Channels

The prime lifetime of a Tweet is 18 minutes. You need to share one piece of content multiple times, two to 3 times a day after publishing it. For two weeks, you need to continue sharing it daily, 2 to 3 times. Better still, you need to re-share your most popular content even months later. This is the only way to gain traction, and become an authority on social media. When you have a lot of posts on social media channels, you build credibility, improve your rank on search engine results and increase traffic to your site.

Better still, you need to post some quotes from the article. Adding the share option in your posts makes it easier for readers to share quotes from the quotes.

Build relationships

Building relationships is the easiest part of distribution, but it is also quite hard. You have to prove that you can add value before anyone trusts you to occasionally or frequently write for their audience. Once you achieve this, you are able to easily get quality, authoritative links to your site.

All in All

The importance of distribution in SEO cannot be underestimated. If you are a one man or woman agency, it can be overwhelming to try and implement all the above strategies all at once. The best thing to do is research on one thing and implement it. It is all about a step at a time.

The post Why SEO Without Distribution is Simply Useless appeared first on Build100k.

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Email marketing is a basic need if you want to boost sales or just simply flood an enormous amount of traffic to your website. However most people do not even have the slightest clue on how to be a successful email marketer that they tend to forget that it is a letter—just delivered electronically. This means that just like how Romeo wooed Juliet, you have to be an Internet Cassanova, luring leads, clients or potential customers to your casa—that is your site.

Here are some email marketing tips to make sure that you will be able to bait those prospects:

1.No list, no dough.

You have to build a list of addresses first. To who will you send your well-written promo email if no one is there to read it? It’s like entering a raffle draw. The more entries you send the more chances of winning. Be sure to create a huge database of email addresses to send your marketing emails. Some ideas on how to build that list would be:

A). Creating popups on your site for whatever purpose you deem worthy of catching the visitor’s attention that they will be forced to input their email address;

B) Putting links on different pages for an upgrade of a promo or offer;

C) A subscription section on the site which is strategically placed for easy viewing.

2) Subscription should be so easy they can do it in their sleep.

Of course they can’t do that, since they might be typing in the wrong email address. But make sure that options to subscribe to your newsletter would be gentle nudges here and there from your social media accounts, and even in the most visible areas of your site like at the bottom of the homepage. If you have a separate subscription page that the user has to navigate to, don’t expect that you can rake in that email address.

3) Anticipation is everything.

Ever wondered why film previews and movie trailers leave us going ga-ga over what’s going to happen really soon? That’s because we’re wired to expect what we don’t know but are given a chance to know. Expectations are hard-wired to us as human beings. Give your client something to anticipate, and he or she will surely give in. For instance, right below the subscribe button, put some sort of an ad that says, “Get ready to become financially free in 2 days!” – that is if you host a financial education website.

4) You want a thank you’? Say welcome’ first.

Before your subscribers can even appreciate what you’re doing for them, you have to let them know that they are welcome. Send a welcome email. Make them feel that they are part of something great, an exclusive family that of course makes you more money than them, but they do not know that. Subscribers are more likely to stay loyal if at the onset they are sent an initial email right away thanking them for their patronage. A catchy headline will also get you a wow’.

5) Wear the right clothes.

You cannot expect your date to be proud to be with you if you don’t look great. The same goes with your newsletter. Make sure that aesthetically, it matches that of your brand. Your campaigns should complement the feel of your brand. It should be unique and not just an obvious template you got somewhere. Popular brands know that image is everything. Build it. Your newsletter’s theme should be memorable.

6) Feed your subscriber’s ego.

The famous Steve Jobs said that Apple dictated what people wanted, and that customers do not know what they want. But face it, you are not Steve Jobs. So stop trying to reinvent the wheel and go with what works. Find out what your subscribers want to read. Study the demographics of your list and make segments and list groups so that you will be able to target a group of people for a specific purpose. If your business has XBOX games on sale, you don’t want to be sending the promo codes for that to an email audience of ages 70 years old and above.

7) The world is small, make it smaller.

Lazy people think of ways to make hard tasks easier, and that’s a principle you would want to apply if you want to make your brand viral. The content and links of your email newsletters should be shareable. Let your subscribers do the work for you. If the content is great, the only distance between getting stuck in their inbox and your success is a share button.

8) Phone versus computer.

If you still haven’t realized, more people may have access to a smart phone probably the entire day than on their laptops or computers. Some may even have a smart phone but do not have a computer. So if your campaign is not mobile-ready, you might have lost the marketing war even before the battle began. Free email marketing services like MailChimp display email content very well on a mobile device. If you cannot afford a paid email distribution service just yet, you may want to consider going for MailChimp.

9) Spam is food, not friends.

Anyone who uses email knows very well that things that get into your Spam folder are basically trash just waiting to be dumped. So in order to avoid tarnishing the name of your brand by falling into the Spam category, it pays to be knowledgeable on the CAN-SPAM act to keep your integrity. Also, even if it is basically against your heart’s desire, be professional enough to include an unsubscribe link in every email that you send. But remind them as well how they were included in your mailing list.

10) If you don’t have anything to say, shut up.

The internet is already filled with useless content that takes up too much space in the cloud. Do your subscriber a favor by sending useful, relevant content. Your emails should always have a purpose, and good business always fosters from ensuring that what you do will be beneficial not only for you, but for your client as well. Email marketing tricks will get advance you to a level at some point, but sincerity will give you success.

The post Top Ten Email Marketing Tips appeared first on Build100k.

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Having a strong online presence is important for any business in today’s marketplace. Having a good website online will cost you some money, but in most cases, this is not enough. A marketing team can help, but if you do not have the money for marketing, you may think that you are better off without a website. However, you do not have to have a huge marketing budget or even a marketing budget to promote your business. Also, If you want to test your idea and experiment with real life results, Here are some ways that you can increase traffic to your website with a small or no budget. 

1. Focus on Your SEO

A vital part of any successful online business is SEO. A good SEO strategy will bring higher amounts of traffic and builds brand awareness. SEO does take a lot of work, and there are new algorithms being released every few weeks to months. Google Analytics and AdWords will keep you up-to-date with the changes to the algorithms and help you find the SEO keywords that you should be focusing on.

However, in the last few updates to the search engine algorithms, keywords have become less of the focus. Keyword spamming was a huge problem, but Google is cracking down on websites that only focus on the keywords.

2. High-Quality Content

Since Google’s algorithms are getting smarter, building content is becoming more important than ever. The more content that your website has the more data that Google has to match with a search result. Good content will keep your visitors on your website, and visit different webpages. The Hummingbird algorithm focuses on what the visitors are doing and what they are clicking on. The more users who visit your website and the longer they stay, the higher that you will be ranked.

What is High-Quality Content? This really depends on the field that you are in. Generally, it is content that people are looking for. This can include FAQ’s and blog posts that answer questions people have. You should also make sure that your content is shareable on Social Media.

3. Have a Contest

If you want to build your social following in a very short time, and you have a marketing budget, you could host a contest. People really like contests, and winning free stuff. However, you need to be creative. Everyone has seen the like, share, and comment to win, and most people will just participate because it is easy to enter. There are many ways to run a contest and giveaway so have fun. Before hosting a contest, you should make sure that you know your areas guidelines about giveaways and contests to make sure you are not breaking any laws.

4. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is when you have your blog post published on another website. The post can be about anything related to your business, or industry. Guest blog posts are a simple, but fun way of driving organic traffic to your website, and build the amount of links to your website.

5. Use Social Media

Social media is the best way to market your business when you have a small marketing budget. Like your website, creating high quality and shareable content is more important than posting a lot per day. Pictures are a great option to share a message within seconds, and you are more likely to get shares, and likes with an image post.

While having a huge marketing budget is nice, you do not need any budget at all to increase your website traffic. Increasing your website traffic only takes smart marketing tactics.

The post How to Increase Traffic on a Budget appeared first on Build100k.

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There are a few tens of thousands of plugins available for WordPress which makes figuring out the essential ones a difficult task to say the least. The good news is you only need a handful of plugins to optimize your site. The essential areas that are worth focusing on include email marketing, content, security, and optimization. There is a few WordPress plugin must haves for each category and a few good reasons why each plugin might be good for your website.

Email Marketing Plugin

Email marketing is a cheap and effective modern advertising solution for your online business. There are a few plugins to make your marketing efforts more effective, quicker and easier in the long-term.

LeadIn

This email marketing plugin is made specifically to track leads to your website. It details visitor’s actions and is a great resource for a website owner who wants to understand his audience better. It a detailed program that even lets you know how many subscribers each opt-in form brought in.

Rapidology

Rapidology is a perfect resource for the business owner who wants maximum control over his email marketing campaign. The plugin allows for multiple opt-in forms in a variety of formats. These include widgets, inlines, slide-ins, pop-ups and more. Its split-testable feature means that you get to choose which opt-in form to integrate with your preferred email delivery service. The best part is it’s free.

Content Plugins

Even the best run email marketing campaign is useless if you don’t have good content that offers real value to the visitor. There is a few WordPress plugin must haves to help you manage your content better.

Disqus Comment System

This plugin replaces the default plugin comment section with the Disqus version. The advantage here is Diqus looks better than the default option and is also much easier to use on both ends.

Page Builder

This plugin from SiteOrigin is extremely efficient and useful for crafting page layouts and posts. The winning feature is its drag-and-drop content builder shaving off precious minutes or hours when updating your content. It is definitely one of the best content plugins that you can get for free.

TablePress

WordPress default installation doesn’t come with the classic HTML tables. TablePress solves this problem. It is free, functional and easy to use and is at least worth considering for your site.

Security Plugins

Most business owners don’t need to be told about cyber security and the risks that hackers pose to a site or blog. The reality is investing in security is not a priority especially for small business owners working on tight budgets. Fortunately, there is a few security WordPress plugin must haves to help on this front.

WordFence Security

WordFence security is a game changer because it allows virtually anyone to enjoy enterprise-level security without the matching cost. It is a free plugin to protect your website from hackers. It includes real-time updates and alerts for potential threats and is definitely worth having.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

This plugin does exactly what it sounds like; it backs up your WordPress to your Dropbox account automatically. This guarantees that you can always recover your website even in a worst case scenario. It backs up daily.

Sucuri Security

This is an auditing and malware scanner that helps to get that extra level of security you need for your website. It automatically searches for malware and other potential security threats. It also has a variety of settings to give you ultimate control over your website security.

Optimization Plugins

Lastly, there is no getting around SEO if you want your website or blog to rank high in search engine results. As with the other plugins suggested here, you don’t need necessarily need a huge budget to optimize your site. There are a few plugins worth considering for this purpose.

Simple 301 Redirects

This plugin offers a simple solution to the common problem of visitors getting redirected to a missing URL. The plugin helps to easily redirect users to an existing page and solving the problem of 404 pages as you work on the missing URL.

Yoast SEO

Yet another optimization WordPress plugin must haves is the Yoast SEO. It ranks top 3 in the most widely used WordPress plugins of all time and for good reason. It offers some of the best functionality you could ever wish for in an optimization plugin and is very easy to set up. It is highly recommended for anyone who wants to optimize his site quickly, easily and cheaply.

Broken Link Checker

It is an open secret that Google penalizes for broken links. Never lose out on high rankings because of faulty links courtesy of Broken Link Checker. The plugin checks your comments, pages, and posts for broken links so you are always on top of your site’s functionality and performance.

  Bonus: Social Media Plugins

It is impossible to ignore the importance of social media in reference to websites and blogs. There are a few useful plugins to help leverage the power of social media.

Social Metrics Tracker

This plugin helps to keep track of all your social media posts regardless of the platform and gives feedback on your performance for each site. The dashboard displays the numbers of likes, shares, and other important metrics so you are always aware of which posts or sites are working well and which ones need to be improved.

Revive Old Post

The aptly named website does exactly what it promises. It ensures that none of your posts go stale and is a great way to stay interactive on social media. The plugin randomly picks old posts from the archives and shares them on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. All you need to do is set how often you want it to post and let it do its job.

  EXTRA BONUS: The one you really need

Iubenda Privacy Policy and Cookie Solution

Most countries have privacy laws that require you to include a privacy policy – a statement of your data collection as a disclosing service to your visitors or users – as a website owner. In most of Europe there are laws that require digital publishers to disclose the use of cookies to their users. iubenda 

These are just some of the notable WordPress plugin must haves that make the biggest impact on your website or blog’s performance and optimization. The best part is these plugins don’t require any coding knowledge or experience. Most importantly, they are cost effective and allow you to compete favorably with bigger businesses with much larger budgets.

The post Must-Have WordPress Plugins to Help You Optimize Your Website or Blog appeared first on Build100k.

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Digital marketing has become essential on the business front. Potential customers and competitors are always online making this form of marketing the best for any business to stay ahead and grow. To enjoy the full benefits of it; however, you will need to come up with a strategy that is easy to implement and one that will propel you towards business success. To help you out, here are valuable digital marketing tips that will help you succeed:

Goal Setting

Starting with solid goal should be the way to start with your digital marketing. When you know what you are looking to achieve, it becomes easy for you to make decisions with the aim of increasing business success rates as far as the goals are concerned. You will know where to put your focus on saving you from wasting too much time on marketing elements that don’t favor your digital marketing expectations.

Go through your idea generation and create S.M.A.R.T goals

Video Marketing

It can be quite appealing to your audience, especially when you include the right content and pay attention to the quality of images and the audio included. Videos can go viral when they are high in quality and have a message. This means that you can enjoy greater viewership by sharing a relevant video with a few of your target group. You can find a video marketing agency to help you create the best videos and share them on the most relevant platforms to gain you value for your business. Or go through trial and error. Understanding each platform and identifying their purpose is going to help you increase the chance of success.

YouTube (Do not treat it like a search engine, more of a recommendation engine): Upload all video and review your analytics. Is your traffic coming from Youtube channel, Suggested video, Youtube search? If not, remove the videos that are not seeing any action. Fine tune your Youtube channel with only best content. Look at best channels and see what they are doing. Have a focus and don’t have everything on youtube. 

Best practices for YouTube: 

Title you would click to watch

55 characters

Explicit value proposition

Thumbnail MUST match title

Facebook Video: I’ve added few suggestion in this article:

Search Marketing

This is a particular type of marketing that is done using search engines. The technology keeps improving making this marketing easier by the day. The use of relevant keywords is one of the approaches that can be practiced to get you positive search results. When it is easier for your audience to find you in search results, it will be better for your business. SEO can be quite helpful, and a professional digital marketing agency can help you out in making all the right decisions with this kind of marketing.

Marketing funnel creation

The marketing funnel should clearly lead the customers’ journey from the time they make a move to your business to the time they are changed into sales. Call to action, lead magnets and opt-ins make very good funnel pieces to get your business where you wish for it to be. Your marketing funnel should include awareness, interest, desire and finally action. You simply need to start by making your customers aware of the service or product you are offering. Then make sure that you feed their interests with the right content before giving them a desire to be part of your clientele for the services of products so they can take the right action. With this kind of funnel, your digital marketing efforts will without a doubt pay off in the end because you have covered the entire process of attracting and maintaining new prospects.

Call-to-action development

This is text or image that prompts your visitors to take the expected actions such as viewing your products and services by visiting your website or subscribing to your newsletter or viewing webinars and any other action you are guiding them to take. The call to action should direct your visitors to a landing page from where you can easily collect relevant visitor information in exchange for valuable offers. An effective call to actions will always generate more leads and increase conversion rates for the website. It should get the attention of your visitors and be creative enough to make them want to take the next expected action.

Mobile Marketing

This form of digital marketing can hardly be ignored considering that a larger population now uses mobile devices to find the information they need as well as to make purchases. The digital marketing strategy thereby passes for any business with the focus being on optimizing the mobile experience the users get. An online presence with a defined mobile approach can get you amazing results and it should, therefore, be considered to ensure you don’t shut out any potential customer. You can get help from a good digital marketing agency.

Social Marketing

Social media platforms have become the way of life for most people today. The networks offer you a chance to communicate, offer content, create and nurture trust and transparency. The approach you take can determine the influence you have on purchasing decisions of your audience. Reactive, fluid and timely social content can get you results easily. This kind of marketing is also quite affordable making it suitable even for startups.

Customized solutions based predictive consumer behavior

It is imperative for marketers to decipher how potential buyers are behaving, where they can be found and what devices they are currently using. Success in marketing in today’s digital world comes from understanding consumer behavior and psychology. By using the right digital marketing solutions, they can create more impactful marketing strategies by interpreting consumer behavior accurately.

Online marketing in today’s digital marketing landscape involves creating and utilizing a whole gamut of software systems and apps. With the support of the best global IT service providers, with unrivaled experience in iOS apps development expertise and ability to create strategies based on your specific marketing needs can help you achieve your short-term and long-term marketing goals.

Lead magnet creation

When working on your digital marketing, you need to offer relevant information to the customers in line with the services or products you are offering them. A good lead magnet can be used with a call to action or alone to trade information. There are various approaches you can use for this, such as offering free white paper downloads which require form filling first. You can then use the collected information to interact with the visitors as they continue in the funnel. Driving traffic and converting will be made easy when lead generation is a success.

Conclusion

Reaching out to the target audience in the most convenient and efficient way is quite challenging to many entrepreneurs. Whether you have commodities or services to sell in the market, you will have to make your brand known to them. This means getting into some sort of marketing plan if at all you are to get the recognition you deserve. Digital marketing will offer you with the right solutions. The good thing about digital marketing solutions is that they offer you behavioral targeting possibilities, real-time data, adjustability and reduced costs in making it all possible.

  The post Digital Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Online Business Sales appeared first on Build100k.

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Everyone knows that the early bird gets the worm; but do you know how and why they say this? Do you know what exactly this proverb means? Well, in a nutshell, it means you need to cultivate the habit of getting up early and maintain the practice for maximum productivity in life. By waking up in the morning, will you reap the profits, gain the advantage and achieve success at whatever you do.

Now while those early-risers will agree with this, most of those who tend to sleep an extra fifteen minutes every morning after the alarm go off may not. One thing you must remember that all the successful people you see around you have reached this epitome of success mainly for their habit building efforts at getting up early.

Extra 15 days

Did you know that you can get as much as an extra 15 days a year just by getting up an hour early every day? This proves how important and necessary it is for you to get up early. It’s only if you manage to beat that inner voice of yours telling you to sleep another fifteen minutes or so will you be able to win the battle between victim and success.

It’s only if you get up early will you be able to offer some competition to the big guys, and keep them looking out for you. If you manage to gain confidence and charge over your inner voice, you will get up early and maximize your productivity.

As mentioned above, you get 15 days just by waking up an hour early every day. So just imagine how many of your days do you waste sleeping? Sometimes, you may have to sacrifice your sleep to get your work done.

Though it’s said that you need eight hours of sleep for increased health, it’s possible for most people to go through the day with just six to seven hours a night. Sleeping more can and will be a waste of time.

Time to exercise

By getting up early, you have time to exercise in the morning, which is the best time for exercising. Early morning exercise charges you up for the day with increased energy, focus, and motivation so that you become fresh and clear-headed to handle any problems and situations you come across throughout the day.

Many people state they feel invincible, and nothing can ruin their mood if they start the day running. Early morning exercise helps reduce stress as it releases the ‘feel good’ hormone serotonin in the morning to remain in your body through the day.

Early morning exercise also helps you find more time and patience to maintain happy and calm relationships with those around you. Once you feel better and have peaceful relationships with the people around you, you automatically feel it much easier focusing on your work. Your productivity is thus increased to help pave your path to success.

Time for yourself

Then again, the early morning is the only time you get some ‘quiet time’ for yourself. Today’s technological and high-pace lifestyle seldom leaves you with time for yourself. You find it difficult finding time for yourself to do creative work like meditation, yoga, writing a letter, reading a book or painting or anything creative which can be resolved just by getting up early.

So if you want some time to yourself, as it’s not possible to ‘buy’ time, the only way you can get this time is by making some time for yourself. And the only way to do this is by rising early in the morning. Not only are the surroundings quiet and calm, but there also are not many up so early to disturb you!

A source of inspiration

Getting up early helps with inducing productivity as it’s in the wee early hours of the day will you get ideas to help boost your business, the inspiration for your novel or piece of art and the answer to any problem troubling you for some time. All this happens because there are minimal distractions around you early in the morning. You thus have more focus and concentration on whatever you are doing.

No skipping breakfast

Of course, it goes without saying that by getting up early, you get time to have breakfast. There’s no need of skipping breakfast, a mistake many people do as breakfast is the one meal of the day you should not miss at all. Breakfast is when you feed your body with fuel after sleeping for so many hours.

Remember, your body had no food while you sleep, so if you skip breakfast, your body runs practically on empty fuel like your trying to start your car when it has no fuel. It’s by having breakfast will you provide your brain and body with food for thought and working, so that you become more productive at whatever you do.

Ahead of others

Once waking up becomes habit building, you manage to remain one step ahead of the crowd. While everyone else will be rushing to reach office on time, you the early bird has everything under control and have arrived at the office before everyone else may have left their homes!

It is only when you get up early in the morning do you get sufficient time to plan, organize and strategize your day’s work and activities. You find time to do everything you had planned, and the more work you do towards your goal, the better are your productivity levels.

In fact, the more organized you are with your time and day, the better decisions you can make as you have already grown focused about what you are doing, and know just what you need to do to reach your goals.

Develop a lifestyle change

So in a nutshell, it’s only by developing a habit of getting up early in the morning will you find time to do whatever you want to do and in the process, edge yourself towards your business goals or life aims.

Don’t worry if you are a late riser; anyone can become an early riser with some dedication, commitment, and urge to excel in life. You need to develop a lifestyle habit of getting up early, and you soon find yourself with so much more time on hand to do so much more in your life.

If you find it difficult getting up early, you could perhaps try sleeping an hour earlier so that you don’t feel exhausted in the mornings. However, don’t expect yourself to develop the habit of getting up early overnight.

It takes time to adjust and fit this change of timings to your every day’s schedule. Moreover, while you may not reap it benefits overnight, only time will help you realize the difference in the pace and effects of success in your life attained just by getting up early!

Challenge:

Can you create an online business in 15 days?

  The post How Getting Up Early Help Improve Your Productivity appeared first on Build100k.