Timothy789, Author at Digital Marketing Mentors Online

Email Marketing For Small Business Owners

Why is email marketing for small business owners? Using email for your marketing can be one of the best decisions you make as a small business owner. Most businesses use email marketing: from large brands down to tiny, local businesses. But for a small business it’s a must.

On a website, most of your visitors will leave without ever having taken any action. Most website visitors won’t buy on their first visit to your website. Studies show that it takes multiple touch points before someone will buy.

But if you can capture their email, by offering something of value in exchange, you can build a longer term relationship with them and this can lead to more sales, even from the same number of visitors.

Email Marketing For Small Business Owners

On a website, a visitor has only a small window of time to buy whatever it is you’re selling. Most wont, and most won’t ever hit your website again! That’s a shame, particularly if you’ve worked really hard building content, (or spent advertising budget) to get them there in the first place.

So if you can extend the time with which they can make a buying decision, you would wouldn’t you!? With email marketing, you offer something of value on your website in exchange for your visitor’s email address. This is known as a “lead magnet” and it can be anything from a free video series to an ebook. So long as you provide a great value add for your website visitor, some of them will sign up to your email list.

Email Marketing For Small Business Owners – Nurturing

The email list is for prospect “nurturing“! On your website, you don’t have much time to get to know your visitors, and they don’t have much time to get to know you. But once on your email list, you can send them information which is of value and build trust.

On an email list, you can continue sending information to your subscribers over a much longer time frame than would be possible on only a website. When you provide value, the law of reciprocity kicks in; your subscribers will get to know, like and trust you (assuming you’re trust-worthy!)

If you do a good job of providing value for them, they are much more likely to see you as an authority in your field and trust what you’re telling them. When this happens they are much more likely to buy what you’re offering, assuming it’s a good fit for their needs.

The email list also allows you to give your potential customers several touch points which wouldn’t be possible from a website. Since it can take around 6-8 touch points before someone makes a purchase from a website, this is definitely a good idea. (This number differs across different businesses and services).

Setting Up Your Offer

To collect emails from a website, you need to join an email marketing service and create a form. Once created, you can collect the code for your form and place it on your website. Make sure to place it on every page so that every visitor will see it. You can even set up your website with a pop up form to give more people the opportunity to sign up to your email list.

To encourage people to sign up to your email newsletter, you need to offer something which is suitably valuable for your website visitors. Make the benefits of signing up visible on your form. Here’s an example of a popup for you can see on one of my websites: (Click here to view it).

Emailing Your List

You’ll need some kind of marketing strategy set up to drive targeted traffic towards your website. See also target market persona.

Once your list starts to grow you can communicate with your subscribers through automated email messages. Depending on your business, you might send out email messages manually, informing them of your services/offers etc. But you can also automate email messages to go out to your list on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, according to your needs.

Here’s a few emails I’ve sent out to one of my email lists recently.

Summary

With a website, most visitors won’t buy from you, at least not on their first visit. To get your visitors coming back to your website more frequently, you can use an email marketing list. Send subscribers to newer content on your website and remind them of your products/services on a regular basis. You can send out emails with a frequency which is appropriate to the needs of your subscribers.

Most website visitors will want several interactions or “touch points” before they make a purchase. This is where the power of email marketing comes in. Email marketing allows you to grab their email address and follow up with subscribers building trust over a longer timeframe.

Access Aweber’s autoresponder services for free here.

Digital Marketing Vs Affiliate Marketing

Digital marketing vs affiliate marketing; what’s the difference? The term “digital marketing” refers to a type of marketing in which a company/business sells and promotes its products via various online channels. “Channels” might include a website, an advertising platform (e.g. Google Adwords) and other online marketing techniques such as email marketing, retargeting etc.

Affiliate marketing refers to an online business model where third parties are rewarded for online referrals. With affiliate marketing the person referring a product isn’t the product owner. Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online business models. Anyone can use affiliate marketing to earn from the sale of other people’s products and services.

To make money recommending products an affiliate simply needs to join an affiliate program and learn how to promote their affiliate link.

Digital Marketing Vs. Affiliate Marketing – Digital & Affiliate Marketers

An owner operated business might use both their own digital marketing techniques and enlist affiliate marketers as well. Businesses use affiliates to help with their marketing because affiliates generally only get paid for successful referral sales. This means it is a very efficient way to advertise for businesses.

Affiliates can earn a variety of percentages for sales referrals. Typically physical products will pay affiliates from 1% to 10% commission for referring a sale.

Digital products on the other hand pay much more. A typical digital product might pay an affiliate between 30% and 40% commission for a referral. This can be done because with digital products there’s very few overheads and advertising is one of the biggest costs. For example, there’s no postage and handling costs with digital products. They can be accessed online without the need to physically ship something.

Strategies & Tactics

Both digital marketing strategies and affiliate marketing strategies can involve the same tactics. A popular marketing platform is Google Adwords, for example which is used by owner based businesses and affiliates alike. With Adwords, the business/affiliate owner places advertising budget on the platform and run adverts according to their targeting and products/services.

Email marketing is a useful strategy used by both affiliates and “owner run” digital marketing. With email marketing, the advertising campaign sends visitors to an email capture page where the email address is taken. The visitor joins an email list and becomes a subscriber of an email list.

Email marketing is a useful tool used by online businesses to nurture customers over a longer time frame. On a website, a visitor only has a few minutes to make a decision. Email marketing extends this timeframe to weeks, months and even years and decades.

Other marketing tactics can involve social media marketing, blogging, video creation and retargeting. A combination of several different marketing tactics can create an overall strategy of attaining customers through online marketing.

Summary

Digital marketing refers to any form of online marketing used by a business. Affiliate marketing refers to third parties who earn from online referrals. Businesses can also use affiliate marketers as a form of their overall marketing strategy too.

A business might decide to pay affiliates as part of their overall marketing strategy because they offer a cheap an economical method of marketing. Since advertising online can be quite costly, and affiliates take the risk of using their own advertising budget to make sales, it’s a popular method for businesses to extend their marketing reach at low risk since they only pay affiliates when a sale is made.

For affiliates it can be a good deal too. If they can find a method for earning a profit through the sale of other people’s products, they can build an independent income and work for themselves. See also “what is affiliate marketing all about“.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging?

How long does it take to make money blogging? According to recent research it can take around 20 months for a blog to start making money, on average. But there’s lot of factors at play with blogging. How well you do will depend on the niche you choose, how often and how well you write, your SEO (search engine optimisation) and the relative competition. In a very competitive niche, you can expect it to take much longer before you get traction. Less competitive niches may even be hard to monetise, too.

Another consideration is your monetisation methods. Those who earn more from a blog typically have more revenue streams.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – Hofstadter’s Law

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. Hofstadter’s Law is an adage coined by Douglas Hofstadter to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity.

Blogging definitely fits with this adage and it’s definitely not a get rich quick scheme. So if you think you can write a few blog posts and suddenly have a heap of traffic you’re definitely very much mistaken. Blogging is a discipline which only pays off months (perhaps years) down the line.

So if you’re determined to build a blog which makes money, it’s well worth choosing a topic you are passionate about. Google can take months before it determines whether or not to rank a blog on the first page of Google. Before this happens, your only traffic is going to come from your own promotional efforts.

So if you’re blogging only for the outcome, chances are strong that you’ll give up before you make a dime! If, on the other hand you are passionate about blogging, and love your topic, you’re in with a much better chance simply because you’re better able to sustain the necessary effort to make it work over the longer term.

How Long Does It Take To Make Money Blogging – A Valuable Lesson

I started a blog several years ago about a topic I knew nothing of, not cared about! The topic I had chosen was only because I thought I could easily rank a website on it and get free traffic from Google. I failed to look for monetisation methods or the sustainability of my interest! After 6 months of writing, I finally gave up! Writing was labour intensive, since I didn’t know my topic. I had to research each blog post. So it was much more difficult and much less enjoyable than a topic I knew!

My site did reach the top of Google for its main keywords. However, it was a difficult topic to monetise and another blog soon took the top place. As my listing fell off Google, I realised I had made a mistake in choosing a topic I didn’t care about. The blog which replaced mine was full of informative videos from someone who clearly had a greater vested interest in the topic.

So beware of the “easy” niches which are easy to rank for. They also may be less easy to monetise than others. Choose a topic you love and enjoy the process. You’ll last much longer and bring more value to the table.

Source: https://www.productiveblogging.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-make-money-blogging

How Long Till A Ranking?

There’s a lot to consider before you start out blogging if your intention is to earn from it. Your topic is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. Without a care for monetisation, what topic would you blog about, just for fun? This can give you an idea about where your interests lie, and what you’re most passionate about. But you also need to tie this interest in with a monetisation strategy for your blog to become financially profitable.

For a website to start ranking on Google, it will usually have been published for several months. Before this, new websites typically are “sandboxed”. The Google “sandbox” is used to place websites on the sideline while they are assessed. As you grow the volume of your content, Google will recognise your blog as worthwhile (or not) and give you a ranking accordingly. But this could be months down the line.

So before you see the results of your efforts, you may need to have put a lot of work into blogging beforehand. If you’re blogging in a difficult niche, which is hard to sustain, you’re very likely to burn out and quit.

Summary

It can take several months or years before a blog will make money. There’s many variables which will determine how well your blog does and over what timescale. Here’s just a few of them:

The niche/topic you choose to blog in and the relative competition on the search engines (e.g. Google)
The age of your blog – older blogs tend to do better for traffic
Your link profile – how many other websites link to you, which websites link to you and their authority/standing with Google
The rate at which you create content and the quality of your content
Your blogging style and how Google perceives your writing/content (use an SEO plugin to help and write for the end users, not the bots).
How people interact with your content – is a big signal which shows Google how people perceive your content
Your social media presence and other social signals such as social shares, backlinks, likes etc
Your monetisation methods and how this relates to your content (popular monetisation methods are affiliate marketing products and advert placements)

You can speed up your timeline to make money blogging through the use of email marketing and also through using paid marketing strategies. See PPC vs organic marketing.

PPC Vs Organic

PPC vs organic marketing; how do they differ? With PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing, you pay to receive a click on your advert. Pay per click can be turned on almost instantly too, using several online marketing platforms (Adwords, Facebook etc.).

Organic marketing uses SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to attract the attention of search queries on Google and other search engines. For organic marketing to work properly you’ll need to attain a ranking for your content. When content ranks highly on the first page of Google, you can expect free organic traffic according to the keywords in your content.

A high ranking for a competitive keyword is quite difficult to obtain. But to rank for longer tail keywords is more achievable. Bloggers use SEO and target longer tail keywords in their content to give them more chance of ranking and getting free traffic.

PPC Vs Organic – How Long?

To get a pay per click marketing campaign running only takes a few minutes to set up. It can be working within a few days if not a few hours. Google Adwords lets you target specific keywords relevant to your business. You can set up an advert which only shows when your keywords and demographics are triggered by a suitable search. So for example if you have a local DIY store, you can set an advert to trigger when someone in your local area searches for “DIY store”.

Here’s the results for a local search for DIY store in Leeds, UK. You can see there’s 210 monthly searches for this term in Leeds, UK. If you set up your advert to trigger only on relevant terms, you won’t waste advertising budget on irrelevant searches similar to your target market persona/target audience.

So paid advertising can start bringing in customers almost immediately. Organic marketing takes much longer. It can take several weeks or months before your website/blog posts appear on the search engines. They may never appear if you’re competing in a very busy niche too. This can make organic marketing a much slower (and potentially more risky) option, even though it’s cheaper.

Pros & Cons – PPC Vs Organic Marketing

Still, there’s a lot to be said for organic marketing. Once you have established an organic presence online it means you’ve got free traffic. Often people will find organic content online in preference to the paid adverts, preferring organic content because it’s more trust worthy. With a paid advert, you know someone set up an advert with no investment in content building. Since it can take considerably more effort in order to attract an audience organically, that content becomes worth more in the eyes of those seeking trustworthy information.

Organic content which can be ranked on Google tends to be that with longer tail keywords, too. With short tail keyword phrases, it’s incredibly competitive on the top of the first page on Google. So it’s much harder to rank. Instead of aiming for those terms, find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. Long tail keywords tend to be more specific which means they are more targeted too. This is useful for businesses who want to attract targeted customers who know what they want to buy.

Long Tail Keywords In Organic Content

An example of a short tail keyword search might be “buy camera”. Here’s an example of what comes up for this particular search. As you can see the first result is a paid advert (PPC).

However, if a customer knows more specifically what they want, it’s much easier to create content which ranks for that longer tail keyword phrase. Plus, you know you’re more likely to make the sale too, since “buy camera” isn’t very specific. But this keyword search is:

Here’s the organic search result underneath all the paid adverts:

So if you sell cameras, it’s definitely a good idea to create pages on your website which relate to long tail specific searches which your shop provides. Long tail keywords are much more specific than shorter tail ones and this is great for organic marketers who create a lot of content. Not only are they better off with ranking such terms on Google, but the terms themselves are more likely to lead to sales than their shorter tail counterparts.

PPC Vs Organic

Despite organic marketing taking much longer to perform than pay per click marketing, it gives you back an exponential return over the longer term. Initially though, with a small amount of content it can be difficult to realise organic’s effectiveness. Over time if you build a content marketing strategy into your marketing plan, it can pay off with free traffic for years from the content you’ve already created.

As your volume of useful content grows, your website authority will build. You’ll gain more backlinks, likes and shares which gives Google a positive social signal. Content can also be manually shared throughout social media to build your social reach. This effort has a compounding effect which over time builds on itself. Older posts can bring in customers years after they have been created. Content ultimately compounds to give you free traffic which increase year upon year.

PPC VS Organic Traffic

Of course this all takes time and effort. Content doesn’t build itself. You can of course outsource this work if you don’t want to do it yourself. But ultimately content marketing should be a part of your marketing strategy for the above reasons. Once you start getting free traffic, it will save you a heap of money you would otherwise be spending constantly on PPC.

Pay per click comes with its own problems too of course. Each PPC advert you run doesn’t automatically bring in customers and 10X your marketing budget, no! It would be nice if it did. Rather, you’ll likely spend some budget learning how to run adverts in the first place.

Adwords, and other platforms can be tricky, with multiple settings, menus and tick boxes. If you don’t know what you’re doing, it can be easy to burn through a budget and target the wrong country! Or place your adverts in front of the wrong audience! So it’s worth treading carefully when you start out with an advertising campaign.

Summary

The good thing about PPC is you can test and measure almost instantly, using your marketing budget wisely to find an advertising campaign which consistently brings in new customers. Ideally, you want to spend less in advertising than you receive in profit.

A positive return on investment with a pay per click advert is the goal. Once you find this (and this doesn’t happen automatically), you can leave it running permanently and it should bring in the customers. You can increase your budget (with a positive ROI) and scale up incrementally.

This just can’t be done with organic marketing. Organics on the other had works as a “slow burn”. Over time, your organic marketing strategy can bring in customers absolutely for free. Although you can’t control your traffic as easily with organic marketing, results can grow exponentially once you hit a certain volume of content and it starts to rank on the search engines.

Target Market Persona

Why is it important to identify your “target market persona”? Your target market persona is the clearly defined identity of the person who is most likely to become a customer.

With a digital marketing campaign, you can ultimately place your advertising in front of a global audience. That includes people from all sorts of backgrounds and demographics. But if you have a hardware store in Delaware, it’s of no use to advertise to someone in the United Kingdom, for example!

Target Market Persona

You want to advertise only to local people if you have a local store. Otherwise you’re going to be wasting advertising budget on people who won’t be shopping with you. The same can be said of a global brand which only appeals to a specific cross section of the online marketplace.

So if your ideal customer is aged between 25-35, you’re going to want to target those people specifically. If your product is only understood by English speaking people, you don’t want to target non-English speaking people. To do so would be a complete waste of your marketing budget, since those people won’t want a product they can’t benefit from .

Target Market Persona: Target Audience / Customer Avatar

The target market persona is also known as your target audience or customer avatar. Marketers define who their “perfect customer” is before running any marketing campaigns. Where do they live? Where do they hang out online? What are their interests are and so on. The more specifically you can define your perfect customer, the better you can target them with your advertising and communicate in a meaningful way in your marketing campaigns.

What drives your customer avatar, why do they need your products/services? When you can understand your customers better, it can help you define your customer persona better and you can become very good at targeting only people who fit this description with your marketing.

Defining Your Perfect Customer

If you already have customers, you can look at them to help you understand your perfect customer persona. What kind of person becomes a loyal customer for life? How old are they? How do they find you ?What are their pains and problems?

Another way to define your target audience is to look at what it is you offer. What problems do your services help with and who benefits the most from them? Look at your most loyal customers and define your avatar by:

Age
Location
Income bracket
Interests
Where they hang out online/offline
What are their problems/pains?

When you understand how your services help people you’re in a much better position to find people who are going to be most interested in your offerings and communicate your value in a way they understand.

Summary

Defining your “perfect customer” can save you thousands in wasted advertising budget while you test and measure adverts which aren’t crafted towards your ideal customers.

Once you understand your “perfect” customer you’re in a much better position to target advertising towards them specifically.

You can also communicate better in your marketing if you really understand the needs, desires, pains and difficulties of your ideal customer persona; and of how your products/services cater to their needs.

Blogging In Digital Marketing

Blogging in digital marketing is an important tool for attracting your target audience organically through the search engines. It can also help establish you as an authority in your field and provide potential customers with valuable information which helps build trust in your brand.

Through a blog, website owners create content and promote it as much as possible. If content starts ranking on Google, this is the best outcome because it means a website can attract visitors organically, without paying for advertising.

Google and other search engines rank content according to its relevancy, quality and the relative competition. With over 600 million blogs on the internet, there’s a fair amount of competition in pretty much every possible niche. So how can you be assured of getting a listing on the organic search engines as a blogger?

Blogging In Digital Marketing

Well sadly you can never guarantee your blog post to rank on Google. But there are ways to give yourself the best possible chance of a ranking. Google uses a number of algorithms and data points to determine whether a website or blog post deserves a ranking on the first page of the search results, and whether to put it first, second third or further down the page.

Here’s a few of the things Google (and others) use to determine whether to rank your content:

Your domain age – how old is your domain name/website
Backlinks – are a major contributor to your ability to rank, where are your backlinks from, is your backlink profile natural and organic?
Time on page – Google sees how people interact with your content. Do they click away, or read through your content?
Quality of your content – the length, subject and quality of your content all have a bearing.
Relative competition – in a very competitive topic, it’s much more difficult to rank content than in one which is relatively unsubscribed.

Blogging In Digital Marketing – Finding Long Tail Keywords

One strategy used by bloggers is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty. In a competitive topic, it’s very difficult to rank your content, especially if there are thousands of other high authority sites with similar or the same content. Short keyword phrases are far more competitive too, so it’s much more difficult to rank for them. To get round this, you can find long tail keywords of 4 or more words which have fewer websites competing for them.

Generally speaking, the longer the phrase, the less competition for that particular keyword phrase. Long tail keywords usually get less traffic than the short tail one unfortunately. But it’s far better to get some free traffic in the less competitive areas, than none in the most competitive topics.

To find long tail keywords with low competition, you can use a keyword planner such as Google’s keyword planner or Neil Patels ubersuggest.

Type your main keyword into the planner and look for long tail derivatives. Then, look on Google with a search of your chosen keyword. Google shows the number of websites which are listed for the term. With a low competition phrase, you’ll find a lot fewer competing websites so you’re in with a greater chance of ranking your content, (if you make a good job of it).

Blog Content & Syndication

Newer websites typically won’t rank as well as older ones which are more established. So if you’re starting out with a blog, expect to work fairly hard in the beginning just to get a small trickle of traffic. Over time, as more and more of your content gets shared and linked to, you should find your traffic grows.

The best thing you can do to give yourself a good chance is to write high quality articles which are an improvement on the competition. Use an SEO (search engine optimisation) plugin (I use Yoast SEO) to help you write SEO friendly content. Write over 1000 words for each post if you can.

Once you have finished writing, your job as a blogger isn’t over. You need to actively share your posts to give them the best possible chance. You can automate this process with a few plugins which help you syndicate your content as you publish. See best free blog plugins for WordPress for a few plugins I use for this.

See also “what is digital marketing?”.

What Is Digital Marketing?

So what is digital marketing? Digital marketing generally refers to online advertising; just like traditional advertising but using digital systems and technology. So it pretty much refers to any digital means to advertise – blogging, pay per click advertising, video, social media, email marketing and so on.

Many digital marketers use pay per click advertising. With pay per click or direct marketing, you get instant feedback as a marketer. You can see quite quickly where clicks have come from and whether a click resulted in the preferred action or not. This feedback is super important for marketers who are testing advertising. It lets them know how online visitors respond to their advertising in real time!

For a small business with a limited advertising budget, the idea of spending huge amounts on building a brand is not the goal. It’s not even practical for most small startups. Instead, small business owners can use pay per click advertising to learn how to acquire customers for the minimum cost.

When they figure this out, adverts can be left running indefinitely and scaled up because the business knows that it’s profitable.

Benefits Of Digital Marketing

This is one of the main benefits of digital marketing. The ability to test and measure advertising and track sales. With a few marketing campaigns running simultaneously, you can acquire customers from a number of them. By using tracking on each one, you can effectively determine the most profitable advertising campaign through a process of testing and measuring (trial and error).

Many beginner marketers will simply run an advert which fails to bring in any new customers. They declare that “it doesn’t work” and quit! But this is a big mistake and just because one advertising campaign doesn’t work, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work as a strategy. In fact, once you hit upon a campaign which brings in business, you can effectively spend $1 to make $2 (or even more).

Depending on your business model, some marketers will spend $1 and make $4. Once in this position, they can increase their marketing budget steadily to the point where they spend $10,000 and make $40,000! It can ultimately allow you to create an autopilot money making system – especially if you’re selling other people’s products using the affiliate marketing business model.

Although in the first instance, spending money on marketing can seem difficult and wasteful, especially if it doesn’t bring in customers initially, if you look at it as an investment rather than “burning through budget”, you’re in a better mindset for long term growth.

Digital Marketing Strategies

There’s other marketing strategies you can use as a marketer too. Although paid marketing is the fastest and most easily scalable method, you can also create content to attract an audience online. SEO – or search engine optimisation is one of the most popular ways to attract website traffic for free. You can build content on a website like this one, or create video content and upload to a platform such as YouTube or TikTok.

Social media platforms are another useful tool for marketers and there’s lots of them. The most popular ones are Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter but there’s many more. See unpaid social media marketing for more on this topic.

Facebook can be use to attract an audience through the use of groups, for example. Find people in your niche by joining groups and interacting with them. You can set up your social media profiles to attract visitors to your website.

Your Customer “Avatar”

One of the most important things to understand as a digital marketer is your customer avatar or target audience. The target audience refers to the small slither, or cross-section of the online marketplace who is most likely to be interested in your products/services.

With a global audience at your fingertips, it’s important to “zone” in on the people who actually matter to your business. Most online visitors won’t be interested in what you have to offer. But many will, and it’s these people you need to understand best to build your business through online marketing.

Where do your people hang out online? What do they search for? Where do they live? How old are they? The more specific you can get about your perfect customer avatar, the easier it will be talking to them with your marketing messages and targeting your advertising towards them specifically.

Summary

What is digital marketing? Digital marketing is online advertising using digital means. Online marketers can test and measure advertising with a small budget until they find a profitable campaign. This campaign, once it’s proved itself can become a globally scalable advertisement which bings in thousands of customers for a business.

Content marketing too can work very well for businesses. With content, it can take a little longer to get traction. But ultimately a piece of content online can stick around for decades. If that content gets traction, either through being ranked on the search engines or being shared virally, it can have dramatic implications for a business.

See also digital marketing mentors for more information.