This post is by guest author, Niraj Ranjan. This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission.
What is your personal brand? Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos once said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.”
A personal brand is something that all of us who has at least one social media account have to worry about. Your digital and social footprint is more important than you would imagine.
A company that wants to hire you will certainly Google you before taking a final call; a research team will check out your online profile prior to granting you a fellowship; even your potential date will say yes to you only after running a quick search on you. So you see, it’s very important!
Mastering the art of personal branding can also help you become an influencer – quite a superpower in the digital age.
Here are some tips that can help you build a strong personal brand:
1. Always be authentic
Authenticity, be it in personal or professional life, is well-received and well appreciated by the people around you. A fake version of you or your brand can stand only for a while and is never the best strategy. Fake also involves being overly self-promotional. As a rule, for any brand, it is advisable to follow 1:5 policy when you produce content or market. It means offer 5 valuable points to the reader; in return, earn the right to talk about you once.
In addition, being fake involves a lot of non-required work. At last, you will end up looking inconsistent and untrustworthy. For example, if you are against the use of tech gadgets, don’t act otherwise so as to please people around you or your audience.
2. Communicate appropriately
The art of communication is the language of leadership – James Humes
The way you communicate has a major impact on your overall personal branding success.
It is important to have enough social intelligence on how to present yourself in a given situation. Here are some key tips:
Don’t address your senior executives as ‘guys’.
Be witty, light, and humorous while talking to a younger audience, but never sound an egoistic or arrogant.
Pay attention to what you say when you are trying to communicate your ideas and opinions. Being clear and crisp is the key to avoid misunderstanding.
Make sure that during one-to-one conversations your body language is in sync with your words. If you say that you are happy, your behaviour has to reflect that.
Ensure to respond as promptly as possible. For instance, use tools like email reminders to ensure that you don’t forget to reply back to an email.
3. Focus on relevant social media platforms
Social media marketing is cost-effective as well as smart medium to build your personal brand. However, it is important to choose and focus on the social media platforms that are relevant to you and your end goal.
A few examples:
If you want to attract recruiters and employers, a professional network such as LinkedIn is where you have to make a lot of noise.
If you are looking to build a brand amongst your friends and social circle, Instagram and Facebook would be your best bet.
If you are a critic and want to spread your reach, again Facebook and Twitter can come to your aid.
And so on…
It is important to identify your audience and figure out where they hang out the most- you can exercise this out by doing a little research online.
For instance, 67% of the internet users are on Facebook and the majority of them are women; so if you want to target women online, you should start with Facebook4. Be updated with the latest information
If I visit your Facebook page and see that your last update was months’ ago, I definitely would not be impressed enough to follow you. Being present and being up to date is crucial.
Everyone now has access to 3G and 4G networks. News and information travel like wildfire and so do feedbacks and opinions. If you want to build a personal brand, you need to stay with the flow or even better stay ahead of the flow.
For example,
if the purpose of your personal branding is to establish yourself as a thought leader, your audience expects you to have opinions and things to say about the latest events happening in your industry. In case a company that belongs to your industry is going bankrupt, they expect some reaction/response from you, as a thought leader.5. Avoid being the jack of all trades
The first thing you need to do before making any attempt at personal branding is to find your niche. What is so unique about you? Something, which only you can offer?
For example, if you are running a blog, do not overwhelm your audience with a wide range of topics and things to say. This sort of brand confusion will lead to a very weakly established brand.
Being all over the place, having multiple interests, and trying to have your foot in every door can signal a lack of expertise and credibility in any one area.
Here are some tips:
Have a central theme to everything you say. For example, if you are all about gender equality, making it the central theme of every story and every message.
Don’t make your message/key point a riddle. The gist of your message has to be clear, crisp, and apparently obvious.
Again presentation matters a lot. Tailor your message to match your audience.
Final thoughts
Back in good old days, your resume was enough to demonstrate your competence; however, it’s not the case anymore. Companies and teams want you only if you show more than a list of accomplishments on one page. They need to see who you are and what your attitude is towards life. This is what building your personal brand is all about. Just like you market a service/product to the world, you market your ability and competence through personal branding.
Affiliate marketing is now not a new concept, but it is still a very fresh and rewarding way of marketing online. It is about a relationship between three main parties: the affiliate (publisher), the merchant (advertiser), and the customer. Furthermore, affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways of making money online.
It offers a low-cost technique for traders and dealers to display their products and services and build brand awareness.
Geno Prussakov has mentioned in of his blogs that 38% of marketers call affiliate marketing one of the top customer acquisition methods.
What is affiliate marketing?
An affiliate marketing model is straightforward; it acts as a commission-based recommendation practice. A partner or affiliate promotes a trader or a dealer’s products for a slice of the pie. Affiliates are as good as extended sales and marketing departments of the merchants. They play a major role in your marketing campaign and assist the customers to choose products and buy them online.
According to a study, in most affiliate programs less than 10% of affiliates drive 90% of traffic and conversions.
Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing. Despite affiliate marketing doesn’t require a fate and years of struggle to get started, you shouldn’t presume excellent results overnight. It is intensely competitive and you need to dedicate productive time for choosing products and ensuring that they meet market needs. Consequently, learn how to promote them and how to measure the success of an affiliate marketing program.
How to become an affiliate marketer?
Let us have a look at the traits of a successful affiliate marketer. Typically, an excellent affiliate possesses the following traits:
To become a successful affiliate marketer is not a tough job; it is a simple process as shown below:
1. Discover an exclusive niche
As a secret success formula, do not try to straightaway offer anything at all. Rather, stay focused on a precise niche market. Figure out your audience, analyze their pain points, offer them solutions to solve their issues, and ultimately assist them to achieve their goals. To identify the service area which can work best for you and your audience, the best place is to visit forum and question answers’ websites of your industry.
2. Make powerful use of search engine marketing
Search engine marketing is a powerful mechanism for online businesses. After assembling affiliate storehouse, jump into its timely and logical promotion. The preferred option of most of the affiliates is pay-per-click. However, to reap long-term benefits use a proper blend of organic search and paid search. PPC can definitely give you instant results but if you rely only on PPC for a longer time, all your profits might end up in the hands of Google Adwords.
3. Understand Your Product and Identify Your Audience
This is a complete analytical exercise. You need to devote your time in knowing your product and knowing your audience. Create a database, you will find it handy as and when required glancing through. Learn in-depth about the products and/or services. Think about the value you can provide to your customers along with your products/services offerings which can help you to build your credibility. This is because trust can be earned from credibility builds trust.
Have a psychological study of your audience. This will help you in developing and designing a web site that converts well and ultimately boosts your ROI.
4. Don’t ponder all your prospects or resources in one thing or place
This is the excellent tip to become a successful affiliate marketer. Promote products from diverse merchants. This way you will be able to balance the cash flows. Furthermore, out of multiple merchants, if one or two fail to promote your product, the overall impact on your business will be minimal. It is absolutely fine to opt for diversification and promote niche products from diverse merchants.
5. Gain excellence in internet marketing
Internet marketing is a very dynamic field. On an ongoing basis, trends keep changing. You need to act intelligently here to succeed. Keep yourself updated with the latest trends, tips, and tactics. In order to become an expert affiliate, you must always dedicate your time in reading, learning, and embracing the dynamics of Internet marketing.
6. Monitor your efforts
As an affiliate, don’t give up if it doesn’t reach the satisfaction levels. Try and try, again and again. Monitor your efforts and analyze your statistics, to figure out what is working well and what is going wrong. Accordingly, amend your affiliate marketing strategy.
How does affiliate marketing work?
Affiliate marketing works on click; by clicking on a special hyperlink made available by the particular affiliate program. The most common type of tracking is tracking via a cookie. When a user clicks on the link, a cookie is stored on their computers. This cookie lets the merchant know that in case a sale transaction happens, it has come from you.
To get started with affiliate marketing, the first step is to sign up for a partner program. On getting login details, you will be assigned a link with a unique ID that makes it feasible to track all traffic sent by you to the advertiser’s site. If your visitor clicks on it and performs the qualified action, you will receive a commission. Qualified action depends on the compensation model. The most commonly used one is pay per sale model which is based on the revenue sharing when a merchant pays an affiliate the percentage of the sale.
Affiliate marketing works best in three types of products /services promotion where it has shown highest success till date:
1. Information products
can make you earn commission up to 50% since they are cost-effective; production costs are lower as compared to prospects they offer
2. Physical products
easiest to sell but churns out a lesser commission (not more than 5 to 10%) since most of the amounts get deducted in variables like shipping, wholesaling, and others
3. Services
based on trends, one can normally expect commission in the range of 10 to 30%
Over 50% of topmost affiliate programs fall into these FOUR categories: Fashion, Sports, travel, and Health & Beauty.
Affiliate marketing can provide you with a stable stream of income. How much you can earn entirely depends on how successful you are in converting your browsers into buyers and service subscribers. Affiliate marketing is cost-effective; the place is not important, you can work from anywhere in the world and still earn handsome amounts.
How to make money as an affiliate marketer?
Affiliate marketing experts often make an income that can tally over five figures per month, however, only 1 to 5% of thousands of marketers literally achieve this level. When an affiliate reaches this elite level, they are often referred to as a “super” affiliate.
“Affiliate Marketing Has Made Businesses Millions And Ordinary People Millionaires. Affiliate Marketing may be Your Next Best Career Move.”
Bo Benette
If anyone asks can you make money with affiliate marketing, the precise answer is “yes”. It is true that affiliate programs can earn extra money and even a full-time income from home. The long answer is a little more complicated. Like any home income venture, success comes not so much from what you choose to do to make money, but whether or not you do what needs to be done correctly and consistently.
Affiliate marketing is the ultimate home business since it has no dependence on finance to get started. Furthermore, neither you need to manufacture, stock, ship product inventory, nor you need to deliver a service on demand. Under affiliate marketing, you are fundamentally paid for referring new clients and customers to other businesses.
[A] Affiliate marketing WITH website
It is better to do affiliate marketing with a website. Once you have figured out your niche and have zeroed down your research on an affiliate marketing program, the immediate step is to build your site. For a newbie in the realm of building sites, an easy option is to go for WordPress. Since the WordPress CMS provides ease in operation and coding skill required is zilch, you can set up your own site effortlessly.
Make sure that you go for the authorized domain for better authenticity of your site. And, the content which you publish on your site should be of excellent quality. Your content plays a major role in your overall marketing strategy.
The type of content could consist of product reviews, banner ads, blog posts, common questions and answers (FAQs), informational content, etc. In your blog posts, you can mention about your products, how it helps your target audience, why they should buy it, what are the common issues with the product and how to deal with it, etc. Coming to the informational content, you can have a tab of FREE resources wherein you can add some slideshow, presentation, tutorial, EBook, etc. all these tactics will bring traffic to your website. In case your product is admired enough and brings sufficient relevant traffic to your website, you could also monetize the traffic in other ways, such as AdSense.
Promotion of website and content
Once your website is ready with relevant content, the next step is the promotion of your website and your content on various social media platforms. On the basis of your niche, you can choose from FacebookTwitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, and several other niches and location-specific networks.
Now, everything is ready for your affiliate marketing, starting from website to content and social media. Once all requirements are fulfilled, you can straightaway go ahead with the promotion of affiliate offers.
Remember, under affiliate marketing, merchants only pay for actual customers, not just visits. This gives affiliate marketing a major benefit over other promotional channels, such as PPC, where it’s trouble-free to spend a large chunk of money on clicks without producing any actual conversions. Successful affiliate programs use the multi-channel acknowledgment to ensure the affiliates that create the most value get paid the most.
According to Bill Burnice, top affiliate networks for 2017 are:
It might be sounding absurd, but yes, you can do affiliate marketing without having a website also.
You can start posting the products which you want to promote on blogs and forums with your affiliate link in your signature
You can take help of EBook as a promotional scheme. Go for writing a ‘viral’ book and post on sites like eBay. An informative and useful book as compared to simply laden with affiliate ads might get quite better traction from your target.
Video marketing is one of the most prominent content marketing strategies as per SEO Trends 2017. Hence, go for sites like YouTube and Vimeo and promote your video clips. You will surely convert a good amount of fan base into affiliate profits.
A simple yet effective technique is to write classifieds for the products you want to promote and submit them on various sites. Classified submissions are regarded as one of the most favoured marketing prompts for affiliates who don’t use websites.
Build your own social network and let your followers know about you and the products you promote.
Write guest posts for the website having high traffic.
Little less recommended method is PPC. Because promotion through pay-per-click technique involves creating PPC campaigns through search engines like Google and Bing, and promoting the merchant website directly through your affiliate link.
Closing thoughts on affiliate marketing
The problem with affiliate marketing, like many other home business options, is the self-styled sages and get-rich-quick programs. These sages and programs hint that affiliate marketing can be done fast and with little or zero effort. So, the issue isn’t really whether or not affiliate marketing is a viable income option (it is), but whether or not you can make affiliate marketing work for you. Affiliate marketing isn’t hard, but it does require knowledge, planning, and consistent effort to make any significant income.
Content marketing is considered as one of the most influential things when it comes to SEO trends for 2017. Until recent past, it was probably underestimated parameter, but now marketers are paying special attention to their content marketing. Content writing has now become the most vital portion of digital marketing. Day-by-day, the quality standard of content is getting versatile and competitive. Quite a few search marketers attempt to attract their target audience with their content development skills, along with other social media skills and engagement tactics.
It emphasizes that in order to sustain competition you are in a constant need to boost the quality of your content. Most of the audience is engrossed in reading good content over the web while searching for something that is similar to your content.
You would have read a lot many articles and blogs on the tools for search engine optimization and social media marketing. Here, we present the top 11 content marketing tools which you need to explore in 2017 to stay ahead in the digital marketing race. These are regarded as the best content creation tools.
These tools will not only help you write your content but also assist you in the optimization of your content. They act as a polish for your quality content which is ready for publishing.
Content marketing tools
1. Co- schedule Headline Analyzer
According to HubSpot, only 60% of people who click into an article end up reading past the headline. This explains how important your headline is for your marketing.
Co- schedule Headline Analyzer is a free tool, widely used in the field of digital marketing. This tool calculates the score for your overall headline quality and rates its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic, and SEO value. It is very simple to operate. The scoring format is also informative. An overall score of your headline is judged on the basis of four parameters; common words, uncommon words, emotional words, and power words. You should definitely use this tool to improve your article or blog headlines.
2. Content Ideator
An easy to operate the tool. Content Ideator helps you find good topics to write about e.g. blogs, articles, and others. It lets you generate content ideas that your audience reads and shares. This tool is also popularly known as a Content Forest tool. The beauty of this tool is it allows you to generate a number of blog topics and ideas in a little amount of time. Once you enter a single keyword or a phrase, it will come up with a long list of ideas out of which some may be helpful and some may not be.
3. Grammarly
Grammar is of utmost importance to avoid confusions when it comes to oral or written communication. Incorrect usage of grammar and spelling mistakes can actually slow down the overall flow of communication. Grammarly is yet another powerful tool that helps you correct your content. It highlights the most possible grammatical slipups, wordiness, and suggests better articles/prepositions strengthen your content. It also provides apt synonyms for the words that you double-click. This content tool helps you with the correction part of your content. Moreover, it also helps with the correct sentence formation part of your content if you are mistaken at any of the sentences.
4. HubSpot
This specific tool promotes inbound marketing platforms. It consists of various tools to monitor and devise effective blog posts, personalized landing pages, and other compelling content along with excellent consumer support. It also includes effective content-marketing campaign activities. HubSpot also helps social media analytics and message-scheduling so that you can advertise your content easily to your social carriers.
5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great and invaluable content creation tool. The first five searches of Buzzsumo are absolutely free. If you would like to identify which online outlets or influencers are getting the most traction in your space, you should definitely look to Buzzsumo for analytics-driven insights.
Based on your search, Buzzsumo will colonize the trending content, which is most social, highest ranking, and most influential. This will give you a perfect idea of how to title your content. In addition, it will help you find out where to advertise your content based on relevant audience reach.
6. Copify
Everyone wish to create quality content. As a business, you need content for everything, from the website pages that drive sales to the blog posts that engage customers on social media. It does require a good amount of relevant research. Based on the research, you can come up with the draft content. Post that proofreading, copy editing, substantive editing, and designing finally shapes your final output. As you can see, it’s a lengthy process and a challenging job!
Imagine neither you are a professional writer nor you have an in-house writer. No need to worry, a simple solution is just a click away, Copify. As an entrepreneur, you can easily access quality copywriters through Copify. Copify helps businesses to source quality content from a network of approved writers, promptly and hassle-free. They do take responsibility for proofreading and formatting and deliver mostly within 48 hours.
Outbrain is the best option to solve the problems in the distribution of your content. Even though it is a paid tool, it will broaden your audience to a huge extent.
With Outbrain, you can easily increase your audience engagement with your videos, articles, blogs, articles, and infographics. Your posts will be advertised as suggested posts besides other articles.
8. Canva
Struggling and juggling with the creation of images? Then you should use a tool called Canva. This is considered as one of the most preferred content marketing tools. Canva offers ready-to-use templates, custom image sizes for all social media channels. It provides a drag-and-drop interface, cool fonts, and many user-friendly features. The images created by Canva are absolutely original and exclusive that you witness on the web.
9. Hemingway editor
Hemingway Editor is yet another important tool, which you should not miss. It points out the general concerns pertaining to complex words, vague phrases, lengthy sentences, too many adverbs, too many nouns, and others. Precisely, it helps you to eliminate your language-related errors and make your content simple and easy to understand. While highlighting errors, it also gives a description that why it is an error. The only limitation is that it just points out issues, doesn’t provide solutions or alternatives.
10. ClearVoice
ClearVoice allows you great flexibility and competence; it is a complete content marketing network. You will get an inbuilt market through ClearVoice. It helps in promoting your content and brand. It allows you to create your content and get connected with the brands in order to produce quality content. The studio of ClearVoice enables the brands to recognize the influencing factors and their competitors so that they can produce the content which is both relevant and valuable.
11. Pocket
If you are looking for a perfect content curation tool, the pocket is an apt solution. This content marketing tool includes the search, arrangement, and share the function of the most relevant and high-quality digital content.
Pocket safeguards all of your articles, images, charts, and videos at a single place for reference. It aids you to bookmark your content, ranging from blogs and articles to images and posts.
Conclusion
With the growing competition of quality content, it has become necessary that you publish your posts with accuracy and efficiency. There are lots of content marketing tools available on the web that will help you optimize your content and make it perfect to be published on social channels.
Content marketing is of utmost importance because it serves you in generating leads and building a vast community. In addition, it will not make you look like a salesperson. Ignorance of the content is ignorance of the sales.
According to Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers plan to create more content in 2017 compared to 2016.
The below-mentioned tips do not follow any particular order, but they all are a package that will give you success in your digital marketing campaign.
Use these tips to inflate your content marketing to boost your web traffic.
1. Use various interactive platforms like Quora
Content marketing has a lot to do with social media and especially interactive platforms. There are multiple platforms where questions and queries are openly shared and millions of people truly attempt them to satisfy the query. Such platforms include Yahoo, StackExchange, Quora, and others. To boost your content knowledge and thereby raising content marketing results try to contribute to such sites and interact with people. Such platforms are growing rapidly and they can very well help you find a new audience. In addition, these sites will also help your target audience reach your website.
You can promote your content across these sites by following the simple course of action.
It is best to follow influencers. Read their posts and try to analyze the way they have written. At times, they serve as the best tutorials in finding out how to write and how to get more thumbs.
Start replying to a few relevant topics which are in line either with your services or with your blogs.
While replying to the relevant topics, you can include links to your blogs. However, in NO circumstance, it should sound self-promotion.
Initially, try to post succinct content so that anyone can read it even while surfing the page. Later on, depending on the question and comfort, you may even post lengthy content.
In case your readers will find your content interesting, engaging, and informative, they will surely follow you till your website to check out your own blogs.
2. Makeover your old blogs
Though it is true that old content can also drive traffic, it is equally important to keep your old content updated and in line with the trends. Each blog listed on your website, be it fresh or old, should have valuable, relevant, and right content.
Your main aim behind the blog posts is to convert your readers into your subscribers. When a reader visits your website for some information and what if they find that your content is stale and irrelevant? It will simply cost you by making you lose your audience. Losing a valuable visitor and subscriber is of course not a welcoming thing. On the other hand, search engines always update their algorithm. There are prominent chances that your site may get penalized if you are not up-to-date.
You can make a few amendments to your existing content in the following suggested manner:
Rectify all minor and major grammatical issues
Incorporate trends that are new and relevant to your blog title. At the same time, delete which is now not relevant based on the recent updates and algorithm workings
Only use images that are relevant and search engine friendly.
Identify the keywords that are actually performing well for higher rankings. You can use SEMrush tool for the same
Periodically moderate comments on your blog posts.
Identify the well-performing posts using blog analytics. Observe a number of views for the specific post.
Keep an eye on the number of shares of your blog on social media.
While updating the old blog post:
Do not modify URL
You may amend the blog title but ensure to retain the keywords.
Assess meta-description if it can be improved.
Provide internal links to your new posts for strengthening internal linking
3. Use compelling infographics
A picture can portray 1000 of words. This is a sort of ‘not-to-miss’ in your effective content marketing strategy.
Infographics should contain no more than 5-6 statistics/ points of information. Research by KISSmetrics found that any more than 6 and it becomes too much for the reader to consume.
Keep these guiding principles handy while creating valuable info graph:
It should be easy to embed to enable more social media shares
Use odd numbers in your title to catch attention. E.g. 243% hike (instead of 250%). Odd numbers always do better than even numbers
Instead of writing long stories, present short, crisp, and catchy phrases/sentences
If your infographic has information in list format, e.g. “5 SEO techniques ”, ensure to label each point with numbers.
4. Make your brand creative with a variety of content
No doubt content marketing is all about blogging, eBooks, articles, and other content in written format. These strategies are going to stay for long and probably forever. However, do not miss out on the new bud of content marketing; video content.
Video content will enhance revenue in 2017 and beyond. Marketers who use video grow their revenue 49% faster as compared to non-video users. According to Cisco, 69% of all consumer Internet traffic will be the result of a video. A video is for sure the future of both content marketing and SEO.
While creating effective video content that makes your brand more creative, do not miss out to ensure:
Your content voice is in line with your audience voice
The video has been designed corresponding to your goal and it serves the purpose
Video content contains the kind of emotion you need to drive with
It does have a strong CTA; it should provide a way to the user to take some desired action. Sometimes it is also better to have lead capture set up with the best possible minimum fields. For example:
Last but not least, it fulfils all possible SEO criteria, e.g. usage of relevant keywords, optimized titles, wise usage of tags, proper description, and others
Conclusion
So far, content marketing has grown from marketing activity to an approach of marketing. It is nothing but creating engaging content to inform your target audience about your offerings and drive them to your website. Follow the given guidelines and enjoy the boost of your search traffic and sales.
