Recurring Revenue from your Expertise

The internet has changed how businesses communicate with their target audiences, potential and former customers. No longer are these groups responding to highly promotional media that is designed to only sell. Instead, they are looking for content that educates and entertains.

By creating content that matches these expectations of your audience, you can accelerate the growth of your small business and create a large, well know brand. This larger organisation will be able to generate the majority of its income from a small core group of customers. The key to this is the demonstration of your expertise. If you can prove you’re a market leader, one with innovative skills and knowledge, you will attract audiences and convert them into long term customers.

So how can you go about generating extra revenue by demonstrating your industry expertise? It actually takes a lot of work to develop a sales funnel that can engage your audience and then deliver a consistent flow of information. This article will explain one of the best ways to demonstrate your expertise easily and generate recurring revenue from a small group of loyal customers.

 

Attracting Your Audience: Where Do You Go?

At the very beginning, it is important to attract your target audience to your site and other marketing medium. There are several ways to do this. The most commonly used marketing strategy is search engine optimisation, even if businesses don’t realise it. Some commentators have stated that Google is the number one traffic provider, with a third of small businesses generating 80% or more of their traffic from the search engine giant.

However, it is not clear whether this includes Pay Per Click adverts or not. Some research has found that organic searching only contributes to approximate 10-30%, whereas paid search can direct almost 50% of your traffic. Yet other companies who do not employ PPC as a marketing channel still report that organic searches can be a major contributor to their website traffic.

Either way, both forms of marketing material are very important for attracting your audience. To generate your traffic through these avenues you need to offer something that is valuable to the audience. The content also needs to be found online. Both rely heavily on the right wording of the content: known as keywords.

While 10 years ago, this would have required you to write the same keyword several times throughout your website copy – Google and other search engines now discourage this. In today’s SEO market, keywords are less strict with long tail and latent semantic indexing calculations common in search engine algorithms. Long tail keywords are words like “create, creating, created” all counting towards the score no matter what form the search engine user asked for.

Latent semantic indexing is where a series of words that essentially mean the same are connected to count towards a score. For instance, internet, online, web and world wide web all refer to the same thing, therefore search engines count them as one.

This makes writing content easier. When writing for search engines, content rarely flowed well. However, when latent semantic indexing and long tailed keywords are used, content can flow better and be more readable. This is more convincing and will help increase conversions and sales.

Social media can also be used as an effective traffic generator. While sometimes your audience will connect with your brand online after they have interacted with it on another platform, in other cases, the interaction comes after they have found some of your social media content. Therefore, demonstrating your expertise on social media is also important.

Email marketing is not considered one of the best options for generating traffic to your site because customers have to sign up to the list prior to being sent content. This means they have already had contact with your brand. The only way that this can be avoided is if you have bought an email marketing list. However, this is illegal in most nations and therefore, not highly recommended.

 

So how do you attract an audience on these channels?

Providing useful information you know the contact needs is the best option. Depending on your industry, the useful content could be anything. However, it is useful to search through the Google Keyword Planner tool to search for what questions are being asked before you start considering your content building strategy.

This tool will tell you exactly how many times certain phrases have been used in search results. All you have to do is to enter in your landing page, your services and what countries you are looking to target and the information will display. For instance, two of the most popular searches for a social media management organisation would be:

  • What is social media?
  • How can I use social media?

There are also other words like social media and social media management, but the questions being asked help guide your content creation stages.

After finding out about what your target audience is searching for, you can then start to build a content strategy.

 

Building A Content Strategy

Your content strategy is the most important aspect of your online marketing strategy. Without any kind of direction you will not be able to attract a targeted audience, which is vital if you want to have a good return on your investment.

The first thing you want to do is write down all the popular keyword and phrases. Then taking each one of these separately, create a basic premise of how you would answer the question or create content based on that keyword.

Once done, write each piece of content. Remember that the point of writing each piece of content is to inform your audience about something or solve a problem. So, for example, you could explain how to grow a Twitter following or start a LinkedIn group to gain more awareness for a brand.

Whatever the content you are writing there are four key points to remember:

  1. Be informative.
  2. Don’t sell your services.
  3. Be consistent.
  4. Publish regularly.

The style of the writing and how you talk to your audience can be completely up to you. However, remember who your audience is. If you are looking to talk to senior business professionals, then you need to keep a persona that they will want to interact with and this will likely be different than a group of sport fanatics.

When creating content for social media, you should create a mix or content. In this mix should be content for directing users to your blog content, communicating with other users and little snippets of information about your industry.

Communication with your audience is important as many users on social media do consider it a community led tool rather than a sales platform. In fact, selling directly on social media has been proven to be highly ineffective with only 1% of all online sales generated through social media updates.

However, by communicating with your target audience and providing them with links to your other content or by giving them snippets of information, you will drive traffic to your site.

As time goes on, your organic rating will increase on the search engines and this will raise you higher in the ranks.

At the same time you can implement a strong PPC campaign that can direct traffic to your site when they show on the side and at the top of the screen for a certain list of keywords. During your PPC campaigns you should look to split test adverts. This is when you have two adverts and you see which one attracts the most traffic and converts more. The one that performs better is kept and another version is then tested.

 

Keeping The Traffic Coming Back

Once you have started generating all this traffic you need to consider how you are going to get the visitor to return. Only about 30% of your visitors will return to your website; unless you subscribe them to something. The most common tool for subscribing visitors is an email contact list.

This list can be generated by directly asking the contact for their details; however, you might find it more efficient to offer them something in exchange for their details. The best options are a free download. The download has to be something that has value to the customer. Therefore, you should look at the commonly asked questions again from the Google Keyword Planner and create small ebooks or whitepapers based on that.

Once you have collected their email address, you can start to market to them with emails. This can be highly effective. A good email copy has the following aspects:

  • Some useful advice.
  • Links to new content (i.e. blog articles, podcasts, etc).
  • An offer.

You need to examine the results of your campaigns every time you send some content. See what is encouraging them to interact with your brand. This will give you an indication of what they are interested in. You might also want to phone up some of the contacts if they have opened your email and clicked through on the offer several times.

One of the most important parts of email marketing is to segregate your email list. This helps you target your audience with specific information that is only relevant to them. It is also useful at separating your potential customers from your current / old customers.

 

Generating Continuous Revenue From Existing Customers

As soon as your contacts make the transition from being potential to current customers you should transfer them to a new list. This helps you to sell more products to them. It is always easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to sell to a new customer. It is also more cost effective.

If you provide high quality customer service to your customers, then you’ll find that they will spend more with you at every transaction. They will also be an advocate for your brand, encouraging others to buy from you..

Your email marketing strategy plays a critical role in this process. However, instead of just trying to sell them a product that they have shown no interest in; there are other options for your business now. The obvious task is to sell them items that are related to their recent purchases. Amazon is very good at doing this and often sell products that were bought with certain purchases.

This does take some careful analysis and consideration, but it is also one of the most successful paths to creating a continuous flow of revenue from a small group of customers.

There are also certain lead generation tasks that you must undertake.

It is important that you ask them for feedback. If you haven’t performed well, it can help you to make improvements to your service for other customers. At the same time, you can then remove them from the list knowing it would be hard to convert them into a repeat customer.

Positive feedback can also be shared with other potential customers through your social media channels, website or email. Word of mouth is a very potent selling technique and may speed up the process to selling to others.

 

Conclusion

Digital marketing is one of the best ways to convert potential customers into long term customers. Loyal customers are highly useful at generating income by being a brand advocate. The main thing that you have to remember is to continue to publish new content and deliver it to them. The content should be highly valuable to your audience, answering questions to solve problems that they might have.

Then when they have landed upon your page you subscribe them your mailing list and email them offers and new content that can convert them into customers. From there you can convert them into long term customers by offering them more advice from your expertise and by offering them the chance to share their customer experience with you and the rest of the world.

Doing this process will help you generate a stable income from a relatively small group of customers with only a good set of publishing tools and our expertise.

The Inbound Marketing Funnel

The inbound marketing funnel is the process your customers go through when they find you and your products online.

Unlike with other marketing processes in the physical world, there are many different elements and avenues your customers can take. This can cause several problems for your marketing team and business.

However, by understanding the inbound marketing funnel and implementing the best strategies for each step of the process, you can better adjust your campaigns to develop strong leads and convert numerous website visitors.

This article will describe the inbound marketing funnel and how you can use it to grow your business and customer list.

Step One: Entry Point

The entry point of your customers can be highly varied. The three main entry points are through search engines, social media and word of mouth. However, there are other methods such as direct entry (i.e. the visitor entering in your address straight away) or from review sites or business directories.

Search engines have the greatest contribution because not only does it include organic searching but also any pay-per-click campaigns.

Organic searches are very effective as a traffic generation path as some businesses report that over 80% of their traffic is generated this way. To create more traffic from organic searching you must optimise your website for search engines. There are several main elements to improving your website’s SEO and these include:

  • Keywords: Picking a single keyword (or phrase) per page and ensuring that it has a density of between 1.5 and 3.0%. Keywords should also be used in the title tags and captions of any images you have on the page.
  • Page titles and meta tags: Need to be optimised so that they have the keywords inserted.
  • Website speed: Google wants the websites it ranks on their search result pages to be of high quality. Part of Google’s assessment on the quality of a website is the speed it takes to load. If your site takes longer than 3 or 4 seconds, you are likely to lose a significant amount of traffic, leads, and revenue.
  • Submit your site index: Through your Google Webmasters Dashboard, submit your Site Index so that it is easier and quicker for your site to be indexed and ranked by Google.
  • Social media: Social media is becoming very important when it comes to SEO. The better the social signals you have (likes, followers, comments), the better the chance your content will be ranked highly.
  • Inbound links: Developing inbound links through your content and getting quoted by other articles will raise the rank of your site. This is because Google sees inbound links as a sign that your website has quality and accurate content.

In addition to search engine optimisation campaigns, you should also have a strong social media campaign directing new and old customers to your website. Do this by advertising useful content on your site and conversing with those who have a strong interest in similar topics to your products or services. Don’t forget to thank those who have interacted with your brand on social media.

Also, you can generate traffic by offering a great service and having previous customers spread word about their experiences with your brand. This can be highly effective as it builds trust early with your key customer group.

Step Two: Lead Generation

Once you have attracted the customers to your website you need to subscribe them to a mailing list or an RSS feed. This is more important than you realise because 70% of those who visit your website are unlikely to visit your site again, unless you regularly remind them of your brand.

There are several ways you can obtain the visitor’s contact details. The first is to offer the visitor something valuable in exchange for their contact details. The valuable item could be anything from a free quote, white-paper, ebook or gift. This is highly effective because most individuals are attracted to free gifts.

Another way is to simply ask for the contact details when they land upon the page. This can be done with an option on the side of the webpage or via a pop-up that requests their details after they land on the page.

Step Three: Converting The Lead Into A Customer

The next step is to convert the lead into a customer. Regular contact should always be kept up with the contact so they do not forget who you are and to help with conversion. This can take several points of contact (i.e. emails, social media updates, blog posts) and could require you to offer more free gifts.

In addition, each piece of content you are sending to them should provide further details why they should be buying from you. Eventually, your campaigns must lead them to a sales page where they can make a purchase.

Knowing when to do this can be difficult, but you should be monitoring the contact’s interactions with your email content. If they are regularly clicking through to your website, it is likely that they are ready to make a purchase.

Step Four: Delight

The final step is when you have finished providing your contact with your product or service. You should have given them excellent service and ensured that they were happy with what they have received.

Then, you keep in contact with them providing the past customer with more useful information. At every opportunity, you should invite them to spread word about your brand. This could be by forwarding on your email content to their friends or family or by mentioning your business on social media.

A good example of this is with Amazon. After you have made a purchase they offer you the chance to tweet, or publish an announcement on Facebook, about your purchase. Later, when you have received your order, they will send an email to request a review of the purchased product.

This process attracts new potential customers to your brand and starts the process again (along with SEO and social media content).

Conclusion

The inbound marketing sales funnel is all about generating traffic to your site and selling products by using your content and previous customer experiences to attract potential customers. The inbound marketing funnel can take several weeks or months to complete. However, the return on your initial investment can be better than most outbound marketing strategies.

Start your business’ inbound marketing sales funnel and see your business’ growth over the long term while you reduce costs and improve profits.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the process of having other online sites and businesses advertise your products / services. It is one of the best ways to generate additional sales for your business.

The biggest advantages of the scheme is that you only pay your affiliates when they have successful referred a customer. Therefore, you can make a great and guaranteed return on investment from using affiliate marketing.

 

The Main Players In Affiliate Marketing

If you are new to affiliate marketing , you need to understand the major parties in the industry. Here is a list of the terms used to describe the different individuals involved and how they fit into the system.

Advertiser / Merchant

The business / individual who owns the product being sold / advertised. These are the people who want to use other sites to promote their work and will pay affiliates for their time. Although many advertisers believe they have the easy part of the affiliate campaigns; having a successful campaign is something will take time and effort and will only yield good results if the advertiser is willing to put in significant amount of work.

Affiliate

The individual or organisation who is advertising products on the behalf of the advertiser. Their business is often built on selling products from numerous brands. Some of these affiliates have one website while others will have many; each concentrating on a specific theme. The affiliate is paid based on the number of sales they have generated.

Network

This is a group of affiliates that advertisers can approach to see if any of those within the network would like to promote their products. This is usually a good way to entice several affiliates to sell a product / service but it can cost more.

Agency

A company that manages affiliates, advertisers and the campaigns so that all involved can achieve a significant return on their investments.

Agencies can offer significant value to the process as they can advise what steps are needed to improve the whole process. This advice can be given to the affiliate or advertiser. As agencies often work with the same select few affiliates, they will also know which affiliates would suit what products.

 

What Are The Main Advantages Of Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing has several benefits. Affiliate programs are constantly working to deliver high quality traffic to your site. This can boost the value of your site, if you were planning to sell it at a later date.

Also, affiliate marketers are like a sales team where you only pay for their performance. If they don’t perform well, there is no cost to your business. This makes affiliate marketing almost risk free; although there is sometimes a small campaign set up cost. This can range between $100 to $1000.

In addition to higher traffic levels, the traffic generated has a high conversion rate. This is because most of the hard work on persuading the visitor to convert has been done for you. When coming directly to your site via PPC, organic search or social media; only about 4% of your traffic will be in a position to buy a product.

In contrast, when someone is directed to your site from an affiliate, they have already been processed down a significant proportion of the sales funnel.

Therefore they are approximately 3 – 4 times as likely to make a purchase. Although some research suggests that if you have an optimised landing page, you can have an 85% conversion rate.

Also, affiliate marketing allows you to grow the reach of your brand. Many affiliate marketers have extensive network of consumers. The affiliate will know what their audience likes and what will excite them. This can be beneficial to the merchant because it can shorten the selling process and increase the effectiveness of marketing activities.

Another direct benefit is that the traffic generated through your affiliate marketing is going to be highly targeted. Therefore, you know that those who have landed upon your page are interested in what you are selling. They may not buy your product straight away, but they might decide to subscribe to your newsletter, blog or download an ebook. This can all be valuable information that you can use to further market to them and convert them into a paying customer.

If this does happen, it is always good to still pay the affiliate for introducing you to the new customer.

Affiliate marketing techniques are known to support a brand’s search engine optimisation. This will help you to develop your own leads as your search engine rank increases and your website gains more organic traffic.

You can also test new marketing strategies and content styles with your audience with very little cost to yourself. With most other forms of advertising, you’ll have to invest a significant amount up front to create new marketing materials and to maintain the campaign. With affiliate marketing, some of the costs are absorbed by the affiliate, giving you a significantly less risky option for testing.

 

Tips On Running A Successful Affiliate Program

To have a successful affiliate program you will have to use the best practices. Here are some of the ways that you can improve the chances that your affiliate scheme is successful.

Offer a high commission – some of the best affiliate marketers can request commissions to be upwards of 30%; especially for software products. This is often because they have a track record of generating traffic and sales for their merchants. When you are setting the commission, consider carefully how much you are going to offer your affiliates and how much you can afford.

Don’t be complacent – don’t think that an affiliate network will automatically increase your website’s sales. You still need to create good product pages, checkout systems and a perfect website.

Provide your affiliates with materials – your affiliates will better at selling if you provide them with numerous marketing materials. This can include banners, email copy, sales copy and other materials.

Be available – affiliates like to know you will be available to talk to them about your products. Therefore, ensure you can be reached by telephone or email when they have questions about your products or how specific campaigns are currently running. You should also communicate often with your affiliates to tell them how landing pages have performed, is there a sudden rise in interest for a certain product or if there is a seasonal abandonment of another. The more you interact, the more enthusiastic your affiliates will be to promote your product.

 

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to generate traffic and sales. However, it is not as easy as picking a few affiliates to market your site. You need to be dedicated to the process and be a good manager of various personalities and processes for your schemes to be a success. Consider looking for an affiliate marketing network today and see if you can grow your business.

Lead Generation Strategy

Your business cannot be successful unless you are actively attempting to generate leads and qualify them for customer acquisition.

There are many different types of online lead generation tactics that you can implement fairly effectively. Here is a list of some of the most effective ways you can generate those leads online.

 

1. Website

A website is often stated to be an online shop front. It can display your products, take orders and deliver sales content. It can also collect leads if you have the right software installed on your site. Some software packages can detect where and what companies (or whether they are private) the visitor is from.

You can also use other lead generation techniques through your website, such as contact forms and quote generators, to collect information on your visitors. To get the most out of your website, ensure you have good call to actions and your page speed is fast. 25% of your visitors will abandon your site should your site not load within 4 seconds and this figure rises steadily afterwards.

 

2. Social Media

Social media is probably one of the easiest ways to obtain the names, details and converse with leads as their profiles are stored on the system and very accessible. However, converting casual followers to leads is a long process that can be difficult.

To make it easier, it is best to follow a set of best practices for social media. For instance:

  • Don’t be too promotional. Only 4% of Facebook users appreciate promotional content on their newsfeeds and 0% of LinkedIn customers.
  • Converse with your audience about relevant topics. However, you don’t need to be too strict. For instance, if you manage a shoe shop, you could converse about fashion in general.
  • Remember to thank new followers for their time, those who share your content for their contribution and to reply to any social media questions.
  • Always be polite and never show any aggression.

In addition, you might want to consider when the best times to post on social media are and the design of your content. Each social media network has different requirements and best practices, so it is best to optimise your content on one network at a time, instead of doing them all at the same time.

 

3. Ebooks / Whitepapers

Visitors love to receive free gifts; that is why you should consider creating an ebook and offering it for free on your website as a way to attract the attention of your target customers. Ensure you aren’t being too generous and ask for their email details (and some others) in exchange for the ebook / whitepaper.

You can make this process even better by creating several ebooks on a number of business areas that you provide services / products for. Then you can use segregated email marketing lists to target potential customers based on what ebook they downloaded and what products / services they relate to.

 

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most successful ways you can generate traffic to your site. Affiliate marketing is where other business owners advertise your products on their site(s) to drive traffics to your site and generate leads. If the visitor converts, then the affiliate earns a commission.

This is one of the best ways to generate leads because the affiliate marketer assumes responsibility for the costs associated with marketing your products. Therefore, you only pay when you make a sale. It also allows you to gain more web space for your products, giving you a greater chance to be discovered online.

Although there are some sites that only occasionally advertised affiliate partner products, there are many small businesses whose only revenue is generated from advertising products from other businesses. Some of these latter businesses can earn thousands of dollars per month this way.

 

5. Word Of Mouth

Word of mouth marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate leads because consumers trust the recommendations from their peers. There are several options for word of mouth advertising. These include social media shares and review sites.

Reviews are very important because you can share these on your website and through other mediums such as social media, email and in your physical stores. Try to obtain as many reviews as possible by offering rewards such as a free gift for completing a review.

However, do not charge your customers for poor reviews. Firstly, this can cause outrage online and secondly, research has shown that five stars are not always as highly rated as four star reviews.

You can also encourage referrals by offering customers a small gift or payment should they successfully refer their friends to your business.

 

6. Pay-Per-Click

Pay-per-click is one of the most successful advertising channels online. It is the second most used purchasing avenue for online sales. Therefore, there are significant returns to be made from using pay-per-click to direct traffic to your site. There are many options available for PPC, include Google Adwords.

However, to make the most of this, ensure that you are following PPC best practices and that you have a high quality website as seen by Google.

 

7. Blogging

Blogging is one of the most commonly used tactics for generating leads. That is because many (81%) consumers trust information published in blogs and 61% will make a purchase based on that information. Blogging has also been proved to increase the number of leads generated with up to 70% more leads generated when more than 15 blog posts are published.

To ensure your blogging is effective, make sure you aren’t being too promotional and you can provide highly useful information to your audience. Blogging can also support your lead generation in other ways as being used as a basis for your content on social media, PPC and email marketing. It will also support your SEO efforts.

 

Conclusion

Lead generation is one of the most essential tasks for your business. Without leads you will have a highly ineffective sales channel that will result in low revenue and either a loss or not enough profit to maintain your business.

Therefore, use the above lead generation techniques to grow the number of potential customers and use targeted marketing to convert them into paying customers.