The Pros and Cons of Starting a Membership Site

How Easy Is Starting a Membership Site?

There are many ways to earn money online, and starting a membership site is a favorite of many marketers. A membership site is basically anything that you offer as a subscription where the customer receives a product or service automatically on a schedule until they choose to cancel or the subscription runs its course.

Delivery is usually on a monthly basis, but it can be more often or less. And the subscription can have an ending date or go on forever.

There are many reasons for starting a membership site, but it’s essential to take a balanced look at the subject because membership websites that make money do face a number of challenges.

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How to Create Clickable Social Cards in Seconds

If you’re looking for an effective way to drive more traffic from social media to your website and boost engagement rates, clickable social cards are a good best bet.

Social cards normally consist of an image and descriptive text underneath, but there’s one thing that sets them apart from regular images. Whereas regular image posts simply expand when clicked on, social cards send users directly to the landing page of your choice. This allows you to have more control over how your business is perceived and attract new customers.

There’s one problem, though. Creating clickable social cards from scratch can be a rather time-consuming and challenging process, especially for less-experienced website owners or those with no access to the back end of a website.

Luckily, the free online tool AnyImage allows you to create as many social cards as you want in just seconds. To find out more, check out the infographic below.

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Writing Blog Posts That Readers Want To Dive Deep Into

How To Start Writing Blog Posts That Your Audience Want

Writing Blog Posts Content is an essential part of online marketing. If you have nothing worth reading or sharing, you’ll never be able to build an audience, earn traffic or leverage the power of your social media platforms

The best place to create content to share is your blog. But it’s not as easy as writing a few hundred words, hitting publish and waiting for traffic and shares to roll in. When you first start a blog, not every blog post you write will interest your readers.

Don’t worry, though. Here’s how to start writing blog posts that your audience can’t resist reading and sharing.

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5 Customer Service Do’s For A Great Customer Experience

How Do You Create A Great Customer Experience?

Great Customer Experience

Does your business have examples of good customer service situations?

Every customer wants a great customer experience when they interact with a business. So creating a customer experience strategy is as crucial and pivotal as providing quality products to your customers.

But some businesses lack a customer-centric culture, and this makes them more likely to feel the backlash of dissatisfied consumers. In any business, things do sometimes go wrong and you are more often judged on how you rectify a problem more than the actual problem itself. Regardless of whether a customer is buying something or they’re filing a complaint, your customer support should accommodate their needs and ensure they resolve the issue on time.

When you provide excellent customer service it creates customer loyalty and makes clients refer your business to family, friends, and colleagues.

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9 Digital Marketing Examples For A Small Business

Digital Marketing Examples For Today

Digital Marketing Examples These days, whether you have an online business or an offline business, you can’t ignore digital marketing if you want to keep ahead of your competition and remain in front of your customers.

Most people use their mobile devices to search for and find information about their problems, so if you’re not findable online it will be hard for you to compete in today’s digital world.

The benefits of digital marketing are not exclusive to big businesses with big budgets. Here are 9 digital marketing examples that are effective and don’t cost the earth to implement. Some don’t cost anything at all.

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9 Things To Test To Make A Sales Funnel Work More Effectively

How To Make A Sales Funnel Work For Your Business

Firstly, what is a sales funnel? In simple terms, it’s the journey that you guide a prospect as they first discover your product or service to the point of them buying and becoming a repeat customer.

Part of making a sales funnel more effective is offering related products as part of your original offer. These are upsells, where they buy your product and some extras and even downsells, where they buy something different from you at a lower price.

Upsells and downsells can increase your average price point for every single order that your customers make. It also increases the lifetime value of every customer.

When you make a sales funnel that is a well-thought-out and includes the right offers at the right time based on your buyer’s journey, you’ll increase your ROI and bottom line. Here are 9 things to test when creating upsell and downsell messages to make your sales funnel work more effectively.

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What Do Customers Actually Think About Your Business?

7 Ways To Discover What Customers Think About Your Business

Your business wouldn’t be here without someone to buy your products or services. But there are most likely many other businesses selling the same products and services you’re offering. The opinion that a customer has about your business as compared to your competitor’s business will determine whether the customer will buy from you or from them.

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The best way to cement customer trust and loyalty is by asking them what they think of your business. Do you know how your customers would answer this question? Getting customer opinions and feedback is one of the best ways to keep them satisfied with your products or services.

Here are 7 ways to help you discover what your customers think about your business.

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5 Steps For Scaling Your Business And Preparing for Growth

The Effects Of Scaling Your Business

Scaling Your Business

Growing a business too fast can cause as many problems as growing a business too slowly.

The difference between a start-up or a small business and a successful and profitable business lies on time and experience. There are many factors that play a big part in how those businesses became successful. These include things like focus, hard work, having the right people and timing.

Scaling your business can make or break it. If you scale up too quickly or recklessly, you’ll create organizational problems that will be difficult to undo. Also, premature scaling can cause your business to fail. On the flip side, scaling your business too slowly could cause you to miss out on important opportunities that come with greater revenue and more resources.

So, as you prepare to take the next phase of business development, these five steps will help you have a successful and profitable scale-up.

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Is Disruptive Marketing Part Of Your Online Marketing Strategy?

What Does Disruptive Marketing Mean?

Disruptive Marketing

Can you make your audience see things differently and open their minds in a new way?

Over the years there have been several terms that describe innovation that disrupts the status quo. For example, “Killer Apps” and “Disruptive Innovation” both describe what happens when something new comes along and disturbs what people are accustomed to. A few classic examples are typewriters, VHS tapes, Floppy Disks and so forth. As you see, each of these things was useful until something came along to replace it.

Disruptive marketing is a lot like that idea. But instead of a product replacing another product it fills in the gaps from the typical marketing strategy by challenging conventional thinking or connecting the old way with a new way of doing something. The new way is the disruption that can get the attention of the audience in a way that might even go viral.

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How To Make Your Business Better Than Your Competition

Make Your Business Better Running your own business is rewarding and challenging. When you start, there’s so much to do, you’re full of enthusiasm and every day seems like a new adventure. Sadly, for many, if they don’t get the (financial) results they’re hoping for, their dream business can turn into a nightmare.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways to make your business better and make the most of the opportunities it offers. Refining and mastering your craft is one of the best.

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10 Ways To Build Successful Habits In Your Business

How To Build Successful Habits

Most people think of habits as a bad thing. However, habits can be good too. Just as you can develop a habit of doing something unhealthy, you can also build successful habits.

Habits are one of the most powerful influences in a person’s life and are sometimes called ‘second nature’. They are actions, which we do almost automatically. They can become second nature and this can influence the results of your business. Of course, there are good habits and bad habits, so it’s essential that business owners work on building good habits, which will result in their success.

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Understanding Contextual Marketing and How It Can Boost Your Business

What Is Contextual Marketing?

Contextual marketing

Contextual marketing pays attention to what your audience is doing in real time in the real world.

During the Superbowl blackout in 2013, Oreo Cookies tweeted out a picture and a statement that said, “You can still dunk in the dark.” This is a classic example of real time contextual marketing. It was unexpected, not planned, but it was effective and went viral.

Contextual marketing focuses entirely on using content for marketing your products and services. Contextual marketing usually means that you’re creating content for your website, using specific keywords so that an advertisement platform delivers the ads of interest to your customers.

For example, if you are using Google AdWords, it will deliver to your audience ads based on the content using the keywords in the content to trigger the right ads. This can be planned as well as happen in real time if you pay attention to how you can relate current happenings to your content marketing. Using as much of both planned and unplanned contextual marketing can rapidly boost your business.

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How To Leverage And Improve Your Email Marketing Results

Email Marketing Results Email marketing continues to be a reliable and cost-effective way for a business to promote, sell and generate sales leads online and offline. Successful marketers still run email marketing campaigns for a host of reasons. In fact, you can use email marketing to foster and grow your customer relationships as well as maintain a high level of customer satisfaction.

But, like other forms of marketing, in order to maximize your email marketing results, you should have a basic understanding of the metrics (obtained results) associated with your promotions.

Here’s 5 metrics that will show you how you can do just that.

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5 Steps You Need To Take To Add Value To Your Customers

Add Value To Your Customers To Boost Sales

Add Value To Your Customers

What value added benefits for customers do you offer?

There are many ways to boost your sales and grow your business, no matter your budget size. However, when you’re working with a tight budget can be daunting trying to add value to your customers and increase your sales while keeping advertising and marketing under control.

It’s easy to start a business online and start selling. There are numerous products online that you can sell as an affiliate but that also means there are many competitors selling the same products and services you’re offering. The difference between the competitor’s business and yours will determine how the customer perceives the added value that you offer. By setting up an effective value added marketing strategy potential customers will be more likely to buy from you, rather than a competitor.

Here are 5 strategies for creating value for customers.

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What Is Retargeting Marketing And Why Should You Use It?

Retargeting Marketing Explained In Simple Terms

In a nutshell, retargeting marketing, sometimes called remarketing, is a strategy that targets an audience who already knows your business because they have in some way already engaged with it.

For example, if your audience visits your website, you can deliver ads such as banner ads and social media platform ads about your business on other websites that they visit.

Essentially, display ad retargeting is all about using technology such as pixels and cookies that enable you to deliver ads to your previous website visitors. There are many benefits to using online retargeting advertising to get your messages in front of your audience.

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13 Ideas For Local Business Marketing

How To Do Local Business Marketing

Local Business Marketing

The more you know about your customer the more products and services you can offer.

Local business marketing can work for any type of organization whether you really are only local to the place you want to market to or whether you’re a global business.

Often, globally or nationally minded enterprises don’t think about the fact that local marketing can still work for them, especially when they’re a small business being run by a sole proprietor.

But you can, and it works too. Let’s look at some local marketing ideas that may work for your business and help you reach your target audience.

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How To Create A Continuous Stream Of Better Blog Content

8 Tips For Better Blog Content

Creating a continuous stream of better blog content is a lot easier than you may think. Being able to keep effective and interesting content flowing to your blog on a regular basis will boost your brand awareness, help establish as an authority in your niche, increase engagement and encourage more people to sign up to your email list. Not to mention help you make more money.

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What’s more, if you have the right blog writing formula, it’ll come to you easily and you’ll never struggle for content ideas again.

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How To Avoid Cash Flow Problems And Streamline Your Profits

9 Ways To Stop Cash Flow Problems

cash flow problems

Do you have more cash coming into your business than going out?

One of the main reasons a lot of businesses go out of business isn’t because they’re not making money. It’s because they didn’t keep track of their finances and cash flow.

They spent indiscriminately without regard to the money coming in and going out of their business and end up having trouble paying debt – often their taxes. This causes them to have to go out of business and even get fined.

Many smaller offline and online businesses face cash flow problems at some time or another. They will often say that it’s either raining money or it’s a drought. When a new business starts, it’s hard to know when and how the money will flow, and if it’ll slow down during certain times of the year or remain steady. No matter what type of business you have, though, you can fix your cash flow problems with a little bit of thought and planning.

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8 Things You Need To Know Before You Create Your Video Marketing Strategy

How To Create A Video Marketing Strategy

Video Marketing Strategy

Video accounts for at least 80% of worldwide internet traffic.

Developing a video marketing strategy is an important part of content marketing today. Video is just as important as using text-based content and beautiful imagery – maybe even more important.

Video is much more likely to get shared, to be engaged with and to go viral than a blog post. Over 80% of businesses use video as a marketing tool and over 70% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video (HubSpot).

Let’s look at the 8 things you need to know before you create your video marketing strategy.

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Why Your Business Needs To Build A Brand Before It’s Too Late

8 Benefits When You Build A Brand

You probably know that you’re supposed to build a brand for your business but maybe you’re not entirely sure what that means. In fact, some people believe that a logo is all you need to brand a business. However, while a logo does play a role in your brand, it’s not your brand. It’s a visual representation, that’s all.

Branding is the process of creating a unique name, message and image in a consumer’s mind. The goal is to differentiate yourself from others in the market and to attract and retain customers.

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