What is passive income? It’s money you get whether you’re actively working or not. For B2Bs of today, this typically includes revenue from automated business systems, investment income and royalties. Passive income is essentially money you can earn even when you’re asleep. This post focuses on six different ways B2B companies can earn passive income. 6 Smart and Lucrative B2B Passive Income Ideas Back in the days, the most common type of B2B passive income was renting office space to a company. Your company owns the building. You rent it out to another company. Then, you sit back as the money from their rent comes in each month. Here are six passive income sources for B2B companies: 1. Affiliate Marketing Know of a service or product that really brings value to your B2B company? Well, with affiliate marketing, you can earn a percentage or flat-rate commission for referring others to the solution directly from your business website or blog. Benefits of Affiliate Marketing as a Passive Income: This is done using a specialized URL which helps the company track your referrals to their solutions on their site. You place the affiliate URL on your site, and wait for the commissions […]
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Almost all purchases in these days begin with online searches. That means that your business needs to have an online presence in order to remain relevant in your market. Online directories are affordable, sometimes even free, methods of advertising online. Here are four more lucrative benefits of listing your company on an online directory listings site: 1) Get Found Easily Building your brand online is the best way to get the word out about your solutions (products and/or services). The more consumers see your brand, the more awareness is created. Oftentimes, consumers will visit online business directory sites looking for specific solutions to solve specific problems. These sites make it simple to find businesses by searching through various categories. If your company’s not listed, they won’t find it during a search on the site. 2) Target Your Marketing Efforts Most consumers who visit online directory listings sites already have a clear goal. They know exactly what they’re searching for online. That means that in most cases, they’re already prepared to make an online purchase. They just need to find the right company to buy from online. One of the lucrative benefits of online directory listings is that you’re targeting your […]
The Customer Lifecycle is a powerful marketing concept which identifies the various key milestones every customer tends to go through or follow during the course of a relationship with a specific brand. Read more.
When you ask businesses what they want from their B2B Vendors websites, the answer is almost always the same: more leads to increase sales. But, according to the 2014 B2B Web Usability Report, when it comes to simplifying the buying process, most vendors create their own stumbling blocks. This KoMarketing Associates survey report features 32 pages of content, complete with 17 data charts, seven research findings and 20 important takeaways on “how to improve your vendor website.” It addresses the key role played by vendor websites during the B2B buying process, such as: The three most crucial bits of information typical buyers need before they’ll move forward and buy from you.AAAAAA The marketing collateral missing from most vendor websites, and why this missing content is deterring your target marketing from doing business with you. The truths about how good blogging and the lack of activity on social media actually effect the buying process. The things that really annoy buyers and make them leave your website altogether. Contact Information is #1 “Must Have” on B2B Vendors Websites According to the MarketingProfs post, What B2B Buyers Want From Vendor Websites, customers expect to find your business contact information in an easily accessible […]
Crowdfunding is a way of raising capital through contributions from others. It’s generally used by entrepreneurs, small business owners, artists, developers, and anyone else in need of funding in order to complete a specific project. Benefits of Crowdfunding The term crowdfunding comes from the use of small amounts of funds from a crowd of individuals to finance a venture. Individuals forming the “crowd” can come from a number of sources. Project managers make use of family, friends, colleagues, social media sites, personal and business websites and blogs, press releases, even email marketing to spread the word about their crowdfunding ventures. All of this is done in hopes of attracting new investors. Crowdfunding allows entrepreneurs and small business owners to expand their investment pools. This gives them the ability to raise funds using sources beyond traditional means such as venture capitalists, lender financing, family and friends. Reasons to Raise Capital with Crowdfunding In short, crowdfunding empowers small businesses and entrepreneurs to raise money for ventures. Here are just some of the reasons individuals become crowdfunders: Raise capital to start a new business. Raise funds to launch a new product. Raise money for an art, movie or music project. Get donations for […]
Do you know the difference between a website and a blog? What purposes do each one generally serve? How do search engines place value on one verses the other? What is a website? A website is a group of webpages that are dedicated to the marketing of a particular brand, industry, niche, or set of products or services. Generally, the content on a website stays the same, which is called “static content.” The purpose of a website is to serve as a brand’s noticeboard. A website contains static webpages that are generally only changed for SEO purposes. The gist of the content remains the same, like the home page of Content Marketing Geek. Relevant content is written for each individual webpage of a website, based on the purpose of the webpage itself. And, that content pretty much stays the same. There are two basic exceptions to this rule: On-page SEO – There are times when website owners will change the wording of the content to re-optimize SEO. This is usually done to add better keywords, upgrade content quality, add SEO information to images, videos, etc… But, in general, the meaning behind the content remains the same. And, changes aren’t made […]
Affiliate marketing is a web-based advertising technique where companies pay affiliates for every lead brought in by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The affiliate acts as a “brand spokesperson” that spreads the word about the products or services.
Today, good affiliate marketing techniques require much more than simply posting affiliate links online. You need to start with a solid foundation in order to get people to actually click the links to increase valuable leads for the company you’re representing.
Image Credit: Picasa Web Albums
But actually, all affiliate marketing techniques are not always big successes. Whether intentional or not, most will not succeed after exhausting much time, effort and resources. That’s because oftentimes, affiliates use unnatural techniques which tend to drive a not-so-great user experience.
Effective Affiliate Marketing Techniques for Valuable Leads
Start right and set your affiliate marketing techniques and campaign towards success. Create an effective platform using these tips:
Choose Your Affiliate Products and Services Wisely
Pick your affiliate items and services wisely by joining programs that compliment your industry and/or niche. If you want to advertise solutions within a niche you’re not familiar with, you just may fail. In this case, you’ll need to be prepared to put in the work required to build this new audience from scratch. If you want to engage your current audience, start with the foundation of what you know well and improve it by keeping up with the trends within your niche.
There are niches that are easy to sell. Unfortunately, there are also niches where products rarely get a sale. The bottom line is: you should choose your niches wisely. What is trending in the social media will give you an idea on niches you should focus on.
But, keep in mind that longevity is important, too. Is the product or service going to be in trend for years or just months?
Own Your Own Website
Image Credit: Meehan Digital Consulting
Get your own website domain name is a good affiliate marketing technique. Owning your own URL is very important in determining your success online. It secures your commissions and shows long term partnership potential. Businesses want to be sure that you won’t dump the item and the client after some weeks or months.
Getting your own website domain will help you increase your client’s trust. This is especially true when the following elements are seen on your page:
Getting your own website is always a smart choice. But, be sure that you are going to promote it effectively. A website is useless if it has no visitors. And, visitors are useless if you’re not attracting an audience that will buy your affiliate products and services.
Content Marketing – Try Article Writing
One of the most effective affiliate marketing techniques is content marketing. Compose quality and informative articles to help your audience understand the value of the affiliate’s solution you’re marketing.
Expanding your article portfolio improves your exposure. This is important to becoming a quality competitor within your niche. Give original, insightful and helpful tips your audience can actually use to improve their lives somehow. Then, relate that content your affiliate products or services, leading viewers to check them out on your site.
Choose Your Affiliate Links
You have to make sure that users have a positive experience when visiting the affiliate links you have provided. So, always include links that come from a top level domain. Concentrate more on quality than quantity. And, aim to establish a good reputation, build a relationship of trust and providing users with a heartwarming experience.
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Photo Credit: Wikimedia Community
Author Bio: Dorothy Matthews is one of the people behind Big Drop, a responsive web design company agency that will meet your expectations and suit your originality.
Getting your law firm’s name out there and showing potential clients that your firm is the best in the field that you operate in is crucial for the success of your practice. Doing this is easier said than done though. Most lawyers that start a law firm don’t have an extensive background in marketing, nor do they have the budget to hire a marketing consultant or agency to handle all of the firm’s marketing activities.
4 Effective Tips for Your Law Firm Marketing Campaign
By being smart about your marketing however, you can improve your firm’s visibility in the market without having to spend tons of money or staying up all night every night slaving away at your marketing plan.
Here are 4 tips that your firm should employ to improve your marketing.
1) Create/Update Your Law Firm Marketing Plan
If you’ve started your business without a proper marketing plan, you need to create one as soon as possible. You don’t need a 100-page document describing exactly how your firm will handle every small aspect of marketing, but you do need to have some measurable and realistic objectives for your business.
Think about what you want to achieve with your firm in the coming year, as well as for the longer term. From your overall objectives you can start to create a monthly planning for what needs to be done in order to get closer to your objectives, which will then form the basis for your weekly marketing todos.
2) Provide a Great Service
Providing a great service will be the foundation of any law firm marketing plan. Only by delivering great value to your clients will you be able to grow your firm. Happy clients will return to your firm when they need more legal help and will recommend your services.
Hiring great employees, and making sure that they are happy in their jobs will help your firm create happy clients and more business.
3) Develop a Great Reputation
Your firm’s reputation can make or break your business. If you are well known for being the best in your field and always providing more value than anyone else, clients will flock to your firm. You can improve your reputation by proactively trying to help everyone in your network succeed, including your clients, colleagues, referral sources, business partners, etc.
This doesn’t just mean trying to find services you can provide to help them succeed, but also connecting them with other people in your network if you believe this could be beneficial for both parties.
Another way of improving your reputation is by writing articles for your website and also pitch them to other publications. If some of your articles get picked up by a major news source, your firm will get a lot of great exposure.
4) Network, Network, Network
Try to spend some time networking every week. You can do this by attending networking events such as local small business events, trade association meetings, but also just by having a lunch with a good client or a drink with a business partner.
You can also use online social networks for networking such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and even Facebook.
Author Bio: Zane Schwarzlose is a writer at Colley & Colley, LLP, a personal injury law firm in Austin, Texas. Zane thinks that reputation management is crucial to law firm marketing.
With the popularity of email and social media, it’s easy for your online video to show up in front of millions of people within seconds. For most people, this is the ultimate goal: to have a video go viral. That requires viral video marketing.
So, how do you make yours go viral? You need to employ effective video marketing techniques.
However, just because a video goes viral doesn’t mean that your online business will benefit. Sure, you’ll end up getting more traffic to your site. But, if you’re not converting these leads into something more, your viral video did nothing to help your success.
Viral Video Marketing Techniques: Make Your Viral Video Count. Image Source: Proceed Innovative
4 Viral Video Marketing Techniques for Online Success
If you want to make your viral video count, the following are four viral video marketing techniques you need to implement:
1. Create a quality video
The amount of time a visitor spends on your website is important to your overall website success. The last thing you want is to have a high bounce rate, which means how quickly a person leaves your site when they land on your page.
On average, an individual typically leaves a website after three seconds if they don’t find exactly what they want. This is a high bounce rate.
Adding videos to your website is a great way to decrease your website’s bounce rate, but in order to do so, you need to create quality videos with a decent length. If the quality of your video is poor, your audience will not watch it.
If your video is too short, you won’t captivate your audience long enough to decrease your bounce rate. If your video is too long, you’ll have visitors leaving before they get through the first few minutes.
The safest length for an online video is between two and three minutes. This keeps your audience on your site long enough to decrease your bounce rate and is the perfect amount of time to captivate their attention without them becoming antsy.
2. Add a call to action
Your video may be informative, funny, witty, engaging, sad or whatever you want it to be, and you may have attracted millions of viewers because of it. However, having these millions of people visit your website will not truly help your online business unless you get them to take some type of action.
At the end of your video, make sure you place a call to action to get your audience to do something other than close out of the browser. Maybe you want them to check out other videos you made.
Maybe you want them to sign up for your email newsletter. Maybe you want them to make a purchase. Whatever it may be, place that call to action on the video and make it easy for your audience to do.
If your video is highlighting a product and your call to action tells your audience to buy the product, let them get to the online shopping cart with one click of a mouse. This way, your online viral video will make an actual impact on your business by increasing sales.
3. Add your branding to the video
You want your audience to correlate your video with your brand. But, if your branding cannot be found on the video, they won’t do this. Thus, they’ll have no idea who created the video, and your online business will suffer.
Make sure you embed the videos directly on your website so that your audience can see the URL, company name and company logo. If possible, add some branding flair, such as your logo or company colors, to the video as well. This will force the audience to see your branding, and it will put your company name in the back of their mind.
If you are using YouTube for your videos, make sure to customize your YouTube channel so that it corresponds with your branding.
Your online presence relies heavily on search engine optimization, but videos do absolutely nothing for your SEO. That is, unless you provide transcriptions.
Search engines cannot crawl through video content, which means that the content used in your video does not help your website get ranked on the search engines. However, if you were to utilize an online video transcription service and provide a verbatim transcription of the video on your site, it will give the search engines content to crawl through and use to rank your site.
Because of this, your website will provide more keywords to the search engines, which they’ll in turn use to better rank your site. If you earn a higher search engine ranking, your website will be found by more people online, thus increasing the success of your business.
Author Bio: Lizzie Lau is a freelance writer who combines personal opinions and research to create appealing and informative articles on various topics.
What’s more important, content marketing engagement or target audience usefulness?
The digital world can be a noisy one with everyone competing to be heard. What will make you stand out takes a bit of time to develop and understand. With B2B content, you’re looking at a model that aims to inform and engage at the same time.
It is also a playing field where your communication should synch with the understanding of customer behavior. Creating content that serves your goals while putting the end user is crucial to your success in the B2B world.
Recognize Need for Better Content Marketing Engagement
The key to creating what customers will buy is recognizing a need and stating clearly how you’re going to fulfill that need. With that in mind, you’re able to align your marketing efforts to those businesses that are in rhythm with your end goal.
Blogging has become a powerhouse for B2B marketing in terms of generating buzz and delivering compelling and engaging content when the buyer needs it. Again, it’s all about that end buyer. When you create content, think about the benefits you are providing and the needs you are fulfilling. Start with that and your results will be increased sales, profits and traffic. Business blogging with a purpose is the vehicle to take you to your goals.
Ask yourself: are you doing it efficiently and effectively?
Audience Need Vs. Content Marketing Engagement
Forbes referenced the synchronized nature of need versus engagement: “Does it speak to them when they’re just beginning their research, or later when comparing competitor features, or finally when coming to a buying decision together with their colleagues?”
Buyers can alter their shopping habits, researching products and services when and where they want. This is a great opportunity to utilize the most unused resource: B2B marketing, and blogging. Unlike push marketing – inbound marketing doesn’t interrupt you.
Seth Godin calls this content marketing engagement technique “permission marketing.” It’s online marketing that isn’t intrusive. Instead, information or content marketing is there when you need it – providing you with the information you’re searching for online.
Godin goes on to say:
“permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they are actually paying you with something precious. And there’s no way they can get their attention back if they change their mind. Attention becomes an important asset, something to be valued, not wasted”.
Find Effective Solutions
Online marketing is impacted by necessity meeting solution. The better that information is presented, the more likely you are to buy into. Creating a space where buyers are given an opportunity for a two-way communication is crucial. Since B2B purchase decisions take more time (depending on how many stakeholders are involved) than B2C, B2B marketing is a feedback channel that gives the buyer a voice.
Ultimately, there’s a demand for different information for different audiences. The blogsphere is a great place to meet that demand:
It’s an engaging space.
It builds connections with your prospects.
The content opens a door to meaningful interactions.
You get a chance to provide relevant information while developing a relationship that prevents, or mitigates, a problem in real-time. You have a chance to be easily accessible when it comes to addressing customer issues, need and concerns. This can only be done by going back to understanding customer behavior and listening to your prospects.
Staying consistent is another part of getting people to come back to the online marketing content that you put out there. Information that understands customer behavior is aware that humans like to be engaged in information that fulfills a need. It may not be in the immediate moment but, B2B clients know the importance of forming relationships with those who prove to be consistent in their marketing efforts.
License: Royalty Free or iStocksource: Shutterstock
Author Bio: John Braithwaite is a father, husband and entrepreneur. He writes on behalf of Ergo Digital, a firm offering online marketing services in Reading, UK and beyond.
I love social networking, and the social media news streams that comes with it. I have a lot of family and friends all over the world. While it would be wonderful to be able to keep close contact over the phone, or in person, with each of them, it just isn’t feasible. Social networks make it much simpler, letting you keep involved in one another’s lives no matter where you are. All in a convenient format that maximizes communication despite distance, or even just lack of time.
Sure, it isn’t perfect. Some people will choose social networking over real life interaction, and a lot of friendships maintained that way can become shallow. But, when used correctly, it is a great way to remain close to others, discover new friends and a lot more. Social networking has a lot of functions, and I try to make the most out of every one, including social media news streams.
A Look Into the World of Social Media News Streams
My favorite element of the social web is definitely the social media news streams and feeds that are on each one. I have customized mine to give priority to certain people, to let me keep in even closer contact. All while avoiding updates I don’t really want or need.
But, how do these social media news streams and feeds work? They are rather complicated, and each site has its own. Here is a simple glance at the news feeds of Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Quora.
Twitter’s Social Media News Stream
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform, rather than a traditional social network like many others. They use a unique algorithm that provides live updates. This works as both a search function, and as part of their news feed. It also limits the number of tweets from each follower, and older tweets will disappear as new ones from your list are added.
All content, as a consequence, is entirely fresh. But it doesn’t allow you to go that far back, and to see older tweets you have to go to the actual profile page. Not all tweets will be kept over time there, either. Since tweets are so small, and so regularly updated, this is a benefit to most users.
=> See more of who sees what on Twitter using this cheat sheet for social media news streams.
Facebook’s Social Media News Streams
Not all Facebook posts are created equal, and the developers know this. However, they do consider each user’s activity to be important, and so don’t single out any specific profile as less important than any other. To keep you from having to see every post by every person on your friends list, it uses EdgeRank to take a small portion from each friend to display.
You can customize settings, as well. Just select what kind of updates you want to get, allowing the most important for you to be both shown on your feed, and in your notifications. Other pages or users can be hidden from your feed entirely.
=> Read more about the social media news streams on Facebook here.
Google+ and Its Social Media News Streams
Google+ is entirely user customized. You select what kind of activity you want from each circle, keeping some silent, some partially ‘muted’, and others entirely active in your news feed. This puts control completely in your hands, rather than using the EdgeRank system in the same way Facebook does.
Quora’s Social Media News Streams
Quora is much more technical in their updates. They use Redis and MySQL to regular update content for users. But, you can get a full explanation through this excellent breakdown by Quora employee and developer Belinda Gu.
