Every day, the business world is getting more and more complex, trickier, and more competitive.

It’s nothing surprising though!

The old theory, survival for the fittest, perfectly fits here. You have your honesty, integrity, principles, and yet you are not going to succeed here simply because you don’t have to struggle in your plan and, more specifically, you don’t have the plan to employ your knowledge, time, and money after advertising.

That is the reality of today’s business.

There are a number of ways you can advertise:

• Display Advertising
• Search Engine Optimization & Marketing (SEO & SEM)
• Social Media
• Pay Per Click
• Native Advertising
• Remarketing
• Video Ads
• Affiliate Marketing

All the above types of marketing have their special individual benefits, and you may not have to try all of them.

The best practice is, you study all the ways, decide which one best fits for you and prepare yourself to employ all your time, knowledge, labor, and, if needed, money to make it a success.

However, we are not going to describe all the above ways of advertising in detail. Instead, we are going to tell you some tips and suggestions on affiliate marketing and social media marketing.

Affiliate Marketing

In short, affiliate marketing is simply where you can recommend certain products or services to your readers. If they click on your unique link provided by an affiliate program and then purchase something, you receive a small commission.

Affiliate marketing is a high-speed trend that really works for brands and businesses of all kinds. A BizReviewed blog post with tips on Inbound Closing, for example, has a comprehensive study on one of the marketers.

Here are some important points that you must know:

1. Strongly targeted

Some of the affiliate programs require that you make your first sale within a specified period of time.

Upon failure, they kick you out and then you have to reapply at a later date, so if you want to join affiliate programs from the first day of opening your blog, you need to promote products through posts and to try to get that first sale within the specified time frame.

2. Promote on social media

Try to use all the social media you can find, such as Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, QQ, Tumbler, Qzone, Tik Tok, Reddit, Viber, Line, and Telegram.

There will be a little more about social media marketing in the latter part of this article.

For this method to work, you need to be consistent in promoting.

3. Promote from both sides

Promote both the blog post that you insert your affiliate links in and the affiliate links themselves.

You could write a Facebook post saying, “If you’re looking for a really affordable gift for your loved ones this Christmas, I definitely recommend this perfume or that Bluetooth headset.” Then leave an affiliate link in that post.

In addition to that, share the blog post you have originally written about that product.

4. Watch out for your disclaimer

Anytime that you are promoting affiliate links on social media or on your blog post, you need to give a full disclaimer.

A good example could be in a Facebook post where you hashtag ad or hashtag affiliate links or something like that. If it is a sponsored post, it is required by the law. You’ll need to check with your country’s guidelines.

Social Media Marketing

Before getting into the details, let’s have a look at the statistics that will tell us why and how we need to advertise online.

27% of all time spent on the internet is now spent on social media sites.

46% of all the users consult social media before making a purchase.

I hope this is enough for you to understand why you need to utilize social media marketing.

Four Steps of Social Media Marketing

1. Free Offer

Why free?

In a search engine context, people are searching for what you sell, but in a social media context, you are an uninvited guest. You are interrupting what they are doing, so you want to provide something so enticing, so attractive that they have to sign up right there.

Free offers are a great way to do that. It can be a T-shirt for visiting your office, a free exam, a free assessment— something or anything that is beneficial to your customers.

2. Have a Landing Page

It is technically wrong to send people to your website. Rather you should send them to a focused landing page that shows them the free offer. It’s a clean and easy way for people to sign up.

3. Evolved ad

Evolved ads have improved over time.

Start out with lots of pics and videos with different headlines, and observe which ones of them perform better. Pick one of the better-performing ones and evolve them. Keep making changes over time, depending on the demand and requirements of the consumers.

The simple truth is that people lose attraction to the same ad that keeps being presented to them. When it gets changed, they are attracted to it all over again.

What you do is very simple: you say the same thing differently, from different points of view, from different angles, or you describe newer aspects of your products.

This might clear up why all of the big companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft keep changing and updating their looks and adding new features before one is worn out to the customers.

4. Focus on your Most Valuable Customers

Your most valuable customers are those who are most likely to buy the most profitable products that you sell.

By defining your most valuable customers, you can be extremely targeted. The better you know your most valuable customers, the better your return on investment is.

Final Words

There are hundreds of ways to advertise online out there. Don’t be confused or don’t fall for doing all of them at one time. Focus on your aim and your ability: how much time, money, merit, and labor you can employ long-term. Only choose the ways that you can afford to continue to use.

Good luck with your online marketing!