He specifically wanted to know:

• But, how much time and money should you devote to each social network?
• Which ones produce the best ROI?
• How much are 100 social media followers really worth?

And the results were very interesting and well worth the 5 minute read.

1. Keep text in your posts to a minimum of 2 lines.
2. Make the image the main thing, and keep the text on the image below the Facebook recommended text limitations  so that you can boost the post if it is doing well.
3. Only boost posts if they are already doing well, if it is not doing well why throw good money it !!
4. Don’t over-post. Statistics show that posting once every second day is ideal from statistics.
5. Not all of posts should be pushing your product/service or you. Some posts should be re-posts of a story that is industry related and relevant.
6. Keep your posts to one photo per post.

Thats it – The Quickest Facebook Marketing Tips You’ll Ever Get !!

And while there are many reason that business and product ultimately don’t succeed you can reduce the risk by putting some effort in at the beginning to reduce this risk and validate the concept.

Below are some ways to validate your new business product, idea, app or concept.

1. Analyze Your Competition

Unless you have specifically developed a totally new concept then you will probably not be the first business to be marketing the product or idea. Yes there are totally unique concepts being released every day but by far the majority of products and concepts are variations, improvements or side steps on existing products and concepts. Savershop is a great example of this- they didn’t invent a new product (razors) -they came up with a new way to market the product (subscription based). Concepts such as Uber  are totally new but as I said majority of new business ventures will have existing competition and even if it is a new idea like Uber they still had existing competitors such as taxi services. (there is an argument that Uber is not a totally new concept but that is the topic for another post) So a good first step is to look to your competition to better understand demand and potential product appeal.

Although you’ll probably never know exactly how well your competition is doing, there are things you can uncover that can give some indication.

Find Your Competitors

The easiest way to discover your competitors is to do some simple Google searches for your product idea. It’s important to think like a potential customer and search for terms that customers would actually use.

Once you uncover a few key competitors, you can use free online tools like SimilarWeb and SEMrush to uncover others. There are also sites such as SpyFu which is a great resource to research what keywords and Adwords our competitors are using once you have found them via SimilarWeb.

As an example, I used Semrush to find out who was selling “rugby trophies” for a client and SemRush not only gave the top competitors actual competition pages but also the adwords Cost Per Click if I want to advertise with Google.

SimilarWeb and SEMrush can also provide additional details about your potential competitors including:

• Traffic Overview
• Geography of Traffic
• Referring Websites
• Search Keywords (Organic and Paid)
• Social Referrals

Reviewing the information with these tools is a good place to start understanding all of your competitors to get a good overview of what you’re up against.

You may also research how long they have been in business or online by doing a whois lookup on their domain name.

2. Understand the marketplace you are entering

Now with an idea of who your competitors are and how they are doing things, it’s time to look a little closer at the market and direct interest from consumers.

Market Trends

As a general rule you wouldn’t want to rush into a declining marketplace or when the “bubble”has burst so to speak.  Google Trends is a really simple and free web application that will allow you to search for keywords related to your chosen product to better understand the trend based on Google searches over time.

Is your product idea trending up, down or is it stagnant? Knowing where the market is going can help you make a more informed decision for your idea.

Social Chatter

Another  great place to begin is to see what is happening in the marketplace and what customers are saying about your product idea as well as their sentiment around it is Topsy. It is perfect for searching for information surrounding hashtags to learn more about what customers are talking about in relation to your product idea.

3. Keyword Analysis

Understanding your product’s trend and social chatter is great but it’s also important to know how many people are currently searching for your product idea each month. That’s where Google’s Keyword Planner Tool comes into play. The Keyword Planner Tool allows you to search for keywords and phrases related to your product and then displays the total number of searches each money for the chosen terms.

In addition, the Keyword Planner tool will also display the level of competition in paid search for each term. This can allow you to better understand how lucrative the keywords are, which can also be an indication of profitability of the product.

To use this tool you need to have a Google Adwords account which you can sign up to for free. Login to your account and select Tools from the top menu, then select Keyword Planner. On the next screen, click Search for new keyword and ad group ideas. Backlinks IO has a great page with step by step instructions and tips on using this great tool.

Now you should be have a clearer idea about whether your idea, app, product is the go and the potential or existing competitors and the marketplace for it. And with this information you should be in a great place to  promote your product, idea, app and achieve great success. 🙂

E-Marketing is defined by webopedia as “advertising and marketing efforts that use the Web and email to drive direct sales via electronic commerce, in addition to sales leads from Web sites or emails.” The term e-marketing in this instance is an interchangeable term in this situation with the terms Internet marketing, or online marketing src Webopedia

Wikipedia defines Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as “a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising.” src Wikipedia

As you see by all of these definition the concepts overlap and cross over and should be all considered together when developing an online marketing strategy. HOW? -you ask!!!

As with any marketing strategy online or offline you need to complete a marketing analyse before you can develop an effective marketing plan. (spoiler alert- there is a Digital marketing template download at the bottom of this article for those that can’t wait) but I would suggest reading through the steps below so you can prepare your online marketing plan more effectively by outlining your goals and thinking how you will track your ROI (Return On Investment).

Step1: Get to know the business and their competitors

Before you can do anything else you need to know what you are dealing with so get to know the business- What is their point of difference? Why should customers choose them over their competitors? Is it their customer service?, fast shipping? long lasting quality products?

What about their competitors? Are their product better or are they just marketing themselves better!! Get a list of at least 3-5 main competitors. Search which social networks and digital channels they are using and analyze their content strategy and marketing strategies. Look at their posting frequency, type and time of day.

Step 2:Identify Business Goals and get a budget- money and time wise

Every piece of your digital marketing strategy should serve the goals you set. “You won’t get far if you don’t know where your going.”

Look closely at the business’s overall needs and decide how you want to use digital media to reach them.

You’ll undoubtedly come up with several personalized goals, but there are a few generic ones that everyone can include and relate to —increasing brand awareness, retaining customers and reducing marketing costs are relevant to everyone.

It is recommended that your digital marketing plan should have two primary goals and two secondary goals. Having no goals means you have nothing to work towards and track and having too many goals means you will not have the resources- time, money and energy to meet them effectively. Even if your budget was unlimited and you had a ton of staff who could work on the many goals  it wouldn’t be effective. Take for example how the big chocolate companies promote their chocolate bars- they don’t have competitions or large marketing campaigns going all at once for all of their individual chocolate bars do they? No they set goals for increase sales of individual bars and then go about achieving the goal. The chocolate company may decide that their goal is an overall increase in sales which is a fine goal but it is a single goal that would define the need for a specific strategy for this goal.

Step 3: Set S.M.A.R.T Marketing Objectives

Once you have your goal you need to have specific objectives so you know if you have achieved the goals. For example your goal could be to get more customers, will one new customer mean you have met the goal or if you don’t get 100,000 new customers mean that you didn’t achieve the goal!! Goals need S.M.A.R.T objectives in order to help you achieve them. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant/Realistic and Time-bound.)

Step 4:  Define the Target Audience

This seems pretty obvious but the target audience can sometimes be a bit harder to define because businesses usually respond to the question “Who is your target market?” with “Everybody!!”  And while everybody may potentially be a customer this approach of trying to attract everyone rather than specific targeted customer groups will more than like result in your marketing efforts being too generic and not specific enough to appeal directly to your “Target Audience” customers.

For your target audience you nee to know -Who are they? What are their buying habits? What social media sites to they use? What  psychographic characteristics can you define for them? One of the best ways to define your target audience is to create a persona of them. A Persona is a description of a specific person who might want your services. The persona should include demographic information, daily habits,  needs, preferences, biographical information. A great “persona” is one so specific that you could actually give them a name.

You should define at least 3 distinct “personas” or target audience groups.

Step 5: Do your keyword analysis

Everybody does this at a different point but the key is that you need to have done your research and found the keywords/phases that will attract your target market and are ideally not the same ones that everyone else is targeting eg you have found your niche markets.

Step 6: “Define your digital marketing strategy”

Armed with the information you have gathered in the steps above you are now able to define your marketing strategy by answering the following questions and completing the downloadable template below.

What is the budget?

What is the business key selling point for their target audience groups ?

What digital tools or environments does your target audience use and at what time of the day or week?

What content resources already exists or can be developed in a timely efficient manner ?

Digital Marketing Template download

But this article is about ways to make money from your website when you don’t have a traditional physical product to “sell”. And just before we begin I would like to stress that in order to really effectively make money you will probably have

1: Sell digital products such as photos, ebook, music- pretty much anything which can downloaded 

Key point here is to be effective you have to have a product worthwhile “purchasing”

Selling your own product is awesome because there are no middle mans, no one is going to take the “cut” – it’s only YOU and the CLIENT. You can sell directly through your website and you’ll get paid directly. While it looks like a simply way to make money, it’s actually not.

It takes a lot of time to create a good product that you can actually sell through your site. So make sure it’s well-made and polished before you throw it out on your webpage. In addition, a perfectly optimized landing page for the product is essential to higher your conversion rates.

2: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is every where on the internet and is a very popular way to make money through a website. Basically on your website you promote via a review or recommendation  someone else’s goods or services and if the browser becomes a “buyer” after following a link from your website the “selling” site pays you a commission for the lead. Simply put when your website visitor clicks on your affiliate link and buys the product – you’ll receive commission.

The percentage of these types of sites are usually quite high hence the popularity of “affiliate” websites.

Where can I find products to promote?

• ShareASale – mostly clothes and accessories
• Commission junction – reliable, payments on-time.
• Clickbank – high payouts,  products not so good.

3: Pay Per Click Advertising

Google Adsense for publishers (bloggers, website owners) and advertisers (business owners, marketers, product owners) is a program where the website  has ad’s appearing on it (like this one tipsforyourwebsite.com with the ads on the right and in the banner) and the owner gets a small amount for every time some clicks on them. These ads are great for remarketing campaigns.

All you do is sign up for an account with Adsense and then setup what type of ad’s you want to show and how you want them to look and then you are provided with a simple script which you just place on your website where you want the ads to appear.

Google will then decide what ads to show to your website browsers which will depend on either the websites that the user has been to or the content of your page.

This is a good option for high traffic websites.

Where to sign up for  Google Adsense

• AdSense – Be aware that Google is very strict with their rules and do not fully check until they actually have to pay you money so you counting your clicks and dollars going up but then just before google has to pay you they may spot a Term and Conditions violation which means they don’t need to pay you.

4: Selling Ad Space

With this option you are literally selling ad space all on your website. Step 1 is you set the price for say the ad space in your header . Step 2 the buyer whose ad will appear in your header area will pay you in advance for their banner to appear. The price will depend on how much traffic your website gets. If your site gets ton loads of traffic from different sources, the banner ad price can go up as $5000 per month. However, if your site doesn’t have much traffic, don’t expect much. Sites like NEWS.com.au make money from selling ad space like this.

websites where you can sell ad space?

• BuySellAds – a popular one.
• AdvertiseSpace – another one.

5: Sell/flip  your site to someone else

Website selling/flipping for a while was a very lucrative business model. A website is only worth flipping or selling if it gets a lot of traffic or generate money through different monetization methods.

The site value is usually based on the income. If your website is making $1000 per/month through selling ad space, you can sell the site for $10,000 – $20,000 (12x – 22x monthly income).

Where can I sell my site?

• Flippa – The most popular website market.
• We Buy Websites – Another marketplace.
• FEinternational – Mostly for high-end websites.

Many people “invest” in domain names without websites but as Google has reduce the importance of keyword domain names and domain swatting has become illegal domain name  “values” has become a very subjective.

6: Drop shipping

For drop shipping you don’t even have to have your own website but I decided to include it in this list as it is another less traditional of making money online. Drop shipping is a fulfillment model that allows you to buy products individually from a wholesaler and the wholesaler will ship the products directly to your customer. So instead of purchasing a large amount of inventory and having to store it , you simply partner with a drop shipping supplier and list their merchandise for sale. Then, once you receive an order you forward it to the supplier for fulfillment. The supplier will ship the product directly from their warehouse to your customer, and charge you only for the price of the shipped item.

This is how many stockist work on ebay and Amazon. It sounds ideal but you must have a strong working relationship with the wholesaler.

OK, by now you have learned the ten most popular ways to earn money your website. But that’s not all you can do.

As the article on Scoop.IT points out

” Email may seem like an oversaturated communication channel today, but email campaigns still nurture leads, increase sales, and CONVERT CUSTOMERS 3X MORE THAN SOCIAL MEDIA. It’s a no brainer.”

So why  is email marketing effective today when we are overloaded with emails?

Email marketing allows you to reach out to your current and prospective customers and keep them updated and engaged with targeted information on the latest deals and news about your products and services.

While many consider email marketing to be the modern day equivalent of the free junk paper catalogs we receive in a traditional mailbox it has the huge advantage of being able to be effectively tracked.  Through email marketing services you can:

• To discover what subject lines worked
• discover what email content worked
• what time of day
• what links did the receiver click on
• then based on the receivers decisions automatically send them a customised following up newsletter or email.

Let that sink in for a moment….. emails marketing can basically work like a personal sales assistant by having a follow up line that re-enforces standard sales techniques!!!!

So what to look for in an online newsletter/e-marketing provider:

• ease of use- the admin area or dashboard has to be user friendly and make it easy for you to import mailing lists etc
• be able to create custom demographics so you can really target your emails to suit specific customers
• provides you with the ability to easily create responsive emails – the majority of mail is now opened on a phone or tablet
• reporting features so you can track what worked and what didn’t work, who has unsubscribe, who forwarded what emails
• automation features so that emails can be sent based on receivers actions. for example if someone didn’t open an email you could send them a follow up one with an engaging  subject line to trying encourage them to open the email this time
• scheduling options – being able to schedule an email to go out automatically
• feature to ensure or reduce the possibility of you being blacklisted!!!
• Integration with other third party tools

Ok enough about the talk what about some recommendations

Mailchimp

Pro’s

• Pretty funky/chimpy
• for premium accounts completely full featured
• A lot of help videos and tutorials
• 90% of the features needed are available in the free accounts
• social sharing in free account
• Responsive emails in free accounts
• segmentation in free account
• easily integrated with third party software such as WordPress
• RSS to email
• custom sign up forms

Con’s

• sometimes the navigation is too funky/smart for its own good so you can’t find the right link to click on next
• automation is only available in premium paid for accounts
• Even with a small list you have to pay to remove mailchimps logo in emails

Aweber

Pros

• full featured 30 day trial
• isn’t bloated with alot of wizards are extra features
• A lot of help videos and tutorials
• segmentation in free account
• easily integrated with third party software such as WordPress
• RSS to email
• custom sign up forms

Cons

• no free version after the 30 day trial
• interface is a bit outdated
• it assumes you understand the terminology

Benchmark

Pro’s

• free full featured plan for up to 2000 subscribers
• Real time reporting
• Responsive emails
• sign up forms
• simple autoresponders
• not as straight forward third party software such as WordPress integration

Con’s

• doesn’t have as many features as aweber or mailchimp
• only simple autoresponders

And there are many many more 🙂 But at this point in time I think the best thing to do test out the 3 above and see which one best meets your needs!!!

Further reading: https://litmus.com/blog/we-analyzed-13-billion-opens-to-discover-where-subscribers-read-email-infographic