What are the benefits of social media marketing?

Posted on by Shawn S

Social Media Marketing has many benefits to businesses, they include:

1. Increased exposure of your business and products

2. Expand your customer base

3. Provides fast and efficient ways for contacting with customers and prospects

4. Allows interaction between you and your clients in a timely manner

5. Keeps you updated on new products and services

6. Enables you to communicate with your clients at anytime, anywhere

7. Increases brand awareness

8. Builds loyalty among your customers

9. Helps you find new customers

10. Provides insight on how people perceive your products or services 11. Gives you the opportunity to provide customer service at anytime, anywhere

12. Increases traffic to your website

13. Enhances the customer experience by responding to reviews online and providing follow-up information

14. Provides a way for you to determine which products or services are in high demand 15. Increases your search engine optimization (SEO) rankings 16. Provides expert advice and support for your customers

17. Gives you access to a global market

18. Does not require much management from you after set up

However, there are also disadvantages of social media marketing to businesses as well:

1. Can attract negative attention

2. Requires time and effort

3. Social media managers need people skills

4. Sites can be hacked

What do you think about digital marketing?

Posted on by Shawn S


It’s an industry term for the use of digital technologies to attract potential customers to different products. It can be used for marketing fundraising, promoting not-for-profit ventures, and attracting activity within business environments.

The people who are cashing in at the moment are those who have expertise in SEO – search engine optimisation skills – which is essentially optimising websites so that they rank highly when you do a Google search. This includes by making it easy for Googlebots to crawl your site, ensuring that there are no disparities between mobile and desktop versions of your pages, having quality content including key words on every page plus backlinks from other sites pertinent to your interests. With so many businesses now leveraging digital platforms as their main point of contact with customers, there is significant demand for these services.

The trick to success in the digital marketing world is knowing what will drive consumer behaviour and spending your money on actually getting those results – not throwing all kinds of messages out there hoping something sticks. It’s about being extremely targeted with your messages to an audience that you know are interested and motivated with a product or service that is valuable enough for them to take the next step.

A good example is the recent video I released on how we can drastically reduce household waste and even turn it into a valuable resource. With over 2.5 million views in just two weeks, generating interest from all around Australia as well as New Zealand and America, there is now significant demand for me to present the information in workshops and courses so that people can take practical action. This would never have happened if I’d just put up a normal post about recycling.

Source: digital marketing agencies North Sydney

There are other elements to be aware of including branding – branding yourself as well as your business or product, storytelling to make it more emotionally engaging – and the use of video which is on the rise. The first step is to leverage all your digital assets including social media channels like Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest etc as well as email marketing before working out how best you can reach your market.

Start by getting clear on who are main audience is and what their needs are. From that you can gather data and information so you can create a specific and targeted marketing plan to meet their needs. Google is the number one source for this with tools like Google Analytics helping to determine how people interact with your business or website. You can even use it to reach out to them directly via forms on your website or mobile apps.

As more people start to recognise that happiness does not lie in consumerism, more options are becoming available for people to make choices that are both sustainable and affordable. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how this develops over the coming months as there is already significant demand for these types of resources.

How can I start the Amazon affiliate marketing step by step?

Posted on by Shawn S

Step 1: Find a niche

-Figuring out your topic is key, as this determines what products to target as an affiliate for. For example, if you picked travel as your niche, you would choose between different destinations. If books was the niche, you could decide to go with fiction or non-fiction categories.

Step 2: Create a piece of content

This part is really up to the inclination of the individual wanted to incorporate into this business strategy. The idea here is that by creating content that links back and relates in some way to the potential company’s brand/products/pages on Amazon, there will be MORE chances for return traffic from interested readers because they’re coming from inside the needed site (your own).

For instance, if you are looking to market a Kindle book about cooking with quinoa, there are TONS of websites out there that serve up recipes. Perhaps one of these sites may have an upcoming piece that you can pitch the idea to them for your own brand/product/page on Amazon’s website. If not or even if they agree, you can always create your own piece of content, using a few choice keywords related to what you are looking to promote. This way, the reader will arrive at the blog post/article/page with a solid understanding of who is being talked about and what it’s being done from before they decide to buy into this idea or not. If you have a working relationship with other affiliate bloggers or marketers already, it’s also good to shoot them a quick query about your products/brands/pages as well as what kind of content they normally post about.

Step 3: Determining the best performing products for you and poking around on their sites to see if there are any holes

-This part is particularly helpful to see what other products are being sold alongside yours. If you’ve picked up a book on quinoa that is also being promoted for avocado oil, it’s good to have at least that reminder to help remind yourself of other related items or possible ideas.

Step 4: Targeting the best keywords for your specific niche

-Although this article is primarily focused on Amazon affiliate marketing, it’s important to not forget about SEO (search engine optimization) when it comes to writing your content in an optimized manner. For the cooking quinoa example given in step 2, there are plenty of good keywords that can be targeted for things like “healthy recipes” or maybe “vegan recipes”.

-In addition to this, it would be a good practice to see what kind of products are displayed on the top spots of Amazon’s search results. If you notice anything that is missing from your own product/page/brand page, it might be a good idea to use those holes as keywords, or at least find out what the top keywords are.

-A good hint step in this process is to check for Amazon’s advertising platform, where you can see what kind of ads are running alongside their search results. This way, you know who the competition is and how they’re getting there.

Step 5: Finding your product pages on Amazon

Once all your research is done, it’s time to start poking around at what you’ve found. Figure out which best performing products are being sold right now on the site and which ones would be most appealing to your audience/clients/readers that have been coming back because of the content you’ve already produced for them. If there are any holes in where the information is being displayed, it’s a good idea to fill them in. At the same time, seeing which products are being sold with low reviews and/or bad ratings may be a sign of a product worth doing a better review of.

Step 6: Testing on an ad campaign on Amazon’s platform

If you have been working with another blogger, marketer or friends that have some experience with Amazon affiliate marketing, you might be able to get together a small test campaign to see how it goes. In addition, if you have spent any amount of time on Google shopping and know how their system works, there are various ad campaigns out there within their interface as well. Just make sure not to duplicate the same ad on both pages at once, as Google Shopping will simply drop your bid price if you do.

Step 7: Optimizing based on the results from step 6

-If it is a small campaign, make sure to track everything carefully and look over what keywords are being used. Once again, these keywords should be related to the product while at the same time not matching up with any other similar products to avoid ad cannibalization.

-If it is an ad campaign, optimize based on CTR (click-through rate) and CPC (cost per click) to see what’s working best for your audience. If you notice that certain keywords aren’t performing well enough, drop them and prioritize the other keywords.

-While all of this is being done, continue to work on your SEO content strategy so you have plenty of blog posts for people typing in the main keywords related to your niche that are also ranking well in Google search. This should be a continuous process while at the same time always looking out for new ways to tie it all together.

-If things are going well enough, it may be worth starting to scale this up into a bigger campaign that can bring in more clicks and sales for your products on Amazon. If not, you might have found out some keywords don’t work as well compared to others so there’s no point trying to continue driving traffic with them. Delete the ad campaign and try again with a new one that has better performing keywords from your research from step 5.

-Throughout all of this, make sure to stay on top of the organic search rankings for any product pages you’ve added in Step 7. If anything is slipping, it may be time to reoptimize some things and carry on.

I hope this article has been helpful for anyone that’s looking into ways to get started with Amazon affiliate marketing. I know it may be a long process, but the nice thing about this is that you can do everything from the comfort of your own home and there isn’t any outlay costs apart from what you would spend normally on Adwords campaigns. If you’d like to discuss this further or have some questions, feel free to contact me at any time! Cheers.

Why is affiliate marketing the best way to make money for beginners?

Posted on by Shawn S

Affiliate marketing is a process of earning money by promoting other people’s products and getting a commission for each purchased item. I know that sounds kinda shady but it really isn’t! And it can be a great way to get started with making money online because there’s no startup cost or risk, you can work from behind your own computer, laptop or tablet and even on the go from your mobile.

If you have an interest in some niche field like fashion, beauty, sports – you have the best chance of success if you find some brand(s) in that niche field and use them as affiliate! There are two ways of doing this: 

1) You personally choose to promote some company X 

2) Choose to promote an affiliate app

That second one sounds pretty cool – I guess it’s kinda like the new trend in the web 2.0 era where people join some website and can get paid for recommending other companies to sign up at this same platform! Well, platforms such as ShareASale or ClickBank are websites that help you find suitable products to promote. You sign up, browse through the offers and then you pick one that interests you!

This is what I did when I first got started with affiliate marketing: 

I signed up with ClickBank and bought a few books on how to market effectively online, why not give it a try?! This way I could learn about all the amazing things I could do with affiliate marketing – so if I didn’t choose this one particular freelancing gig, freelancing guru would have made me some money regardless! Here’s a list of best books on affiliate marketing:

The first book is for complete beginners and will teach you how to build your first website and make it profitable. It will also point you in the direction of good hosting services and tools that you can use when building your site.

The second one is for beginners but also entrepreneurs who want to increase conversions on their existing website (or build a new one). It goes into much more detail about how to convert visitors into customers, buyers and subscribers.

It doesn’t matter whether you decide to go for option one or two, you will need to build your website! It could be a simple blog where you write articles about the topic of interest and point out products that are worth buying. Or it can be a fully-fledged eCommerce portal which sells items directly from manufacturers – but the latter is much more complicated and requires some coding and design skills!

So, you’ve decided to go for affiliate marketing and built your website – now what? You need to decide on a payment method which is the easiest and most common: PayPal! Just make sure not to spam your links all over the internet as it’s against their TOS. Also, avoid low quality websites from Russia or the Philippines as they tend to spam links everywhere and will get your account banned.

Another important aspect is content. Most services will allow you to create a website with a given set of themes, but if you want to be taken seriously by Google then you need to put some extra work into creating truly unique content that provides true value for potential customers