Proper formulation of online marketing strategies is necessary for remarkable growth and prosperity. However, it is not everyone’s cup of tea. It requires sound knowledge of business promotion and online marketing trends. An understanding of the basic concepts of online marketing may be of great help. The ultimate aim of online businesses is to achieve high conversion rates, which is quite difficult to attain in practical terms.

Quick facts:

• Approximately 61 percent of companies carry out less than five tests every month.

• Even a slight delay in page response time can result in 7 percent reduction in conversions.

Here are a few ways to increase the conversion rates dramatically:

• Perform A/B testing - A/B testing (sometimes called split testing) can be defined as a process of comparing two versions of a web page to see which one performs better. You can test your website’s headlines, page layout and navigation, order buttons, etc. No doubt, A/B testing leads to better conversions and substantial growth.

• Create better value proposition – Improve the font size, use innovative designs, integrate relevant images and write useful content to attract the maximum number of users and improve your presence as well. Use of CTAs on your home page will be an added advantage to improveconversions.

• Create a sales funnel – This simply means creating a worthy buying process for your customers rather than compelling them to purchase your product. You need to give them a free demo or a free trial to gain their confidence.

• Never use complex language –Always use simple, clear and easy to understand language. Write your content in a conversational form for better understanding of your customers. If your customers understand your products and their benefits they will definitely take quick actions.

• Increase trust – Websites often use social proofs, however, you should also use well-known articles and other resource material. Show your physical address and email IDs to exhibit that your organisation is real. In fact, you must display the name, bio and photos of your team members to build trust and confidence.

• Use a professional website template – This is the most important factor, when it comes to improving conversion rates; you must use high quality professional website to engage your customers. Its colour, layout and navigation should be pleasing to the human eye.

• Never irritate your users– Some business websites use flashing banners, blinking text, pop-ups and full screen ads, which distract their users. Avoid such distracting elements.

Quick facts:

• Videos on landing pages can improve conversion rates up to 80 percent.

• A/B testing is the most used testing method for improving conversion rates.

If your website is unable to attract enough traffic and produce results, has high bounce rates and faces tough competition in its niche, despite you investing in several online marketing measures, it is time you go for SEO. With the help of strong, measurable and proven SEO techniques, it is possible to achieve top rankings and visibility. In fact, businesses can drive high traffic volumes to their websites and attract new customers.

Here are a few proven SEO techniques to achieve higher traffic to your website:

• Missing Title Tags – You should never ignore the importance oftitle tags. Title tags help your customers understand about a specific page and its content. This will improve your web page’s visibility.

• Use 301 redirection – If you have changed your website address or domain name, use 301 permanent redirection to help your users browse to your new site. This is the most efficient, safest and search engine friendly technique for webpage redirection.

• Have proper website structure – Your website should have proper structure, well defined paths and use of breadcrumbs to ease e-navigation. This will help both users and robots to crawl and read your website in an easy way.

• Use anchor text - Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. This makes indexing and browsing much easier. You can use descriptive anchor text to gain more prominence.

• Broken Links - Broken links or a dead links are a link on a web page that no longer work. Such links can damage your website's rankings and usability. So, fix them as soon as possible to improve your site’s usability.

• Dead-end pages - A dead-end page has no outgoing links. You should fix such pages to improve the experience of your users.

• Duplicate content – Search engines and users dislike duplicate content. Try to write fresh content on each and every page of your website. This will improve your brand image and enhance the experience of your customers.

• Robots.txt – Use this file to give instructions to web robots about your website. This is the best way to block unwanted URLs and improve your site’s performance on the web.

• Use image descriptions - Image descriptions provide textual information about non-text/image content that appear on your site. You can incorporate your keywords for better rankings and traffic.

• Avoid Doorway pages - Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing. This type of manipulation is wrong and deters search engines.

All these elements will enhance your credibility and build trust. So, it is better to follow proven SEO techniques to achieve a good amount of traffic, generate new leads, increase brand exposure, attain positive ROI and much more.

If you have decided to sell your products or services online, it is the right time for you to choose the best e-commerce platform. Nowadays, various types of e-commerce platforms are available on the web, making it quite difficult to choose the best one. However, when it comes to extensive features and flexibility, nobody can ignore the potential of Volusion. Volusion is a fully hosted, all-in-one e-commerce platform that allows you to own both an e-commerce website and a shopping cart software.

Volusion allows you to choose an e-commerce template, set up product categories and upload inventory.

Here are a few reasons to choose Volusion for your online store:

• Availability of beautiful designs – Volusion offers various types of high quality designs and wonderful layouts to create an online store. The biggest advantage is that you can customise any template to meet your business needs.

• Inventory management – Volusion helps you to create product listings with images. You can monitor your stock and manage it efficiently with the help of its value-added features. In addition, it is also easy to use and handle.

• Attract customers – Volusion is known for its social media and SEO tools. It helps you to optimise your content to attract new customers.

• Safe payment options – Business owners choose Volusion because it has secure payment processing options. You can easily update your stock and manage your shipping options online.

• SEO friendly – You can edit your robots.txt file, fix critical errors and make your online store search engine friendly.

• Regular support – Volusion offers complete support (24/7 live support) and assistance to store owners.

• Coupon codes – Store owners can provide coupon codes and gift cards to their customers to improve sales.

• Social media sharing – Customers can easily share products from your store with their social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, etc.

• Data access and reporting – Youcan easily generate reports, sales data, and users’ statistics and even analyse your site’s performance.

Quick facts:

• Over 40,000 stores are currently using the Volusion software.

• Over $21 billion in merchant sales worldwide to date.

Therefore, choose Volusion to sell your products or services and build strong relations with your customers and to beat your competitors. Its advanced features will help your company to grow beyond your wildest dreams and improve its operational efficiency.

Social bookmarking is a highly popular technique amongst SEO professionals. In fact, it is one of the best and the most effective methods to achieve referral traffic. Social bookmarking is a centralised online service, which allows users to add, edit and share bookmarks of web documents. Most of business owners make use of social bookmarking but not in the most efficient way. If used systematically, social bookmarking alone can attract a large amount of traffic to your website.

Here are a few tips to use social bookmarking sites more efficiently:

• Focus on headings – Apt headings attract new customers and improve their overall experience. You must provide attractive headings to your articles. This will certainly improve traffic to your website.

• Write short descriptions – You must write short and meaningful descriptions to engage customers. If possible, try to create buzz around a specific topic to grab the attention of your customers.

• Choose the right category – If you want to make your content viral, always choose the right category. Putting your article in the "miscellaneous" will take you nowhere.

• Create a good profile – Most people start submitting their links abruptly without furnishing their complete details. Always create a good profile to build your brand image and achieve authenticity. You also need to increase your followers to make your presence felt.

• Always submit fresh articles – Always submit fresh, original, latest news or articles to inform and update your customers. Boring and old news may deter your audiences.

• Respond to comments - Always respond to comments and make people feel happy. This is a great way to make new friends and expand your network.

• Go with the trend – Always choose trendy topics to achieve the maximum number of clicks. You must explore your industry and its latest advancements.

• Spread your network – Find your business niche, follow industry leaders and analyse your competitors. Use URL shortening system for fast sharing.

• Share images – To attract new customers, you must share funny images, videos, stories and infographics.

In addition, you should use Google analytics to track your referral traffic and other tools to monitor your success rate. Today, you can use various social bookmarking sites (Stumbleupon, Delicious, Reddit, Pinterest and many more) to drive huge traffic to your websites. These sites are phenomenal and can improve your website’s visibility on the web.

Quick facts:

• Stumbleupon drives over 50 percent of social media traffic in the United States.

• The average Stumble page view lasts 72 seconds which is 25% longer than the average web page views.

Today, business owners use content marketing to combat various types of challenges and capitalise on new opportunities. However, they often fail to attain desired advantages. The reason could be anything, from poor content marketing strategy to its poor execution. However, it must be noted that content marketing alone can transform your business and improve it’s ROI. It can empower your overall marketing strategy and expand your reach in a strategic manner.

Here are a few ideas to make your content more effective and productive:

• Use your content to guide your customers. Create engaging content that can solve the problems of your customers in an interactive manner. This will attract more traffic and improve the conversion rate.

• Use social mediums to extend your reach. Most business owners neglect it; however, it can make a huge difference and attract the maximum number of customers. This will eventually boost up the productivity and visibility of your content.

• Always write substantial and relevant posts with the maximum number of examples, case studies and explanations to help your customers. Substantial posts are useful and add value to your marketing efforts. This will also improve your visibility on the web and increase your traffic.

• Never ignore the power of guest blogging. This is the best technique to show your knowledge of your industry. This also gives you a valuable backlink, which will improve your site’s backlink profile.

• Always provide unique content to your customers to gain confidence and build your brand.

• You can reframe your old content and create visually appealing presentations, videos and case studies to engage customers.

• Always follow a content strategy and syndicate your content to gain the maximum results. This will attract new customers and at the same time improve their understanding.

• Create evergreen, trendy and short headings, sub-headings, videos, infographics and email content for higher conversion rates. Always use beautiful images and CTAs to attract traffic.

• Monitor your success by using Google Analytics. This will help you to streamline your content marketing strategy and create a powerful brand in your niche.

• Always focus on your audiences rather than keywords. Focus on producing high quality content for your audiences so that they can take informed decisions.

Today, businesses cannot afford to ignore content marketing due to its ever growing prominence on the web. In fact, it helps them to focus on the right opportunities, align their marketing strategies and bring miraculous changes.

Quick facts:

• 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.

• By 2017, 51% of companies will have an executive in their organisation who will be directly responsible for an overall content marketing strategy.

• 63% of marketers create content according to buyers’ persona; 38% by vertical; 30% by geography; and 30% by account or customer.

Business owners all around the world use different types of platforms to widen their network and expand their businesses. However, they often miss the world's largest professional network – LinkedIn. It is the best professional network with more than 433 million members in 200 countries around the globe. Therefore, businesses must use this platform to make new connections, generate leads and increase their brand popularity.

In a nutshell, LinkedIn is the most dynamic, flexible and vital platform for businesses. Hence, make it a part of your digital marketing strategies.

Here are a few reasons to use LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn is important for growing businesses – Whether a business is small or large, it must expand its reach and make new connections in order to stay ahead of the competition. Therefore, businesses must use this social platform to attract B2B marketers.

• Business owners love LinkedIn – Business owners love LinkedIn because it connects them with global professionals. They use this platform as a tool to improve the image of their brand as well.

• Good platform for product launch – Nowadays, more and more businesses use LinkedIn to launch their products or services as well as to spread news and other vital information about them.

• Find new talent – It is a perfect place to find new and upcoming talents. Businesses can easily contact staffing agencies and other placement companies to recruit professionals.

• Effective for lead generation – LinkedIn has the ability to improve business leads and conversion rates. In fact, it is much more effective than other networking sites. In addition, it is the best platform for B2B marketers.

• Content distribution – LinkedIn is the most suitable platform to share valuable content. Businesses establish their brand and influence their customers with the help of this platform.

• Improve professional relations – LinkedIn is the most versatile platform to improve business relations. It helps to solidify connections and attract new people (from the same niche) as well.

• Increase brand visibility –This is the best networking site to grow and expand a brand’s visibility. You can optimise your profile for greater online visibility. Use relevant keywords and descriptions to achieve prominence.

So, attract new customers, improve your brands’ visibility and influence your audiences in a professional way through LinkedIn.

Quick facts –

• 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute their content.

• LinkedIn has now surpassed Facebook as the #1 most important social platform for B2B marketers.

• LinkedIn is the third most commonly used social network for business owners.

Social media plays a vital role in every aspect of online marketing. Modern marketing teams understand the importance of social media and no wonder they use it to create buzz around their brands, products and services. Unfortunately most businesses are still unaware of the true power of social media.

Whether we like it or not the fact remains, we are living in an age where we can’t afford to wait for the opportunities to strike; that is why organisations need to be ahead of time. They need to use social media intelligence to generate the maximum value for their businesses.

Quick facts:

• A staggering 77% of B2C companies have acquired new customers through their Facebook presence.

• Twitter has approximately 320 million monthly active users.

• More than 16 billion photos have been uploaded to Instagram since its launch.

Here are a few tips to utilise these social media sites effectively:

• Spend time – Since social media marketing is a time consuming task, you must give special attention to the timing of your posts on different sites. This form of marketing requires deep involvement, toengage your customers and develop relationships with them.

• Generate traffic – You need to be creative, innovative and experimental while using social media platforms. You should understand the current marketing trends before developing your content. This will maximise the impact of your efforts.

• Post regularly –It is very important to keep your customers engaged besides attracting potential customers. This is how you can convert a browser into your fan in no time. You must share interesting and informative content with your customers to inspire them and build trust in the community.

• Analyse your competitors – You must find out what your competitors are doing to attract new customers. You must identify what sort of information they are using to improve their customer base. Thus, you can improve your social media strategy and its effectiveness.

• Post valuable content – You should postinteresting and useful content for your customers. Always write structured content. Create short, clear, practical, informative and crisp videos for your customers so that they can understand your message.A focused content campaign improves your customers’ engagement and helps you to achieve more traffic. Your originality will reflect in your brand and improves its reach.

• Business promotion – You can promote your business through brochures, infographics and other materials. You can post discount coupons and offers for your customers to encourage them to act.

However, you must be very careful while posting any content on social sites. You must proofread and edit them to make them look more credible. Unfiltered content can tarnish your image and may repel your potential customers.

In addition, you can use advanced Social media tools to promote your website efficiently. You can use Hootsuite, Agora Pulse, Social Oomph, Sprout Social, Buffer, MeetEdgar, Crowd Booster, etc. to drive more traffic. Make sure you strike the right balance.

It goes without saying that online business promotion is what every business craves. There are various advanced methods of promoting an online business such as article writing, video creation, content distribution, press releases and much more. However, when it comes tomarket exposure, traffic and conversion, nothing can beat press releases. Press releases are one of the best methods of conveying a company’s message. Press releases have the ability to generate the right buzz at the right place at the right time. In fact, it can spread your message to millions of people in seconds and establish your brand identity.

Unquestionably, press releases extend your website’s reach and boost its overall visibility. No doubt, a well written press release helps your cause immensely.

Quick facts:

• 80 million people get their news online every day.

Here are a few benefits of writing a press release for your business:

• Delivers good results - Press releases deliver outstanding results for any business, irrespective of its size, profile or area of operation.

• Instant exposure – A press release is the best way to achieve instant exposure. This is good for both small and medium business owners. They can easily communicate their messages, promotional offers and much more in an effective manner.

• Improves sales - Press releases can boost your profit margins, by highlighting noteworthy benefits and features of your products or services. Press releases can easily grab the attention of customers and encourage them to make their decisions.

• Supports marketing plan – Online business owners use press releases to improve their marketing strategies and generate new sales leads. Business owners develop precise press releases for their targeted customers.

• Branding - Press releases are one of the most effective ways to build trust and credibility in the market. Business owners can improve their brand awareness and increase traffic to their websites. No doubt, this is the finest way to update and educate your customers.

• SEO benefits - Press releases offer invaluable backlinks, which are good for websites to gain prominence. This is an organic way to achieve backlinks. You should also optimise your press release to increase your online visibility. Distribute them to the maximum number of online directories and media outlets for better exposure. In addition, you also need to use CTAs.

Online business leaders and marketing evangelists recommend using press releases for an effective business promotion campaign. This is a professional method of communication and can influence buyers’ behaviour. However, you should keep your message simple, concise and specific for better conversions.

If you want your website to generate more sales, improve traffic, decrease bounce rate, engage more and more customers and satisfy them at the same time, just fine tune your home page and see the difference. Yes, your website’s home page is the first element that can impress your customers. Therefore, it should be highly impressive and effective. A better designed home page can easily generate greater traffic and engage more customers.

Today, most of the website owners redesign home page in order to make it much more functional, authentic and creative rather than a piece of content. They not only integrate better images and social proofs with it, but also make it easily navigable for their customers. Of course, there are many more elements that need to be focused, such as:

• Heading- Your home page should have clear and simple heading. It should be free from jargons and directly communicate with your customers. In fact, you should diligently use your sub-headings to convey your message efficiently.

• Integrate Call-to-Action – Youshould use call-to-actions for customer engagement. Your CTA should be visually attractive and should match the theme of your website design. You should optimise your CTA according to your needs.

• Compelling images – People love to see high-quality images; you should use highly attractive and business-specific images on your home page to make it look more impressive. You can also integrate high-quality videos for more customer engagement.

• Benefits – Never forget to mention about your products or services and their benefits. Use direct and easy to understand language for your customers.

• Navigation – In order to decrease the bounce rate, it is important to use clear navigation on your website. It also helps in improving conversion rate. Navigation menu should be visible and hierarchical for greater understanding.

• Content – Always create high-quality content for your website; it can impress users and make them take immediate actions. Your content should be thoughtfully optimised and have CTAs. You can include case studies, whitepapers, guides and e-books.

• List features – You should also list features along with the benefits for more conversion. In fact, it helps users to know more about the products or services. It will make your websitemuch more strong, functional, useful and user-centric.

No doubt, all these elements can make your home page much more compelling and effective. It will have a significant impact on your search engine optimisation efforts also. So, influence your customers by creating influential home page.