How SEO Can Help Small Businesses Grow?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is still not a household term that every Filipino knows about. However, SEO has become one of the most important online trend and marketing strategies that every small businesses have taken advantage of. With SEO, you have the power to get closer to potential customers and increase leads to your business. 

Here's a scenario:

Juan is applying for a working visa in Canada. He was advised by his immigration consultant to get an IELTS certificate since it is a requirement for foreign workers. So Juan goes online, he then searches for the "best IELTS review center". Search engines like Google will give the results and lots of websites rolled up on the search engine results page (SERP). Juan clicks on the website that is on the number 1 spot in results page. Juan basically become a lead to the business. If Juan likes your services, he will contact you or visit your office, making him your client. Of course, business owners must make it sure that Juan finds the information he needs to have - make sure your website is user-friendly and informative.

You don't need direct selling, let your clients find you - that's one of the powers of SEO. With the booming presence of smart phones and affordability of internet services (not to mention the freebies telcos are offering to subscribers), reaching your audience should be a piece of cake. 

How to SEO? 

Now that's the question that requires technical knowledge. Let's apply SEO to real life situations. Imagine that you are applying for a job. Then to impress the employer, you need to make sure you have the best portfolio and your referrals confirmed your skills for the job. That's how SEO work, you are the website then search engines will be your employer. You need to have the knowledge and skills so that search engines will rank you up on their results page. Of course it won't happen overnight. You need to work really hard to get the promotion and be on top. Not to mention, Google and other search engines are always changing and updating their algorithm. Be sure to keep up with the trend.

Technical knowledge isn't enough for SEO. One needs to establish authority to a particular niche. SEO or search marketing shouldn't be as far as traditional targeting in getting into the shoes of the customers. It's a longer investment but the wait will be worth it if you want long term results. 

What is a Blog? How Can We Earn Money from It?

A blog is actually a dynamic website where one can publish informative articles. In layman's term, it's a journal, wherein you can write and publish whatever you have in mind. Famous blogging platforms include Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal and Tumblr.

I know why you are reading this post because you certainly want to earn money from your blog! There are actually two things you can do to earn money from blogging. 

1. review or feature a service or a product (directly to the business or as an affiliate)
2. run ads from several ad publishing network like Google Adsense

Product Review/Feature

For the first option, you can contact the business owner or representative that you will be writing a review or feature of their products on your blog. Of course, to convince them, you have got to show statistics of your website traffic, number of followers, and how popular you are to a particular niche. They will be paying you for your blog's popularity and your authority in a specific niche that their products or services are categorized into. Who would want to pay someone if they aren't sure that the  review and feature of their products/services will be read to the right audience, right? If you are not comfortable in contacting business owners because it might take some convincing or time, you can join affiliate marketing sites like Amazon.com. Amazon.com sells diverse range products from electronics, clothing, books to magazines. Amazon also feature third-party sellers. To earn money from Amazon, you can review or feature their products (with your affiliate code in the product link) on your blog. You can earn money when someone buy the product using your affiliate link. 

On the other hand, don't be surprised if a business owner will contact you to feature their products that is to assume that you are already popular in your niche and your authority is undeniably high. Mostly, business owners will send the product for you to review and test. The product will be yours! This is very common to those who are already running popular and authoritative gadgets sites like pocketables.com.

Running Ads from Ad Network Sites like Adsense

You can become a publisher of various advertising network by signing up on their sites and run their ads on your blog. Once you will become a member, all you have to do is to copy the advertising code or a script and paste it on your blog. You will get paid when your visitors click on that ad. These script or codes are programmed to display ads based on the content of your blog. You don't have the total control of what product or service is to be displayed from Google Adsense unlike when you are writing a post about a product review or feature. 

Earning Money Online in a Professional Way - A Quick Overview

The internet has been a very important discovery to all of us. It boosted the use of computers not just in businesses and different industries but as well as to the weirdest individual interest you can imagine (hello Youtube videos and funny memes). To sum it up, we use the internet for education, entertainment, communication, and now - earning money online.

Here are some of the ways that one of us can earn money online in the most professional way.

Sell Your Products/Services Online

If you are a business owner then the internet is your best friend. The internet covers wider audience as compared to brick and mortar establishments. If you have enough budget, you can create a website that presents the products or the services you provide. The website will serve as a portfolio of what the customers can expect from you. You can put up a cart system so that your customers can pay online at their utmost convenience. Apart from that, you can optimize your website to make it more visible to search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This online strategy is called SEO or seach engine optimization.

If you think that creating and maintaining a website can be too big for you, then you can post your products to free classifieds sites online. These include the following:

• sulit.com.ph
• ayosdito.ph
• craigslist.com.ph
• olx.com.ph
• 88db

Of course, to better your sales, you can create a business page either via Facebook or Google Plus so that your costumers can reach you easily.

• Facebook page
• Google Plus page

Just make it sure that you are providing the contact details and the address of your establishment so that any potential costumer will be able to contact you easily.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is performance-based or commission-based type of marketing strategy. It is also called referral marketing. Meaning, you can earn money based on the items or services you have marketed. As an affiliate marketer, you don't have to own the items or the service, instead you will be the one selling these things  from the merchant or business owner to their costumers. For example, if you will become an affiliate marketer of Amazon then you are only entitled to earn a small percentage of the items you sold. 

There's also a special type of affiliate marketing that has become popular these days. It is called reward system or loyalty websites. In this type of marketing, registered users will perform various tasks - either sharing links, answering surveys or watching videos that contain different advertisements from various businesses. These users will earn points (which can be exchanged into cash and gifts) depending on what type of activity they are doing. The reward system varies from one to another. 

Keep in mind that there are also direct affiliate marketing programs and indirect ones. Direct affiliate programs are those which come from the business directly and you are only selling items from one business. For example of this is Entertainment Earth and Ultimate Pumpkin Stencils. On the other hand, indirect affiliate marketing programs are from those affiliate directories. These affiliate directories combine different reward  and referral programs of various businesses. The advantage of signing up into affiliate directories is that they offer wide array of products but the referral program can vary. Apart from that, the directory will also get percentage from what you earn. Some businesses opt for this kind of affiliate program because running a reward system can be of high maintenance. Amazon Associates both offer direct affiliate program and indirect affiliate program from their third party merchants.

Here are some of the most popular affiliate programs you can explore.

• Amazon Associates
• Click Bank
• Commission Junction
• Clix Galore
• Churpchurp
• 8share.com

- Blogging/Publishing Ads

Blogging or publishing ads is basically a type of affiliate marketing. If you are into writing and you have a blog, you can sign up to various ad publishing companies and run some of their ads to earn money. How this works? Basically, after you sign up, you will be given a chunk of codes that contain a tracker that will monitor the number of times the ads have been displayed and clicked. You can earn money if the ads displayed on your blog have been clicked by your visitor leading them into the advertiser's landing page or website. With blogs, you can have total control of what is to write and you can have the option on the placement of the ads. Here are some of the ad publishing sites you can sign up to:

• Google Adsense
• Infolinks
• Kontera
• Chitika

- Review sites/article submission sites

Review sites or article submission sites are also part of affiliate marketing programs. Users can submit any articles in various niche as long as they follow the terms and conditions presented by the admins of the website. These articles will be reviewed and once approved, it will be posted on your behalf. You basically become a ghost writer and you will not be credited on your work. Apart from that, the admin of the website will be the one controlling the placement of the ads.  If you are a control freak, you can always opt to have your own blog. Or if you want the best of both worlds, go ahead and try these two methods. Here are some of the review sites where you can earn money.

• infobarrel.com
• squidoo.com
• hubpages.com

Getting a job online

If you are not interested in any of the above options, you can always get a job online. There are plenty of choices you can choose from. These jobs can range from graphics design, web development and design, SEO, data entry, marketers, article writing, video making, customer support to accounting. The following are some popular websites that host a lot of freelance jobs:

• easyoutsource.com.ph
• onlinejobs.ph
• odesk.com
• 99designs.com
• fiverr.com

Remember, it takes a lot of hard work and dedication to earn money online. It is not something you can achieve overnight. The internet provides a lot of information on how we can productive while we are online. I hope the ones discussed above will provide an idea for you start earning money without investing too much. Go and visit other post to have a closer look of the above strategies.