Thursday, April 6, 2017

Content Marketing - Blogs

What is Blog?

A blog is an excellent tool for creating and publishing content. It can be your website’s home base or a hub for your content, where you can write posts such as product announcements, service guides, thought leadership articles, press announcements, and more. It is basically a platform for you to share your ideas and thoughts with the world.

Content Marketing - Lifecycle Emails

What are Lifecycle Emails?

Lifecycle emails are basically permission-based emails that offer value to your customers. When your customers sign-up for your product or service, you can prompt them for these email subscriptions.
eNewsletters are typically distributed weekly or monthly. Let’s look at when and why you can send these emails.

Content Marketing - eNewsletters

What are eNewsletters?

Like lifecycle emails, eNewsletters are also permission-based emails that offer value to your customers. When your customers sign-up for your product or service, you can prompt them for these eNewsletters' subscriptions.

Content Marketing - WhitePapers

What is a Whitepaper?

A whitepaper, also called a research paper, is a kind of an extended report which focuses on a particular topic, elaborates it, and explains it in detail.

Content Marketing - Case Studies

Both whitepapers and case studies are primarily B2B marketing content, however there is a thin line of difference in the way they work.

What is a Case Study?

Case studies feature a client story, narrating how a client used your product or service to achieve its business goals.

Content Marketing - eBooks

What is an eBook?

An ebook is like a whitepaper but it is more informal, loose, and more playful. The language used is more everyday talk and is designed in a visual manner. The content must be entertaining and easily consumable with bold headlines, callouts, and bulleted lists.

Content Marketing - Digital Magazines

What is a Digital Magazine?

A digital magazine is a periodical, which is something in between a PDF and a traditional magazine. It can be a fortnightly or monthly magazine containing a variety of content from articles, videos, podcasts, and more.
A digital magazine is an awesome tool for presenting a ton of content that you already have but don’t want to host on your main website. For instance, you can create a digital magazine consisting of infographics,

Content Marketing - Mobile Apps

What are Mobile Applications?

Mobile as well as web-based applications are awesome tools for marketing your content to a populace, which is increasingly using their smartphones instead of their PCs to access the Internet.

Content Marketing - Web Apps

What are Web-based Applications?

Though mobile apps are in the trend, you should not limit yourself to these. You should also create web-based applications, which are built to serve a specific use and customer base; and can be accessed from desktops, laptops, and even mobiles.

Content Marketing - Podcasts

Podcast and webinars are spectacular pieces of content that can be easily consumed, by an audience, without any hassles. Unlike an online video, customers can listen to your podcast or webinar anytime, whether they’re driving or jogging. That being said, both podcasts and webinars can use videos. However, audio podcasts are more popular and preferred by most people, while a webinar typically is accompanied by online presentations.

Content Marketing - Webinars

In last chapter, we have learnt about podcast and how they can be used in content marketing. In this chapter we should learn about webinars.

What are Webinars?

A webinar, in contrast to podcasts, goes a bit further, as it is a participatory experience, where attendees can access the conference via a weblink or a meeting invitation.

Content Marketing - Infographics

What are Infographics?

Almost every business today creates a video or infographics as part of their content marketing program. In a business context, you can use videos to give customers a guided tour of your product or service. With infographics, you can help your customers understand a specific problem that you solve for them.

Content Marketing - Articles

What are Articles?

Whether they be the good old long-copy feature articles or the new-fangled, instruction based, step-by-step how-to ones, articles are essential to the success of your content marketing strategy. You can use articles to
  • Discuss industry trends
  • Offer solutions to typical concerns of customers
  • start a discussion

Content Marketing - Press Releases

What are Press Releases?

Like articles, press releases or online new releases as they are often called, are essential to provide your brand more exposure and recognition. Generally a press release comes under PR and marketing, and they help you to inform your potential buyers of your products and services.

Content Marketing - Social Media

How to Use Social Media Channels

Social media promotion has become an essential part of any content marketing strategy today. This includes B2B and B2C marketing aspects and covers different social media channels such as social sharing networks, video channels, photo sharing sites, online communities, and more.

Content Marketing - Examples

While there could be a thousand best examples of content marketing, we’ll discuss here three brands, who are creating the most compelling content, ideas, and strategies.

Content Marketing - Web Resources

There are plenty of web resources out there, but here we will highlight the top four resources for learning content marketing in a holistic manner. Since content marketing includes the whole gamut from content creation, search engine optimization and data analysis, the resources included here also have specialization in one or two of these areas.

Content Marketing - Quick Guide

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is known by many names such as inbound marketing, corporate journalism, branded media, native advertising, and customer publishing to name a few. However, the basic idea behind the strategy remains the same, i.e., to create and distribute content that engages and attracts a targeted audience, while encouraging them to take action which is profitable to a business.

Content Marketing - Useful Resources

The following resources contain additional information on Content Marketing. Please use them to get more in-depth knowledge on this topic.

Useful Links on Content Marketing

Discuss Content Marketing

Content Marketing is all about creating and distributing content that engages and attracts a targeted audience, while encouraging them to take action which is profitable to a business. This is a brief tutorial that explains how you can use content marketing to your advantage and promote your business.

A/B Testing – Overview

A/B Testing (also known as Split testing) defines a way to compare two versions of an application or a web page that enables you to determine which one performs better. It is one of the easiest ways to analyze an application or a web page to create a new version. Thereafter, both these versions can be compared to find the conversion rate, which further helps in finding the better performer of these two.

A/B Testing – How it Works

You can monitor the visitor’s actions using statistics and analysis to determine the version that yields a higher conversion rate. A/B Testing results are usually given in fancy mathematical and statistical terms, but the meaning behind the numbers are actually quite simple. There are two significant methods through which you can check conversion rates using A/B Testing −

A/B Testing – Why to Use?

A/B Testing is used to make business decisions based on the results derived from data, instead of just making predictions. It allows you to create variations of your website or app and then helps you to confirm or discard your decision to make changes.

A/B Testing – What to Test?

A/B Testing is about creating multiple variations of an application or a website and then comparing all these versions using samples to determine the best variation that has the maximum conversion rate. There are different types of variations, which can be applied to a web page or an application.

A/B Testing – Process

A/B Testing comprises of a set of processes that one must follow sequentially in order to arrive at a realistic conclusion. In this chapter, we will discuss in detail the steps of A/B Testing process that you can use to run tests on any web page −

A/B Testing – Collect Data

The data from Google Analytics can help you to find visitor behaviors. It is always advisable to collect enough data from the site. Try to find the pages with low conversion rates or high drop-off rates that can be improved. In this chapter, we will discuss a few tools which can be used to collect data for A/B Testing.

A/B Testing – Identify Goals

The next step is to set your conversion goals. Find the metrics that determine whether or not the variation is more successful than the original version. Goals come from your business objectives, so as an example, if you have to increase the sale of clothes in terms of objectives, it can be as −
  • Clear product images.
  • Increase site visit rates.
  • Reduce shopping cart drop rate.

A/B Testing – Create Variations

As A/B Testing is about creating new versions of an application or a web page and then comparing all versions to see the conversion rate. You can improve the conversion rate by analyzing the statistics to check new variations.

A/B Testing – Run Experiment

It involves presenting all variations of your website or an application to the visitors and their actions are monitored for each variation. Visitor interaction for each variation is measured and compared to determine how this variation performs.
As discussed in the previous chapter, there are various tools that can be used to generate hypothesis and to run the variations −

A/B Testing – Analyze Results

Once the experiment is completed, next step is to analyze the results. A/B Testing tool will present the data from the experiment and will tell you the difference between how the different variations on a web page performs, and also if there is a significant difference between variations, using the help of mathematical methods and statistics.

A/B Testing – Tools

There are various tools that can be used to generate hypothesis and to run the variations, these include −
  • Visual Website optimizer (VWO)
  • Google Content Experiments
  • Optimizely

A/B Testing – Multivariate

Like A/B Testing, Multivariate Testing is based on the same mechanism, but it compares higher number of variables, and provides more information about how these variables behave. In A/B Testing, you split the traffic of a page between different versions of the design. Multivariate Testing is used to measure the effectiveness of each design.

A/B Testing – SEO

SEO is a method to display your website at the top of the page, when a search is performed for those relevant items. It includes the information that your website offers to the visitors and why webpage content is relevant to come at the top in a search result. Many potential customers feel that A/B Testing or Multivariate Testing will have an effect on their search engine rankings.

A/B Testing – Interview Questions

What do you understand by A/B Testing? What is the goal behind performing A/B Testing?

A/B Testing - Quick Guide

A/B Testing – Overview

A/B Testing (also known as Split testing) defines a way to compare two versions of an application or a web page that enables you to determine which one performs better. It is one of the easiest ways to analyze an application or a web page to create a new version. Thereafter, both these versions can be compared to find the conversion rate, which further helps in finding the better performer of these two.

A/B Testing - Useful Resources

The following resources contain additional information on A/B Testing. Please use them to get more in-depth knowledge on this.

Useful Links on A/B Testing

Discuss A/B Testing

A/B Testing is one of the best way to compare two or more versions of an application or a web page. It enables you to determine which one of them performs better and can generate better conversion rates. It is one of the easiest ways to analyze an application or a web page to create a new version that is more effective. This is a brief tutorial that covers the fundamentals of A/B Testing with suitable examples to illustrate how you can put it into practice.

Amazon Marketplace - Why Amazon?

There are various reasons why you should consider selling at Amazon Marketplace. In this introductory chapter, let us take a look at some of the prominent reasons why you should choose Amazon Marketplace.

The Amazon Advantage

Amazon is not just an online store, rather it’s a Marketplace! It is one of the oldest merchants on the web and has over 200 million customers worldwide. There are many potential buyers who put their trust in Amazon and prefer buying products from Amazon only, even if the product costs slightly higher than at other e-commerce sites.

Amazon Marketplace - Types of Account

You must certainly be investigating what choices you should essentially make before starting to sell your product. The very first choice you should make is about the type of account you should hold. Secondly, what product should you sell, and thirdly how should you manage the shipment and return for the product.
Amazon offers two types of accounts − Individual Account and Professional Account.

Amazon Marketplace - What to Sell?

You can find what to sell links on the Amazon webpage. There are huge number of products open to sale for both Individual and Professional account holders except for some marked by asterisk for which Individual account holders need to take prior approval. These are, however, open for Professional account holders.

Amazon Marketplace - Product Listing

Listing is an essential part of establishing your online selling business. It involves creating your product catalog by specifying the mandatory and striking details of your product. Listing your merchandise on Amazon gives your store visibility to countless shoppers online. It can be done in four ways −

Amazon Marketplace - Fees

In this chapter, we will discuss the types of fees that Amazon charges from the merchants who do business using its platform −
  • Variable Closing Fees
  • Amazon Fulfillment Fees
  • Referral Fees
Let’s discuss these in detail, starting with Variable Closing Fees.

Amazon Marketplace - Account Setting

In this chapter, we will discuss the two different types of Account Settings on Amazon Marketplace.

Individual Account

An individual Account is the least essentiality to sell products on Amazon. There is a referral fee attached, and in some cases, there is a variable closing fee. There are FBA charges if you are using the service and the shipping costs if you are shipping the product yourself.

Amazon Marketplace - Buy Box

All Amazon sellers want the coverted Buy Box. This is the same as all website holders want their website to rank on top of Google search. When a buyer searches for a product, there may be many sellers selling the same product with different offers.

Amazon Marketplace - Shipping Methods

The shipping method you use within Amazon is of your choice, considering it meets the customers chosen timeframe. As mentioned earlier, it is beneficial to go by FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) Service. The less time you spend each day arranging for proper packaging, the more time you will have in finding and listing new products.

Amazon Marketplace - Listing a New Product

If you want to list a new product in the Amazon catalog, then you need to follow the steps given below −
  • Click the ‘Create a new product’ button.
  • Select the category into which you want to list your product. Amazon then displays a list of sub categories.

Amazon Marketplace - Pricing Tools

If you want to save your time, do not go into setting the exact price. Set all the prices a little on the higher side − higher than the viable sales price of the product. Then using some pricing tool, modify the same as per the set of rules in the tool.

Amazon Marketplace - Get Highest Profit

Garnering highest profit is the ultimate goal of all the sellers and it should be, for this is something that draws most sellers to Amazon Marketplace. There are two key parameters in the formulation of a profitable business. They are −
  • Demand for your product, and
  • Margin on the sale.

Amazon Marketplace - Price Calculator

It is quite an effort to know how much revenue you can generate by selling a product on Amazon. Being one of the most popular marketplaces for online merchants, Amazon has a wide array of fees - marketplace account fees, variable cost fees, referral fees, shipping costs, etc.

Amazon Marketplace - Tax Handling

Calculation of Sales Tax

The basic question that comes to mind is how is the sales tax on Amazon calculated?
  • If a product is subjected to sales tax in the state in which it is shipped, the tax is calculated on the total selling price of the item.

Amazon Marketplace - Shipping Process

In this chapter, we will discuss the shipping process involved when you are on Amazon Marketplace.

Shipping Merchant Orders

When you go for fulfilling orders yourself, you need to ship the products to the customers. Amazon mails you as soon as your product is picked by the buyer. However, it may happen at times that you may not receive the email instantly and it may take up to 20 minutes to get the complete order information. Amazon informs you what you sold and at what price and the fee that you will be charged. Your duty is to ship the product to the buyer in time.

Amazon Marketplace - Seller Central

Amazon Seller Central is the web interface used by merchants to manage their orders. A person selling via the Amazon Seller Central is considered a third-party seller. Smart sellers use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). However, anyone can use the Seller Central and can retain full control of their product listings and pricing. There are four main management areas - Managing your inventory, handling sales, shipment of products, and dealing with returns.

Managing The Inventory

So far, we have discussed how to list a product, raise its sale, its shipment, etc. Let us now discuss how to manage the inventory while it is still in the Amazon system.
  • Open the Inventory Menu on the Seller Central. There will be two Manage Inventory options at the top to help you in managing your inventory, be it seller shipped or an FBA inventory.
  • Click the Filters button to view the type of item you want to see.

Amazon Marketplace - Creating Reports

Amazon provides reports for the sellers about the details of their sales.
  • You can find the Inventory report option in the inventory menu and an order report option in the orders menu.
  • You can see the FBA items in the active listings report which includes all the active listings.

Amazon Marketplace - Managing Reviews

You have now mastered the art of selling on Amazon portal, including how a product sells, how to manage your inventory, etc. However, keeping your customer’s satisfied is equally important.

Customer Feedback

Satisfied customers keep buying from you. You are now tagged as a trustworthy seller. Good customer feedback leads to repeated sales. There are certain things like supplements, household needs, sports equipment, etc.

Amazon Marketplace - Your Amazon Rating

Amazon keeps an eye on the behavior of each seller to ensure they are performing well. If a seller falls too low on the rating scale, he/she won’t be selling on Amazon for long. Performance area has three parameters on the basis of which a seller is rated by Amazon. These are −

Amazon Marketplace - Selling in Bulk

In this chapter, we will discuss about selling the products in bulk on Amazon Marketplace.

Promoting Your Products

Once you start enjoying the sale of your product, you will have a quest to generate more demand for your product. You may want to stick to the following tips for the same −

Amazon Marketplace - Best Practices

To ensure that Amazon integration works smoothly with your store and you have a voluminous sale, there are a few best practices that needs to be taken care of.
You should keep the following in mind in order to use Amazon Marketplace in an effective way −

Troubleshooting Problems

There are many problems that will surface once you start the selling process. Following are some such problems and the ways to solve them.
  • Managing low sales − At times, despite selling a very good product you may not receive a very welcoming response from the customer, resulting in poor sales. Try to figure out the reasons for the same and implement the ways to increase the sales.

Amazon Marketplace - Important Terms

Following is a list of important terms frequently encountered on Amazon Marketplace −
  • Amazon Price Calculator − Pre-designed calculators by Amazon which are well equipped to help the sellers in determining their total profit on items after shipment and all monetary transactions.
  • Amazon Seller Central − Amazon Seller Central is the web interface used by merchants to manage their orders.

Amazon Marketplace - Quick Guide

Amazon Marketplace - Why Amazon?

There are various reasons why you should consider selling at Amazon Marketplace. In this introductory chapter, let us take a look at some of the prominent reasons why you should choose Amazon Marketplace.

Amazon Marketplace - Useful Resources

The following resources contain additional information on Amazon Marketplace. Please use them to get more in-depth knowledge on this.

Discuss Amazon Marketplace

Amazon, the E-commerce giant, is one of the oldest merchants on the web and has over 200 million customers worldwide. Amazon is the unrivalled marketplace to sell products online. It provides an excellent platform for conducting online business and has proved beneficial for both buyers and sellers.