Digital Marketing is expected to grow 19% to almost $130 billion this year, approximately 54% of total US ad spending. Year after year, traditional marketing in print and newspaper continue to slowly decline as spending continues to shift online. Digital Marketing offers unrivaled targeting capabilities, audience reach, and accessibility. Digital Marketing has now become an inevitable part of every business with an online presence. If you want to stay in the game, you need to amp up your Digital Marketing strategies. What exactly are the pillars of digital marketing? Let’s have a brief look at them to understand better:

Social Media Marketing:

Everyone these days has marked their online identity with a presence on at least one social media platform – be it Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest. Engaging and growing these audiences is a moving target as these platforms evolve alongside new advertising formats, targeting capabilities, and even restrictions caused by regulation. Harnessing and mastering these capabilities to grow your business audience organically and through paid advertising on social media platforms is one pillar or digital marketing.

Search Engine Optimization and Content Marketing:

Each day Google serves about 3.5 billion search results each day. Optimizing your website to improve its ability to rank well and receive traffic from these searchers is one of the most important aspects of building your digital presence. The two essential aspects for any digital property are on-page SEO factors and off-page factors, commonly referred to as link building and content marketing. Creating well-written, long-form, and informative content using information architecture and rich media (images, videos, infographics) will help make your content engaging for users and valuable to Google. Getting this content linked to and featured by authoritative publications in your industry, known as link signals, are important because they demonstrate to Google that the internet finds your website and content useful.

Email marketing:

Email campaigns are a powerful strategy to keep your audience engaged and to be able to bring them back to your digital assets. Engaging your email subscribers with useful content that deserves to be in their inbox, not spam, is an essential part of making these campaigns successful. Also making sure you’ve addressed key deliverability considerations such as SPF records, the number of links within your email, how many subscribers marked your email as spam or moved it directly to the trash, will determine how successful email marketing is for your digital brand.

Radio and television marketing:

The mass media, via which a single message can reach thousands at a time shouldn’t be left behind. These are most accessible means of communication and reach even the common man, who may not have access to social media. To target such audience, radio and television marketing is essential.

Digital marketing cannot function on the basis of any one pillar – you need to consider factors, sync all the pillars and devise an effective strategy to cut through the communication barriers and become more accessible to your target audience.

You may already be aware of what SEO is and how important it is for any kind of website striving to make money through the internet. If you are a business that uses a website to offer services or products, SEO is more than necessary for you. But how do you know what are search engines looking for when they test your website? We’re going to cover exactly that in this post.

Search engines love relevancy

The first thing you need to make sure is that your site is relevant to the keywords you are using. For example, if you’re selling shoes, your website needs to be about shoes. It can’t have a page with shoes and a keyword like accessories or bags. Search engines want people to come to a page when they search for a key phrase and actually find what they were looking for.

Quality of Content Matters… A Lot!

Quality of content doesn’t mean good text or a convincing story. What search engines are looking for is a page that offers unique, well-researched content in the form of text, images and other small graphics that send out a clear and concise message to the people visiting. Using useful information architecture to make your content interactive, such as sorting, filters, jump links, collapsible/expandable content regions, and other front-end javascript interactivity helps indicate to Google that your content will be engaging and useful to searchers. One of my favorite tools to use for Content Optimization is LinkGraph’s Content Optimizer, which helps guide content improvement by scoring your landing pages and identifying topics that the content needs to explore thoughtfully in order to be relevant for the primary keywords you are targeting. Using a tool like this to make sure your landing pages have the right content as well as heading tags to rank for the keywords your targeting is a great way to streamline your workflow. 

The user experience

Another thing that is very important to search engines is the end-user interaction your website provides. If users hit the dreaded “back” button and pogo-stick on your search results, search engines learn that your search result didn’t provide content to satisfy the user’s search intent. If your website doesn’t have a modern, easy-to-use user interface, has a lot of ad-units, or takes more than 3 seconds to load, you’re likely going to have weak user-experience signals. Improving on those issues will help your site perform better in search results.

The speed of your website

Site performance and load speed is critical – search engines will rank your site higher if they open and load fast (under 3 seconds). A user is typically willing to wait for about 4-5 seconds for a page to load before hitting the back button and looking for another search result. If the page doesn’t load within this window of time, not only visitors will leave your page but the search engines will also drop its ranking. To increase speed of your website, use a good server, CDN, compress your static assets (CSS, JS, and images) and cache any non-dynamic pages. Google Pagespeed Insights is a great tool to use to profile the performance of your website and identify issues that may be holding your site back from performing better in serach.

Mobile friendly

The most important part of any website these days is its cross-compatibility. If your website doesn’t open properly on one of the platform from mobile to desktop, it will never be able to rank.

Search engine marketing is one of the many methods of internet marketing that exist.  When done properly, it can lead to a geyser of traffic coming to your website.

Question: when launching an affiliate marketing blog should I set up an LLC or remain as a sole proprietor for tax purposes?

This question was submitted by one of our mentoring students who is just beginning their new business as an affiliate marketer. One of the first steps to ensure your success is to decide on the right business structure for your endeavor. Will it be a DBA doing business as a sole proprietor or an LLC limited liability company and what are the advantages and disadvantages of each business structure option.

While we are professional affiliate marketers and Internet digital executives we are not legal nor tax experts so this is information to begin your research process. Be sure to check with your tax advisor and attorney before making your final business structure decision.

The difference between DBA and LLC

All businesses in America are by default considered a DBA meaning that the business owner i.e. the John Doe is doing business as ABC affiliate marketing agency. The name of your company is considered your tradename for all your business transactions. Be sure to create a name that communicates your branding message to your customers and is memorable.

A DBA is also called a sole proprietorship. This means that the individual who operates the business is also the owner or proprietor. One of the main disadvantages with this type of business structure is that any business liability or lawsuit becomes your personal responsibility thus there is no protection for your family’s assets from business risks.

Limited liability corporations nicknamed LLC are created as a separate entity from your personal finances. The advantages that your LLC will be responsible for debts and lawsuits but you as an individual and your family will be protected.

When sole proprietor DBA is your best choice.

If you have limited assets then the simplicity of a DBA is for you. Also if the business type you are launching such as affiliate marketing, as opposed to high-risk businesses such as transportation, is low-risk DBA will suffice. As your company grows and you build up assets and expand into riskier ventures you can then form an LLC.

If you elect to be a sole proprietor you will need to fill out a DBA form and file it with your local business office. When you do this your government agency will check if that name has not been used by another business. The DBA filing is an important step in consumer protection to prevent fraud by bogus companies operating under fictitious names.

When an LLC is best for your Internet business

because an LLC gives you protection against liability, separating your personal and business assets, it is a more complicated setup then a simple DBA filing form. It works best for businesses that have sizable assets they want to have protected. Additionally having an LLC with your company name will prevent other companies from using that name so you are protecting your brand legally.

The IRS federal government does not tax your LLC instead your business profits will flow through directly to your personal tax returns.

Costs of LLC and DBA

In most states, the cost of forming an LLC is greater than that of the DBA. Thus entrepreneurs with lien budgets often start as a sole proprietor DBA because of its affordability and then later set up their LLC. We advise that our mentoring students all use this affordable and reliable LLC set up service provided by LegalZoom.

While we are professional affiliate marketers and Internet digital executives we are not legal nor tax experts so this is information to begin your research process. Be sure to check with your tax advisor and attorney before making your final business structure decision.

The difference between DBA and LLC

All businesses in America are by default considered a DBA meaning that the business owner i.e. the John Doe is doing business as ABC affiliate marketing agency. The name of your company is considered your tradename for all your business transactions. Be sure to create a name that communicates your branding message to your customers and is memorable.

A DBA is also called a sole proprietorship. This means that the individual who operates the business is also the owner or proprietor. One of the main disadvantages with this type of business structure is that any business liability or lawsuit becomes your personal responsibility thus there is no protection for your family’s assets from business risks.

Limited liability corporations nicknamed LLC are created as a separate entity from your personal finances. The advantages that your LLC will be responsible for debts and lawsuits but you as an individual and your family will be protected.

When sole proprietor DBA is your best choice.

If you have limited assets then the simplicity of a DBA is for you. Also if the business type you are launching such as affiliate marketing, as opposed to high-risk businesses such as transportation, is low-risk DBA will suffice. As your company grows and you build up assets and expand into riskier ventures you can then form an LLC.

If you elect to be a sole proprietor you will need to fill out a DBA form and file it with your local business office. When you do this your government agency will check if that name has not been used by another business. The DBA filing is an important step in consumer protection to prevent fraud by bogus companies operating under fictitious names.

When an LLC is best for your Internet business

because an LLC gives you protection against liability, separating your personal and business assets, it is a more complicated setup then a simple DBA filing form. It works best for businesses that have sizable assets they want to have protected. Additionally having an LLC with your company name will prevent other companies from using that name so you are protecting your brand legally.

The IRS federal government does not tax your LLC instead your business profits will flow through directly to your personal tax returns.

Costs of LLC and DBA

In most states, the cost of forming an LLC is greater than that of the DBA. Thus entrepreneurs with lien budgets often start as a sole proprietor DBA because of its affordability and then later set up their LLC. We advise that our mentoring students use sites like LegalZoom.