Interview with Lisa Bell, Digital Entrepreneur

Meet Lisa Bell, writer, editor, author, and Director at The Word Architect. She is also the founder of The Organic Shop, an online health shop providing a range of natural and cruelty-free products for men, women, children, babies, and even furry family members. She loves to talk about all things marketing, copywriting, digital marketing, and social media.

Create a winner digital strategy for the holidays

While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are in the rearview mirror, Boxing Day, Christmas and New Year’s are knocking at the door. As we enter the busiest shopping time of the year, digital marketers need to pull out all the stops to get their share of the spending pie.

Gratitude is the best attitude

2023 has certainly been another challenging year not just for South Africa, but globally. However, there is always positive news to be found, and it seems that 2024 might be just that.

Why good SEO doesn’t always equal high rankings

Website owners regularly express frustration about their well-optimized site’s inability to rank, despite facing minimal competition. So why doesn’t good SEO always equal high rankings?

Why less is usually more in Digital

Why less is usually more in Digital I often tell clients/marketers/start-ups: “Rather do a few channels well than all of them poorly”. While this statement applies to all areas of life, it is particularly relevant to internet marketing. Of course, if you have an unlimited budget and time, then definitely go ahead and design a new site, set up a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, content campaign, and blast everything on social media. However, most companies have a finite amount of money and time. Therefore, it is better to grow your marketing plan by starting small and adding on elements. Start with a website and then add-on core social media accounts your users actively use. Then, build your content up and begin to rank higher on search engine results pages. Once you have nailed search, expand to PPC and Affiliate Marketing. Finally, once you have mastered all of this, expand to newsletters, podcasts and videos. If you have a small marketing team, spreading resources thinly across several channels will unlikely yield the results you are looking for and will leave your team feeling frustrated and demotivated. From the user experience point of view, the less-is-more approach is also becoming more and more appealing as users are inundated with messages, ads, videos and emails. Marketers have been going full steam ahead, pressured by C-suite, high customer expectations, and the daunting selection of new innovations and tech tools, to adopt and master more channels in order to reach more customers and to create a more sophisticated multi-channel explosion. Yet research shows that we are seeing a shift towards the compact and minimal in everything from lifestyle to home building. It’s the backlash from too much screen time, always being plugged in, and the personal device addiction. As a result, more people are unplugging, embracing minimalism, and decluttering their life. LESS OVERWHELMING IS IN. So, if your customers are simplifying and downsizing their lives, your marketing messaging will more likely come off as appealing if it is presented in a cleaner, simpler box. For example, instead of creating 20 marketing videos a month to keep your social media channels active and your brand relevant, what if you created 2 really amazing videos that are more likely to go viral. Better quality video, better quality content. Finally, with August being Women’s Month, I would like to take the opportunity to thank the women who have been a part of AdMarula’s journey the past decade and who have made their mark on our business in more ways than I can say. These include our clients, publishers, industry friends, suppliers and of course our staff, from the very first day we pushed the ‘go live’ button up till now. I have been privileged to work with some incredibly talented and smart women and have learned many valuable lessons from our interactions. May you all be celebrated as you deserve to be. Onwards and upwards! Daniel Gross – CEO All CEO's Thoughts Interviews and Insights Industry News Interviews and Insights Why Black Friday 2022 will differ from before 26 Oct 2022 Why Black Friday 2022 will differ from before Despite current downturns in the economy, evidence shows that the e-commerce industry is picking up and going back to pre-pandemic… Read More CEO's Thoughts Never stop marketing 26 Oct 2022 Never stop marketing There’s a LOT going on in the world right now. This is not a political piece, yet it is diffiult to ignore the world-shaping events… Read More Interviews and Insights Interview with Sandra Jardim, Blogger/Founder of MammaBearLove 26 Oct 2022 Interview with Sandra Jardim, Blogger/Founder of MammaBearLove Our October profile is Sandra Jardim, mom to twins Gisela and Alaia and blogger/owner of MammaBearLove. She uses her blog as… Read More Prev123Next

Voice search for Affiliate Marketers

When preparing your affiliate marketing activities for voice commands, it’s good to know if your target group is likely to use voice search. For example, a survey done by searchengineland.com of tech-savvy users, show that he age group with the heaviest voice search usage is the oldest group, ages 65-plus. 88% of respondents aged 65 or older use voice search at least a few times a week. 50% of users ages 65-plus claim to use voice search 1-3 times per day. For companies targeting this age group, voice search should absolutely find its way into their marketing mix. Interestingly, the age group just below this one – 55-64 – had the lowest voice search adoption rates among all respondents, with 32% of respondents indicating they rarely or never use voice search. Perhaps this age group is more accustomed to searching for things using screens, whereas the oldest age group is less technologically-savvy and enjoys the ease of searching and interacting using voice commands. Voice command and Google Search Traditional search through search engines is still going strong, regardless of the growth of voice search. Certain processes of affiliate marketing will stay the same through Google Voice Search. After people reach a website, found with the help of voice search, they can land on your affiliate website and become a referral after clicking your affiliate link and purchasing a product. However, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), will be a bit different. You will need to optimize your affiliate website for voice commands rather than typed keyword queries. Including questions in your content is one way of preparing your site for search commands, because many search commands are questions. Direct purchases with voice command There are definitely some points to consider when looking at the link between voice command and direct purchases. As more people start using voice command to order products, this can affect people who would otherwise sit behind a desktop, find products on Amazon and look up some reviews online. This could be a review from your affiliate website, for example, in which case you would lose this referral due to voice command. Now if you are were an Amazon affiliate, the question would be, will you lose referrals because voice command is on the rise? And the answer is yes and no, because you can also argue that users who want to buy in this quick and convenient manner would be the ones that go directly to the purchase website without doing more research. How much your site will be affected by direct purchase through voice command in the future will also depend on your niche. Some products are more suited for a quick purchase through voice command, while other products require more investigation before purchase. Don’t hesitate to contact our team if you have any further questions about your website and voice search. Happy selling! The Publisher Team

Less is more – more or less

I often tell clients/marketers/start-ups: “Rather do a few channels well than all of them poorly”. While this statement applies to all areas of life, it is particularly relevant to internet marketing. Of course, if you have an unlimited budget and time, then definitely go ahead and design a new site, set up a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, content campaign, and blast everything on social media. However, most companies have a finite amount of money and time. Therefore, it is better to grow your marketing plan by starting small and adding on elements. Start with a website and then add-on core social media accounts your users actively use. Then, build your content up and begin to rank higher on search engine results pages. Once you have nailed search, expand to PPC and Affiliate Marketing. Finally, once you have mastered all of this, expand to newsletters, podcasts and videos. If you have a small marketing team, spreading resources thinly across several channels will unlikely yield the results you are looking for and will leave your team feeling frustrated and demotivated. From the user experience point of view, the less-is-more approach is also becoming more and more appealing as users are inundated with messages, ads, videos and emails. Marketers have been going full steam ahead, pressured by C-suite, high customer expectations, and the daunting selection of new innovations and tech tools, to adopt and master more channels in order to reach more customers and to create a more sophisticated multi-channel explosion. But when do we realize we’ve hit the point of over-saturation? How much is too much? Research shows that we are seeing a shift towards the compact and minimal in everything from lifestyle to home building. It’s the backlash from too much screen time, always being plugged in, and the personal device addiction. As a result, more people are unplugging, embracing minimalism, and decluttering their life. LESS OVERWHELMING IS IN. So, if your customers are simplifying and downsizing their lives, your marketing messaging will more likely come off as appealing if it is presented in a cleaner, simpler box. Good marketing means listening to society’s trends in order to keep brand messaging one step ahead of cultural shifts. Taking a more scaled back approach, rather than trying to do more with a multi-multi-channel CX, may be more appealing to your audience. For example, instead of creating 20 marketing videos a month to keep your social media channels active and your brand relevant, what if you created 2 really amazing videos that are more likely to go viral. Better quality video, better quality content. Of course there will be times that call for a more aggressive approach, whether you are launching a new product or pushing an offer, but for the most part keep it simple. Like Ron Swanson of the TV show, Parks & Recreation, said: “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” Daniel Gross – CEO

Most important SEO trends in 2019

New year, new challenges and for any affiliate/online marketing professional staying on top of the latest SEO trends and changes should be high on the priority list. We know you are busy, so we’ve saved you the effort of scanning through all the sources and brought you a short-list of the most current SEO trends you need to be aware of (and aim to implement) in 2019. Don’t build your whole business on Google – Google and other search engines CAN provide high quality and targeted traffic, BUT there are so many other places to obtain traffic from including social media, email marketing, Yahoo Answers or network with other bloggers and affiliate marketers. Understand your user’s intent – Does your audience prefer text? Images? Video? Audio. Knowing this will all be more important than ever in 2019. Super content  – If you’re still creating content just to keep your blog alive, that won’t be good enough any longer. Google is intensifying its focus on evaluating content quality and rewarding sites that provide exceptional depth – this trend will continue in 2019. Mobile-first indexing – In a nutshell, mobile-first indexing means that Google uses the mobile version of your page for indexing and ranking, BUT that does not mean “mobile-only.” There’s still a single index with both mobile and desktop versions so best to get both right and no better time than now. Page speed – Google’s nuts about delivering the best UX and delivering it fast. Desktop page loading time has been a ranking factor for a while. And it recently got a twin sibling – mobile page speed’s become a ranking factor for mobile. Perhaps time to speak to your hosting provider about that loading time? Structured data – With the rise of AI this is becoming more and more important. If Google wants to move from a mobile-first to an AI-first world, structured data is key. Time to start looking at and understanding structured data, schema, active and passive search behaviors, and how they can connect to behaviors that signal intent. Increate your E-A-T– Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness – better known as E-A-T in Google’s search quality rating guidelines. Hire experts to author and leverage data from known entities, and ensure credentials and credit is given to both, OR get more of your employees to blog, write, and speak. That is the level of expertise that Google is looking for to power their results. The techie stuff – don’t forget the technical side of SEO. Three words: Speed (your page should definitely load under 3 sec), JavaScript (here to stay, so familiarise yourself), Progressive Web Apps/PAW’s (start thinking about how your website can live on as a PAW in the future). Good luck! Affiliate Management Team