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You may have heard that content is king in this digitally connected age. Here are 6 simple steps to get the ball rolling with some excellent content marketing in your business.

1. Define your goals. You can’t go anywhere without a goal. Set concrete goals for your marketing attempt, such as fortifying your connection with a particular audience or branching out to new ones.

With all the analytic tools available today, you can easily be able to monitor your progress as you move along.

2. Define your audience. Who are you marketing your product or service to? If you don’t have a clear vision about this, you’ll be wasting your time and money trying to market to everyone—which is sort of like throwing pasta on the wall and hoping it sticks.

Instead, build a vision of your ideal crowd. Perhaps even make a storyboard about the “typical” person in this group to fill out your marketing attempts with a genuine copy.

3. Define your style. What exactly is your brand all about, and what’s the accompanying style that best matches your message?

If you bounce all over the place with your words and your appearance, you’re going to make your audience confused and lose potential customers. Solidify the details about your appearance—everything from color schemes to fonts to content topics.

4. Learn from the past. Chances are if you’ve been in business for a few years already, that you have some extant content out there already.

Take a look at what did well, and what bombed, and try to figure out why. Build on your success, and stay away from failure as you move forward.

5. Assemble the team. If you’re a one-man-band, that’s great, but once a business reaches a certain point, you’ll need multiple people on the team.

One person could be blogging and incorporating SEO keywords, while another is interacting with the fan base on social media, and yet another is crafting and implementing Google ads.

The more specialized each person can become, the more their expertise will increase the overall success of your business—but remember to keep everyone within a good loop of communication.

6. Make a plan. Set up checkpoints, goals, and deadlines. Use analytic software to track clicks and see what parts of the strategy are working.

Just like goals are crucial for creating a destination, a plan is crucial for getting to those goals.

Designing a web site that get results can take time to complete and the best results is achievable when you are fully involved and prepared in the process.

Making your company an attractive and popular is more than just placing a picture of a product or a description of a service on a web page and publishing it to the web. Many issues need to be addressed to ensure success.

PRIMARY MARKET RESEARCH
Strategic marketing provides the structure that helps assemble the information through which the company understands its customers. This is the information needed in order to sell successfully. Hence, before beginning any development work, it is important to have a clear picture on who the customers are and why they are likely to buy.

In describing the target customer, such factors as gender, age, and socio-economic group are essentials while further information such as technical capability and language level can also be useful.
Including this information in your design briefly puts the web site designer in a much better position to produce a site that the end user will feel useful and comfortable with.

OBJECTIVE OF THE WEBSITE
Determine the objective of the website; is it to provide information, to produce direct sales? On the other hand, is it just a brochure-ware site showing the company and its capabilities? Is it to generate enquiries from new customers? Alternatively, to keep existing customers informed.
Objectives will include the detailed information on any existing brand identity and the image the company wants to portray to the world at large. Remember your web site is the salesperson to your potential customers.

PROMOTING THE WEBSITE
Promotion of the website is essential if potential customers are to find your web site. Although it is not obvious to the viewer, the purpose of this information is to provide the search engine with the data they need to place the site in the correct category in the database, which in turn helps the search engine respond to search terms entered by users.
To achieve successful ranking in search engines the title and meta-data must reflect the content of the page. Keywords and phrases need to be researched thoroughly, what exactly are your customers likely to enter as search terms into search engines.

UPDATE YOUR WEBSITE
Analyze your site as often as possible to make sure that it is presenting the image, content, accuracy that your customers and prospects expect. The costs associated with this effort are different from those of other marketing media, but the significance should not be under estimated. Updating your web site continually helps your readers come back after another to find out what are new things you have posted recently.

Finally, the major part of the web site is carrying out your research into your customers and understands them and then conveying all required details properly to your web site designer so that they can build a web site, which your customers will find useful. After all, you are building; your web site is for your customers!

I am Abubakar Oyerogba, I help individuals, and small businesses build online platforms to attract new customers, retain old customers, and make more profit.

Abubakar Oyerogba
Digital Consultant and Strategist
Bevenstra

Take a moment to think about how you would really answer this question.
If given enough thought just about any business owner who utilizes the Internet for any purpose will likely find that whether or not they intentionally organized an Internet marketing campaign, they may already be marketing their products and services on the Internet.
This article will examine some subtle ways business owners may already be marketing their business on the Internet.
Do you have a website for your business? Business owners who answer yes to this question are already marketing their products or services online just by virtue of the fact that they have a website online.
Having a live website means there is the potential for curious Internet users to access your website. You may not be actively promoting your website but you may still find that your website generates interest in your products despite the lack of promotional endeavors; this is a form of passive marketing.
Do you participate in message boards and include a link to your website in your signature? Again, business owners who answer yes to this question are already marketing their website online.
Savvy business owners realize the importance of participation in industry related message boards to create an interest in their products and services, establish themselves as knowledgeable about the industry and offer a link to their own website even if it is in the signature line of their posts.
However, even business owners who do not realize this may already be inadvertently enjoying the benefits of Internet marketing which result from message board participation just by doing something they enjoy and may be doing as a form of leisure activity.
Do you include keywords, which are relevant to your business in the content of your website? Business owners who answer yes to this question are also already marketing on the Internet by optimizing their website for these keywords.
These search engine optimization (SEO) affects the websites whether or not they were even aware of the concept of keyword density and how it can help to SEO a website. Business owners will likely use certain words often depending on the type of products and services they offer just because it is natural and logical to do so.
This tendency, however, can result in search engines boosting your website rankings for these particular keywords. The concept of SEO is much more involved and complex than simply using keywords frequently but business owners can gain some benefit just by naturally applying relevant keywords to their website.
Do you solicit feedback from your customers online? This is yet another example of how business owners may be accidentally marketing their business on the Internet.
Most business owners realize the importance of soliciting feedback from customers for business purposes and business owners who offer products online might solicit feedback in the form of online surveys. Although the business owners may be doing this simply for a business, purpose the fact that it is done online makes it fall into the category of Internet marketing.
We have already discussed several ways in which business owners may already be marketing online but what about business owners who want to have an increased online presence. Business owners who may already be marketing online accidentally may wish to launch a full scale Internet marketing campaign.
The best way to do this is to hire a consultant with experience in Internet marketing to assist you in creating a campaign, which is effective for your target audience.

Oyerogba Abubakar
Digital Consultant / Strategist
Bevenstra

just this will come well at least we are going to rest and face other things

There are many tools for building a website; WordPress is one tool that allows designing a website so simple or very fast. WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS), built on PHP and MySQL. WordPress as a content management system (CMS), allows you to easily create, edit, manage and publish content on your website without having to learn any programming language at all.

When talking about WordPress, the first thing that comes to our mind is blogging. However, WordPress is capable of doing so much more. From business, websites to e-commerce and beyond, you can virtually build any kind of website using WordPress. WordPress also powered 26.4% of the web.

WordPress was released on May 27, 2003, by its founders, Matt Mullenweg, and Mike Little, as a fork of b2/cafelog. The software is released under the GPLv2 (or later) license.

Many global brands do use WordPress to power some of their website, Sony Music, TechCrunch, The New Yorker, Facebook, and many others. WordPress allows users to update all website media and content seamlessly, one can embed third-party code like Google map and YouTube video in a WordPress website.

One of the main reasons WordPress is widely accepted is because of WordPress theme. WordPress Themes is the WordPress template styles, there are free, and paid WordPress theme that allows you to build any type of website you want, with an awesome user interface.

WordPress plugins allow you to extend the functionality of your website. Using these plugins, you can create a contact form for your website, add a checkout system, calendar, add an extra layer of security, and even create landing pages, with just a few simple clicks.There are over 43,000 plugins available on the official WordPress Plugins database.

Installing WordPress is as easy as ABC. You can set up your website in less than five minutes. Most web hosts now offer single click installs, which let you install WordPress in a couple of minutes. In addition, there are WordPress specific hosting plans, where the hosting company install WordPress for you and let you dive right into the WordPress dashboard to work on the site.
WordPress is an interesting tool and if you give it a try you will never go back again because, WordPress has been improving on its security, SEO, and many more.

I wish I could say more about building your website with WordPress, to enjoy all the benefits that I have stated above and more your website must be built with WordPress.

Thanks for reading and if you have, any questions about WordPress please feel free to leave a comment and I will do my best to help you.

Sometimes ago i wrote an article title "Can Your Logo Be in Black And White,” i got some positive other people's point of view but some are asking.
What is logo?

Logo can be define as a symbol or mark that represent your brand, when people see logo of a bitten apple you know the company that represent or a swoosh mark your mind goes to Nike.

Logo is a symbol or mark of a brand, can we say logo is branding? No logo is not branding, logo happens to be an elements of branding, let say logo is your brand symbol or mark; it is what people will see anywhere and know that is your brand.
So what is branding?

Branding has been around since 350 A.D and is derived from the word “Brandr,” meaning “to burn” in Ancient Norse language. By the 1500s, it had come to mean the mark that ranchers burned on cattle to signify ownership—a precursor of the modern logo.

Branding today is so much more than just a look or a logo. It has come to signify the emotional “gut feeling” reaction a company can elicit from its customers.

Your brand is the set of perceptions people have about your company. However, branding is the set of actions you take to cultivate that brand.
In other words, your brand is a noun, but branding is a verb. Logo design is branding. Develop your brand voice is branding. Brainstorming with your marketing team on an ad campaign is branding. Any action you take to shape your brand is branding.

Why does company need a logo?

A brand without a logo cannot differentiate itself from other brands. Brand logo is a symbol or mark and if there is no symbol or mark, your difference will not be clear like the old days seven up clichés.

Logo design should not be rigid because some of the most popular brand like Apple Computer has done some logo modifications and transformations over the years.

A logo that was design before the advent of internet may not be applicable with the types of media that is available now.

ADVANTAGES OF A NEW PROFESSIONAL LOGO

Gain New Customers
People remember you
Increase in brand value
A Great First Impression
Communicates your brand essence
Stand out from the Competition
(Source The branding bible by designmatic.com)

I cannot exhaust the reasons why a brand needs a logo, brand and logo works together in branding.
Many brands faces the problem of what is a standard logo, they are criteria’s that a logo must met before we can say this is a very good logo.
Your logo designer should understand your brand color, channels that the logo will be apply to, your audience (customers) and remember to avoid trends because a trendy logo design, hardly stay long overtime.

According to 99design.com there, seven types of logo.

1. Lettermarks
2. Wordmarks
3. Pictorial marks
4. Abstract marks
5. Mascots
6. Combination marks
7. Emblems

Whatever the type of logo you have or planning to have, the most important thing is to remember that logo is not branding, but and element of branding, and you need logo to differentiate your brand amongst your competitors and make sure that your logo is SMART which Simple - Memorable - Appropriate - Resizable - Timeless (source logogeek.uk).

Thank You