Month: July 2018

It’s a Big, Big World Wide Web

The Internet is an ever-expanding entity, seeming to grow by leaps and bounds by the second. The landscape and its inhabitants are mercurial, flowing and changing constantly for myriad reasons. Did your re-creation of a red-carpet look get likes on Instagram? Did a breaking news event happen? Who will be in the next summer blockbuster movie? The list of reasons we use social media evolves and grows as smartphones, tablets, and personal computers become more accessible to the masses.

Parents face challenges when it comes to communicating via social media platforms; online safety being the main concern, as well as misinformation or disconnection from in-person communications. There are dozens of social media outlets available for consumers today, although their popularity ebbs and flows like the tides. Social media has become a tool to keep track of their kids’ activities, finding it convenient to check in, share information and photos, and even make a phone or video calls to speak to their loved ones. For countless people worldwide, the access granted by the Web outweighs the risks associated with it.

How to keep your kids safe online is a subject all parents consider daily.  Practical advice is available to those parents from a variety of sources, though, to be honest, most of the answers will be provided via a quick Google search on their smartphone. Let’s face it, we are all along for the ride on the Information Superhighway, so it makes sense to know the rules of the road. Just like our cars and mobile phones, social media allows us to engage with news, culture, society, education, and entertainment in new and exciting ways.

Basic safety techniques are usually offered first, and once implemented provide a good foundation for more age-specific ground rules. As your children grow older, and their interests grow and change, their exposure to content online and their usage of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Snapchat, Tumblr, etc. also grows. Parents are well advised to make a habit of creating accounts on the same platforms and interact with them there. This keeps parents up to date about what their children are doing, and whom they are doing it with.  A strong online presence in their social circles will keep you connected and provide another layer of personal protection for your child by discouraging predators.

When your child is online, they will like/follow/subscribe to strangers and they will attract followers outside your friends and family. Establishing trust about internet safety is essential to creating healthy online habits. The web is growing constantly, and the sheer volume of entertainment and knowledge your child has available to them is simply astounding. Teaching kids to be good virtual citizens and that words matter is an easy way to help keep their online interactions enjoyable ones. Don’t forget to remind them no matter how many followers they have on Instagram, you will always be their biggest fan.

What Some Celebrities Do To Stay Relevant

Attaining celebrity status, to most people, is a great achievement, but little do they know that staying a relevant celebrity is pretty hard. There are some things these celebrities do to stay in the game that normal people would find funny. Most of the time, they do some of these things because of the high expectations of their fans, but also for personal promotion, to get more endorsement deals.

When most people hear the word celebrity, what comes to their minds are expensive cars, private jets, luxury home, million dollar vacation destination, and the likes, so these guys really have to step up their game to stay wanted. Most of them put in a lot of energy in enhancing their social media presence because that is actually one of the main mediums they use to interact with their fans. Here are some of the many things celebrity do to stay relevant.

  1. They hire a social media team to manage their accounts

Most celebrities hire social media management agencies and pay them big bucks just to manage their social media accounts. It can be a team of 10, 20, 30, they don’t care. All they want is to have the highest online presence in the industry. This management team will be in charge of the kind of pictures they upload, the captions they add to their pictures and even the people they follow. To a normal person, this might sound absurd, but that is what is trending.

  1. They intentionally make controversial statements to get noticed

This is actually a very common one and it is trending in the industry like wildfire. Celebrities intentionally make comments either negative or positive on controversial issues just to get the needed attention. So when you hear stuff like, ‘Oh, did you hear what LOL said about the Iranian jet that….’ just have it in mind that probably that celeb planned it with the hope that the comment will trend. Some of them even go to the extent of starting fake relationships with each other.

  1. They release nasty pictures and tapes

This is actually regarded as the last line of action when it comes to staying relevant. A lot of celebrities have done this in the past and many are definitely going to use this method in the future. What they do is intentionally upload private images and videos to the public and claim that they got hacked. Some might even say they ‘mistakenly’ uploaded it. A lot has been seen in the past and this method has made a lot of people popular.

  1. They buy their way to the top

One of the ways celebrities earn a living is through their social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter and most especially Instagram. But they cannot achieve this without commanding enough audience, so what they do is buy followers and likes on Instagram and other social media to stay in the game. Some buy enough to get them verified and this will increase their chances of making more money from their social media account.

These are just a few obvious things celebrities do to stay relevant because to them it is a matter of who is who in the industry.

How Affiliate Marketers Make Money

One of the trending and highly rewarding businesses online is affiliate marketing. These marketers make passive cash from commissions they get from products they sell online. A lot of people find this line of business very appealing because along the way they really have nothing much to lose except probably their time and a few bucks some of them use for campaigns. They don’t own actual products, neither are they in charge of delivery, what they do basically is to create a platform through which they can direct people to buy products from the merchants they are promoting and after every purchase, they get a commission on the sale.

Many companies and organizations have adopted this method of marketing over the past few years because it works and helps increase conversion rates. This is a great advantage to merchants because compared to the conventional way of advertising, where they would be required to pay advertisement companies like television stations, radio stations and the like to publicize their products and services, they would not be able to properly track sales unlike promoting their products and services via affiliate marketers.

Most of these affiliate marketers make use of different mediums like blogs, websites, social media accounts and even word-of-mouth, to promote products and services online. The most popular among these mediums is social media because of its great potential to attract organic traffic.

One of the most common social media platforms they use is Instagram. This platform is very popular in the affiliate marketing niche especially those promoting fashion, home decor, real estate and other related products that require them to create awareness on the type of products they market by displaying them via images. These affiliate marketers then make a captivating caption to convince people to buy the displayed product via their affiliate link and get a commission straight up. What most of them do is that they buy real Instagram followers to boost the initial traffic to their affiliate link. They then tag highly followed people and use hashtags they think will drive them even more organic traffic.

Other platforms they use that are quite common are blogs and websites. They make their blogs or websites niche-specific so that they will be able to target a particular group of online visitors. For example, an affiliate marketer can create a blog that specializes on reviewing web hosting products alone and register as an affiliate for all the web hosting companies he reviews and promotes on his website. The reason why they are niche specific is just to better convert traffic to sales. Imagine a scenario where an individual is aiming to subscribe to a hosting service and tries to read a review of the service on a site. If they see different products that are unrelated to web hosting, like fashion, baby clothing, etc., it is certain that the first thing that will come to mind is that, ‘these guys are not professionals in web hosting’. To avoid this, affiliate marketers stick to just a niche per site.

Super affiliate marketers make up to a million dollar in passive income a year while the average affiliate marketers make tens to hundreds of thousands a year.

How I Made My First Million Online

I made my first million when I was 22. Then I was still in college and I had this idea to start-up online entertainment. I always had a passion for entertainment and in fact, when I was 8, I used to do stand-up. I would hold my brothers captive and tell them multiple jokes, but I always wondered why they didn’t laugh. I didn’t want to believe my jokes weren’t funny.

When I finished high school, I had opportunities to perform at parties and small shows, and I noticed people loved my style of comedy. That was when I made up my mind to go into comedy for real, but the competition was so much in the industry for an upcoming comedian like me. So, a friend advised me to start creating rib-cracking videos and share them online. That way I would be able to reach a higher number of people and get picked up by an agency that would pay me loads to perform.

Then, the journey started. I first thought of different comedy clip ideas that would play well with my target audience. Then I created multiple branded comedy clips for a period of 3 months. I just thought that if I could upload a video per week online, people would love to subscribe or follow me because people love the consistency and that was what I was aiming to deliver. I bought a video camera and talked to one of my friends, who knows a thing or two about video coverage, to help me out for free and we went on to create close to 50 videos.

What I did next was to establish an online presence, an avenue for people to see what I do. Then I opened different social media accounts and the one I enjoyed traffic from the most was Instagram. Before opening an account, I made sure I studied the online comedy niche closely and my competitors. What I noticed was that a lot of them usually make use of multiple highly followed hashtags to promote their videos and encourage more public interactions.

After some months, my videos started trending and I started getting offers to perform at some events and shows. I was so happy and fulfilled that I was finally getting noticed. One of my close friends then advised me to buy Instagram followers, just to compliment the ones I had already. I got enough to get me verified and after that, my story changed for good. I didn’t just get multiple endorsement deals, but I also get offers from companies to advertise via my account for cool sums of money.

This made me reach my million dollar mark pretty early but the journey was not easy. It took me time, continuous and relentless dedication, to achieve all these. There were obviously challenging parts, like when the first 20 videos I created didn’t get as much attention as I expected, but it took just one video to change my story for good.

How I Started Marketing My Products Online

I am into female fashion designing and photography. I started gaining interest in fashion when I was 12 and can remember I used to cut random clothes in the house just to create my “awesome” designs. Trust me; it got me into a lot of trouble with my mom because her bed sheets were always my victim.

I later went to a fashion school in London, and it was eye-opening. I learned more and got inspired to start my own fashion brand. So I focused on the female fashion niche by designing and sewing clothes ranging from normal dresses, skirts and shirts to wedding gowns. I had a few clients, and when I say a few, I mean like 20 regular clients. It was fine at first, but I was not getting the type of income I wanted and this must have been because of the high competition in the industry coupled with the presence of already established brands. I had to go back to my board to carve out my sales strategy.

That was when I picked up on the idea of marketing my products on social media platforms. This strategy worked for me because of the kind of product I sell and people love fashion. Aside from that, the internet has a global marketplace with a high number of users, even my grandmother uses it.  I had the potential of gaining access to a high number of future clients, who might get to like my designs and place orders.

Before I started advertising my products for free online, I had to get some things in place. First, I got all my designs ready and then I thought to myself, why to hire a photographer since I would be posting thousands of pictures online and that would be a lot of charges. So, I took a few photography classes, and I think my daily selfie addiction helped me get a hold of it fast. Also, I had to select the online platform that would work with the kind of product I had. I went for Instagram because it’s the best platform to share my pictures, get reviews and, of course, potential orders.

How to increase Instagram followers was my next challenge because, without enough, my goal will not be reached. I went online to check out methods I could use to achieve this. I saw a lot and adopted a few that I thought were great and would work. The first tip I got was to capture and share high-quality pictures that would attract people and then add a very captivating caption followed by a call to action underneath it. Then I learned that tagging highly followed individuals would also help in promoting my posts.

Another thing I did was buy Instagram followers at a very cheap rate and after this purchase; I got into the fashion game big time. I got more orders, almost more than I could supply, and even got paid to help people advertise their fashion-related products via my account.