We all know what kind of year 2020 was for almost everyone, so will spare you the clichés and platitudes. Our thoughts, of course, are with those whose lives were turned upside down by the pandemic and, in particular, those who have fallen victim to COVID-19. For Azam Marketing and for our clients, it’s been […]

Since this blog launched in 2007, readers have been able to be notified of new posts by subscribing using a service called ‘FeedBurner’.

In 2007 FeedBurner hosted over a million feeds for 584,832 publishers and on the 3rd of June of that year Google bought the booming company for a rumoured $100 million. However, for reasons only known to the gods at Googleplex, in the thirteen years since Google’s acquisition, the service has been more-or-less completely neglected and left to rot. There are indications FeedBurner may eventually be closed down.

Changing an RSS/email feed providers is not a decision to be taken lightly, but at Azam we felt our followers deserved much better than the dated offering of FeedBurner. Therefore, we have bitten the bullet and switched to a service called follow.it. A far-reaching analysis of the top 30 feed management services for blogs of size of Azam.info led us to conclude that follow.it was by far the best service for our subscribers.

Existing Azam.info Subscribers

If you are one of our many loyal existing subscribers, our engineers have made sure you have been seamlessly transitioned to the new provider.

Email subscribers should have received this post in their inboxes (if not, please subscribe here). We’d encourage you to ‘white list’ the follow.it email address you’ve received it from so that our updates are not categorised as ‘spam’ by your email provider.

If you’re an existing RSS subscriber, make sure that http://www.azam.info/feed is the URL you are using in your feed reader.

New Azam.info Subscribers

If you haven’t subscribed yet, then you are missing out on being kept up-to-date with blog posts that our thousands of followers enjoy. Azam Marketing’s bods will be publishing ‘must-read’ content over the coming year, such as the techniques it has taken our boffins hundreds of hours of granular testing and optimisation over months to increase the yield from our online marketing campaigns.

Unlike most publications, we value your time and therefore only share the very highest calibre content here, publishing new blog posts sporadically. Therefore, on average, you will only receive one notification every few weeks from us.

How can you be notified every time we publish a new blog post? The two simplest methods are via email and RSS.

How to Subscribe by Email

In terms of the former option, enter your email address in the box below and then hit the blue ‘Press to Subscribe’ button. Next you’ll usually have to confirm you are not a robot in the new window that appears.

After that, you may need to verify your email address, so check your inbox or ‘junk mail’ folder to see the email from follow.it. All you have to do is click the verification link and, hey presto, you’re subscribed!

One final step: to ensure our emails don’t go to your junk mail folder, please ‘white list’ follow.it’s email address. How to do this depends on which email provider you are using, but with most of them you can mark the email address from which you receive our verification missive as being a ‘safe sender’, ‘white list’ it, or add it to your ‘contacts’.

How to Subscribe by RSS

If you’re more an RSS kinda of guy or gal, all you have to do is follow us via this link. Our RSS feed link is http://www.azam.info/feed.

Coming soon, you’ll also be able to receive notifications of new blog posts via a Google Chrome browser extension, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WeChat and several other methods, so stay tuned!

follow.it for Your Blog

If you’re a blog owner yourself and thinking “this follow.it service the Azam blog has migrated to is rather neat and maybe I should do the same?”, then we would vigorously nod our head. It stands heads and tails above the competition in terms of the features it boasts and what it has in its product roadmap.

Incredibly, AppSumo‘s store for SaaS products is currently selling a lifetime subscription to follow.it, enabling you to use the service for your blog for a one-off fee rather than having to a pay a month-on-month subscription amount to either follow.it or any other such provider. The cost for this starts at a ridiculously low $59. But we have to warn you: the lifetime deal will end very shortly.

You can get a $10 reduction off follow.it or any other product at AppSumo by using this special link.

We’ll round off this post with the following video in which one of the AppSumo team members give a lowdown on this exceptional tool we are thrilled to have partnered up with.

The post Subscribe to Azam.info with our Magnificent New Email and RSS Feed Service first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

Smart entrepreneurs understand the importance of domain names and how the right domain will accelerate a business’s presence and profits. This is why, to pick but a few examples, the domain name Business.com sold for $345 million, LasVegas.com for $90 million and CarInsurance.com for $49.7 million.

A domain name is not just something one types on a mobile or laptop to visit a website. It is a brand. It is printed on letterheads, business cards, advertisements, pens, carrier bags, maybe even company cars etc.

A prime domain name is the equivalent of having your business located at a prestigious address in the offline world and can dramatically enhance your reputation and revenues.

It is also worth bearing in mind more and more people are accessing websites on mobiles and tablets, so it’s more important than ever to have a short domain name to make it easier for them to type in a URL on their devices.

Since our inception in 1997, Azam Marketing has built an enviable portfolio of snappy, prized domain names. Some are undeveloped and others have websites on them, with some of our sites being over 20 years old.

One of the main reasons our domain names are tremendously valuable is because pages hosted on them rank much higher in search engine results than those on more recently registered domains. Search engine algorithms give superior ‘Domain Authority’ to domains that are (a) “aged” (registered a long time ago) and (b) have quality and mature links going to them. Our domains tick the boxes on all counts.

As we announced in our recent video, we have launched a new website showcasing our most prime domain names available for sale. You may see the selection on offer by whizzing over here.

Since the website launched a few weeks ago we have already sold one domain and are in the final stages of completely the sale of two others.

We are celebrating Azam Marketing’s 23rd anniversary and are thrilled to announce the launch of our 23-23-23 Promotion today. Enjoy a gargantuan 23% off the prices of all our domain names and websites for sale for the next 23 days. Yes, purchase our V.I.P. web assets for an astronomical reduction of nearly a quarter off their regular prices until and including 23 September 2020!

All you have to do is quote ‘AZAMBLOG23OFF” when you complete the enquiry form on the bottom of our Azam Premium Domains website.

Additionally, if you refer an individual or organisation who buys one or more of our domain names we will give you a very juicy 23% of the sale price for the period of this promotion! (This offer is obviously subject to certain T&Cs to counter fraud and the like: for instance, you can’t refer a family member to buy a domain name to earn the referral commission and they transfer the domain to you.)

Therefore, spread the word to as many people as possible and you can earn nearly a quarter of the sale price of our domains, potentially many thousands of dollars.

We’re into the final third of the year now. Success comes from action not equivocation, so take advantage of this exclusive limited period promotion before it’s too late.

If you have an enquiry about our domain names or 23-23-23 Promotion, please feel free to email us at domains [at] azam.net , telephone +44 (0) 20 33 55 4334 or Skype ‘AzamMkt’.

The post Fast Track your Online Growth! 23% Off Prime Domains for 23 Days first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

Breaking News: in our new video, Nadeem spills the beans on a couple of new stallions we’ve brought into the Azam Marketing stables.

A gruelling process taking the same length of time as Odysseus’ fabled journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War has concluded in two rather splendid assets being acquired to add to Azam Marketing’s portfolio to set us up for our growth plans for the 2020s.

The obstacles thankfully did not include either Minotaurs or Cyclops in the Mediterranean but, among others, did feature a Kafkaesque involvement in a tussle between two warring nations in the Caucuses in central Asia.

Nadeem reminds us how meticulous planning and relentless persistence more often than not leads to fruitful outcomes, sharing words of wisdom from Thomas Edison and Gena Showalter.

This presentation is the third and final part of a triumvirate of videos entitled “The Azam Comeback”. You may watch the first two here at Azam.info: I. A Revelatory Update on the Last Six Months and II. The Launch of Azam’s New Website to Boost Your Online Growth .

Watch the video here:

In the video, Nadeem encourages viewers to visit ‘The Hunger Site’ to support their worthy causes. Here is the link to their website, which we would encourage you to bookmark and visit regularly: https://thehungersite.greatergood.com/clickToGive/ths/home

Now that you’ve found out about our domain name acquisitions, accelerate your own journey to online success rather than taking a labyrinth route like the aforementioned Odysseus by taking over one of our potent domain names or websites. They might not possess the powers of a Golden Fleece but will almost certainly get you to your end goal much quicker. Sail over here: Azam Prime Domain Names and Websites for Sale .

Not seen a domain name or website on Azam Domains that fits in with your plans? κανένα πρόβλημα/pas de problème/no problem. Visit our partner site, who boast a pantheon of over 19 million domains and websites for your delectation by marching here.

The post The Formula? Planning + Persistence + Patience = Success. first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

As announced in our recent video, today we are thrilled to officially launch our brand new website!

In the last decade we have built and managed dozens of websites for our valued clients, but this is the first internal website Azam Marketing has published in all that time.

What is the website? All is revealed in the following video from our Manager Nadeem.

In the revelatory announcement Nadeem also divulges his remorse to this day for a painful decision he had to make with Azam Marketing back in 2006, launches a potentially lucrative promotion exclusively for the viewers, and various things besides.

Watch it here:

Now that the curtains have been opened, take a trip around the spanking new Azam Domains website here.

In the video Nadeem refers to two of the many incredible domain names for sale on Azam Domains. Both of them hosted successful websites in the past and have significant numbers of highly-prized aged, mature inbound links to them which will boost the presence in Google and other search engines for whoever buys the domain names and hosts websites on them.

Alongside that, their extremely long histories of circa 20 years means their webpages will be afforded a massively superior Domain Authority by search engine algorithms than more recently registered domain names and those webpages will be ranked much higher in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

See the details about the first one, 121Love.com, on this page and the second one, 1Lit.com/1Lit.co.uk, over here.

If you are interested in buying these or any other of our other valuable web properties, please complete the enquiry form at the bottom of our new website.

As Nadeem mentions, a new video has been released to follow this. It is quite an eye-opener. Watch it here on Azam.info.

The post Revealed: Azam's New Website to Skyrocket Your Online Presence first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

We are pleased to release a new video in which Azam’s CEO Nadeem candidly describes the tumultuous ups and downs he’s been through in the first half of 2020 as a result of the Coronavirus outbreak and other matters.

He also reveals the first of a few exciting new initiatives launching from Team Azam in the second half of this year.

Watch it here:

In the video Nadeem encourages you to pen a review of Azam Marketing if you’d like to. Here’s links to our profile in three places – on Google, Facebook and on Trustpilot – you are welcome to consider posting your reviews to:

Google Reviews

Facebook Page Reviews

Trustpilot Reviews

Thank you. Your support is always greatly appreciated.

The presentation is the first in a triumvirate of videos entitled “The Azam Comeback”. Watch next two in the series here on Azam.info:

II. Revealed: Azam’s New Website to Boost Your Online Growth

III. Planning + Persistence + Patience = Success!

The post The Insane Life of an Entrepreneur: The Tumultuous Last Six Months Exposed! first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

Our CEO, Nadeem Azam, was invited onto Ummahpreneur’s live video series to be interviewed by podcaster Abby El-Asmar yesterday.

Abby is doing a remarkable job in nurturing entrepreneurship in the Muslim community and he holds the interviews to give both established and aspiring businesspeople the opportunity to learn some of the strategies for success from his guests.

In the no-holds-barred interview, followed by a live question and answer session, Nadeem shared, among other things:

• How to grow your business in an economic recession such as the one we’re going through
• The secrets to landing high-paying clients and working with major corporations
• How to market your business for free using the online-offline strategy
• How to develop the mindset to overcome hurdles in business and life
• Why you need to always build an exit plan into your business

The feedback from the hundreds of entrepreneurs watching was astounding, with dozens of people posting positive comments on Facebook and elsewhere! They were saying things such as Nadeem’s exuberance, his tenacity against so much adversity and the golden nuggets of practical guidance he had provided had inspired them to redouble their efforts with their own ventures with a greater level of passion and focus.

Make yourself a cuppa, sit back and enjoy the interview here:

See more Ummahpreneur podcasts on their website here and follow them on their Facebook group by going here.

Azam Marketing’s boffins have been preparing free and exclusive content to inspire, educate and guide entrepreneurs that we will be publishing in this blog over the coming months. So don’t forget to subscribe via the options available on this page!

The post The Ultimate Guide to Business Success - An Exclusive Video Masterclass first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

Happy fiday is a popular podcast series run by New Zealander Dale Jones which shares invaluable information on how to get to the position of F.I.R.E. If you haven’t come across the acronym, it stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early.

Happy fiday has interviewed Azam Marketing’s CEO Nadeem Azam on his journey towards F.I.R.E. In the no-holds-barred broadcast Nadeem talks about his struggle commencing in his teenage years to get to a position of financial independence and spills the beans on strategies listeners can employ to retire early.

Listen to the podcast by pressing the play button on the left side below:

You may also listen to the interview on the happy fiday website here.

Would you like to massively scale your business earnings and retire early? Azam Marketing‘s crack team has got unsurpassed expertise growing businesses large and small, so contact us now to see how we can help!

The post The Secrets of Achieving Financial Independence and Retiring Early! first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

We apologise for the radio silence of late. Azam Marketing‘s CEO Nadeem updates our readers and lays bare the trials and tribulations of recent years below.

Today is the greatest day of my life (so far).

On this day, the 1^st of November 2019, by the grace of God, I have finally succeeded in winning a battle that commenced when I started working in 1981 at the age of nine, a thirty-eight year long campaign.

For the sake of brevity I’m only sharing the most essential highlights of happenings over the last several years, but it is still rather lengthy and I apologise in advance for that; it’s necessitated by the considerable timespan it covers. What happened today only makes sense if I explain its backstory, none of which I’ve put pen to paper about before.

Several years ago I invested the revenues I’d earned from my endeavours over the decades into a very close family member’s business. The agreement was I would put up the money, he would (exclusively) put in the work (into starting a business in a sector he’d worked in for twenty years) and he would pay me a healthy monthly income. It would enable him to pursue a long-held ambition, which I wanted to help him with, and at the same time would provide me with the passive income stream I’ve been striving for my entire life and therefore free me to, at long last, prioritise goals for my personal and professional life I’d had to put on hold since my teenage years.

Having been taken advantage of by quite a few people before, I made sure everything was clearly and meticulously discussed and agreed beforehand, not only verbally but in comprehensive contracts approximately 25 pages long in aggregate.

Low and behold, I did not receive either my first month or the second month’s income. Or the fifth or the tenth or twentieth month’s.

For years, a large part of my life involved chasing this person to try to get my money. I went to his house a hundred times. I must have made over five hundred phone calls. I’m sure I wrote at least a thousand emails.

This fellow would always try to avoid me and, on the rare occasions when I did manage to get hold of him, had every excuse known to mankind to avoid paying me.

I discovered the business was being run abysmally and, with my entire life earnings and savings being dependent on its success, I had no choice but to do the one thing I didn’t want and have had to do more times than I can care to remember: put my life on hold yet again to work on someone else’s venture.

I therefore spent years working on turning around a business in a sector I had zero interest in (real estate) and became its CEO, Project Manager, Marketing Manager, Sales Director, Credit Controller, website designer, cleaner and general dogsbody, running many parts of a large, multi-faceted, and desperately-understaffed business from top to bottom, without even earning a penny in salary. I had no choice but to neglect my own baby, Azam Marketing, and that’s why matters have been lacklustre on that front in recent years.

As it became apparent the family member was unwilling to even half-competently run the business, the decision was made to sell it. After I spent thousands of hours turning it into an efficiently-run and highly profitable enterprise, we put it on the market four years ago.

To not make this post longer than it will be, I’ll skip over what happened in most of those four years but suffice to say everything that could have gone wrong went wrong.

At the start of 2018 I eventually found a serious buyer willing to pay a fair price. After protracted negotiations and contractual to-ing and fro-ing, the sale was scheduled to be completed at the very latest in June 2018, then various dates in July 2018; our absolute final, final, final deadline then became 31 August 2018. Deadlines came and went over many months and we remained entrenched in one legal and logistical rabbit hole after another.

The various participants in the sale, which included four teams of lawyers, three sets of accountants, plus agents, auditors, banks and the like, were made up of the most inept, uncooperative and egotistical professionals I have ever dealt with in my career, and that’s something three separate outsiders who also had to deal with them as part of the transaction kept fuming. To give an example, for me to get one key document from our own conveyancer would typically require a dozen emails and phone calls over a month.

The four sets of lawyers went out of their way to act in a way that would have resulted in the sale collapsing, contesting almost everything any of the others suggested. Their egos were the size of Jupiter and their willingness to compromise and charge ahead with the sale non-existent. (Their incentive was to drag out matters as long as possible, as they were making hundreds of pounds an hour.)

As the only person who had a bona fide passion to complete the transaction, I spent most of most days contacting some or other of the 24 individuals involved in the sale to encourage them to co-operate with each other and liaising between them to resolve the literally hundreds of obstacles that were being hurled in our path.

Each and every “final” completion deadline came and went: the last day of November 2018, Hanukkah 2018, Christmas 2018, 18 January 2019. As you can imagine, by now the buyers and their lenders were becoming extremely frustrated and, with Brexit looming on top of hurdles being presented in front of us by stakeholders at a faster pace than us being able to jump over the previous ones, the likelihood of them pulling out of the sale became catastrophically likely.

The intractable nature of the sale zapped any remaining milligrams of energy I had left. A specialist doctor in a hospital diagnosed me with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and insisted I take at least a few weeks off work.

I had no choice but to ignore him. I kept reminding myself of the “mind over matter” mantra/edict the presenters at every health and motivational presentation I had attended drummed into us.

By this point I’d endured several long years of the eviscerating uncooperativeness of the family member and now things had gone from bad to worse, with most of my days involved trying to get headway with several other narcissists and tyrants as well.

My mood plummeted to depths I’ve not experienced before. I stopped travelling on the London Underground on some days because the only solution that would present itself to me to get out of the never-ending quagmire was to jump in front of one of the trains.

For the first time since I launched Azam Marketing in 1997, I killed off my online presence: not posting social media updates, no blogging, no forum posts, nothing. Over the months quite a few people contacted me to ask where I’d disappeared to, but I had neither the inclination nor time to conjure and advertise A Merryful Life of Merriment, which is what an online presence typically demands, when the reality was I was trapped in muddy trenches fighting World War III. I resolved I would not “show my face” to the world ever again, and never write about myself on social media or make another media appearance (turning down a BBC News television interview etc.), unless and if I succeeded with this endeavour.

One of the most painful parts of the struggle was that the very few people I confided in about the situation were unsupportive to say the least. So-called friends who I’d enthusiastically helped time and again took little interest or told me the challenge was not surmountable and I should give up on it.

As literally everything I had depended on this – completing the sale would (a) free me up from being tied to the family member who was deserving of a gold medal for ineptness and unreliability, (b) put me in a position where I’d never have to work a day again in my life, and (c) thereby enable me to, at long last, pursue the burning ambitions I’d put on hold for literally decades – I obstinately ignored all the naysers.

Every morning – often after a night of unbearable insomnia – I’d muster every ounce of energy I could to get out of bed and go into battle again, spending the following ten to twelve hours working on the contractual negotiations and emailing, texting, phoning and going to meet the various participants to strive forward with matters.

This afternoon, I went to the Albert Bridge which crosses the River Thames. Here’s some images of this magnificent 1873 span:

I moved to London at the first opportunity I could, 27 years ago, to seek my fortune in the capital, like Dick Whittington. As I ended up living near the bridge, and hardly knowing anyone in the city, I would visit it from time to time after work. At night-times I’d gaze out at this glorious illuminated structure with London’s majestic skyline in its background and would vow I’d make a success of my life.

It was as chilly and blustery this afternoon as it’d often be when I’d go to reflect on my life on my beloved bridge as a fresh-faced young man.

I spent half an hour praying at the middle of the construction.

I then opened up my bank account’s app on my mobile phone.

At 15:41 on the 1^st day of November 2019, I saw that the proceeds from the sale of the business had finally been received into my bank account!

I was overcome with emotion. I was delirious. I was shaking. I stared for an eternity at my mobile screen as I could barely believe my eyes. The number I saw before me I would never have even dared dreamed of when I would stand on the same spot three decades previously.

Everyone refers to me as a “grafter” if they’re being kind or a “workaholic” if they’re being slightly less so and the bounty from this Exit represents the culmination of a lifetime of sweat to pursue my desire to be financially free.

I’ve been involved with quite a few major projects in my life, such as working with a company to launch them on the UK AIM’s market and another on the US Nasdaq, but nothing I’ve been in charge of has come close to the difficulty of this exercise. It’s taken the large part of a decade, a decade in which I did not take a single holiday, for me to get to understand the nooks and crannies of the failing business, turn it around, package it for sale, find a buyer, and plough through the contractual negotiations to get to today’s completion. The legal documents alone must total over 1,500 pages.

The impact on my life of today’s Exit, in a multitude of different ways, is impossible to overstate.

Today, for the first time in my life, I can say I am truly free.

Now you’ll understand why I’ve been AWOL in recent times.

I end this account by thanking God. During all those years of very dark days, days on which everything and everybody seemed to be conspiring against me, it was He who fed me with the willpower to struggle on.

“For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.”

Never ever give up.

Nadeem

The post Today is the Greatest Day of My Life first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

Azam Marketing’s Founder and CEO, Nadeem Azam, muses on a remarkable anniversary, one that is exceptionally rare for companies in the cut-throat and fast-moving internet space to survive long enough to mark.

A week is a long time in online business and a hundred is an eternity in an arena in which my colleagues and I experience more changes in our day-to-day work in a year than people in professions such as accountancy, dentistry, legal work, teaching, plumbing, high street retailing, hospitality and many others will go through in their respective trades in a decade.

For Azam Marketing to have been alive and kicking as of this week for not a hundred but an extraordinary 1,096 weeks is something that, on the one hand, flabbergasts me and, on the other, makes me feel blessed. In case you’re wondering why 1,096 weeks is worthy of penning this eulogy, it’s 11,047,680 minutes… or… to employ a unit of measuring time that will elucidate where we stand more clearly… 21 years. Mais oui, Medames et Messieurs, the 4th of August 2018 sees us mark our 21st anniversary!

The internet was a different country back on the 4th August, 1997 when a naive, raw and enthusiastic incarnation of Nadeem, half my current age, seated himself in front of a Power Macintosh 5260 to formally launched his assault on cyberspace by going live with his first website on the free web hosting platform Angelfire. The web browser of choice towards the curtain call of that millennium was Netscape Navigator. Most people used dial-up internet connections with blazing speeds ranging from 28.8Kbps to 33.6Kbps and were salivating at the prospect of having 56Kbps.

Google did not exist in 1997. Three years earlier “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” had been renamed to something more catchy, “Yahoo!”, and a sizeable portion of the planet’s 121 million internet users would use the portal to find what they were looking for from the 1,117,255 websites in existence.

Here’s what Yahoo looked like on the day after the birth of Azam Marketing:

From those embryonic days leap into a time machine, enter a date 21 years into the future to August 2018 and we crashland into a world in which there are 1,902,145,187 websites, and c. 4,456,932,140 people, more than 55% of the planet’s population of 7,730,758,428, make use of the internet. Yahoo has long since been kicked into the gutter by the leviathan Google that it gave birth to by allowing it to become the sole search engine provider on its platform, and has plummeted to a miserly 2.21% of the search engine market share; in June 2017 it sold to Verizon for a pittance of its former value.

As for Azam Marketing during that 21 year time travel, while we obviously haven’t enjoyed anything like the growth trajectories of the Googles of this world, thankfully we have gone in the same direction of today’s all-dominant dotcom behemoths rather than that of Yahoo and the vast majority of our peers from the mid-to-late 1990s. The latter typically did not even last for five years beyond the dotcom crash, nevermind ten or twenty or 21.

I will leave you to enjoy a new, updated version of our birthday showreel video, in which we showcase 21 highlights from Azam Marketing over the last 21 years:

The post Azam Marketing Comes of Age - Happy Birthday to Us! first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

A significant ratio of potential customers rely on positive online reviews when they want to purchase a product or a service. Positive reviews online affect the buying behaviour of customers in every industry. Needless to say, a customer will gravitate towards a product with positive reviews instead of a negatively reviewed item.

Positive reviews enhance your organic search click-through-rates

Depending on the search engine you are using, reviews will prominently appear in the top SERPs (search engine results pages) alongside listings from your site itself. Some surveys have suggested that online reviews make up to 10% of Google and other search engines’ results.

Obviously a listing with positive reviews draws more attention as opposed to a listing that has poor or no ratings.

Positive reviews enhance your search engine optimisation

There are many sources that Google uses to get local business information, and among them are the popular review sites. If you have a higher percentage of popular reviews coupled with on and off-page search engine optimisation, your business listing goes up in the organic results.

Positive reviews are a social proof

If your business has positive reviews, it is a social proof that your business is legitimate. A customer can tell that what you are offering is genuine enough.

Be mindful that negative reviews, while invariably upsetting, do not herald the end of your business. You only need to respond to them, and shows customers you care about their opinions.

Positive reviews help build trust

Positive reviews have everything to do with purchasing decisions by customers, whether they are buying online or visiting the physical location of the business. For instance, if the customer is looking for a restaurant, the reviews available play a role in the decision-making process. Every consumer needs to have trust in a business they are looking to give their hard-earned money over to!

Reviews are valuable feedback

If you have genuine reviews, whether positive or negative, you get critical feedback from customers. You will use this feedback to help in improving your business.

Impact of positive reviews on local SEO

Most entrepreneurs are only too aware of the importance of a good reputation. What people think and say about your business is crucial.

It is essential to listen to the feedback one gets from customers. Online reviews are essential in the following ways:

• They enhance your SEO rankings
• They influence consumer purchasing decisions
• They affect which search results get clicked on

Positive reviews are a way for different businesses to acquire an advantageous position in the local SEO results. Search engine results that have good and positive reviews attract more click-throughs as well as physical visits. Having positive reviews in local search engine results can translate to winning a customer or not.

Dangers of buying reviews and how they affect your business

Every entrepreneur wants his business to receive positive reviews. However, this is obviously not possible, particularly in an era in which most consumers have extremely high expectations. The clamour for positive recognition may drive some to employ black hat tactics. Note that you should never buy reviews as it is likely to eventually hurt the integrity of your business. These purchased reviews are fake and usually look fake. If you are discovered, your business will not only lose its reputations, but customers will walk out on you.

It is possible for review sites to employ user tracking and other methodologies to identify fake reviews. It is essential to keep it genuine every time.

Conclusion

Every business wants positive reviews because that is what will drive purchases and increase their profits. Having positive reviews also helps your business dominate the top positions within search engine results with favourable listings.

References:

Huffington Post

Podium

Shopify

Search Engine Journal

Webopedia

The post How to Use Review Sites to Boost Your Business first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

A while back I went to a talk by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and he was bemoaning the fact that, even though he was raised in Surrey, England, and knew next to nothing about current affairs in Japan, because of his name, visage and ancestry, whenever anything newsworthy happened in Japan, journalists would harass him for his insights!

A name such as “Nadeem Azam” is a liability in contemporary Britain, in which every day I am subjected to questions such as “where are you from?” and appraisals such as “you speak good English”, but when journalists want to reach out to somebody to be interviewed on, say, the Iranian nuclear deal or Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s jiggery pokery, I get the feeling it helps!

We’ve recently marked “World Population Day” and below is an interview with me in the daily newspaper “Gulf News”, in which I share my tuppence (“two cents” for my Stateside friends) on the population explosion in Dubai since the 1970s and the advantages and disadvantages of the emirate having an 83 percent foreign-born population.

“Gulf News” is the most widely read website in English in the Middle East. It enjoys a combined print and online audience of 5.4 million uniques every month.

Print Edition:

Web Edition:

On a small mobile screen, you may not be able to read the interview in the above images, so here it is:

“Nadeem Azam, CEO, Azam Marketing and Middle East Analyst and Marketing Expert, told Gulf News that large cities such as Dubai must prepare for the future growth of urban centres.

“Population growth predictions show the population of Dubai will reach over five million by 2027, which is almost a doubling in the current number of residents. Such a significant rate of population growth can lead to a variety of issues. Most notable is the construction and maintenance of infrastructure. Housing obviously has to be provided for a booming population and this can prove to be challenging particularly in already-tightly-packed cities with limited space.,” he said.

“A tighter concentration of people, physical assets, infrastructure and economic activities can result in challenges and upheavals that can have negative repercussions, particularly over the medium-long term.”

According to the World Migration Report 2015, Dubai has the highest foreign-born population in major cities globally with 83 per cent of the emirate comprising residents from other countries.

Aazam [sic] said “a sizeable foreign-born population invariably has a profound impact on a place. On the positive side, an increasingly cosmopolitan make-up can be tremendously valuable to a location by bringing in fresh ideas, and more and wider skillsets. These benefit the host locality in terms of improving services and facilities available to existing residents, the private sector and the public sector, ranging from neurosurgeons to operate on patients to chefs introducing new kinds of cuisines to people.”

We’ve been blessed to have been kept busy by client work over the last few months which has meant we haven’t been blogging as much as we would have liked. But we’ve resolved to give some much needed TLC to azam.info going forward, so will be releasing at least one new gem each week for your delectation! Click here to subscribe for free, so you don’t miss out.

The post Nadeem Interviewed in Middle East's Most Popular English Language Newspaper on the Challenges Posed by a Population Explosion first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

Far too often we see content marketers quit at the moment of conversion, the time when a prospect turns into a customer. It appears like that’s the end of the story for most of them.

But, as digital marketing authority Christine Warner emphasises, preserving buyers is as important if not more than procuring new ones. When consumer retention measures succeed by only five percent, earnings can typically rise between 25 to 95 percent.

The content marketing funnel doesn’t stop. As you’re busy concentrating on content for the top of the sales funnel or producing ebooks and white papers for the middle-funnel, all the prospects you’ve previously generated are fading into the Land of Forgotten Customers. New customers are undoubtedly important – but it’s also critical to focus on existing ones.

Toby Scammell points out that the more we study sales patterns, the more we learn that consumer spending tends to defy conventional wisdom, so you need more than just your gut instinct to learn how to retain them. So, what are the things you can do to ensure they’ll remain with your company and purchase more of your brand?

Put Audience Development on the Top of the Priority List

What organizations are finding out is that viewing content as just a replacement or a campaign for other marketing focuses is the wrong strategy. When you view content as a way of feeding direct marketing operations, there’s just one attributable profit to it—as a replacement for brochures, advertisements or other imaginative marketing resources. As we all know, messaging that fails to resonate with its audience can never hope to capture their attention.

The truth is, content is usually more costly than all those other alternatives. It takes longer, and it’s harder, so it’s stressful – and without a strategy, you won’t get where you want to be. Businesses that are thriving have found that content marketing needs to give more than one kind of value to be deserving of the expense. It needs to present combined value over multiple areas of the organisation.

Nourish Your Brand Ecosystem

Let’s take a look at what this looks like through the eyes of the existing customer. They’re part of your audience already as they’ve been through the content funnel. You hold a connection with them because they’ve bought from you, which indicates that you retain reasonable business interest to reach them.

If someone already reached the bottom of your funnel, they’ll continue to be a member of your inbound traffic. They’ve noticed your content was helpful and now that they’ve previously built a reliable relationship with you, they’re even more inclined to recommend your content to others. That’s the solution to keeping your funnel full: as existing customers recommend your content, they shift to brand advocates, the most helpful of all testimonials.

A carefully-thought-through content marketing and audience development strategy is the best way to plug up those leaky holes.

If you’re interested in more marketing news and guidance, be sure to check out our homepage for new articles.

The post Why Content Marketers Need to Stay in Touch with Their Audiences first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

If you are a marketer in today’s world you need to be profoundly aware of the optimal demographics for your product or service to be successful. That insight will take your campaigns to the next level. If you don’t, you will lose out to the competition.

Here is why targeting searches at search engines or followers on social media by age is so important:

Buying Habits

Every age group has a set of buying habits. This information is readily available with a few searches online. It allows you to know how to propose specific offers, whether it’s a one-time promotion or a long-term subscription. But if you don’t know their age in the first place, you can’t leverage this data. Therefore you might want to tailor your social media content or your search engine advertising copy and graphics to the manner that appeals to them the most.

Engagement

Needless to say, providing content to retirees and semi-retirees ages 55+ is going to require a different approach than creating engaging content for millennials. For example, many retirees are faced with a surplus of free time in retirement and struggle to know what to do with it.

Therefore, retirees could be a viable target for engagement as they often don’t plan or adequately address their spare time in their third age. This is an example of why targeting your social media followers by age is crucial. If you want to create engaging content, you need to know who your audience is, what they value, and how your products and services can solve one of their problems. That information will affect everything from the words you use to the images in your marketing.

Sharing

Getting your followers to share your content can be a significant advantage. It allows you to enjoy a viral component without spending more money. When you know their ages, you can request in a way that they are most likely to hit the share button.

Language

Different generations use different language and slang. You might ask someone who is older to take action in a more formal, traditional way. On the other hand, younger people often prefer the informal approach.

Finding Your Followers’ Age Information

Most platforms today, like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have a way to determine the age of your followers. Sometimes this is done with a central account dashboard. Other times, you need to use third-party apps.

These apps have complicated algorithms that can either access the API uniquely or determine general ages by other means. Whether you use built-in data or tools or choose to purchase one, they can both be valuable. They’ll give you insights to grow your brand in the future.

When it comes to the ins and outs of digital marketing it can seem overwhelming at first. But whether you are a veteran marketer or a beginner, you should focus on understanding the age categories of your target market. This will allow you to create compelling content and advertising that speaks directly to their wants and needs, increasing your conversion and profits from your endeavours!

The post Targeting Followers On Social Media By Age first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

Increasing B2B sales isn’t simply a matter of hanging out your shingle and hoping that more customers will come your way. Businesses who purchase from you want to believe they have the right vendor at the right time for the right price. Because there are more people involved and there are higher price points, we know from experience at Azam Marketing it can often take months to close a business-to-business sale.

As a business who markets to other businesses how can you tilt the playing field and make sure that when the customer is ready to buy, your company is the one that comes to mind?

1. Collect Feedback

Feedback, whether received through surveys, in-person interactions, or email, is vital for both technical improvements to your site and funnels and your customer-facing work. Because in-depth and useful feedback from clients is hard to come by, it’s important that you take steps to automate the process and encourage your clients to provide you with more.

Talk with your clients. Find out what they liked and what they didn’t like. Talk about the number of steps that they took to get to the sale and the process that they went through. Ask them what about your company caught their attention and what they didn’t like.

Your customers’ needs are constantly evolving. By listening to what they are saying and keeping your ‘finger on the pulse’ you can stay ahead of the competition, making more sales for your company.

2. Produce Videos

There are compelling reasons to have video on your site, but the biggest reason is that it’s one of the most effective means of selling your company’s product. Customers and clients engage with video, often watching and engaging with the shorter ones for the entirety of the clip.

Here are some noteworthy statistics about video marketing.

• 43% of customers want to see more videos from marketers
• 9% of marketers name video as the type of content with the highest ROI
• 4x as many customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it
• Shoppers who view video are 1.81x more likely to purchase than non-video viewers
• 4 in 5 customers believe that demo videos are helpful

Depending on your products, your videos can have many purposes.

• How-to videos explaining a single part of your product.
• Explainer videos that outline what your company does and how it does it.
• Funny videos designed to get others to think about your product.
• Video testimonials from your clients to persuade others.

3. Upsell and Cross-sell

Upselling and cross-selling have increased sales of B2B and B2C companies for ages. Upselling simply offers a higher version of the product itself. Cross-selling offers related products to your clients.

Upselling

Amazon has this tactic down cold. For instance, If you place an order for a laptop, you will inevitably be asked whether you want to upgrade the memory card or get a better one. It is the logical thing to do and, shown to millions of people every day, boosts Amazon‘s sales and revenues. The intent behind this is showing the customers that he could get a better product by spending a little extra.

Cross-selling

The McDonald’s sales force are also pros at this tactic. Cross-selling offers your client something different but related to the first product. For instance, you’ll most likely be asked the famous question, “would you like fries with that?” or the less leading, “will that complete your order?” with every order. This gives McDonald’s customers to look at the menu for another few moments, pondering their next mouthwatering treat.

Cross-selling and upselling tactics can be applied to nearly any business who wants to improve its bottom line and increase B2B sales. By offering multiple versions of the same service or related services, you can create a selling juggernaut with your already ‘warm’ clients.

4. Run Events

Local events can boost your bottom line like nothing else because they allow you to put a face to the name of the client. Savvy businesses regularly hold events to keep their brand at the top of mind for their customers. Here are some statistics about event marketing for your reading pleasure. The company Certain has gathered over 75 statistics for a larger view of the event marketing picture. Here are a few:

• 84% of consumers repurchase the product promoted at the event, after their first purchase
• 51% of marketers surveyed believe that events strengthen existing customer relationships
• 60% of marketers use tradeshows and events for face-to-face customer meetings
• 58% of marketers believe that events and conferences are important ways to improve customer experiences of their services or products
• 31% of event marketers believe that trade shows, conferences, conventions, and channel events are essential to doing business in their target customer markets
• 69% of B2B marketers consider in-person events effective)
• The top 5 B2B content marketing tactics: Social Media Content (92%); eNewletters (83%); Articles on your Web Site (81%); Blogs (80%); In-Person Events (77%).

The event you hold doesn’t have to be something very formal. You can set up something on Meetup for your contacts and clients to attend. By offering them something different to get them in the door, you are getting your brand to stand out and lining up potential customers.

5. Publish Case Studies

Whether your business constantly generates data and whether you have hired a marketing agency like yours truly or you are the one doing the advertising, leveraging that data into the creation of case studies – and perhaps white papers – is often beneficial for your business. Case studies generates fuel for the fire to get more clients interested in your product or service because it’s measurable proof of what your company does.

73% of buyers used case studies in B2B purchasing decisions (2016 DemandGen Report). Fortunately, developing a case study mostly involves the collation of materials rather than the creation of new materials. Look at your customer successes. Are there ways that you can parlay that into viable case studies?

These 5 marketing tactics to increase B2B sales are by no means the only way to capture the attention from customers and earn higher revenues from them. Each tactic has its pros and cons, but all of them give you the opportunity to increase your bottom line.

What steps can you begin to implement today to increase your company’s revenues?

A slightly different version of this article is originally posted at Tenfold.

The post 5 Marketing Tactics to Increase Your Business-to-Business Sales first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

Your favourite digital bods are thrilled to be entering the video age with a series of exciting new videos. The first releases have been created for the tens of thousands of loyal followers of our social media channels and their aim is to infuse folk with hefty dollops of inspiration sprinkled with pearls of wisdom from some of the greatest minds in history combined with what we have learned while running Azam Marketing.

We have created bespoke videos for each of our several different Facebook and Twitter accounts. The videos are similar, so we’ll showcase just a couple of them below for your delectation.

This one is for Azam Marketing’s Twitter account (follow here):

Twitter only allows videos to be up to 2 minutes 20 seconds in length and so we created the above to be just one second shorter than that limit. Facebook’s maximum time length is a lot longer (at 45 minutes), so we were able to shoot slightly longer videos for that channel and include another quotation from the “Wizard of Menlo Park”.

This particular one is for the Nadeem Azam Facebook page (like and follow here):

We’ve uploaded a few other videos to our YouTube channel in the last couple of weeks, including two indepth tutorials that are over forty minutes long each and pure gold dust, so make sure you check it out and subscribe here!

The post Develop a Winner Mindset like Thomas Edison! Watch Inspiring New Azam Videos first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

I’ve been interviewed several times by radio and television stations this year, but the interview I’ve enjoyed the most is with Shawn Collins as part of his renowned ‘This is Affiliate Marketing’ podcast series.

For those people who don’t know him (have you been living under a stone??!!), Shawn is a legend in the affiliate marketing industry, having been a key figure in its development since he started out in 1997.

Shawn is Co-CEO of the Affiliate Summit, an industry conference for affiliate marketing, which regularly sells out and features the biggest names in performance marketing. He is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of FeedFront Magazine.

His book, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants is the best selling book in the space, and it is considered to be required reading by affiliate managers. He also wrote the Amazon bestselling book, Extra Money Answer, as well as Affiliate Manager Boot Camp: Recruiting, Educating, and Retaining Affiliates.

Shawn makes a point of not “talking shop” in his podcasts and there is no business talk; instead he tries to get to know what makes the personalities in the industry tick. As Shawn states, “affiliate marketing is about the people, not the companies”.

In the interview Shawn asks me about:

• Muhammad Ali
• Programming video games as a kid
• Ending racial, class, and gender bias in creative professions
• Studying political science and political ambitions
• My addiction to reading which means checking out dozens of books from local libraries

Click play below to listen to the podcast, with relevant pictures:

Links from the interview:

• Nadeem on Facebook
• Nadeem on Twitter
• ’50 Books from the Past 50 Years Everyone Should Read at Least Once’
• Nadeem with Muhammad Ali
• “Enough is Enough: Let’s End the Racial, Class and Gender Bias in the Creative Professions!”
• “This is Affiliate Marketing with Shawn Collins” podcast series
• Shawn Collins on Twitter

My team and I at Azam Marketing have lots of exciting things we will be announcing over the next few months so subscribe to this blog to remain updated for free.

The post Nadeem Interviewed on Muhammad Ali, Racism and Sexism in the Workplace, and His Biggest Addiction first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.

It is vital to ensure your sales strategy is laser focused and effective. Your B2B and B2C lead acquisition strategy is critical to success or failure. You may have the best talkers, presenters and deal-makers in your team. However, it’s going to be a long and difficult journey, and potentially cataclysmic for your business, if you have a mismatched and ineffective client-acquisition strategy.

To devise a methodology that will reap dividends for your business, your first step is to distinguish between B2B and B2C. The sales strategies that you employ are distinctly different, depending on your target audience. Here are six key differences to keep in mind:

Lead Pool

The lead pool size is a major differentiator between B2B and B2C sales strategies. With B2Cs, you are targeting large numbers of people – often millions – who you feel need your product or service.

Let’s say, as example, that you’re selling cornflakes. To zoom in on your target audience, just count the number of people who have breakfast every day. And, in case you want to broaden the market, you can get marketing to design a campaign that sells cornflakes as snack and dinner alternatives. In this case you potentially have a lead pool made up of billions of people.

For B2Bs, the lead pool size usually shrinks significantly, and is more defined by the companies’ specific requirements. As an example, let’s presume that you’re selling one of those corn/oat-flake making machines. This limits your lead pool to companies, such as Kelloggs and Nestle. You don’t even have those artisan cornflake makers in your lead pool, unless you can convince them to turn to machines.

Given this reality, a blanket approach won’t work. Similar companies will go after that puddle-sized lead pool. So, you need to be specific in your pitch to each of the companies in your pool.

For both B2B and B2C sales teams, here’s a useful pointer from SEOmoz‘s effervescent CEO and co-founder Rand Fishkin in terms of how to win over your lead pool: “Best way to sell something: don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect and trust of those who might buy.”

Required Product Knowledge

Your sales team needs to know about what they’re selling. This is the same, regardless of whether they’re trying to procure purchases from consumers or businesses. You and your colleagues need to be flexible and up-to-date with your techniques. As Brian Halligan, CEO and co-founder of HubSpot, emphasises: “People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction.”

Both B2B and B2C sales teams need to know their product like the back of their hand. They should know their features, design details, advantages and disadvantages. Competitor knowledge is necessary too. Buyers are more sophisticated these days – be it B2B or B2C. They will know some details about your product and ask questions.

The difference lies in the depth of knowledge required. Buyers in B2B and B2C have different information requirements. A modern mother buying cornflakes, for instance, may want to know the calorie and sugar count of the product, as well as its price and taste. Your sales team can be trained to respond promptly these queries. After a week or two, they may already be highly knowledgeable about your product.

Compare this to a B2B sales team. Your team needs to know the specifications and technical details of the product. They need to know how this would fit into the systems – hardware, software and human-powered – and processes of your target companies. And, it is almost always different from one company to the next.

A few weeks of training often won’t cut it. An effective B2B sales team needs continuous training, thorough product knowledge, and experience in product presentations and fielding questions from executive-level prospects.

Number of Decision-Makers

In a typical B2C buying scenario, you only deal with one decision maker. In our cornflake example, to this day in a family set-up it is still usually the mother, and it is her tastes, budget and preferences that you need to consider. Perhaps her partner or children will also have a part to play in the cornflake-buying decision – but that is not always the case.

In the case of B2Bs, the decision-making process is more than likely to be a lengthy process that involves trying to win over several stakeholders. According to CEB (now Gartner) Executive Advisor and author Brent Adamson, the average number of B2B stakeholders is 6.8.

There are several factors to explain this, such as globalization, the decentralization of decision making and solutions packages (instead of singular products). Whatever the case, your B2B sales team should employ a strategy that factors in several key decision-makers.

Expected Response

The response to your sales strategies is expectedly on opposite ends when it comes to your B2B and B2C efforts.

You strive for an emotional response from your B2C clients. Sure, you might offer some facts here and there. Perhaps you will tell your prospects that cornflakes are good fibre sources and that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But, the end goal of your marketing outreach is to gain customer loyalty. You want them to love and prefer your product, even if there are better breakfast options.

It’s different with B2B clients. Corporate purchases – such as cornflakes making machines in our example – are usually on the top end of the price scale. They’re investments that need thorough consideration, especially when it comes to the expected costs, returns, advantages and disadvantages. These are things that can’t be left to emotions.

B2B buyers are more likely to approach their purchasing decision with rationality. Keep this in mind when drafting sales strategies that target corporate buyers.

Decision-making Process

In the B2C scenario, the decision-making process is quick – in some case, even impulsive. People buy out of habit or they buy in-the-moment. Their decision is influence by advertising, word-of-mouth or habits/ cravings. To sell to this kind of audience, you need product awareness and presence.

With B2Bs, however, the wooing period is longer. There are several people making the decision, and you need to convince each one of them. You will go through a lot of phone calls, meetings and demos if you’re keen on closing the deal. And, this can take months.

Length of the Business Relationship

Typically, B2C business relationships are looked upon as one-off transactions. The focus is right there at the point of purchase. Outside that, preferences and loyalties can change. The cornflake-buying mother today may decide on another brand next week; or, she may choose to switch to eggs and toasts for breakfast.

With B2Bs, it’s different. The whole purchasing process is an investment for both sides. Your sales team puts in weeks or months of their time and effort attending to the requirements of the prospect. You nurture your lead, and provide necessary information and content. You follow-up, meet and present to all stakeholders. Your buyers put in their time and effort too to find the best-fit solution for their needs.

The underlying expectation of this mutual investment is that it’s for a long-term relationship. It’s never a one-off transaction because there’s going to be a consistent need for maintenance, support and upgrades. The stakeholder’s purchasing decision takes a long time because it’s a crucial one: that of choosing a business partner.

Of course, this can also apply to B2C transactions, at a lesser degree. You create relationships with your clients, whether B2B or B2C. This is where your business’ success lies. As speaker, writer and Chief Content Office of MarketingProfs, Ann Handley, puts it: “Make the customer the hero of your story.”

This article is originally posted at Tenfold.

The post Winning New Customers: 6 Major Differences between B2C and B2B Sales Strategies first appeared on Digital Marketing & Business News, Views and Advice.