Shopify

Imagine your fashion brand just launched a new line of shoes and you want to get the word out. Do you revamp your entire website to announce the presence of these shoes? You could, but it might be time-consuming and require the work of software engineers. A more efficient option might be to announce the shoes in your own blog post, which lets you broadcast your new offering without impacting the rest of your website.

Starting a blog makes a lot of sense for a growing business. It’s a great form of organic marketing, and it’s easy to do. Here’s an overview of blogs, with tips for starting a blog of your own.

What is a blog?

A blog is a regularly updated online journal where authors share content like written posts, photos, and videos. Entries typically appear in reverse chronological order, with the latest blog posts appearing first in the feed. Abbreviated from the term “web log,” a blog provides routine updates to an online community of interested readers.

Blogs come in many forms. A personal blog can look like an online diary, where bloggers share thoughts and experiences with their audience. A business blog can promote products, inform a target audience about a company, or deliver content that optimizes search engine results and drives traffic to an ecommerce store. Some blog owners lease out space on their blogs, allowing advertisers to pay for sponsored posts promoting their brands.

Most blogs provide a lot of leeway for the people who maintain them. You can spend all day writing blog posts, or you can post only on rare occasions. This flexibility makes most blog content different from news articles, which audiences expect at regular intervals.

Blog vs. website: What’s the difference?

Both blogs and websites exist online and can be accessed via web browsers. However, the terms “blog” and “website” are not synonyms. A website is any collection of web pages published under a common URL. A blog specifically refers to an online journal, a portion of a website that contains written and visual content.

Websites can include landing pages, ecommerce stores, video libraries, photo portfolios, contact pages, and blogs. In fact, many business websites contain a blog section where the company can post updates without upending the entire website. However, those websites likely contain many other sections, too—the blog just occupies one web page out of many.

In essence, a blog always appears on a website, but not all websites have blogs.

Benefits of blogs for businesses

Blogs can add a lot of value to a business website. Sometimes blogs can even be the start of a successful business. Epic Gardening started out as a blog and later branched into ecommerce. In an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Epic Gardening founder Kevin Espiritu explains that his company’s blog origins helped center its mission when ecommerce became the company’s primary focus. “Our mission as a company is to teach the world to grow,” Kevin says. “Whether it’s an article or a blog article, podcast or YouTube video, whatever, that’s the primary goal.”

Here are five specific benefits that businesses can expect from a successful blog:

Improves search engine optimization (SEO)

Blog content can help your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is particularly true for blogs that cover niche subjects. Let’s say your blog’s niche is woodworking. If you write a detailed new blog post about joint fasteners, your post might show up when people type “joint fasteners” into search engines. Showing up on SERPs can drive website traffic, which in turn can lead to more sales.

Fulfills a content marketing strategy

In addition to posting on social media platforms, a well-maintained blog can be the cornerstone of a broader content marketing strategy. The shareable content you create in a blog can be repurposed for social media marketing, newsletters, and other marketing channels. These combined efforts can amplify your business’s reach and visibility.

Establishes expertise and authority

You can use your blog to share personal insights, industry knowledge, and expertise, positioning yourself as a thought leader and trusted source in your field. This helps you build credibility with customers and peers alike.

Promotes products and services

If you sell products online, blogs can help you explain their value to website visitors. You can use a blog post to highlight product benefits, use cases, and success stories. For instance, if your ceramics company rolls out a line of dishware, you could dedicate a series of new blog posts to showing the dishes in action, highlighting their dishwasher-safe construction, and sharing customer testimonials about them.

You can also promote your products even when you’re not directly writing about them. Continuing the dishware example, you could launch a series of seasonal recipes and point out that your new plates provide a great way to serve dinner.

Engages customers

Try using your blog to speak directly to your audience by addressing readers’ questions, concerns, and interests. Solicit blog post ideas from subscribers. Answer questions in the comment section. Directly quote clients when you write a blog post. This engagement fosters a sense of community and strengthens customer relationships.

14 types of blogs

Blogs take many forms and serve different purposes. Some of the most common types of blog formats include:

1. Business blogs. Focused on promoting a business, these blogs publish content that highlights industry trends, company updates, and product information.

2. Personal blogs. These are online diaries or personal web pages where individuals share thoughts, experiences, and insights about their personal lives.

3. Educational blogs. Focused on teaching, these blogs often sell online courses or offer tutorials and how-to guides on various subjects.

4. Lifestyle blogs. Many bloggers run lifestyle blogs that cover topics such as fashion, travel, and wellness, often reflecting the blogger’s personal interests and daily life.

5. Tech blogs. A tech blog covers topics related to technology, such as software reviews, tech news, and how-to guides.

6. Food blogs. A food blog focuses on sharing recipes, restaurant reviews, and cooking tips, often accompanied by high-quality images.

7. Beauty blogs. Beauty blogs typically feature content related to makeup, skin care, and hair care, often including tutorials and product reviews.

8. Fashion blogs. Dedicated to the latest trends in fashion, these blogs showcase outfit ideas, style tips, and shopping advice.

9. Travel blogs. Someone who travels extensively can create a travel blog to share experiences, tips, and photos from their journeys, inspiring readers to explore new destinations.

10. Parenting blogs. Focused on family life, these blogs offer advice, tips, and stories about raising children and managing family-related challenges.

11. Health and fitness blogs. Many blogs in the health and fitness sector focus on wellness, exercise, nutrition, and mental health, often including workout routines and healthy recipes.

12. Niche blogs. These blogs focus on a specific angle within an industry, like a design blog that focuses on eco-friendly interiors. Niche target specific—though not always small—audiences.

13. Group blogs. Managed by multiple contributors, these blogs allow multiple bloggers to share diverse content under a common theme or topic.

14. Reverse blogs. In a reverse blog, the content is primarily generated by the blog’s readers or community, with the blog owner acting as a moderator.

How to create a blog

1. Choose a blogging platform and web hosting service
2. Plan your content strategy
3. Customize your blog to fit your brand
4. Write and publish your first blog post
5. Promote your blog
6. Optimize your process for continued success

If you’re new to blogging—or have engaged in personal blogging but never business blogging—you may find it a bit intimidating to get started. But it’s quite easy to get a new blog off the ground. Here are six steps to follow:

1. Choose a blogging platform and web hosting service

Begin by selecting a blogging platform that suits your needs, such as WordPress, Blogger, Shopify, or another content management system (CMS). Next, pick a web hosting service that offers reliable performance and consider whether you want a free domain or a paid one. Your choice of hosting service will affect the blog’s speed, security, and overall user experience.

2. Plan your content strategy

Your content strategy will narrow the focus of your blog, giving you guardrails for what to cover and what to leave out. Research successful blogs in your subject area and write down a list of best practices. Decide whether you will be the one authoring most of the content, if you’ll hire a writer to develop blog posts, or if you’ll lean on guest blogging, which involves other bloggers contributing content in exchange for a backlink to their website.

Develop an editorial calendar around a reasonable schedule that allows you to create content consistently without becoming overwhelmed.

3. Customize your blog to fit your brand

Use your chosen blogging software and content management system to set up your blog. Choose from a variety of blog templates and customize the design to reflect your brand. Ensure your site is optimized for both desktop and mobile users.

4. Write and publish your first blog post

Your first article will introduce your blog’s purpose and tell readers what to expect. Make sure it’s well-written, engaging, and aligns with the brand voice and style you’re aiming to use across your blog. Once your first blog post goes live, publish content regularly to keep your audience engaged.

5. Promote your blog

Leverage email newsletters and social media promotion to drive traffic to your blog. Share your posts on platforms like Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Instagram to reach a wider audience. Engaging with readers through comments and social media can help build a community around your blog. You can also cross-promote your articles with other blogs by guest blogging on each other’s platforms.

6. Optimize your process for continued success

Review your blog’s performance using tools like Google Analytics to track metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and customer engagement. Update your editorial calendar and refine your content to ensure your blog remains relevant and successful.

The recent price hikes have probably affected your wallet, both at work and at home.

Essentials like food rose about 17% from 2020 to 2022, while gasoline more than doubled to almost $5 a gallon. Understanding what’s behind these fluctuations is crucial, as they indicate shifts in your purchasing power.

Here’s what you need to know about purchasing power, and what it means for individuals as well as small business owners.

What is purchasing power?

Purchasing power is a term for how much material goods your money can buy at a given time—or the bang for your buck, so to speak. Inflation (the sustained increase in prices over a given time) affects purchasing power, and the two move inversely. For example, if consumer price inflation was 5% in the past year, that means purchasing power declined by 5%.

Purchasing power and inflation influence the cost and standard of living, affecting how much you pay for the things that maintain your lifestyle. This includes housing, transportation, food, fuel, health care, and entertainment.

Economists and public policymakers watch inflation to see if it’s accelerating, slowing down, or even reversing to the point where prices fall (deflation). Central banks, such as the Federal Reserve in the US, analyze inflation trends to set benchmark interest rates, as part of their mission to promote economic growth while preserving the currency’s purchasing power.

A brief history of purchasing power in the economy

In your everyday life, you may track inflation and purchasing power for particular things—a gallon of gasoline or a pound of ground beef, for example. But governments and economists track inflation through indexes, based on baskets (a representative collection of many goods and services). They use inflation indexes to gauge the degree of price changes throughout an economy.

The idea of purchasing power is central to the economic well-being of a nation. As prices go up and the purchasing power of currency goes down, people can buy less with one unit of currency than they could before. To maintain their lifestyle, individuals need to earn more. When Congress created the Federal Reserve in 1913, the central banks’ two primary objectives, known as the dual mandate, were to promote maximum employment and price stability.

Stable prices mean low inflation, so the purchasing power of Americans isn’t eroded. The Federal Reserve’s target for price stability is to hold inflation to 2%, which it considers sustainable. This means consumers can adapt to the small amount of inflation and maintain purchasing power.

Indexes used to track inflation

Many kinds of indexes track inflation in different countries and regions. In the US, economists most commonly look at the following as barometers of changing prices:

Consumer Price Index (CPI)

This is the most frequently used reference for inflation because consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of the US economy. The Census Bureau conducts the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), surveying prices on about 80,000 goods and services and focusing on consumers in urban areas.

Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE)

The Federal Reserve prefers PCE as a more accurate inflation gauge because it covers a broader range of goods and services and includes rural consumers. Also, the PCE updates the proportionate weights of spending categories more frequently to reflect shifts in consumer spending behavior. The PCE index generally tracks closely with CPI but is sometimes more muted; for example, when the CPI peaked at 9% in mid-2022, PCE was roughly 7%.

Producer Price Index (PPI)

While the other indexes focus on the prices consumers pay, PPI tracks changes in prices received by producers of goods and services at the wholesale level. Economists view the PPI as a possible predictor of CPI changes because wholesale prices precede the final prices consumers pay.

Key factors in purchasing power

Purchasing power refers to how much you can buy at a given time. Some key factors that affect purchasing power include:

Inflation and deflation

Changing prices are the most important determinant of purchasing power. Inflation erodes the power, while deflation (such as during the 2008 financial crisis and the years following World War I) increases it. The formula to calculate the rate of inflation looks at the difference between the starting and ending values of CPI. The formula looks like this:

Inflation rate = (Ending CPI – Starting CPI) / Starting CPI x 100

For example, let’s say the CPI had a value of 100 and rose to 10. The rate of inflation would be:

(107 – 100) / 100 x 100 = 7%

Because purchasing power moves inversely to inflation, a 7% inflation rate means a dollar’s purchasing power is down to 93¢ compared to the year before.

Income

Growth in household or business income does not necessarily mean more purchasing power. For example, say inflation was 3% in the past year. If your total income such as wages, rent, and investment income also increased by 3%, your purchasing power remained steady and you could buy the same amount of goods and services.

On the other hand, if inflation was 7% while your income grew only 3%, you’d have less purchasing power. If your income grew by 7% and inflation only rose by 3%, then you gained more purchasing power.

Interest rates

The level of interest rates can influence economic growth and inflation by encouraging or discouraging borrowing that funds consumer and business purchases. Central banks try to balance economic growth with restrained inflation by guiding interest rates higher or lower.

A key example of interest rates affecting our purchasing power is housing—particularly home mortgages. Housing costs account for more than a third of the CPI. During 2020 and the COVID-induced economic slowdown, a borrower with good credit could get a mortgage with a 3.5% interest rate. Since then, mortgage rates have almost doubled, increasing monthly payments.

Money supply

In economic terms, a nation’s money supply is the total of all cash and cash equivalents circulating in the economy at a given time. In effect, it’s a gauge of the funds available among banks for potential loans to households and businesses. In the US, the Federal Reserve influences the money supply by taking actions that either expand the supply to encourage economic growth (easing) or restrict the supply to keep growth from overheating and leading to price inflation (tightening).

Some ways to maintain purchasing power now and in the future could include:

• Investing in financial assets that have higher average long-term returns, such as stocks

• Finding cheaper substitutes among goods and services, such as supermarket-brand groceries instead of brand-name products

Business owners can also negotiate discounts or other concessions from suppliers, or start or join buying cooperatives to improve their purchasing power compared with big companies.

What is purchasing power parity?

While purchasing power mainly focuses on the value of a nation’s currency in domestic transactions, it’s also pertinent when buying goods or services in foreign countries. This makes it important to understand the dollar’s value relative to other currencies. This is where purchasing power parity (PPP) comes in.

The theory of PPP is that goods and services should cost the same in any country or region after factoring in currency exchange rates. Converting foreign currencies to a reference currency—typically the US dollar—makes it possible to fairly compare the purchasing power of countries.

🌟Resource: International Ecommerce: How To Sell Globally Online

Calculating purchasing power parity involves the implied exchange rate for two currencies. The implied rate may differ from the actual exchange rate in currency markets because of different inflation rates among countries, trade tariffs, and other factors. Still, it can be useful in getting a sense of relative purchasing power.

The formula for the implied exchange rate looks like this:

Implied exchange rate = price of basket of goods in currency A / price of basket of goods in currency B

Let’s use an example of a hypothetical basket of consumer goods and services, priced at $500 in the US, and €400 in Germany. The implied exchange rate would be:

$500 / €400 = $1.25 per euro

This means an exchange rate of $1.25 per euro would produce purchasing power parity.

A different real exchange rate would give one currency more or less purchasing power. A $1.10-per-euro rate makes the dollar relatively stronger, for example, while a $1.50-per-euro rate makes the euro relatively stronger.

Imagine you’re on a fishing trip. For every nibble on your bait, you pay 10¢. However, If you catch something, you win $100. Knowing that every cast counts, you ensure your bait is enticing, your hook is sharp, and your line is sturdy enough to reel in your catch.

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing works similarly. A solid ecommerce strategy that converts clicks into meaningful actions, like a purchase, can boost your revenue, but one that isn’t well executed can mean sunk money. Improving your PPC conversion rate is like using a stronger line: You can transform more of your nibbles into big catches.

Learn how to calculate and improve your PPC conversion rate so that every penny counts.

What is the PPC conversion rate?

Your pay-per-click (PPC) conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who took a desired action (such as a purchase, free trial request, or app download) out of the total number of clicks on your ads. PPC typically refers to search engine marketing (SEM) ads but can also include paid social or display ads as well.

PPC conversion rate focuses on macro conversions (actions that support a business’s main goals, like increasing revenue), but some marketing teams also measure micro conversions at every step of the user’s buying journey, such as add-to-cart and checkout rates.

Increasing your conversion rate can lower your customer acquisition cost (CAC), so you spend less money to achieve each conversion. It also results in a higher return on investment (ROI) for your paid marketing efforts because more conversions mean your ads are translating into real business outcomes.

How do you calculate PPC conversion rate?

To calculate your PPC conversion rate, divide the total number of PPC conversions from an ad by the total number of clicks and multiply by 100.

The PPC conversion rate formula is:

Conversion rate = Number of conversions / Number of clicks x 100

For example, if 500 people clicked on an ad and 10 made a purchase (or took some other desired action), your conversion rate is 2%.

You can calculate PPC conversion rates according to each ad or an entire campaign. Drilling down to individual ads helps you pinpoint what elements are working. For example, you might find that ads with personalized landing pages result in more sales than those that don’t. You can also review conversion data for all your ads to determine the total ROI of your paid spend and adjust your investment accordingly.

What is a good PPC conversion rate?

Average PPC conversion rates will vary by type of ad, such as Google search or display. For example, the average conversion rate on Google search ads is 4.4%, while the average conversion rate is 0.57% on display ads.

PPC conversion rate benchmarks also vary by industry and conversion type. Google search ads for apparel brands have an average purchase conversion rate of 2.77%, while vehicle ads average 7.98%.

Considering these variations, a good conversion rate target is anywhere between 2% and 5%.

6 tips for increasing PPC conversion rates

1. Segment your audience
2. Optimize ad copy
3. Create relevant landing pages
4. Implement split testing
5. Use conversion-based bidding
6. Analyze and adjust keywords

Here are six tips to increase your PPC conversion rate:

1. Segment your audience

When you target a mass audience, your ad is unlikely to appeal to most of them, which results in more non-converting ad spend. Instead, customer segmentation ensures your ads are relevant, engaging, and tailored to your target audience.

You can segment your audience through:

• Demographics. Tailor ads according to age, gender, income, and other factors to speak to specific audiences.

• Keywords. Focus the keyword targeting of your search ads on search queries that indicate an intent to purchase. For example, someone comparing products might still be unsure of what they want, but a user with a more specific search might be ready to add it to their cart.

• Location. Use local ad targeting to reach areas where demand is highest or where you’re trying to win new customers.

• Behavior. Data like browsing and purchasing behavior can help you retarget those close to making a purchase or those who visited a specific page.

• Interests. Ads that speak to an audience’s specific interests will engage them more than those that don’t.

• Customer journey. A new customer will require different messaging than an existing customer preparing to make another purchase. Align ads to the customer’s phase in their buying journey.

2. Optimize ad copy

For an ad to resonate, it must speak to the user’s needs. For example, if you sell a vacuum for dog hair and are targeting parents, you might include copy about keeping your home and children’s clothes clean.

Take the time to craft compelling calls to action (CTAs). Depending on where your audience is in their buying journey, your customers may not be clicking the ad to purchase, but the right CTA could get them there. A prompt like “Learn More” or “Shop Now” can be too generic to entice a prospect, missing a chance to prime them for conversion. Here are some ideas for alternatives:

• Get started—no credit card required
• Sign up in 60 seconds or less
• Start your fitness journey today

3. Create relevant landing pages

Once a user clicks on an ad, landing pages can be where you capture them. Start by aligning your ad and landing page content to achieve conversion goals.

Determine which action you’d like your customers to take once they land on the page and make sure every element (copy, visuals, and CTAs) guides the user toward that action. Avoid offering too many things on the page simultaneously because this could confuse your customer and lead to a bounce (when a customer leaves your page without taking any action). Instead, create one landing page for each PPC offer so you can target specific audiences.

For example, if you own a travel agency selling Caribbean vacation packages, your ad might include a CTA to “Book now and receive 20% off.” This ad would link to a landing page with various Caribbean destinations with the same offer. The page shouldn’t include deals for European destinations or other travel offers.

On top of improving landing pages for messaging and user experience, optimize for usability. This includes having pages that load within one to two seconds and are easy to navigate on mobile devices.

4. Implement split testing

The best way to make conversion optimization decisions is to test, review data, and iterate. Split testing, or A/B testing, involves creating two or more versions of an ad or landing page to determine which results in higher conversions. By continuing to test and optimize, you learn more about what your customers want, helping you make better decisions and spend less money on ads that don’t convert.

Here are some variables to test:

• Value propositions in ad headlines
• Video ads vs. static images
• Single product vs. multi-product carousel ads
• Long-form vs. short-form ad copy

When split testing, define your objective to guide your test and measure success. Only test one variable at a time to avoid muddying results, and run tests for at least two weeks to gather enough data.

You can run A/B tests on a PPC campaign using a third-party experimentation tool, such as VWO or Shogun.

5. Use conversion-based bidding

While the goal of click-based bidding (or cost-per-click) is to drive the most traffic to your site from an ad, conversion-based PPC campaigns maximize valuable actions after users land on your site. This ability to hone in on different goals can be a much more effective strategy to improve conversions from PPC.

Smart bidding on platforms like Google Ads lets you choose a bidding strategy based on goals like target cost per action (CPA), target return on ad spend (ROAS), conversion optimization, and more. You can also monitor your ads closely and make adjustments in real time.

For example, you could increase bidding on keywords generating high conversions and reduce spend on specific audience segments according to performance. Bid modifiers also let you make granular changes, like adjusting bids based on specific demographics, locations, or other factors.

6. Analyze and adjust keywords

To get the most value for your spend, analyze and adjust the keywords you’re bidding on continuously. Regularly review search term reports on Google Ads and Bing to see which queries trigger your ads. This will also let you spot high-performing and underperforming keywords and adjust your spending accordingly.

You can also implement negative keywords to avoid spending on keywords irrelevant to your business. To do that, use Google Ads’s Search Terms Report to generate a list of queries that trigger your ads and keyword research tools like Moz or Ahrefs to find similar keywords. Review the queries and create a list of terms that don’t align with your brand or product, then exclude them from your bidding strategy.

Integrate your PPC ads with Google Analytics to get deeper insights into customer behavior once they land on your website from a specific keyword.

Businesses of all sizes use QR codes to provide information about a product, showcase a portfolio, guide diners to a menu, or process digital payments. To do this, businesses provide a code that a customer scans via a smartphone camera. The code navigates to a payment page where customers can complete the transaction using their preferred payment method.

Whether you operate a stand at your local farmers market or want to provide more payment options at your brick-and-mortar store, it’s wise to accept QR code payments. Here’s an overview of how QR codes work and how they can benefit your business.

What is a QR code?

A QR code, or quick response code, is a scannable image composed of black and white squares arranged as a matrix barcode. When you scan a QR code with a tablet or smartphone camera, it triggers the device’s QR code scanning software to take a specific action, like opening a website URL that takes you to a landing page or launching a customer’s payment app on their mobile device. QR codes can also hold other information, like someone’s contact information.

Ultimately, QR codes work much like traditional barcodes, but their intricate layouts can store far more information than a standard barcode can.

How do QR code payments work?

1. A customer scans a QR code
2. A linked app triggers the payment process
3. The customer approves the QR code payment
4. The payment app receives payment authorization
5. The money transfers

Now that you can simply scan QR codes to complete transactions, many businesses have embraced the codes as a way to accept payments. Here’s how the QR code payment process works:

1. A customer scans a QR code

A QR code payment begins when customers scan a code using their phone camera and accompanying camera app. There are two types of QR codes you might encounter: static QR codes and dynamic QR codes.

• Static QR code: This is a fixed QR code that doesn’t change and directs all customers to the same place; a business may print it out and display it at a checkout counter, for instance, to direct customers to its online store.

• Dynamic QR code: Dynamic codes are unique and correspond to specific transactions; a digital point-of-sale (POS) system can generate a unique QR code, for instance, that appears on the screen during checkout so a customer can scan it and complete their order on their phone.

2. A linked app triggers the payment process

Payment apps—such as PayPal or CashApp—then interpret the code and facilitate the transaction by pulling up a checkout page where customers can enter their payment information, including contact details and method of payment.

3. The customer approves the QR code payment

The payment app will ask customers to confirm their total transaction amount. The customer may have the option to adjust the final amount of money on their bill—by adding a tip, for example.

4. The payment app receives payment authorization

At this point, the payment app will request authorization from the customer’s bank or payment service. Customers can pay using a variety of methods such as credit cards, debit cards, and payment platforms like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Different banks have different ways of authorizing purchases. In many cases, users can use passwords, pins, and biometrics like facial recognition or fingerprint scans.

5. The money transfers

With the payment approved, money transfers from a customer’s account to the business’s merchant account. Payment processors will collect fees from the merchants to facilitate the transfer, but these fees aren’t linked to the use of QR codes; they’re the standard fees that the processors always charge to businesses for using the processor, and most fall between 2% and 3% of the purchase price.

Sometimes QR payment fees are lower than the fees the processors attach to credit card payments. For instance, in the US, PayPal charges 2.99% of the transaction plus a 49¢ fee for standard credit and debit card payments, but it only charges 2.29% plus 9¢ per transaction for QR code transactions.

Benefits of using QR codes for payments

QR code payments are a big part of doing business today. They’ve become a popular method of making payments because they’re secure and allow customers to buy things without carrying cash around. They’ve also become a preferred alternative payment method with merchants. Here are some reasons why:

Affordability

You don’t need an expensive POS system to use QR codes. Smartphones and tablets can handle all the computing needed to process payments with QR codes. What’s more, some QR code payment providers charge lower transaction fees than traditional card processors.

Security

While it’s true that a QR code stores information, that info does not include account numbers or banking details. And because QR codes facilitate contactless payments, there are fewer opportunities for hackers to intercept customer data.

Convenience

QR codes simplify the customer journey, creating a frictionless path to checkout. Dynamic QR codes contain payment links so customers don’t need to click through multiple pages to get to the payment page, and facilitate payment methods from digital wallets to credit cards. This makes QR codes as convenient as cash for consumers.

For retailers, a free QR code generator makes the QR creation process simple and cost-effective.

Data collection and analysis

You can use QR codes to collect information about your customers and the transactions they’re making. This includes their names, addresses, purchase amounts, and payment methods. This can help you plot future marketing campaigns, project revenue, and boost customer engagement. For instance, you may learn that your average transaction amount is $87. Using this information, you could attempt to boost sales by offering free shipping on orders over $100.

Every business invests in security. For physical stores, this might involve installing cameras or anti-theft devices to combat shoplifting. For ecommerce businesses, this could mean establishing data security practices to ensure customer information stays confidential. These protected assets—inventory and customer data—are crucial to the business’s success, and keeping them safe is worth investing in.

The same can be said for another important business asset: intellectual property (IP). One way to protect IP is through patents, and for the right businesses, patent protection is absolutely worth the investment. Here we break down the costs of applying for and obtaining a patent.

What is a patent?

A patent is a government-granted right for some forms of IP. Specifically, a patent gives the inventor the sole right to make, use, or sell their invention, usually for a period of up to 20 years, thereby protecting the inventor’s ability to profit from their own creation.

Many people in the patent law community view patents as conducive to ingenuity.

“Inventors are more incentivized to invent when they know there’s some mechanism that allows them to profit for a time without being undercut by competitors,” says Karan Jhurani, a patent attorney with the intellectual property law firm Fish & Richardson.

In the US, patents are issued by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a federal agency. Inventors interested in acquiring a patent submit an application to the USPTO, usually through patent attorneys. Should the application meet the USPTO’s requirements, the agency will grant patent protection over the invention for a period of up to 20 years. Patents do not apply to IP such as literature, drama, and music (those are eligible for copyright) or symbols and logos (those can be trademarked).

Types of patents

There are three different types of patents available:

Utility patents

A utility patent, the most common type of patent, protects intellectual property like machines, processes, systems, and manufactured goods and materials. A new chemical compound or a new kind of kitchen appliance, for example, would qualify for a utility patent.

Design patents

A design patent covers the ornamental design of an invention, like the shape of an indoor exercise bike or the special ergonomic handle of a vacuum cleaner. Patterns or graphics that can be affixed to any item do not qualify for patent protection, but they may qualify for trademark or copyright protection.

Plant patents

A plant patent covers new species of plant life that are cultivated through grafting (cuts of plants), not through traditional seed cultivation. The latter are considered natural phenomena and are not patentable.

Provisional vs. final patent applications

There are two kinds of patent applications: A provisional patent application and a final patent application.

A provisional patent application protects inventions that are still in development and not yet ready for market. To convert a provisional patent into a permanent one, you need to file a non-provisional patent application within a year of filing the provisional application. If approved, the term of the patent is backdated to the provisional filing date. Documenting this timeline can be important for defending your invention against copycats.

How much does a patent cost?

There are a number of costs to consider when seeking a patent, and the total cost can range from just a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. Some of the patent costs, such as government filing fees, are unavoidable. Others will vary depending on the complexity of your invention, who you are as an inventor, and the legal fees you incur.

If you’re just getting started in your patent journey, the best way to understand how these fees can range and add up is by looking at them in the context of the step-by-step patent application process.

Basic patent fees

First off, you’ll need to consider USPTO patent filing fees—some of the more predictable costs associated with obtaining a patent.

“The USPTO offers a tiered fee structure,” Karan explains. “The fees will depend on the size of the entity providing the application. The fees won’t be as high for a solo inventor as they will for a Fortune 500 company.”

For a USPTO-designated “micro-entity” (meaning you have a limited income and have never or rarely filed a patent), the fee for filing a provisional utility patent application ranges from $60 to $300, depending on entity size. Fees range from zero (for micro-entity filings online only) to $320 for non-provisional applications. Design patent fees are slightly lower, ranging from $44 to $220.

On top of that, there is a $160 minimum fee for a USPTO examination, in which your application is checked against existing inventions (this is called “prior art”). If all goes according to plan, you must then pay the USPTO at least $240 to actually issue the patent.

Karan stresses that, more often than not, the costs of obtaining a patent exceed these basic minimums—sometimes unpredictably. There are fees associated with correcting mistakes and responding to USPTO questions and concerns.

“Like with a will, you can certainly draft one yourself. But as things get more complex, mistakes become more likely, and this can create headaches down the line,” says Karen. “Unforeseen fees, forfeiting an earlier filing date—these costs add up, and they can hurt your patent rights in the long run.”

Attorney fees

One way to control for and predict costs is to hire a patent attorney (or sometimes a patent agent, a non-attorney licensed patent professional). Before you hire one though, it’s important to know what that involves. An engagement letter, which commences an attorney-client relationship, can give you a clear idea.

“Your engagement letter should specify what all the fees are and what you’re on the hook for,” Karan says.

If you choose to hire an attorney to assist in compiling and submitting your patent application, you will have to pay a variety of fees throughout the process.

• Retainer fees. Paid at the outset of the attorney-client relationship, it functions as a reservation fee, ensuring your lawyer’s availability to work on your case. Retainer fees can range from $1,000 for solo practitioners and small law firms to between $5,000 and $15,000 for mid-sized and larger firms.

• Hourly rates. Attorneys are usually paid by the hour, with junior associates charging between $150 and $350, and senior attorneys, partners, and patent specialists charging between $500 and $1,500.

It’s important to note that attorney fees will generally be higher in major metropolitan areas like San Francisco and Boston. Conversely, patent agents tend to charge flat fees for set packages of services.

Patentability search

A patent attorney or agent can perform an exhaustive, preemptive search for all prior art in a wide range of databases. This ensures your invention is indeed patentable. And while it’s an optional step, it can help avoid additional costs down the road.

Patentability searches range in cost from $250 for a simple invention to thousands of dollars for a more complex one. The more complex the invention, and the more experienced the attorney, the higher these fees go. For example, computer software-related inventions, which are widely considered to be among the most difficult and costly to patent, can cost upwards of $3,000 to adequately search.

Drafting the patent

Eligible patents contain a lot of information: exhaustive diagrams and a minutely detailed written description of how the invention and each of its components work. Drafting a patent application requires a high degree of technical and legal expertise.

“A patent attorney or agent can typically draft a patent by themself, but sometimes you need to pay for draftspeople to draft specific plans for patentable items,” Karan explains. Using a draftsperson can be particularly beneficial in the design patent context to ensure you’re making the application as accurate and close to the actual representation as possible.

Drafting a provisional patent application can cost anywhere from $400 for a simple invention to $600 for a more complex one. For non-provisional patent applications, costs can range from $1,000 to $1,500 for simple inventions but can go much higher for ones that require more complex diagramming.

Patent examination

After the attorney or agent files the patent application, the USPTO assigns an examiner to the case. USPTO examination fees range from $160 for micro-entities to $320 for small entities to $800 for large entities. Patent examiners then conduct their own patent search, review the application, and issue any concerns or objections to the applicant in the form of a document known as an “office action.”

Patent office action

If your patent examiner issues one or more office actions against your patent application, you will need to respond in order for the patent application to proceed. When an attorney or agent handles these on your behalf, it’s a process known as “patent prosecution.”

In prosecuting the patent, you will most likely need to pay the attorney’s hourly rate. The amount you ultimately pay in connection with responding to office action will depend on the number of concerns raised by the examiner and how complex the responses are.

Issue fee

If a patent is granted, the USPTO will send a Notice of Allowance and Fee(s) Due to the applicant or their attorney. To complete the patent process, the applicant will then need to pay an issue fee for the patent, and, if applicable, a fee to publish it in a patent application publication. The utility patent issuing fee for micro-entities is $240, $480 for small entities, and $1,200 for large entities. Issuing fees for design patents range from $148 to $740.

Maintenance fees

Once you receive your patent, it is valid for up to 20 years from the filing date. Depending on the type of patent issued, a patent owner will need to pay periodic maintenance fees to the USPTO. For utility patents, the minimum maintenance fee is $300. It is paid out in three installments over the course of the patent term:

• At least $100 at the three and a half year mark
• $100 at the seven and a half year mark
• $100 at the 11 and a half year mark

When John Murphy, affiliate marketing expert and owner of The Cold Plunge Store, noticed an odd traffic pattern in his Shopify Analytics report, he suspected fraud. “This new affiliate started sending a ton of traffic out of nowhere,” he says. “It looked like I was using some weird tactics to get people on my website.” John visited the referring affiliate link and found evidence of redirect fraud, so he removed the affiliate from the program to prevent additional losses and damage to his business’s reputation.

Affiliate marketing is popular with businesses and individual creators: For creators, it’s a straightforward way to earn money online; for businesses, it’s a versatile and low-risk approach to online marketing. Experts predict the affiliate marketing industry will reach nearly $40 million by 2028.

But John isn’t alone in his experience with affiliate fraud: Industry data indicates a significant fraud issue—nearly 20% of all affiliate traffic is fraudulent, costing the industry billions annually. 

Here’s how fraudsters work, how to spot them, and seven tips to help you prevent affiliate fraud from affecting your online business. 

What is affiliate abuse?

Affiliate abuse (or affiliate fraud) occurs when an affiliate marketer employs deceptive or prohibited tactics to boost their earnings from an affiliate marketing program, a digital marketing partnership between a business and one or more individual creators (or “affiliates”).

Ideally, affiliate incomedepends on performance: Affiliates promote a business’s products or services and earn a commission based on specific customer behaviors resulting from their efforts. Affiliate abuse undermines this system by using fraudulent tactics to generate false leads and sales, harming the business’s reputation and financial health.

Common types of affiliate fraud

Affiliate fraud comes in many forms. It can include criminal activities, scams, and legal promotional tactics that violate the terms of your affiliate agreement. Keep an eye out for these six common types:

Click stuffing

Click stuffing (or click fraud) is an affiliate marketing scam that exploits pay-per-click compensation models. Abusive affiliates use bots to artificially increase the number of clicks to their affiliate link, and you, the business, pay the affiliate a commission for each fake click.

Digital ad fraud

Ad fraud occurs when an affiliate violates your affiliate agreement’s paid ad policy, which specifies whether affiliates can run specific types of paid ads. Many affiliate programs prohibit the use of paid ads—and those that allow ads typically limit the types of ads an affiliate can run. Search engine advertising is often off the table, for example, because an affiliate’s ad might appear before a company’s site on the search engine results page (SERP). 

Ad fraud can drive up your advertising costs by forcing you to compete with your own affiliates for ad space. Paid search violations can be particularly damaging if an affiliate bids on brand-specific keywords for the ads (like your company name), which can divert otherwise organic traffic through the affiliate’s links.

Fake leads

Fraudulent affiliates can also use software to generate fake leads or false or stolen information, simulate newsletter signups, site visits, contact form submissions, or come up with any other behaviors that factor into your lead qualification system. Fake leads drive up your affiliate marketing costs, degrade the quality of your lead database, and harm your reputation. 

Purchase fraud

Many affiliate offers include sales commissions, which compensate affiliates for purchases resulting from their activities. Some scammers use fraudulent purchases to boost their earnings. Purchase fraud can raise your affiliate marketing and fulfillment costs and cause reputational damage. Common tactics include placing orders with stolen credit card information and purchasing and returning large amounts of inventory.

Redirect fraud

Redirect fraud occurs when an affiliate purchases a domain name (URL), installs a script that forwards all visitors to your company’s website, and credits their own affiliate link as the traffic source, diverting traffic and commissions away from legitimate affiliates to themselves.

Some affiliates engage in “typosquatting,” or buying URLs similar to yours (for example, one with a slight misspelling). When users accidentally visit these domains, they are redirected to your actual site through the affiliate’s link. This allows the affiliate to earn commissions as if they had legitimately referred the users.

Others use redirect scripts on hidden or misleading links, driving low-value traffic from uninterested users.

Cookie stuffing

Some affiliates use a technique called cookie stuffing to falsify sales attribution. When a user visits a fraudulent affiliate’s website, the site attaches a cookie to the user’s browser that attributes any future purchases from your company to that affiliate. If the user makes a purchase later, your affiliate marketing system will indicate that you owe the affiliate a commission, even if the sale did not result from the affiliate’s efforts.

Tips to prevent affiliate abuse

Affiliate scams are unfortunately common—but there are a number of ways to reduce your risk. Here are seven tips to help you prevent affiliate marketing fraud:

Clarify your expectations

An affiliate program agreement is a legal document establishing the relationship between an affiliate marketer and a business. It supports affiliate compliance by helping honest affiliates understand your program and deterring potential scammers. 

Include information about prohibited promotional methods, such as running paid ads, posting affiliate links to coupon sites, or sending unsolicited emails. You can also outline the consequences for violating affiliate terms to deter fraud and support potential legal actions.

Screen affiliate program applicants

A thorough screening progress can deter fraudsters and help you recruit the best affiliates for your business. 

Legitimate affiliates generate traffic by building authority in specific niches, so review each affiliate’s site and social media, and prioritize those with high-quality, focused content. While your research can’t prove whether the affiliate engages in unethical practices, it can reduce fraud risk by engaging affiliates capable of generating legitimate business.

Watch out for red flags, like low-quality content or recently created social media accounts. Spammy or low-quality content can damage your brand reputation, and a limited online presence may indicate a lack of experience, authority, or even a fake identity.

Join affiliate networks

Reduce your risk by joining an affiliate network, which connects marketers with brands. These networks help recruit and manage affiliate partners. Most pre-screen affiliate marketers before admitting them to the network, and many offer fraud detection and support services. Shopify Collabs, ShareASale, and CJ Affiliate are three popular options.

Review website traffic

Use Google Analytics (or your website analytics provider of choice) to uncover fraud. Review referring URLs to identify prohibited sources or paid traffic, and investigate any unusual spikes in activity, especially if they’re from unfamiliar sources or regions where your products aren’t typically popular.

Monitor affiliate activities regularly 

Use affiliate management software to track traffic volumes, earnings, and conversions by affiliate account, and investigate any sudden changes or inexplicably high or low numbers. A particularly high conversion rate can indicate fraudulent purchases, for example, and a very low one might point to click-farming. 

Look for an affiliate management system that offers built-in fraud detection software. Some systems automatically run reports and flag suspicious activity, which can save you time and make it easier to keep tabs on a large number of affiliate relationships.

Use device fingerprinting

Device fingerprinting generates a unique ID for a user’s computer by combining information from their operating system, web browser, and IP address. This technology can help identify duplicate accounts and detect affiliates using software to simulate customer behavior.

Penalize fraudulent activities

If you uncover fraud, take action right away to prevent additional losses and signal your commitment to enforcing your agreement to other affiliates. You might ban the affiliate from your program or even report them to authorities if the fraud involves stolen credit card information, for example. 

You don’t necessarily need a lawyer, but consult one if you have concerns about retaliation, are considering legal action, or have contract questions about an affiliate’s actions.

Consider two scenarios. In the first, someone recommends a spatula on social media and shares a link to an online store. Each purchase made through the link earns the poster a commission. In the second, someone encourages you to pay for the right to sell a company’s spatulas, promising sky-high profit if you invest in the company’s sales network and recruit others to join. 

What’s the difference between these two scenarios? Is one of them a scam? 

The first is an example of affiliate marketing—a popular, legitimate, and effective tactic—while the second may be an illegal pyramid scheme. Here’s more on these two strategies, how they work, and how to tell the difference between them. 

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing strategy where a brand pays an individual creator (a.k.a. the affiliate) for driving traffic to its website. Compensated actions often include conversions such as clicks to an ecommerce website, referrals, downloads, or purchases that the affiliate’s referral links generated. It’s a symbiotic relationship where the business leverages the affiliate’s audience and marketing skills to promote its offerings, and the affiliate gets paid when those marketing efforts are successful.

How affiliate marketing works

1. Establish an affiliate program
2. Develop affiliate relationships
3. Issue unique affiliate links
4. Have affiliates promote the brand
5. Pay affiliates for attributable actions

Businesses setting up an affiliate program often take the following five steps:

1. Establish an affiliate program

A business owner decides to start affiliate marketing and builds a program, specifying its goals, customer actions for which it will pay, and the compensation terms. 

2. Develop affiliate relationships

The business advertises its program, joins one or several affiliate networks (platforms like Shopify Collabs that act as intermediaries connecting affiliates with brands), and invites individual creators and aspiring affiliates to join.

3. Issue unique affiliate links

The business onboards affiliate partners, providing applicable marketing materials and unique referral links or codes to each affiliate. 

4. Have affiliates promote the brand

Affiliates use various marketing channels to distribute affiliate marketing links. Successful affiliates often use digital marketing strategies like social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO marketing) to promote products or services. 

5. Pay affiliates for attributable actions

The business tracks customer actions resulting from the affiliate’s marketing efforts and rewards affiliates according to its compensation schedule.

Benefits of affiliate marketing

Many reputable companies use affiliate marketing programs to boost brand awareness and increase revenue. Here are some key benefits:

Minimal start-up costs

Starting an affiliate marketing program is relatively inexpensive. Costs are typically limited to investments in performance-tracking software or payments to an affiliate manager or platform. There’s no need to develop campaign collateral, purchase ad space, or pay upfront for endorsements of your products or brand.

Low risk

Affiliate marketing offers a low-risk way to promote your online business. You decide the payment terms and only pay affiliates when they deliver results. Many companies pay affiliates a percentage of attributable revenue, ensuring the program’s costs never exceed its profits. 

Flexible 

There are many ways to run an affiliate marketing program, and you can adjust your compensation model as your needs change. You might raise your commission to promote a newly launched item, for example, or add compensation for leads to get more customers into your sales funnel. 

Targeted

Like many influencer marketing strategies, affiliate marketing lets you reach specific market segments by selecting affiliates popular with your target audiences. By leveraging individual creators, you can drive niche consumer groups to landing pages designed to encourage conversions. 

John Murphy, an affiliate marketing expert and owner of The Cold Plunge Store, says that affiliate marketing is a good way of reaching customers who like to do research before making a purchase. 

“If the buyer journey involves a lot of research upfront, that gives you the opportunity to write content that’s geared toward educating people,” he says. “Then you can guide them to the website and put helpful content on those collection pages and product pages.” 

What is a pyramid scheme?

A pyramid scheme—sometimes known as a pyramid scam—is a fraudulent business model in which individuals pay a company to sell its products or services based on promises of outsized profits. According to the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), a business may be classified as an illegal pyramid scheme if it encourages recruiting new members and generates a large proportion of its profits from membership fees instead of from selling actual products or services. These businesses are called pyramid schemes because the organizers at the top typically receive all the profits while almost all of those lower down lose money when the venture fails. 

Pyramid schemes use a strategy known as multi-level marketing (MLM), a sales and marketing approach that involves promoting products or services through a network of independent participants. Although MLM participants rarely earn money, network marketing can be part of a legitimate business model, and MLM companies are legal, including well-known businesses like Avon Products and Primerica. 

How pyramid schemes work

1. Parent company recruits independent distributors
2. Company charges participation fee
3. Company incentivizes recruiting new participants
4. Distributors recruit new participants
5. New distributors recruit additional distributors
6. The pyramid scheme collapses

Pyramid schemes tend to follow six stages:

1. Parent company recruits independent distributors

Business representatives encourage individuals to join the company. Participants are often called independent distributors, sales representatives, affiliates, associates, or independent business owners. 

2. Company charges participation fees

New recruits pay for the right to represent the business, and a portion of their payment goes to those who recruited them. Some pyramid schemes also charge recurring membership fees and many require distributors to purchase inventory upfront.

3. Company incentivizes recruiting new participants

The business instructs distributors to sell its products or services, but emphasizes the need to recruit new participants, providing a stream of returns to earlier investors. 

4. Distributors recruit new participants

The distributor encourages others to join, and new members pay the business for the right to participate in the program. Distributors earn a percentage of the new participants’ initiation fees or a portion of any successful sales their recruits make.

5. New distributors recruit more distributors

The business and older distributors encourage new members to recruit still more people in an effort to generate revenue from participation fees.

6. The pyramid scheme collapses

Because the pool of potential recruits is finite, it eventually runs dry. Without an influx of new members, the scheme is unsustainable and collapses. This often leaves distributors with expensive inventory they can’t sell, leading to significant financial losses for most participants—particularly newer members at the bottom of the pyramid.

Is affiliate marketing a pyramid scheme?

No, affiliate marketing is not a pyramid scheme. Affiliate marketing is a legitimate business activity that leverages an individual creator’s network to generate sales.

Although both pyramid schemes and affiliate marketing programs involve partnerships with individuals, only pyramid schemes charge participants for the right to sell products or services. Participants in pyramid schemes make significant investments in the company or its products but often lose money because they can’t sell enough of the products they bought. For this reason, pyramid schemes are considered a type of investment scam and are illegal under US state and federal law.

Affiliate marketing vs. pyramid scheme: key differences

Here are some key differences between affiliate marketing and pyramid schemes:

Investment 

Unlike pyramid schemes, legitimate affiliate marketing programs do not require individuals to spend money to promote a business. Affiliate marketers might spend money to build their social following or take out ads, but any outlay is discretionary on the part of the affiliate, and no investment is required by the company. 

Revenue

One of the defining characteristics of a pyramid scheme is that the business generates at least some of its revenue from membership fees. Legitimate affiliate programs center on genuine product promotion and only generate money from customer sales.

Recruiting

Although some affiliate marketing programs encourage affiliates to recruit new participants and offer referral bonuses, they place less emphasis on this tactic than do pyramid schemes. Instead, affiliate programs encourage product-focused promotional efforts. Because pyramid schemes often generate revenue by charging affiliates recurring fees to participate in the program, many exert a lot of pressure on participants to recruit others into their network. 

Promises 

Pyramid schemes often promise participants a quick path to wealth in exchange for minimal effort, and many paint glowing pictures of a life of luxury. Affiliate marketing programs rarely promise instant riches; instead, they clearly outline exactly what affiliates can expect to earn for specific customer actions resulting from their efforts.

Growth

Because pyramid schemes rely on the continuous recruiting of new participants, they inevitably collapse once they exhaust the supply of new recruits. Affiliate marketing programs don’t rely on recruiting, so they can continue to generate profits for businesses and affiliates as long as the products they promote are in demand. 

When consumers think of your brand, what do you want them to remember? Maybe it’s your fun, youthful vibe, or your environmental approach. How your company portrays itself often creates an impression in the minds of consumers well before they’re considering making a purchase. 

The decisions you make for your company’s logo, brand messaging, and visuals all contribute to how consumers perceive your brand. As a result, consumers begin to connect your brand with specific feelings and ideas, known as brand association. 

Read on to learn more about why brand association is crucial and how to create positive associations for your business. 

What is brand association?

Brand association refers to specific ideas customers connect to your brand. One of the goals of marketing and design teams is to create strong and positive associations to attach to your brand name using ads, logos, tag lines, visuals, and other marketing materials. 

Customers may associate a brand with a location, characteristics, or the results they promise to deliver. For example, when asked what they associate with Nike, consumers may think of its swoosh logo, its slogan (“Just do it”), its association with Michael Jordan and other famous athletes, and characteristics such as “competitive” or “sporty.”

Why is brand association important for your business?

Your brand associations can affect your reputation and brand equity. Here are some of the benefits of building a strong, positive brand association: 

Builds brand loyalty

Brand loyalty means your customers have an attachment to your company and will continually choose your product over a competitor’s. Brand loyalty blooms from the customer’s experience with the product and brand. A strong, positive brand association can lead to loyal customers over time. For example, if your customers think of your jewelry line as one embodying effortless chic and a commitment to sustainability, they may turn to it for repeat purchases because it matches both their style and values. 

Drives sales

Consumers who have a positive image of your company are more likely to frequent your business. How consumers perceive your brand and its reputation significantly impacts their purchase decisions. Over half of adults surveyed in the US agreed that a brand’s reputation is critical in deciding whether to buy a product. 

Sets you apart from competitors 

In a crowded field, a strong brand association can be a crucial differentiator. If consumers know what your brand is about—whether it’s your bold, brutalist aesthetic, your endorsement by their favorite actor, or your innovative scents inspired by the natural world—they’ll know why to choose it.

Types of brand associations

Consumers may associate your brand with emotions, words, images, and more. Here are some of the common types of brand associations:

Personality-based

You can build a strong, positive brand association based around personality—either real or fictional. Think Michael Jordan for Nike, a drum-playing Energizer bunny, or any number of mascots in the cereal aisle. Brands founded by famous celebrities may also capitalize on the connection, such as Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty or Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS.

Benefit-based

Creating benefit-based associations involves highlighting what a product does and how it can make your life better, whether it’s showing how your detergent cleans stains better than competitors or how the organic cotton of your t-shirts feels on your skin. 

Interest-based

To create brand associations based on interests, your company can employ a brand strategy that piques the target audience’s interest. Think about what will resonate with your target audience—you can try secret product drops, pop-ups, parties, and other kinds of special offers and events that will help cement positive associations in the minds of consumers.

Attitude-based

You may want your customers to connect to intangible characteristics and attributes. Customers can think your brand is cool and aspirational, stately and luxurious, or dynamic and athletic. You can use your actual product and advertising to create attitude-based associations, but also your customer service, website user experience, and packaging. 

Attribute-based

Attribute-based brand association relates to the actual characteristics of your products or services. Maybe your sunglasses are known to have the highest quality lenses, or your furniture line is 100% burnished steel, or maybe all your dolls have accessories in a trademark color. 

How to build positive brand associations

1. Establish a clear brand identity
2. Make a list of associations you’d like to develop
3. Create a brand association map
4. Build a consistent marketing strategy
5. Develop partnerships to cement your associations
6. Have a plan to combat negative associations

Building positive brand associations requires developing a clear marketing and branding strategy. Here’s how: 

1. Establish a clear brand identity 

You need a clear brand identity to stand out from the competition. This includes logos, packaging, brand voice, and typography. For people to have strong ideas about your brand, they must first be able to pick it out of a crowd.

2. Make a list of associations you’d like to develop 

This is when you get innovative—think of the associations you’d like your target audience to make with your brand. Try to use both specific and general associations. General associations could be attributes like luxurious or expensive, and specific ones could be hand-sewn, floral, or your memorable logo. Pick a lane—it’s hard to be too many things at once, and you don’t want to muddle your messaging. 

3. Create a brand association map

A brand association map can help you visualize the various associations consumers have with your brand. You put your company name in the center of the diagram, and the associations in the circular space around it. The closer an association is to the center, the stronger its connection to your brand. 

If your brand is new or you don’t have the data from consumers, you can brainstorm to come up with likely connections. These can include competitors, celebrity endorsements, and attributes like “efficient,” “affordable,” or “hot pink.” By first understanding how customers perceive you, you can work toward either refining or altering those associations. 

4. Build a consistent marketing strategy

Develop a marketing strategy to highlight your desired brand associations. Be consistent across all brand assets—your website, packaging, logo, celebrity endorsements, social media reels, and TV ads should all reinforce the same strong brand associations. 

5. Develop partnerships to cement your associations 

Partner up with people relevant to your brand, who can highlight your desired brand associations. You could contract social media influencers for promotional videos, pay a famous musician to sing in your commercial, or recruit young buyers to become brand ambassadors at their universities. 

6. Have a plan to combat negative associations 

Not all associations are positive—bad press and negative reviews, whether founded or unfounded, can impact how customers perceive your company. Have a crisis management plan in place to deal with bad press, as well as a long-term policy on how to move the needle on less urgent but often more stubborn associations you’d like to change. 

Facebook turned 20 in 2024, and the social media giant’s economic, social, and political influence over the past two decades is undeniable. Analysts credit the platform with generating massive economic value, transforming the media and information landscape, shaping social and political revolutions, and pioneering the monetization of personal data—to name a few examples.

Today, Nearly 40% of the world’s population is on Facebook. Its parent company, Meta, is valued at just under $1.3 trillion, and its revenues and user counts continue to rise. In other words, if you want to communicate effectively with any audience—for any reason—you need to understand this social media platform and have a plan to use it to your advantage.

Top Facebook statistics

Facebook is a giant in the social media landscape. Here’s what you need to know about who uses the platform, how they engage with it, and how it helps marketers and business leaders drive results.

Facebook user statistics

Facebook is the world’s largest social media platform.

• Facebook’s audience accounts for roughly 37% of the global population, 56% of internet users, and 61% of social media users.

• Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has nearly four billion monthly active users across the social platforms Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and the Facebook apps Facebook Messenger and Facebook Marketplace.

Facebook has a global audience.

Facebook demographics

The majority of Facebook’s audience is under the age of 45, and the platform has slightly more female than male users.

Facebook is more popular than most other social media platforms with US adults across all age groups.

Facebook revenue statistics

Meta’s global advertising revenues totaled nearly $132 billion in 2023.

• Meta earned $131.9 billion in advertising revenues in 2023, up from $113.6 billion in 2022 and a nearly 140% increase over 2018 figures.

Facebook earns more from US and Canadian users than from users in other markets.

The majority of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from mobile device usage.

• The percentage of Facebook revenue from mobile advertising is increasing. In late 2019, the social media platform reported that 94% of its global advertising revenues were attributable to mobile device usage.

Facebook usage statistics

Facebook is one of the most visited sites on the internet.

• Nearly 70% of Facebook users visit the site daily.

• Facebook’s daily active usersmake up 68.73% of the platform’s total user count.

• The average Facebook user spends 30.9 minutes on the platform each day.

Facebook is the US’s most popular social commerce platform.

• 49% of US adults and 62% of Gen Z users say that they are likely to make a purchase on the platform.

The majority of people access Facebook from the mobile app.

Facebook removes billions of fake accounts each year.

Facebook engagement statistics

Brands can amass followers on Facebook, and clever posting can encourage them to engage.

• The average engagement rate on Facebook posts from brands is .06%.

• Facebook Page fan engagement rates are under 1% per post.

User engagement varies by gender and post type.

• The typical female user clicks on 40% more Facebook ads than the typical male user and leaves nearly twice as many comments.

Reels are the highest performing Facebook post type.

Facebook marketing statistics

Most businesses post on Facebook as part of their social media strategies.

• Facebook advertising revenues are expected to top $127 billion by 2027.

Facebook marketing can increase brand awareness and drive traffic to a company’s site.

• 58% of people say that they’ve visited a brand’s website after viewing its Facebook stories.

• 69% of marketers say that their Facebook marketing strategy increases brand exposure, and 52% say that it boosts traffic.

Facebook video statistics

Video content performs well on Facebook.

Video ads can effectively drive sales.

• Conversion rates for vertical video ads with audio are 29% higher than rates for other ad types on the platform.

You can spend hours (days, weeks even) designing the perfect landing page for your product launch, but that effort only matters if all those visitors actually take action. If they bounce, what’s the point? Conversion rate optimization is the science of strategically improving your website to turn more visits into conversions. 

The average ecommerce conversion rate falls between 2.5% and 3%. But even with minor tweaks to your copy, layout, or other elements, you can boost this number.

If you need more convincing, delving into conversion rate optimization statistics can reveal how much potential there is to increase conversions. Here’s how CRO can unlock new opportunities for your business.

Important CRO statistics for ecommerce

CRO is the process of transforming potential customers into qualified leads or paying customers. Here are some essential CRO statistics that highlight the power of this digital marketing strategy:

CRO statistics by industry

The average website conversion rate varies widely depending on the industry. For example, the highest average conversion rate for a furniture store (where occasional purchases are made) will be very different from that of a company that sells snacks (a regular purchase). To set yourself up for success, compare your rate to the benchmark in your industry.

In the first quarter of 2024, the average conversion rates were:

• General apparel: 2%
• Active apparel: 1.9%
• General footwear: 1.9%
• Active footwear: 1.9%
• Toys and learning: 1.7%
• Food and beverage: 1.6%
• Health and beauty: 1.6%
• Home, dining, art, and décor: 1.5%
• Sporting goods: 1.5%
• Home appliances: 1.5%
• Electronics and accessories: 1.4%
• Beauty and makeup: 1.2%
• Beauty and skin care: 1%
• General handbags and luggage: 0.9%
• Home furniture: 0.6%
• Luxury apparel: 0.6%
• Luxury handbags: 0.3%

General ecommerce CRO statistics

For ecommerce sites, technical improvements can lead to upticks in conversions:

• Personalizing your site’s content for different demographics can prompt more customers to buy. For example, ecommerce marketers can convert upward of 30% more visitors using AI-powered tools like Unbounce’s Smart Traffic to surface the best content for the incoming user.
• Making your website just one second faster can lead to a 7% rise in conversions, and ensuring your website loads in two seconds or less can increase your conversions by 15%.
• Simplifying your website can boost conversions. For example, to optimize the lead generation form on your homepage, consider reducing the number of fields. FSAstore.com, an ecommerce business supplying health items for those with flexible spending accounts, simplified its web funnel, and the updated version saw an uptick of 53.8% in average sales revenue per visitor.
• Accelerated checkout tools save customer shipping and billing information for purchases across the internet, simplifying the checkout process and increasing conversions. For example, Shop Pay lifts conversion by up to 50% compared to guest checkout, and it outpaces all other accelerated checkouts by at least 10%.

Landing page CRO statistics

Building dedicated landing pages is a tried-and-true method for generating conversions. Landing pages are standalone web pages potential customers arrive at after clicking a marketing campaign asset. They typically include a headline, a subheading with a clear value proposition, a hero image or video, and a call-to-action button.

The data shows that using landing pages improves conversion rates, and it also reveals how small tweaks implemented via A/B testing can make them even more effective. Consider these landing page conversion statistics:

• On landing pages, A/B testing can increase conversions by as much as 30%. This means that if you actually take the time to create and test at least two versions of each landing page, you can significantly increase the number of customers clicking that Buy button.
• Using A/B testing to adjust ad headlines resulted in a 12% increase in revenue for Bing, according to The Wall Street Journal. When you run PPC ads across the web, subtle wording changes can have a significant impact on your conversion rates. Continually test different versions until you’ve maximized clicks. 
• When used as a lead generation tool, landing pages have a 23% signup rate—higher than all other types of signup forms. Use landing pages to prompt visitors to sign up for your email marketing newsletter and nurture them through the marketing funnel.

Mobile CRO statistics

As of 2023, mobile accounted for approximately half of web traffic worldwide, so optimizing for smartphones and tablets is critical. This is especially true for ecommerce stores—72% of all ecommerce sales came from mobile devices, and the mobile ecommerce share will likely reach approximately 88% by 2027.

Here are a few conversion rate statistics to underscore the significance of mobile optimization:

• As of June 2024, the average mobile ecommerce conversion rate for online retail was 2.89%.
• Mobile ecommerce has the highest rate of cart abandonment at 85.65% (desktop is 73.76% and tablet is 80.74%). To reduce cart abandonment and improve conversion rates in the checkout process, consider offering one-click checkout, free shipping, and an easy returns policy.
• Mobile load speed matters; conversions can fall by up to 20% for every one-second delay on mobile. Invest in mobile CRO by using mobile site speed tricks like lazy loading, which defers the loading of nonessential resources.
• Your mobile experience can influence customer perception of your entire brand—and impact future sales. Research from Google indicates that people with a negative experience on mobile sites are 62% less likely to purchase from that brand in the future. Investing in CRO for mobile has lasting effects on brand loyalty.

CRO as a long-term strategy

CRO isn’t a one-time fix. It’s an ongoing process where you adapt to new technologies, trends, and consumer preferences. Businesses optimizing for consumer preferences, in particular, are seeing large returns on their investments. Personalized messaging, for example, results in 50% better customer re-engagement and 21% more sales conversions.

Businesses leverage CRO tools to maximize these conversions and raise the value of existing website traffic. For example, Stikky, a software-as-a-service company building premium mobile experiences exclusively for Shopify merchants, found that investing in its infrastructure and implementing Shopify’s checkout sheet kit (a checkout system for iOS and Android that is customizable and easy to maintain) boosted conversions by 15%.

If you’re familiar with search engine optimization, you already know it’s a highly effective digital marketing strategy to drive relevant organic traffic to your website. But getting more people to your website is only half the battle.

That’s where conversion rate optimization comes in, helping you turn visitors into customers and guiding them to complete conversion actions like purchases or newsletter sign-ups.

Learn what CRO and SEO are, why they’re most effective when combined, and how you can implement these practices on your own website.

What is CRO?

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of analyzing and optimizing web pages or applications to increase the percentage of users who take a desired action.

CRO tactics include:

• User behavior analysis
• Target audience segmentation
• A/B testing layout improvements
• Call-to-action (CTA) optimization
• Usability testing
• User surveys

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of analyzing and optimizing a website to increase rankings and visibility in organic search engine results pages (SERPs).

SEO work includes:

• Technical SEO improvements ensure search engines can effectively crawl and index content.

• Adding relevant keywords to headings, title tags, and long-form content to improve their searchability.

• Planning and creating high-quality content to target users at different stages in their customer journeys.

• Building backlinks to strengthen the site’s authority.

4 benefits of using CRO and SEO together

1. Increased traffic value
2. Data-driven decision making
3. Lower acquisition costs
4. Improved user experience

On their own, CRO and SEO are both effective ways to boost organic traffic and increase conversions. When you combine the two, their impact multiplies.

Some of the top benefits of using CRO and SEO together are:

1. Increased traffic value

Traffic from search engines tends to be of higher quality than that of cold audiences coming from digital ads. By searching, organic audiences have already expressed some interest in the products or information you have. Once SEO efforts have done their job by getting people to your website, CRO takes the baton to improve the chances they’ll take action once they get there.

CRO work improves the value you get from every visit by improving the conversion percentage for all channels, no matter where your audience is coming from. Together, SEO and CRO efforts create a more valuable set of website visitors on your site.

2. Data-driven decision making

Both SEO and CRO rely on data from sources like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and CRO tools like Hotjar to guide their efforts.

Whether it’s building a data-informed understanding of your audience or selecting the right landing pages to optimize, when CRO and SEO data work together, they create a clearer picture so you can make informed decisions.

3. Lower acquisition costs

SEO brings in more relevant organic traffic. Organic acquisition is more cost-effective than paid advertising, which means conversions from these users reduce your overall customer acquisition costs (CAC). This can decrease your reliance on ad spend while boosting overall performance.

CRO increases the number of visitors who convert by better guiding existing traffic toward becoming paying customers. This improves conversions for all channels that drive users to the website, maximizing your return on investment (ROI) and helping you reduce overall acquisition costs.

4. Improved user experience

SEO and CRO both work to improve a website’s user experience (UX) in different ways. SEO ensures that visitors from search get what they’re expecting. CRO ensures the website makes it clear what the next ideal action is. Both practices involve improving the load speed of webpages, which significantly improves the UX.

How to use CRO and SEO together

Here are some steps to get you started blending your CRO and SEO strategies:

Optimize headings

Headings are an important tool to help you rank for keywords and help search engine crawlers understand a page’s content. Unfortunately, some site designers make the mistake of optimizing headings for keywords without considering their effect on conversions and user experience. Most users only skim pages, so headings also need to be attention-grabbing and communicate your value proposition effectively.

Use keyword research tools to identify which target keywords to include in your headings, then follow conversion rate optimization best practices, such as including action words and benefits. This will help your site rank for important keywords and convert visitors once they click through from the search engine results page. Lastly, edit your heading so it’s 60 characters or less—this ensures the end won’t get clipped in the search results.

For example, if your target keyword is “vegan leather handbags,” a landing page with a heading titled “Best Vegan Leather Handbags” is effective for SEO. However, “Affordable Vegan Leather Handbags for Eco-Conscious Shoppers” is a better title because it communicates your value proposition (affordability), matches search intent, and incorporates the target keyword—all while totaling 60 characters in length.

Improve site speed

Nobody likes a slow website, including Google’s crawlers. Improving your site speed improves your Core Web Vital scores, a ranking factor in Google’s algorithms since 2021.

Improving your site speed can also improve your conversion rate by decreasing the likelihood of website visitors bouncing off your site if it is too slow to load. An ideal site load speed is within zero to three seconds.

Optimize for mobile

These days, most people are never too far away from their mobile devices. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re reading this article on your phone. Search engines account for this in their algorithms, requiring that websites are mobile-friendly and present the same (or very similar) content to users regardless of their screen size.

Mobile optimization is a must-have for users in today’s world. If your site isn’t fully functional and easy to use, users will find a competitor’s site that is. Opting for a responsive web design that’s mobile-friendly can significantly boost your site’s conversion rate by ensuring users stay on the site and continue to take a desired action. So, as you finalize your web design process, take the time to test your website on a mobile device as well as your desktop computer.

Streamline your site structure

From a conversion rate optimization perspective, an organized and intuitive structure makes it easy to find information and reduces the likelihood of users bouncing off the site if they can’t.

From an SEO perspective, a well-organized structure helps Google understand your site architecture and crawl your content as efficiently as possible. If Google can’t crawl content on your site because it can’t find it amongst a messy site structure, then some pages won’t be indexed, which means they won’t rank in organic search results or bring organic users to that landing page.

To improve your website’s structure, consider your brand story, plan a clear hierarchy, and add a search function to maximize flow and discoverability.

Add FAQ sections to content

Adding frequently asked questions (FAQs) to webpages helps your site rank for question-based search queries, appear in featured snippets, and appear in the answers to People Also Ask questions on Google’s search engine results pages.

FAQs can also increase your conversion rate by addressing prospective customers’ objections and giving users the information they need to inform their research and decision-making. This means they won’t have to reach out with those questions, adding a layer of friction, or turn to a competitor if they aren’t addressed.

Add internal links

Internal linking creates links between relevant pages within your website. This link-building strategy benefits your SEO by passing link authority from high-authority pages to lower ones. It also demonstrates connections between articles, building topical authority. And it can help search engines efficiently crawl your site.

Internal linking can also benefit CRO by guiding users through a logical conversion path and directing them to relevant content that matches their needs, such as a demo video or the pricing page.

Auction-style platforms like eBay often market the relative ease with which you can use their services to sell goods. But looks can be deceiving. While buying an item on eBay is as simple as clicking a few buttons, selling an item entails much more: setting a minimum final selling price, advertising (and honoring) realistic shipping times, and understanding the platform’s fees. 

That last point particularly impacts how much profit you can expect to take home after selling an item on eBay. 

Here, we’ll explore some of the common fees eBay sellers pay, share sample scenarios in which a combination of fees might apply, and offer tips for reducing seller fees.

Types of fees on eBay

eBay sellers must pay some fees regardless of what they sell, while other fees apply only in specific situations. Here are some of the most common fees the platform charges:

Insertion fees

eBay sellers pay an insertion fee to list an item on the site. If you’re listing fewer than 250 items per month, eBay waives this fee. However, if you surpass this listing floor, you pay a 35¢ insertion fee per auction listing. 

Insertion fees are nonrefundable, even if the item for which you paid the fee never sells. If you’re approaching 250 listings in a calendar month and want to avoid paying insertion fees, pay close attention to this threshold.

🌟Wondering how to sell on eBay? Follow our step-by-step guide, where you can also learn about how eBay can integrate with your Shopify store.

Final value fees

When your item sells, eBay charges you a final value fee. This fee is a percentage of the total amount of the sale, plus 30¢ per order. The total amount of the sale includes your item’s selling price, handling charges, some shipping costs, sales taxes, and other applicable fees. 

The final value fee percentage depends on the type of item you’ve sold. For example, the final value fee percentage for women’s handbags is 15% if the total sale amount is $2,000 or less, and 9% if the item’s price is more than $2,000. 

To provide another example, the final value fee percentage for collectible trading cards is 13.25% if the total amount of the sale is $7,500 or less, then 2.35% on the portion of the sale over $7,500.

Promoted listing fees

You can promote your eBay listings to increase their visibility by paying a promoted listing fee. This fee only applies if your items actually sell through the promoted listings. As the seller, you choose how much you pay per promotion by choosing an ad rate for each item. This will be between 2% and 100% of the item’s total sale amount.

🌟eBay dropshipping is a low-cost business idea that provides access to a large audience of buyers. Here’s how to get started.

Optional listing upgrade fees

Aside from promoting your listing, there are more things you can do to increase the likelihood of a sale. For instance, you can add optional listing features like subtitles (50¢ to $3), bold-faced text ($2), and reserve pricing, or the minimum selling price you’re willing to accept. The fee for adding a reserve price is $5 or 7.5% of the reserve price, whichever is greater (for a maximum fee of $250).

International selling fees

If you sell an item to a buyer outside your registered country, eBay charges you an international fee, which you pay on top of the final value fee. The amount will vary depending on your home country:

Real estate listing fees

If you plan on selling real estate on eBay (yes, it’s possible!), you’ll pay a separate real estate listing fee. The fee amount varies depending on the type of real estate (residential or commercial) and the listing format (classified ad listings, private mortgage notes, etc.). 

Note that real estate listings on eBay are highly regulated. The law prohibits sellers who do not hold the appropriate real estate license in their home state from selling property on eBay on behalf of a third party.

eBay store subscription fees

Some sellers choose to sell items through their own dedicated eBay store. If you go this route, you must pay a store subscription fee depending on whether you sign up for a Starter, Basic, Premium, Anchor, or Enterprise account:

• Starter: $7.95 monthly when charged per month and $4.95 monthly when billed per year.
• Basic: $27.95 monthly when charged per month and $21.95 monthly when billed per year. 
• Premium: $74.95 monthly when charged per month and $59.95 monthly when billed per year. 
• Anchor: $349.95 monthly when charged per month and $299.95 monthly when billed per year.
• Enterprise: $2,999.95 per month, billed annually. 

One benefit of opening an eBay store is lower final value fees and free listings each month above the 250-listing threshold.

Example sales and eBay fees

Let’s look at a few hypothetical eBay sales scenarios to see how the seller fees stack up:

Example 1: Selling a handbag

Julie sells a vintage Louis Vuitton monogram handbag for $575 on eBay. Since this is Julie’s 251st listing for the month, the insertion fee is 35¢. 

The final value fee is 15% of the total amount of sale, which also includes the shipping cost ($20) and sales tax (10%, or $57.50). This means the total sale is $652.50, and the final value fee is $97.88. 

With the addition of the insertion fee, the total fees associated with Julie’s listing are $98.23.

Example 2: Selling an iPhone through a promoted listing

Mark sells his old iPhone X for $145.00 on eBay. He does so using a promoted listing plus optional listing features, including bold-faced text ($2) and an enhanced image gallery (35¢). Mark selected a promoted listing ad rate equal to 6% of the total amount of sale, or $9.74. This is his first-ever eBay listing, so the insertion fee is waived.

Shipping will cost $10, and the sales tax amounts to 5% of the item price, or $7.25. That brings the total amount of sales to $162.25.

The final value fee for cellphones is 9% of the total amount of sale, up to $2,500, making the final value fee in this example $14.61. 

All together, Mark’s total seller fees are $2 + 35¢ + $9.74 + $14.61, totaling $26.70.

Example 3: Selling a book to an overseas buyer

Stephanie sells a first-edition copy of Stephen King’s It for $70 on eBay to a buyer in South Korea. This is Stephanie’s 280th listing for the month, so she must pay an insertion fee of 35¢.

It costs $25 for international shipping to Seoul, and the sales tax is 10%, or $7. This brings the total amount of sales to $102.

The final value fee for books and other printed material is 14.95% on the total amount up to $7,500 and 2.35% on the portion of the sale over $7,500. This makes Stephanie’s final value fee $15.25.

Because Stephanie is based in the US, the international selling fee is 1.55% of the total sale amount, or $1.59. Therefore, the total seller fees associated with Stephanie’s sale are $17.19, or 35¢ + $15.25 + $1.59.

How to reduce eBay seller fees

Finding ways to reduce your sales feescan increase your sales proceeds. Some tips for lowering eBay seller fees include:

• Keep it simple. Reduce your eBay selling fees by making your listings attractive without resorting to listing promotions or optional listing upgrades. Use clear headings and compelling product descriptions that preempt inevitable buyer questions (e.g., describe wear and tear, material type, etc.).

• Keep your listings number low. Staying below 250 listings per month means you can avoid insertion fees. 

• Open an eBay store. Opening an eBay store comes with a subscription fee, but it can also lower final value fees and provide free listings over the 250-listing threshold every month. Stores can be a great cost-saving option if you become a high-volume seller.

• Offer free shipping. This can attract more buyers and increase the likelihood of a sale; also, by offering free shipping, you can lower an item’s total sale amount and the final value fee. (Of course, you still have to factor the cost of shipping into your own expenses.)

Being a brand ambassador might sound like a dream job. After all, who doesn’t want to get paid to travel, cook, or play video games? However, monetizing your social media presence takes more than posting a few photos or making a couple of videos in your free time.

Content creators can earn income by working with compatible brands. These partnerships are often mutually beneficial—brands benefit from an ambassador’s ability to reach new customers and the ambassadors are paid for their efforts. It’s a win-win—but only if all the conditions are right first.

Discover what it takes to become a great brand ambassador and pick up a few tips for attracting brand deals.

What is a brand ambassador?

A brand ambassador is someone who works with a company to promote its products or services. Unlike contracts for sponsored posts or ads, companies typically work with brand ambassadors to represent their products or services for a long period of time. Ambassadors may create multiple pieces of content and promote the brand online or in the real world.

Ambassadors working on digital media platforms may create social media posts, host live Q&A sessions, or participate in other promotions to highlight the brand’s message or products. Alternatively, they may work in person by attending industry events or participating in brand activations.

Brand ambassadors promote brand awareness to increase sales. Companies compensate their ambassadors in correlation to the volume of customers they bring into the fold. They may receive commissions on sales generated by their content or hourly fees for appearances and in-person events.

Pros and cons of being a brand ambassador

A brand ambassadorship is a substantial commitment. Consider the pros and cons of forming a long-term partnership with a brand before agreeing to a contract:

Pros of being a brand ambassador

• Steady income: A brand ambassador role can be a terrific way to earn money for people with the right skills. Forming an ongoing partnership with a brand can lead to a steady stream of income and reduce the need to look for additional monetization opportunities.

• Increased visibility: If you’re looking for greater publicity yourself, brand ambassadorships are a two-way street. Partnering with a major brand can give you access to a broad audience.

• Expanded network: Joining a brand ambassador program may help you expand your professional network since in-person events are opportunities to get to know other ambassadors and meet representatives from other brands.

• Professional development: Partnering with a brand can help you build marketing and analytics skills in addition to your content creation chops. You’ll get an up-close and personal look at how successful companies create campaigns to generate leads and increase brand awareness.

• Access to product discounts: Brand ambassadors often receive exclusive discounts and free products in addition to cash compensation.

Cons of being a brand ambassador

• Reputation risks: As a brand ambassador, you’ll be tied to the company you represent for better or for worse. If the company makes a misstep or suffers from a PR crisis, it can have a negative impact on you as their brand partner.

• Time commitment: You’ll likely need to set aside time to attend events and create content to support your brand partners. Committing to a brand ambassadorship often means spending less time focusing on your personal content efforts.

• Compromise on content quality: Most brands ask ambassadors to create content featuring their products and following certain brand guidelines. Branded content may have a different tone than your organic posts, and sharing too much branded content may come across as inauthentic and negatively affect your engagement rates.

• Varied compensation: Some successful brand ambassadors earn significant income, but compensation is often based on performance and quite a bit of luck for both you and your partner organizations. If your followers aren’t likely to purchase products, you may not make much money from your partnership.

How to become a brand ambassador

1. Hone your voice
2. Grow your online community
3. Up your engagement
4. Network with other influencers
5. Build an influencer kit
6. Research brands
7. Check the job boards
8. Build professional contacts

If you’re interested in taking on brand ambassador roles, take the following steps to make your social media feed appealing to potential brand partners:

1. Hone your voice

Work on building a strong personal brand. Don’t be afraid to post niche content that focuses on a specific topic and establishes subject matter expertise. This can make your account appealing to relevant partners. If your area of focus aligns with the brand’s target audience, you’ll be a natural fit.

For example, if you love cooking, consider sharing your genuine passion for recipes as a food influencer. Once you’ve established your authority, you may be able to land a successful brand ambassador gig with cookware brands.

2. Grow your online community

Companies look for partners with active followings. Brands see an engaged audience as evidence that your community trusts you and that your content could influence followers to purchase.

To build that following, populate your social media accounts with high-quality content. Establish a regular posting cadence by planning a social media content calendar. Frequent posts will help attract followers, and creators with large follower counts are more likely to attract partnerships. Brand ambassadors are often compensated based on audience size—you’ll earn more money with more followers.

3. Up your engagement

Post authentic content to attract likes and comments and boost your engagement rate. Ask your followers questions. Solicit feedback to create natural opportunities for engagement. Write comments on other accounts’ content to help boost your page’s visibility. Follow other influencers and interact with their content. If they return the favor, your account will benefit from the exchange.

Companies look for brand ambassadors who can influence their followers. A high engagement rate shows brands that your audience is invested in your content and is paying attention.

4. Network with other influencers

Once you’ve established a cohesive online personality, get to know influencers who focus on similar topics. Building relationships with other content creators can lead to content partnerships. Consider collaborating with influencers you admire. Creating content together can help both partners reach new audiences. You may also learn from their experience about what good potential brand partners (and maybe even some brands to avoid), and other tips on how to become a successful brand ambassador.

5. Build an influencer kit

Put together an influencer media kit to highlight your appeal to potential partners. You can use this one-to-two-page document to reach out to your dream brands and inquire about becoming a brand ambassador.

Media kits typically provide engagement statistics, a list of active social media platforms, and a summary of your follower counts. Include audience demographic information and any memorable successes that demonstrate your account’s unique value.

6. Research brands

Join networks like Shopify Collabs to see which brands are looking for creative partners. Research your favorite brands to see if they’re accepting ambassador applications. If you partner with a brand that you genuinely love, you’ll be able to bring authentic excitement to your promotions.

Get to know the company before you accept an ambassadorship position. Test the brand’s products to make sure you feel comfortable endorsing them to your audience. Research the brand’s values and make sure they align with your views to minimize reputational risks.

7. Check the job boards

Keep your eyes peeled for brand ambassador opportunities. Some organizations advertise their brand ambassador programs on job boards—submitting an application may help you get your foot in the door.

8. Build professional contacts

Reach out to brand representatives and share your influencer media kit. You can also connect with PR agencies that work with multiple brands. If you build a strong network of professional contacts, agencies might come to you with opportunities from other brands in their portfolio.

After a long day at your full-time job, the last thing you want to do is clock into another one. So if you’re looking to earn extra income, you might seek a side hustle that’s a bit more low key—even one that’s so laid-back you can make money in your sleep.

Passive income sources can make this a reality. It can take energy and time upfront to establish ways to earn passive income, but once you do, your venture can sustain itself with little to no effort from you.

12 ways to make money in your sleep

1. Rent out unused space
2. Create online courses
3. Begin a dropshipping business
4. Launch a YouTube channel
5. License stock photos
6. Start a blog
7. Monetize your crafting hobby
8. Try affiliate marketing
9. Sell print-on-demand products
10. Open a high-yield savings account
11. Write an ebook
12. Share your internet connection

Here are a dozen ideas for earning passive income and making money while you sleep:

1. Rent out unused space

If you have an unused spare room, garage, or backhouse, you can earn rental income. Advertise your space on websites like Zillow, Apartments.com, or SpareRoom. Post about your room on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram. Print flyers advertising your rentals, and get permission from local businesses to place them around your area.

Review rental applications, compare applicants’ credit scores, and consider performing background checks on prospective tenants. Once you choose a renter, write a rental agreement that defines important information like rent price, security deposit amount, lease terms, property policies, and information about utilities. Consult professional legal counsel to help you craft your rental agreements to ensure they comply with all federal, state, and local government policies and laws related to tenant rights.

If you have an available parking space attached to your property, you can also earn money by renting it out through services like Spacer or SpotHero. Parking space rentals can be a particularly lucrative side hustle in busy cities with limited parking options.

2. Create online courses

If you’re knowledgeable in a particular subject like science, math, or fitness, you can produce your own online course to sell on platforms like Thinkific, Udemy, Skillshare, or Coursera. Pick a topic that will remain mostly unchanged (like biology, as opposed to social media trends) to improve your chances of creating a profitable online course with staying power.

3. Begin a dropshipping business

With dropshipping, merchants sell products on their ecommerce store and partner with third-party suppliers to ship those products to customers. Since dropshipping suppliers handle the order fulfillment process, entrepreneurs don’t have to track inventory or pack items, making it a passive income source.

Merchants using the dropshipping model can use a platform like Shopify, which makes it easy to launch a dropshipping store.

4. Launch a YouTube channel

According to one report, the number of monthly active users on YouTube reached nearly 2.5 billion in October 2023. That’s 2.5 billion reasons to start a YouTube channel. To make the most of the upfront time and energy you’ll need to put into your channel, consider topics and content genres that will appeal to a broad audience and require little maintenance on your part. For example, if you play video games in your spare time, consider filming yourself for a gaming-centric channel. Or if you have a knack for creating ambient music, you can create music videos for studying, meditating, or different moods.

You can apply to join the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) and start monetizing your channel once you:

• Hit 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the past year, or
• Hit 1,000 subscribers with 10 million valid public Shorts views within the past 90 days

After the initial work, your YouTube channel can make money at all hours for years to come.

5. License stock photos

If you have a knack for photography, consider uploading pictures onto stock photo websites like iStock, Shutterstock, or Alamy. There’s a high demand for stock photos, which professionals and content creators pay to use for presentations, advertisements, websites, book covers, and social media posts.

When someone licenses one of your photos, those websites pay you for your work. Depending on the website and the quality of your photos, you can earn a few cents to a few dollars from a single use of your licensed picture. Making money from stock photo websites takes time, but since you aren’t entering exclusive contracts, you can earn extra cash from the same photo being licensed repeatedly and on different platforms.

If you have a huge backlog of photographs, you can upload them all for a better chance of earning money passively from paying clients needing to license content online. If you have a drone with a camera on it, you can also explore the market for licensing drone footage on websites like Pexels or DroneStock.

6. Start a blog

Write a blog post about a topic you’re passionate about—whether it’s business, marketing, travel, food, or something related to your day job. If you enjoy the process of posting your first blog, consider turning it into a consistent practice to build an audience and monetize your content.

To start a blog, pick a niche and choose a platform to launch your blogging content. For example, Shopify includes a blogging platform with customizable themes to get you started.

To monetize your blog, you could display ads, implement a paid membership program like Patreon, promote digital products like templates, or include affiliate links where you get paid for directing traffic to another company’s products or services.

7. Monetize your crafting hobby

If you already make homemade items in your free time, consider turning your hobby into a source of passive income by listing your homemade goods on your own website with a platform like Shopify. Alternatively, you could list your handcrafted items on a marketplace like Etsy or Amazon Handmade.

8. Try affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a strategy where content creators make money by promoting products or services for companies. Every time someone clicks on your unique affiliate link and makes a purchase, you can earn money. It’s an ideal strategy if you already have an online following of 1,000 people or more as you can promote affiliate links via your blog, YouTube channel, email marketing campaigns, and social media channels.

To get started, research different affiliate programs designed to connect marketers and small businesses with creators who have an audience. For example, Shopify Collabs is available to anyone with over 1,000 followers on a single social media account.

If you have an engaged social media following and partner with the right companies, affiliate marketing can become a profitable online business where you create a revenue stream from people clicking on your links.

9. Sell print-on-demand products

The print-on-demand (POD) business model involves partnering with a third-party company that manufactures products only after someone purchases them. If you have graphic design skills, this might be a profitable business for you, as you can put your own designs and branding onto t-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, backpacks, and other items.

This model eliminates the need for upfront investment in inventory or warehouse management systems, allowing you to sell products and earn profit without handling manufacturing or order fulfillment. You can launch an ecommerce store and partner with companies like Printful or Printify—two print-on-demand brands that Shopify integrates with.

10. Open a high-yield savings account

After you pay your bills each month, consider putting any leftover money into a high-yield savings account that boasts higher interest rates than a regular savings account. The interest rate on a savings account, or annual percentage yield (APY), determines how much you’ll make. For example, if your account has a 5% APY, you can earn 5% interest on whatever money you put away in that account.

Opt for FDIC-insured banks, so in the case the bank fails, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will reimburse you for your losses. Speak with a professional financial adviser before making any major decisions about investing or saving. Evaluate your own cash flow needs and put together a plan for what you can set aside from your monthly budget for saving.

11. Write an ebook

You can make money online by creating digital assets that customers can find and purchase well after you publish them. If you have a specific area of expertise, you can write a nonfiction ebook on that topic. If you’re a storyteller, try your hand at fiction by writing short stories, novellas, or a full novel. You can publish and sell ebooks on platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), Apple Books, or Draft2Digital.

12. Share your internet connection

Another way that you can earn more money is by sharing your internet connection with companies like Honeygain—an app that securely activates your unused bandwidth for data intelligence tasks like content delivery or web crawling.

These services also provide large-scale data to paying businesses while encrypting users’ specific data to protect their privacy. As these apps run in the background on your internet connection, you accrue credits that you can redeem for cash payouts. For example, you can redeem your credits on Honeygain once you exceed $20.

The internet is a busy place, as online business owners know all too well. When you’re trying to get your website in front of your target audience, you have to get creative. Blog writing is one way to stand out from the crowd. A great blog post can catch the attention of readers and search engines and help you bring organic traffic to your site.

Writing blog posts and getting people to read them isn’t always easy. You need to know how to write engaging blog content, but you also need to understand what to write about and how to get it to the right readers. Whether you’ve had your own blog for years or are just brainstorming your first blog post, there are tips and tricks to help you make the most of your effort. Here’s what you need to know before you start writing.

What is a blog post?

A blog post is an individual entry on a blog, typically similar to an article or op-ed. Blogs are online platforms that can function like a personal journal, a repository of reported news, a portfolio, or anything with an element of curation. People who write blog posts are called bloggers. Typically, blog posts appear in chronological order, with the most recent posts appearing first. You can also pin top performing posts to the top of your feed.

How to write a blog post

1. Choose a blogging platform
2. Brainstorm blog post topics
3. Outline your post
4. Conduct keyword research
5. Begin the actual writing process
6. Optimize for on-page SEO
7. Include internal and external links
8. Add images
9. Edit the post
10. Publish and promote your post

Blogging can be an excellent content marketing tactic to promote your brand. A good blog post peppered with relevant keywords and headings can rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive traffic to your website. That’s why many businesses choose to start a blog to engage with their target audience, provide valuable content, and start prospective leads on their customer journey. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to write the perfect blog post that bolsters your brand among your target customers.

1. Choose a blogging platform

Whether you use a standalone blogging website or embed a blog in your existing site, you have a lot of options to choose from. The best blogging platform will include an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), or will integrate with the CMS that’s already powering your website. It will also have useful SEO tools, visual customizations, and an affordable price.

2. Brainstorm blog post topics

Once you’ve selected a platform, start brainstorming interesting ideas that resonate with your blog’s audience. Think about your ideal customer. What are their pain points that your products and services can address? What trending topics or compelling stories might hook readers? Answering these questions will help you generate blog post ideas.

🌟Looking for inspiration? Here are 15 standout blogs run by ecommerce stores and ideas you can adapt for your own content marketing strategy.

3. Outline your post

Whether you’re a seasoned blogger or writing a blog post for the first time, you may benefit from putting together a blog post outline. The outlining process helps you organize your thoughts and focus on a topic, just as it would in journalism or fiction writing. Structure your outline around the main points you want to hit, and leave space for your personal writing style to shine through.

4. Conduct keyword research

An effective blog post captures readers’ search intent. To maximize your odds of doing this, leverage keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Keyword Planner. If you spread relevant keywords throughout your entire blog post, you’ll boost your chances of turning it up on search results.

5. Begin the actual writing process

It’s now time to write the first draft of your blog post. You can write articles and posts in your blogging platform’s interface, or you use a word processing tool like Google Docs or Microsoft Word for your initial draft.

6. Optimize for on-page SEO

Once you’ve completed an initial draft, go back and optimize for on-page SEO. This includes utilizing relevant keywords, writing a compelling meta title and meta description, and adding alt text to images. Don’t limit yourself to the keywords that show up in your initial keyword research. Related keywords can help you turn up in even more search results. Just make sure they’re truly relevant to the topic at hand. Starting your article with a brief summary of its key points can also help your blog post turn up on SERPs.

🔍Maximize your blog’s potential to attract more readers. This comprehensive guide includes nine steps to increase organic traffic with SEO.

7. Include internal and external links

Link your blog post to relevant pages on your own website as well as other articles on outside sites. Your internal links keep users on your platform, while your external links can help add credibility to the content you’re providing.

8. Add images

Each blog post should include a featured image at the top of the page. This image will appear in links to your post—such as in the feeds of social media platforms—so choose one that’s visually appealing. Only use images that you have the rights to publish, and always attribute the work of the artist or photographer behind your image. Compelling visuals can be the difference between an ignored blog and a content marketing success story.

🌟Looking for free stock photos? Explore this list of the 36 best free stock photo sites and find the perfect fit.

9. Edit the post

Before you hit Publish on your blog post, do a final editing pass. Stylistically and syntactically, your entry should match other posts on your website. Your facts should be accurate (with external links as needed), and you should link the content to the services and products your company provides. If your writing is a bit rusty, study some time-tested writing tips to help you along.

10. Publish and promote your post

It’s finally time to publish your entry. If it’s your first time doing so, consult your blogging platform for instructions on how to post. Then get the word out. Promote your blog post on social media platforms and in email marketing blasts. If you’re a member of Facebook groups or Reddit forums, promote your work there as well.

Imagine you’re visiting a new city and looking for a place to eat. What would be more helpful: a billboard advertising the best pizza in town or an enthusiastic review from a local friend?

Authentic personal endorsements tend to carry more weight, which is why launching an influencer marketing program has so much potential. Tapping a social media influencer to promote your product is akin to sending personal recommendations to potential new customers.

If you’re ready to harness the power of social media personalities, here’s how.

What is influencer management?

Influencer management is the practice of implementing, monitoring, and maintaining an influencer marketing campaign. The process includes the scouting and screening of partners, relationship management, and campaign tracking. Keeping tabs on your social media partnerships will ensure you effectively leverage influencer marketing.

6 tips for effective influencer management

1. Assess your target audience
2. Research your partners
3. Provide guidelines
4. Set clear goals
5. Monitor performance
6. Use an influencer management platform

To build winning influencer marketing campaigns, you need a robust influencer management plan. Here’s how to develop a strategy—from identifying relevant influencers to keeping track of success.

1. Assess your target audience

Start by learning as much as possible about your target audience. Consider who your product might benefit and who makes up your existing customer base. Create customer profiles based on different audience demographics to better pinpoint your ideal customer.

This step is necessary to find influencers with a relevant following. For example, if your product is a low-cost alternative to expensive skin care items, you may consider partnering with content creators who focus on budget beauty.

2. Research your partners

The creators you partner with should have solid reputations. Do your due diligence and research potential influencers before you onboard them. To gauge if they’re a fit for your brand, identify whether they have been a part of any controversies, what they’ve said about your company in the past, and whether they have worked with your competitors.

3. Provide guidelines

Develop a detailed creative brief describing your product, brand values, and campaign objectives. This will give partners a better idea of how you are positioning your product and what is and isn’t off-limits.

4. Set clear goals

Create a set of campaign goals for your influencer marketing efforts. Potential goals include increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and driving sales.

Defining your goals will give you a way to measure your campaign’s success. It can also help you identify the right influencers. For example, if you set a goal of increasing your male audience, you may choose to prioritize partnering with social media creators with a large male following.

5. Monitor performance

Keep track of key metrics related to your goals. Monitoring performance statistics including engagement rates and return on investment (ROI) can reveal whether your influencer marketing campaigns are working. If you aren’t meeting your goals, it may be time to revise your strategy.

6. Use an influencer management platform

Influencer management platforms have all the tools you need to effectively manage your influencer relationships. These platforms support influencer discovery, creator payments, and content approval. The right campaign management tool will save time and help you develop successful campaigns.

8 top influencer management platforms

1. Shopify Collabs
2. Meltwater
3. Creator.co
4. Grin
5. Aspire
6. CreatorIQ
7. Upfluence
8. Brandwatch

The right influencer marketing platform can help your team with every aspect of your influencer programs. These are the best tools to start:

1. Shopify Collabs

Shopify Collabs is free for Shopify users and integrates with the platform. With Shopify’s customer service team at your disposal, you can access professional help 24/7. Shopify Collabs features in-platform communication tools to support relationship management, product seeding (sending free products to influencers in hopes of a review), and analytics. It also includes an influencer application form. Content creators who like your product can reach out about potential influencer collaborations or brand ambassador roles.

Channels: Instagram, TikTok, and X

Integrations: Shopify

Features: Campaign analytics, product seeding, influencer application pages, and affiliate marketing software

Pricing: Free for Shopify users

2. Meltwater

Meltwater, formerly Klear, is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that works with all major social media platforms and offers Shopify and WooCommerce integrations.

With its searchable library of indexed creator profiles, Meltwater is a powerful tool for influencer discovery. Users can apply filters to identify influencers who fit their exact needs. It also offers in-depth reporting tools for monitoring campaign performance and tracking ROI.

Channels: YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok

Integrations: Shopify, Salesforce, Magento, WooCommerce, Slack, and Bitly

Features: Influencer search tool, campaign analytics, ecommerce integrations, campaign management, and social listening tool

Pricing: Contact the sales team for more information

3. Creator.co

With Creator.co, users set their objectives, define the type of partnership they’re looking for (such as paid product promotion or user-generated content), and search for relevant influencers. This tool has a network of influencers across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram and offers in-depth insights that can help you choose the best partners and identify fake influencers.

Channels: YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok

Integrations: Shopify

Features: Creator discovery, affiliate management, creator insights, social listening, email support, and content-only campaign (gifted and paid) creation

Pricing: Creator.co offers four pricing tiers: the Serve tier at $460 per month; Start-Up at $1,795 per month; Trailblazer at $2,695 per month; and Bespoke from $3,495 per month

4. Grin

Specifically designed for ecommerce companies, Grin can search your current customer base for potential partners and gather social media account information for all your registered users. This can help you identify content creators who have both already purchased your product and have a following. Collaborating with existing customers can nurture authentic brand relationships—partners can genuinely speak of their experience with your product.

Channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, and YouTube

Integrations: BigCommerce, DocuSign, Klaviyo, Slack, Instagram, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, WooCommerce, Shopify, MS Outlook, and Gmail

Features: Content management, reporting and analytics, relationship management, discovery and recruitment, product seeding, and payment processing

Pricing: Grin designs customized pricing plans for each client; contact the Grin sales team to learn more about pricing

5. Aspire

Aspire is an all-in-one platform with an impressive suite of tools. Users can create profiles for specific marketing initiatives by inputting campaign details such as target audience, campaign timeline, goals, and influencer eligibility content.

Aspire’s search feature identifies which influencers can support the campaign’s objectives. The campaign lifecycle management tool tracks how many influencers you’ve contacted and where your relationship stands. Supervise content creation and approve campaign content directly in the platform.

Channels: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and blogs

Integrations: Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Gorgias, Shopify, WooCommerce, Impact.com, ShareASale, Klaviyo, and PayPal

Features: Campaign creation, campaign tracking, payment processing, campaign analytics, contract management, content management, content library, and Meta-branded content ads

Pricing: Aspire offers three customized pricing tiers: Basic, Pro, and Enterprise. Contact the sales team for more details

6. CreatorIQ

CreatorIQ uses AI-powered technology to assign an Integrity Quotient to each of its more than 20 million indexed creators. It evaluates data points including the influencer’s engagement rate, image quality, caption quality, and comment quality to match influencers to brands.

Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Twitch, and blogs

Integrations: PayPal, Shopify, Amazon, Tipalti, Google Analytics, DocuSign, Looker, Tableau, AvantLink, Impact.com, CJ, and Awin

Features: Influencer discovery, automated recruiting, influencer relationship management, content approval, campaign management and reporting, audience analysis, product seeding, contract management, fraud detection, and payment processing

Pricing: Contact CreatorIQ to learn more about pricing and request a quote

7. Upfluence

With Upfluence, you can use detailed search filters and individually weighted keywords to find the right campaign partners. Upfluence’s native communication tools enable teams to manage influencers together—every user has access to all of the correspondences between your team and your selected influencers.

Channels: Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, and blogs

Integrations: Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, Hootsuite, Klaviyo, Zapier, MS Outlook, Gmail, and PayPal

Features: Influencer search, campaign and influencer management, third-party analytics, lifecycle management, recruiting, content approval, reporting, product seeding, payment processing, social listening, and affiliate management

Pricing: Upfluence offers custom pricing plans. Contact the sales team for more details.

8. Brandwatch

Brandwatch aids in every step of the influencer marketing process. Users can search its database of indexed creators to find partners, manage contracts, monitor campaign performance, and complete influencer payments. Brandwatch can also manage multiple brands or campaigns at once.

Channels: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, and TikTok

Integrations: Shopify, Salesforce, Zendesk, Neurons, Sociuu, QBank, and StoryStream

Features: Influencer discovery, network creation, network management, campaign management, and automated reporting

Pricing: Contact Brandwatch to learn more about its custom pricing plans