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Effective Landing Pages
This month we discuss landing pages, what they are, and how they can be used to increase your conversion rate.
What are Landing Pages?
Your site has landing pages whether or not you think it does. Even if you didn’t specifically...
Quick Query - Scott Peterson
The Streamline Sales Tax Governing Board is the new, multi-state agency charged with simplifying the collection of state and local sales taxes. Since this will impact ecommerce businesses, we’ve asked its Executive Director, Scott...
SEO Report Card: Stayleaner.com
Each month it gets harder to select an ecommerce site to assess, as the requests from readers keep coming in increasing volume. This month I've chosen Stayleaner.com, the ecommerce site for J & J...
Affiliate Marketers
Over half of our law firm’s practice involves affiliate marketing. If we are not setting up an affiliate marketing program, we are involved in claims relating to affiliate misconduct. On the one hand, the riches to be realized by your...
Respond to Your Customer. Now.
One of the most frequent complaints from ecommerce customers is the inability to receive timely answers from a website. I’m always shocked at the number of websites that provide only a “contact us” form, with no phone number or other...
Affiliate Marketing
Andy Newlin works for SierraTradingPost.com, in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Sierra Trading Post is an ecommerce merchant that sells outdoor gear and clothing, and Newlin is its Online Marketing Manager. He oversees the affiliate marketing efforts...
Fulfillment Companies Offer Benefits
Imagine having a state-of-the-art fulfillment department. This fulfillment department would have the most upto- date order management software, computer hardware and warehousing functions. The employees of the fulfillment department would...
Blogs and Affiliate Marketing
Blogs have typically not been thought of as direct response sales tools. In their brief history, blogs have morphed from being “personal online journals and diaries” to vital tools for business, but the focus has been more on using...
Optimize Your HTML For Search Engines
SEO can be broken into two distinct areas – "onpage" factors and "off-page" factors. On-page factors include anything that you can affect on the page itself, such as the title tag, body copy, H1 heading tags, image “alt” attributes,...
SEO Report Card: Discountflies.com
Welcome back to another installment of “SEO Report Card.” Each month I assess the search engine optimization effectiveness of an ecommerce site. This month's brave volunteer is DiscountFlies.com,...
Baron Bob: Wonderfully Wacky, Marvelously Successful
Bob Brooks got a business education at the prestigious Johnson Wales University in Rhode Island. Now he runs a $1-million-a-year ecommerce company on the Internet. It all makes perfect sense and all...
Macromedia Exec Sees "Dreamy" Future
It is generally agreed among non-programmers that Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash, more than almost any other software products, brought the production of quality, functional websites within reach of non-programmers and changed...
Seeing Stars on the Web
As awards show season gets under way, celebrity fashion will be receiving a tremendous amount of global press, even more so than your typical Hollywood-obsessed news day. Outside of Los Angeles and New York, capitalizing on this high...
Your eCommerce Activities Could be Criminal
The online world is an interesting place today for many reasons. Remember the old western movies when the cowboys came into town for several days of mischief? After weeks on the range, they would often decide on their own what laws to...
Minimize Customer Complaints
Customer complaints are a fact of life for all business owners, and the topic of dealing with them is always important. Understanding how to respond to a customer complaint will improve your customer service, as well as encourage repeat...
The Home Page: Putting Your Best Foot Forward
You never get a second chance at a first impression. Or so the saying goes. Perhaps that’s the reason that website home pages are the most focused on by designers and marketers. In this case, I’m quite happy to agree with conventional...
Pay-per-click Tools Maximize Your Time
As a business owner and entrepreneur, you know that there are two things you can always use more of - money and time. While you are likely to increase the first item by reading this column, you can also free up more time by automating the...
Email Etiquette is Good Customer Service
I had an interesting e-conversation a few weeks ago. It turned into a one-sided blast fest, with me at the brunt of it. The source? A business professional looking for work. I let it all roll off my shoulder, but something about it seemed...
Optimizing HTML Code for Maximum SEO
Overview
Search engine optimization has come to the forefront in recent years as competition for search engine rankings increases. Online business owners often times rely heavily on search engines to generate traffic to their websites,...
Combining CSS and JavaScript to Save Page Space
Overview
Real estate on a website has become a valuable commodity. Website owners and designers are faced with the challenge of providing enough content to satisfy their visitors, while also maintaining the visual appeal and usability of...
Order Management Software Saves Time, Reduces Errors
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
When Charles Dickens opened his classic A Tale of Two Cities with those words he was thinking only about the French Revolution. But his...
Web Analytics: Understanding Visitor Behavior
In the beginning, there were “hit counters”. Occasionally you will still see one at the bottom of a website, prominently displaying the number of hits over a given time frame. There was a time when the success of a website was gauged...
Google Analytics Draws Industry Reaction
On November 14, 2005 Google announced its free, hosted web analytics service. Based on the Urchin analytics platform, which Google acquired earlier in the year, the service boasts website analysis tools aimed at executives, marketers, and...
HTML Email: Effectiveness Requires Planning
Email can be an essential tool for every online retailer. Professional-looking emails instill confidence, build brand awareness, and increase customer loyalty. Retailers can send email communications using HTML that are as visually...
Be Careful of the Number 1 Spot
Pay-Per-Click advertising works in an auction-based format, since there are a number of advertisers competing for the same keywords. The higher you bid, the higher your ad will appear. Bids can range anywhere from a few cents to several...
Successful Blogging: Utilize the Four
Everyone remembers the three “R’s” from your school days: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic. These three areas are considered essential to building a good educational foundation. Similarly, there are also some basic essentials to...
Search Engine Optimization: Avoid Complex URLs
Search engines tend to have problems fully indexing dynamic websites (in other words, sites that are hooked up to a database of content).
The kinds of sites that search engines have the biggest...
RelentlessImprovement.com Succeeds with Nutritional Supplements
Peter Hitesman was a loan officer for a banking institution in what he would consider his past life. It was a job that required an extreme attention to detail, intense customer service, and often times long hours.
But he traded that all...
osCommerce Founder: Open-Source Encourages Collaboration
Harald Ponce de Leon had an idea to create an online shopping cart system that would serve as a guide to other ecommerce developers. That was in 2000. In order to attract interest, he released his...
Ten Things You Absolutely, Positively Need to Know When You Get Sued
It’s one of those unanticipated business problems. The cost of dealing with it can be overwhelming. The risk of loss to you and your business is huge. While you are in the middle of managing ecommerce operations, sales, billing,...
Customer Service Focus - January 2006
As I have mentioned many times before, communication is the key to excellent customer service. One of the primary ways that merchants communicate with customers is via email.
Steve Walker, owner of Rescuepetstore.com said, “If I don't...
Use Web Analytics to Improve Profits for New Year
I love this quote by Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result.” It’s a great concept to bear in mind as the New Year begins. I expect many of you are looking for better results...
Reaping Holiday Sales in January
So many online stores put all of their focus into attracting holiday shoppers during the end of the year that they overlook the fact that the month of January can also be profitable. At the very least, planning ahead to handle holiday...
An Introduction to CSS - Part 3
Overview
In our last two tutorials about Cascading Style Sheets, we covered how to apply styles to all instances of an HTML tag, and also how to create style classes and then selectively apply styles to only certain HTML tags. For the...
Encoding Images Using HTML
Overview
One of the most basic HTML elements is the image tag, which is used to tell a browser to display an image on a webpage. While it is a simple tag to learn, the image tag has quite a few attributes that are important to be aware...
SEO Report Card: BalancedLifeProducts.com
Welcome to “SEO Report Card”, where I assess how well search engine optimized a selected ecommerce site is. For this first installment, our guinea pig is BalancedLifeProducts.com, a small ecommerce site, based in Madison, Wisconsin,...
The Shipping News: Plenty of Carriers for eCommerce Companies
Talk about your needle in a haystack.
When you ship one package through the Fedex system it becomes one of more than six million that the company formerly known as Federal Express moves about the globe every day. If you shipped it on...
International Shipments Worth the Effort
One of the greatest attractions of an online business is the vast number of customers that the Internet allows a retailer to reach. Web surfers from all over the world can navigate beyond the boundaries and borders that exist in the...
Fulfillment Help: Try Order Management Software
Online retailers know that there are many steps required from receiving a sales order to actually shipping it. For many retailers, these steps are separate and distinct: Print the order, enter it into accounting software, produce a...
eCommerce Sales Taxes: Determine Your Liability
Nexus – What Is It?
Nexus is defined as a “connection” or “link.” In the world of lawyers, accountants and auditors, a nexus is an effective connection of a person or a company to a state so that the state has the ‘right’...
eCommerce Marketing: Use Email, Blogs and RSS Together
Think of things that just naturally go together and what comes to mind? Peanut butter and jelly for one, ham and cheese for another. How about a hammer and nails or a table and chairs? In terms of online marketing, two strategies go...
Use Google's Site Targeting
Google advertisers, rejoice! If you ever wished you could pick and choose which sites across Google AdSense network your ads will appear, now you can!
In a recent development, Google AdWords introduced a new advertising model called...
Search Engine Optimization: Writing Effectively
In order to achieve maximum search engine visibility, you need to think a bit like a search engine when writing the copy for your website. Search engines look at the HTML code that makes up your web page and attempts to parse out the...
Optimizing Your Product Images
Overview
Product presentation is more important for an online store than it is for a brick-and-mortar store. Rather than being able to touch an item, inspect it for quality, or try it on as the case may be, an online shopper has only...
Introduction to XML: Creating a Google Sitemap
Overview
Last month, we featured a basic introduction of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and how to begin writing your own XML documents. While we were able to create an XML document to describe data, it may not be clear why this...
An Introduction to CSS - Part 2
Overview
In our last Cascading Style Sheets (“CSS”) tutorial we learned how to apply CSS styles to HTML tags using tag selectors. Using these tag selectors we were able to format information using an external style sheet rather than...
1-800-Bakery.com Links Bakeries with Consumers
Award winning bakery chef Stephen Pazyra thinks bakery items are more than mere food. To him, baked goods represent comfort foods that evoke nostalgia, bring back memories, and make people feel good....
North Dakota Senator Leads National Sales Tax Project
Quick, what’s six-point-five percent of $171 billion.
It’s about $11.1 billion.
That is approximately the amount of sales and/or use tax revenues that would be due states, counties and cities on the ecommerce activity on the...
Home Pages for the Holidays
With winter approaching, it’s time to start thinking about those holiday decorations, parties and gifts that will make the long, cold nights feel a little warmer and brighter. Whether you celebrate...
Customer Service Focus - December 2005
This month we are focusing on a several online businesses to see how different merchants deliver excellent customer service. We asked four merchants what was the single most important thing they did to deliver quality customer...
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