April 2016 Top 10: Our Most Popular Posts

Here are our 10 most popular articles for April 2016, recognizing that articles we published earlier in the month are more likely to make the list than later ones.

19 Free Website Design Tools

There are plenty of free tools and resources to help with your website design, whether you’re just looking for a little flare or you want to build a new site from scratch. Here is a list of free tools and resources for website design. There are helpful design apps, platforms to create full sites, and resources for font, icon, and image freebies. Read Article…

–

9 Ecommerce Marketing Skills That Drive Success

From pay-per-click advertising to blogging and from search engine optimization to analytics, ecommerce marketing is broad, diverse, and, potentially, complex. The aim is to find those activities, promotions, and tactics that generate profits. Five years ago, Practical Ecommerce published an article describing the skills critical for ecommerce entrepreneurs. The suggestions were, perhaps, counterintuitive: be able to write, know how to learn, and be a skilled listener. Read Article…

–

4 Reasons Ecommerce Marketing Campaigns Fail

Not every social media post, or email message, or advertisement will perform. In fact, marketing campaigns and tactics often fail. So the goal is not necessarily to avoid failure. The goal, instead, is to learn from failures. To paraphrase a famous line from a nearly 250-year-old Robert Burns’ poem, “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” Read Article…

–

14 Social Networks for Ecommerce Merchants in 2016

A social network can offer an ecommerce merchant the opportunity to promote a business and even sell some products. Explore new and emerging social networks, along with new features on established networks, to find opportunities for your business. Here is a list of social networks for merchants to consider in 2016. Read Article…

–

Create Responsive Ecommerce Product Pages with Bootstrap

The Bootstrap framework makes it easy to lay out responsive ecommerce product detail pages. Small business owners and even novice site designers can use Bootstrap to build a professional looking page. Bootstrap is one of the most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript frameworks for developing responsive web pages. Read Article…

–

6 Principles for Small Business Automation

Entrepreneurs and small business managers are hands-on folks. They are often involved in nearly every aspect of the business — from marketing to fulfillment to accounting to website design. At some point, however, all of that special attention may actually inhibit growth, so that the business leaders need to step back and let some processes happen automatically. Read Article…

–

4 Things Add-to-cart Rates Tell an Ecommerce Business

Monitoring an ecommerce business’s add-to-cart rate can identify and solve conversion problems, and, ultimately, help an online store earn more. Add-to-cart rates track the percentage of site visitors who add a product to a shopping cart. This performance indicator is often closely associated with bounce rate, which tracks the percentage of visitors who leave after seeing just one page on a site, and cart completion, which describes the percentage of visitors who buy something. Read Article…

–

SEO: How to Combat Google’s Ad Increase

In the wake of Google’s move to increase ads at the top of the search results pages while removing side-rail ads, many are focusing on the impact on paid advertising — rising cost per click, increased competition, and the like. However, organic search is affected as well. Devoting more space on search results pages to advertising shrinks the already slim space for organic listings. Read Article…

–

SEO: 22 Tools, Tutorials for Bing

If all of your search marketing efforts are on Google, you could be missing out on Bing. It accounts for roughly 20 percent of all U.S. desktop searches, according to comScore. Bing Webmaster Tools offers a full suite of advanced tools and useful tutorials to help website owners optimize their sites on that search engine. Read Article…

–

Content Marketing: How to Find Topics

Content marketing can be a like a greedy monster. It may be powerful, it may be capable, but it is also hungry, devouring a constant flow of ideas. Every article, every blog post, every infographic, every video requires a spark, an idea, a topic. Read Article…