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Marketing & Advertising
For Ecommerce, Better to Use Search Ads or Display?
March 19, 2018 • Armando Roggio
For online sellers, digital advertising is not a choice between search ads or display ads, but rather understanding how each of these tools can help generate sales. The term "search advertising" describes placing ads on a search engine results page. Search ads target specific keywords and seek to capture potential customers intent on finding some piece of information or, perhaps, finding a product.
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Technical SEO
Gzip Compression Could Make Your Site 90-percent Faster
March 16, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Not using gzip on your web server? Your company should be. Enabling gzip compression could improve initial page load times by as much as 90 percent. Your business's faster web pages may even lead to better search engine rankings, an increase in site traffic, and more sales.
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Code
Enable HTTP/2 for Happier Customers, Better SEO
March 12, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Enabling your company's website to use HTTP/2 could result in better performance, happier customers, and improved rankings on search engines. All of that, in turn, could help your site generate more traffic, more conversions, and more profit. The HTTP/2 standard is a significant update of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that has been used to connect computers via the internet since 1991.
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SEO
5 Ecommerce SEO Tactics to Try Today
March 9, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Search engine optimization seeks to help search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo understand a page's purpose and content in the hope the search engine will serve up a highly-ranked link in search results. An ecommerce business could spend months or even years optimizing search engine traffic. Some SEO techniques require wholesale changes in site structure, a nearly constant flow of new content, or days of keyword research.
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Schools & Resources
Crisis Communications Checklist for Retail Businesses
March 7, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Has your business committed a social media faux pas? An employee, perhaps, did something embarrassing, or maybe your entire industry is getting bad press. How your company communicates through a crisis may impact the entire organization, including profitability and viability.
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Content Marketing
Content Marketing Can Drive Long-tail SEO
March 5, 2018 • Armando Roggio
A robust content marketing campaign may attract shoppers searching on long-tail keyword phrases, which could generate additional sales. The term “long tail” describes statistical distributions where there are many points, if ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for April 2018
March 4, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Need inspiration for your company's April content marketing? Write about baseball, American filmmaking, holidays, or springtime activities and shopping. Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing articles, videos, podcasts, or even graphics with the aim of attracting, engaging, and retaining an audience of customers and potential customers. It is marketing based on reciprocity.
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Marketing & Advertising
A Brief Introduction to Affiliate Marketing for Ecommerce
February 21, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Affiliate marketing is a promotional model that connects merchants with independent marketers who are willing to invest time and money to sell a merchant's products. Put another way, affiliate marketing connects a business that has a product to sell with a marketer who can sell it. Affiliate marketing is performance based. Thus advertisers only pay when affiliates deliver a specified customer action. In the ecommerce context, this action is typically an online purchase, which makes affiliate marketing very cost effective.
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Business
Manage Your Business Blog with a Kanban Board
February 15, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Content is an important part of ecommerce marketing. Often, content marketing begins with a consistent, well-written, and well-managed blog. For sole proprietorships and small businesses, it is possible to manage a ...
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Business
From Retail to Manufacturing, Kanban Improves Efficiency
February 12, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Kanban is a project management approach that can be applied to nearly any step-by-step process to increase efficiency, reduce waste, and help a business improve. Although Kanban was developed in the 1940s and 1950s to boost manufacturing efficiency at Toyota factories in Japan, the system has been adapted to many industries, including software development, publishing, and retail management.
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Business
Create Google Docs from a Google Sheet
February 8, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Your business can use Google Apps Script to pull data from the rows and columns of a Google Sheet and create individualized Google Docs that include only the information needed. This can make your business and the folks running it more productive. Here's an example.
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for March 2018
February 4, 2018 • Armando Roggio
March is prime time for information about nutrition, success, humor, and being outside. So why not create seasonal content that will help your business build customer relationships and make sales? Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing articles, podcasts, or videos with the aim of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers. It works on the principle of reciprocity — exchanging things for mutual benefit.
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Shipping & Fulfillment
New Electronic Logging Mandate May Increase Shipping Costs
January 30, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Critics of a new logging mandate for freight carriers claim it is creating a shortage of drivers and increasing shipping costs in many industries, including retail. Beginning December 2017, the U.S.
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Keyword Research
How to Identify Keywords That Signal Shoppers’ Intent
January 23, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Keyword phrases are the fuel that drives many online marketing efforts, including search engine optimization, paid search advertising, and even content ideas. If marketers do a better job in selecting keyword phrases, they may do a better job promoting their products and content.
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Marketing & Advertising
Will Customer Profiles Replace Marketing Personas?
January 15, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Emerging technologies make it possible to move segmentation and personalization models beyond marketing personas to distinct, individual customer profiles. The ability to collect customer information — and organize it (i.e., big data) and draw insights from it (i.e., machine learning) — makes it possible for marketers to evolve. This evolution from buyer personas to individual profiles can provide superior personalization and an enhanced experience for shoppers.
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Keyword Research
How to Build an Ecommerce Keyword List
January 9, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Keywords are an important building block for ecommerce marketing. Developing and maintaining a keyword list may help an ecommerce business understand shoppers and do a better job of marketing to them. In the context of search engine optimization, searchers' words or phrases summarize their thoughts, questions, or needs. Those keywords represent the language people use to ask for help finding resources online.
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for February 2018
January 3, 2018 • Armando Roggio
Valentine's Day dominates the retail calendar in February, driving more than $18 billion in consumer purchases in the United States alone, including, by some accounts, $5.4 billion in ecommerce sales. Valentine's Day spending often includes dinner out, movie tickets, and flowers. But there is still plenty of opportunity for online retailers. The challenge is in how to attract those purchases. One solution is content marketing.
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Marketing & Advertising
Live Streaming Can Promote Ecommerce Products
January 2, 2018 • Armando Roggio
From demonstrating intricate products in real-time to broadcasting webinars and conferences, live streaming is a natural progression of an ecommerce business's video marketing. It is an important tool for engaging customers. The technology behind live streaming is not necessarily new.
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Fraud Prevention
7 Telltale Signs of Payment Card Fraud
December 26, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Purchases made with stolen payment cards cost the ecommerce industry billions of dollars a year worldwide. But, in at least some cases, merchants could have avoided losses had they recognized ...
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SEO
Voice SEO: What Marketers Know Now
December 20, 2017 • Armando Roggio
How should your business optimize for voice search? The answer may be that the search engine optimization community doesn’t really know yet. In fact, perhaps the best thing your marketing department ...
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Business
4 Challenges for Mid-market Ecommerce in 2018
December 18, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Changes in shopper behavior, improvements in technology, and pricing policies meant to “protect” small, brick-and-mortar retailers all represent significant challenges to mid-market ecommerce and mid-market omnichannel retail businesses in 2018. These ...
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Conversion
Encourage After-Christmas Customer Reviews
December 14, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Customer reviews may boost ecommerce conversion rates and make product pages more findable on search engines. Combine this fact — that reviews improve search engine optimization and conversions — with the ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for January 2018
December 11, 2017 • Armando Roggio
The beginning of a year represents new opportunities for content marketers. In January, help potential customers get started on their new hobbies and activities, celebrate one of the greatest Americans,
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Trends to Try in 2018
November 29, 2017 • Armando Roggio
The line, if there is one, between content marketing and publishing will continue to blur in 2018, as businesses produce high-quality articles, books, and broadcasts to attract, engage, and retain ...
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Schools & Resources
5 Ecommerce Site Design Trends for 2018
November 23, 2017 • Armando Roggio
New techniques, technologies, and user behaviors drive ecommerce website and application design every year. In 2018, expect ecommerce sites to employ the CSS Grid Layout, use mobile-friendly full-screen modal windows,
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Marketing & Advertising
Coupon Codes Can Measure Ecommerce Marketing Results
November 20, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Coupon or discount codes your customers enter during the ecommerce checkout process can help your business monitor and measure marketing and advertising effectiveness and make better promotional decisions. For a professional ...
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Local Business
4 Marketing Lessons from Opening a Brick-and-mortar Store
November 15, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Lessons learned from opening a brick-and-mortar retail store may apply to online merchants, providing insights about promoting products, driving sales, and engaging shoppers. On November 9 through 11, 2017, I helped ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Unconventional Black Friday Marketing Tactics, for Ecommerce
November 10, 2017 • Armando Roggio
The competition for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales is stiff. Online sellers — from the smallest garaged-based startup right up through Amazon — are sending email messages, buying pay-per-click ...
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Content Marketing
5 Content Marketing Ideas for December 2017
November 5, 2017 • Armando Roggio
From curated wish lists to telling your company’s story, December 2017 offers content marketers many opportunities to connect with shoppers. Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing articles,
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Content Marketing
How to Use Retail Co-op Funds for Content Marketing
November 3, 2017 • Armando Roggio
Manufacturers and distributors that supply mid-market and enterprise retail businesses will sometimes pay those retailers to place ads alongside content as part of a cooperative advertising program. The secret to ...