Paul Chaney - Practical Ecommerce - Page 9 of 11

Articles by: Paul Chaney

Paul Chaney

Paul Chaney

Paul Chaney is a contributor for Practical Ecommerce, having written his first article in August 2005.

Paul is author of The Digital Handshake: Seven Proven Strategies to Grow Your Business Using Social Media (published by John Wiley & Sons), and The F-Commerce Handbook: 10 Secrets for Unlocking the Sales Potential of Facebook and The Social Commerce Handbook: 20 Secrets for Turning Social Media into Social Sales, both of which are published by McGraw-Hill.

Connect with Paul via email at pchaney@gmail.com.

Social Media
Managing Negative Facebook Page Comments

May 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

A small business owner contacted me recently. She had received a comment on her Facebook page criticizing the price of her products. In her way of thinking, it would be better to have no comments at all than to give disgruntled customers the opportunity to use her Fan page as a platform...
Social Media
5 Ways to Increase Ratings and Reviews

May 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Today's Internet is largely driven by peer-to-peer interaction. When making a purchase, consumers seek out the experiences of others. This includes reading online ratings and reviews posted by other consumers, which can increase overall engagement and drive sales. With that in mind, he...
Social Media
5 Ways Merchants Can Locate Social Communities

May 6, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: One of the marketing challenges faced by ecommerce merchants is finding online communities that have an interest in the merchants' products. Few observers dispute the potential of social media, provided merchants can find interested parties to be social with. We posed th...
Social Media
16 Facebook Marketing Strategies

May 3, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are thousands of Facebook apps, including a growing class designed for marketing use on company Facebook Pages. Here is a list of 16 different marketing strategies — using apps — that can help your ecommerce business. 1. Facebook Send button Facebook recently launched the “Send”...
Social Media
Sprout Social: Social Media Management Time-Saving Tool

April 26, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are a number of tools that help reduce the time required to manage social media engagement. We have reviewed many of them here, in "15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity" and "5 Time-Saving Social Network Tools." In this article, I want to review a resource that I have ...
Social Media
8 Benefits to Facebook ‘Likes’

April 18, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Last week, I addressed strategies for increasing numbers of Facebook Likes, in "15 Ways to Get Liked on Facebook." This week, I discuss 8 reasons why getting Likes can benefit your business, and I cite research that attempts to assign a value to each "Like." 8 Reasons to Encourage Like...
Social Media
15 Ways to Get ‘Liked’ on Facebook

April 12, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Once a business has established a Facebook Page, a key challenge is to grow its fan base. This is accomplished, in part, through the use of the "Like" button. By clicking the Like button, a person expresses affinity for the brand or its products. It is the Facebook equivalent of an emai...
Social Media
Social Q&A: New Take On An Old Genre

April 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

The question-and-answer genre has been around for a long time in the form of bulletin boards, discussion forums and sites such as Answers.com and AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com). A new variation ...
Social Media
Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts; 8 Suggestions

March 29, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Google’s so-called “Farmer” algorithm update emphasizes original, unique content for favorable organic search results. Frequently-updated, keyword-optimized, topically-relevant blog posts can provide your ecommerce site with original content, and improve its search engine rankings. I have seen it happen
Social Media
3 YouTube Advertising Options for Small Businesses

March 21, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Online video has gone mainstream. Thanks to sites like Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, more people are watching full-length movies and TV shows online than ever before. But no site has the video audience of YouTube. Consider these facts, which are from YouTube's Statistics page: M...
Social Media
3 Tools to Create New Facebook iFrame Pages

March 14, 2011 • Paul Chaney

March 10 was a big day for Facebook Page owners. On that day, Facebook upgraded Pages to a new layout and removed FBML — Facebook Markup Language — as the custom-tab-creation code, replacing it with iframes. The latter action spelled trouble for do-it-yourselfers because it required the...
Social Media
10 Tips for Marketing on Redesigned Facebook

March 7, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Now that Facebook has made a number of changes to its platform, such as the new design, new layout and the use of iframes to create custom tabs, an updated list of Facebook marketing tips could be helpful. This follows from my three-part explanatory series of those changes, at: "Part...
Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 3: Sponsored Stories Ad Units

February 28, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: This is "Part 3" of a three-part series describing the recent changes Facebook made to its platform, and how those changes affect smaller companies. The series has ran in the following order. Part 1: Page Redesign Part 2: From FBML to iFrames In this "Part 3" instal...
Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 2: From FBML to iFrames

February 22, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. In response, Practical eCommerce will publish "How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants," a three-part series aimed at addressing each of these changes. T...
Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 1: Page Redesign

February 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. First, Facebook implemented a planned redesign of business-oriented "Pages" (also called "fan pages" or "business pages") to mirror the way personal Profiles — for individuals ...
Social Media
5 Social-Shopping Sites to Help Retailers, Consumers

February 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney

I received an email recently from a friend asking me what type of vacuum cleaner he should purchase. I noticed the email did not come from him directly, however, but from ShopSocially, a social shopping website that is part of a new class of sites in which reliance on friends is at the ...
Social Media
The Basics of Advertising on Facebook

January 31, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook commerce has a long way to go before it's on par with traditional ecommerce. But many ecommerce merchants report that Facebook Ads, a self-service, pay-per-click advertising platform similar to Google AdWords, generates positive returns. In this article, I am going to outline t...
Social Media
Tools to Build a Strong Twitter Following; Relevance Is Key

January 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Twitter is helpful for many small businesses. One key to maximizing its value is to find relevant people to follow in the hopes they will return the courtesy. Relevance is essential to growing a follower base that would most likely read your content, and eventually become customers. I w...
Social Media
Designing for the New Twitter Layout

January 17, 2011 • Paul Chaney

It won't be long before everyone is subject to the new, wider Twitter layout. Up to now, the new layout has been optional and Twitter users could switch back to the old settings. Though no firm date has been announced for the transition, Twitter indicates it will take place soon. Here's...
Social Media
4 Realities of Selling on Facebook

January 11, 2011 • Paul Chaney

There are few who question Facebook's potential for ecommerce merchants. Access to a user base of nearly 600 million consumers — coupled with the targeting of specific audience segments based on users' Likes — are compelling reasons to experiment with it as a sales channel. However, li...
Social Media
9 Twitter Productivity Tools

January 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Many people consider Twitter an enormous waste of time. "Why would I care what someone had for dinner?" is a question often asked by those who do not use Twitter for personal communications. Granted, if improperly managed, Twitter can be a huge black hole sucking up lots of time. What...
Social Media
Social Commerce Top 10 for 2010; Outlook for 2011

December 29, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Two social commerce topics that created the biggest stir this year were location-based social networks like Foursquare and Facebook Places, and group coupon deals championed by sites like Groupon and Living Social. Groupon became the year's leading social commerce newsmaker when it repo...
Social Media
The 12 Ways of Facebook Commerce

December 21, 2010 • Paul Chaney

One of the most-loved songs associated with the yuletide season is "The Twelve Days of Christmas." In an effort to pay homage to the song and the season, here are 12 ways to market your ecommerce business using Facebook, during Christmastime or at anytime. 1. Create a Facebook Page C...
Social Media
10 Free Facebooks Apps for Ecommmerce Merchants

December 13, 2010 • Paul Chaney

The best things in life are free. Or so The Beatles sang, in Money. Here is a list of ten free Facebook apps that I recommend for ecommerce businesses. I've divided them into four categories: Landing Page Creation, Email Marketing, Facebook Shopping Carts, and Other. Landing Page Crea...
Social Media
Amplify.com Combines Blogging, Social Networking, News Clipping

December 9, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Blogging is popular among social media users. But many small businesses still do not use it for marketing. Most lack either the time or commitment required to make blogging a successful marketing strategy. But there is a now a way to incorporate blogging that doesn't require the same d...
Social Media
Social Media’s Effect on Holiday Sales

December 2, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Ecommerce is playing an increasingly important role in holiday sales. But how much of that growth can be attributed to social media? I asked Hitwise, the competitive intelligence service, how much traffic ecommerce sites received from social media. A spokesman for Hitwise responded vi...
Social Media
Facebook Requests Home Page Status; Effect on Ecommerce Merchants

November 24, 2010 • Paul Chaney

When people log onto the Internet, they tend to go one of three places: Google, their email inboxes or, increasingly, Facebook. Now, Facebook is reportedly positioning itself to become the home page for its users. According to articles in TechCrunch and The Wall Street Journal, Facebook...
Social Media
LinkedIn’s New ‘Company Pages’ Showcase Products, Recommendations

November 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney

LinkedIn has released a new version of its company profiles called "Company Pages," which provides a place for businesses to "showcase their products, services and associated recommendations," according to LinkedIn. Heretofore, LinkedIn company profiles served only a research purpose ...
Social Media
3 Group Coupon Companies for Purely Online Merchants

November 15, 2010 • Paul Chaney

A lot of activity is occurring around the group-coupon-deals space in recent days. Facebook launched "Deals," which, according to Facebook, "local businesses will be able to offer you deals when you check in to their place on Facebook." And there's Groupon Stores, which allow merchants ...
Social Media
8 Steps to Social Media Success

November 9, 2010 • Paul Chaney

"How do I get started?" is a question I often hear regarding social media marketing. In this article, I provide eight steps to help. Think of it as a checklist of must-do items that will put you in the best position to integrate social media into your overall marketing mix and take adva...

« Previous 1 2 3 … 8 9 10 11 Next »