Page 188 – Practical Ecommerce

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Conversion
Marketplace Mania, Part 1: Reviewing the Buying Experience

November 15, 2012 • Dale Traxler

Editor's Note: This is "Part 1" in a series on buying and selling products on the major marketplaces. This installment focuses on the buying experience. eBay.com launched the first online marketplace back in 1995 with its large-scale auction platform. Amazon.com has since focused on s...
Finance
Third-Quarter Ecommerce Results Bode Well for the 2012 Holiday Season

November 15, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan

The growth in online purchasing continues. In a survey of 1,989 online consumers conducted during the last week of October, digital-tracking firm comScore found that In Q3 2012, online sales grew 15 percent over the same period last year, compared with a two percent year-over-year growt...
Business > Merchant Voice
Why free content can give you excellent SEO but poor subscriber growth

November 15, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

Getting customers to sign up to your newsletter – and to keep them – is a challenge most of us face. Those who’ve bought from you once are more likely to buy from you again (especially following an email), and those who are newsletter members are more likely to convert into purchasing ...
Analytics & Data
How to Measure SEO Performance

November 14, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization may be a mix of art and science, but it’s as measurable and accountable as other online marketing channels. Knowing what key performance indicators to measure for SEO is the first step. Establishing a regular routine for monitoring and measuring performance wi...
Social Media
13 Facebook Marketing Apps Worth Your Attention

November 14, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook’s modifications to fan pages — most importantly the shift to Timeline — has reduced the use of specialized, third-party marketing apps. However, that does not mean these apps have ...
Payments
How to Lower Credit Card Processing Costs and Obtain Better Terms, Part 4: Negotiations

November 13, 2012 • Phil Hinke

Editor's Note: This is "Part 4" in a four-part series on how to lower your debit and credit card costs and obtain more favorable terms and conditions. "Part 1: The Basics," "Part 2: Attitude," and “Part 3: Preparation” we published previously. Before starting any negotiations, make s...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: Planning Your Holiday Calendar

November 12, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Email marketing is a powerful driver of holiday sales. But haphazardly sending emails is not the way to optimize campaigns. Taking just a few minutes to think about what an email will contain and when it will be sent should help to improve results. What follows is an example holiday em...
Content Marketing
23 Tools to Help Manage Content

November 12, 2012 • Sig Ueland

To ensure your customers have a rich experience with great content, you'll need more than just a content management system. You'll need a basket of tools to research, generate, market, and track your content. Here is a list of tools to help you with content. There are content search-...
Technical SEO
4 Fast Ways to Kill Your SEO

November 9, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization experts usually focus on what you should do to improve your site’s organic search rankings. In this post, I'm asking the opposite question: What are the fastest ways to destroy your site’s SEO performance? Here's a list of my top four mistakes. Mistake 1: Lau...
Business
Strategies for Free Shipping

November 8, 2012 • Dale Traxler

With the holidays quickly approaching, it's a good time to review your shipping strategies. Free shipping is ubiquitous as ever, even though shipping costs are increasing. If you choose to charge for shipping, even a nominal fixed amount, like $4.99, you risk a shopper abandoning your c...
Marketing & Advertising
21 Pay-per-click Resources to Learn and Improve

November 8, 2012 • Melissa Mackey

If you’re new to pay-per-click advertising, or are responsible for training new PPC staff, you can never have enough training resources. With that in mind, I’ve assembled a number of resources for PPC beginners — and for PPC pros. Here are 21 blogs, websites, and books to learn and improve your PPC skills.
Conversion
Preparing for Television Commerce; 4 Steps

November 7, 2012 • Armando Roggio

A recent survey found that almost half of American television viewers were interested in making purchases directly from their television sets, using remote controls or companion devices. Given that consumers may spend five times as many hours a week watching television as they do browsi...
Keyword Research
Google Analytics: Overcoming ‘Not Provided’ Keywords

November 7, 2012 • Jaime Brugueras

What do you do when 36 percent of your traffic data is gone? For most of us, the answer is “panic.” After all, for an online business, traffic data and search-engine-optimization knowledge is essential. If you don’t understand the behavior of visitors to your website, then your business...
Marketing & Advertising
3 Marketing Lessons from Goruck.com

November 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Goruck is an American manufacturer and retailer of high-quality rucksacks, bags, and gear that does an exemplary job of marketing its products. In fact, there are at least three lessons ...
Social Media
Facebook Simplifies Ad Creation Process

November 6, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook has simplified its ad campaign creation process. The changes address (a) the redesign of the user interface, (b) a concentrated focus on marketing goals and objectives, and (c) the ability to easily use different ad types. To create an ad using the revised system, follow thes...
Photography & Video
17 Websites with Video Backgrounds

November 5, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Video is an excellent tool to present a product or a brand, as well as engage an audience with a rich visual experience. And when a website uses video in its background, the effect can be stunning. Here is a list of websites that utilize background videos. There are clothing sites, bev...
Business > Merchant Voice
Magento and multi channel selling

November 3, 2012 • Richard Stubbings

These days it is not enough to have a single web site. The E-commerce market keeps evolving and you have to move with it to keep up. When I first started 15 years ago, it was relatively new. It was an extension to your B&M store that brought in extra income. So you have two sales c...
Link Building
SEO: 3 Ways to Grow Links to Your Ecommerce Site

November 2, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Search engine optimization relies in large part on relevant content and authoritative links from other sites. As the search engines develop ever-more stringent algorithms around relevance and authority, it becomes harder to acquire links that will actually matter to your site’s SEO effo...
Social Media
9 Blogging Lessons for Ecommerce Merchants

November 1, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Blogging is a combination of science and art. The science part requires that bloggers use the latest search-engine-optimization tactics. The art is to hone writing and editing skills. But it doesn't have to be as difficult as that may sound. As a longtime blogger and journalist, I've ...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Diversify Your Traffic Sources

November 1, 2012 • Dale Traxler

In “Understanding Google’s Algorithm Changes," contributing editor Jill Kocher explained the frequency and magnitude of Google's ongoing search algorithm changes. Having read that terrific article, it reminds me of the importance of diversifying your store’s traffic sources. As an ecomm...
Conversion
8 Key Ecommerce Marketing Tactics

October 31, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce merchants have many options for acquiring site traffic, building customer relationships, and ultimately improving sales and profitability. Enumerating all of the marketing tactics available and creating an ecommerce marketing playbook of sorts may encourage new campaigns and...
Google Ads
Google Shopping: 5 Optimization Tips

October 31, 2012 • Scott Smigler

With the Google Shopping transition completed on October 17, all of Google’s organic, free product listings — those that showed a product thumbnail and price in search results — disappeared. If you want your product listings to appear in Google, you now have to buy Product Listing Ads t...
Social Media
LinkedIn Updates Member Profiles

October 30, 2012 • Paul Chaney

LinkedIn recently launched a new version of its user profiles. It will be available to all members in the coming weeks. More than just a design change, the new profile increases your opportunity to make connections, tell your professional story, and engage with others in your network. ...
Conversion
4 Ideas for Cyber Monday Sales

October 30, 2012 • Armando Roggio

The Monday after Thanksgiving — Cyber Monday — could see more than $1.25 billion in online U.S. sales this year, as eager holiday shoppers look for special web pricing. Like it or not, since about 2005 online retailers have trained shoppers to bargain hunt the weekend after the Thanksg...
Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: Using Product Data Feeds

October 29, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet

A common error that merchants make when launching an affiliate program is not providing enough marketing support for their affiliates. Merchants sometimes assume that all they need to do is provide a few banner ads to their affiliates, who would place them on their sites. But many sav...
Business > Merchant Voice
7 marketing avenues that have been a waste of time and money, and 4 that haven’t

October 29, 2012 • Elizabeth Hollingsworth

I’ve made plenty of mistakes in running my website business, and spending money on certain marketing vehicles is one of them. 1. People ignore banner ads online When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad online? And bought anything from it? I certainly haven’t and I know fro...
SEO
Understanding Google’s Algorithm Updates

October 26, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

The term "webspam" refers to low-quality sites that use manipulative search engine optimization strategies to win rankings and traffic. Google’s war on webspam has reached an all-time high, with the search giant churning out an average of one-to-two updates a day. Understanding these al...
Conversion
Niche vs. Mass Market Product Strategies

October 25, 2012 • Dale Traxler

In "Multichannel Selling a Necessity," I addressed the need for ecommerce merchants to utilize multiple selling channels because that is where the customers are. In this article, I will focus on matching your product strategy to the appropriate channel. Niche vs. Mass Market In market...
Conversion
7 Steps to Better Ecommerce Marketing

October 25, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Effective marketing rarely happens accidentally. Successful campaigns are most often the result of good planning and execution. Planning a marketing campaign can provide an excellent opportunity to focus on a business's unique marketing problems or challenges and the proper actions req...
Analytics & Data
Creating Custom Segments in Google Analytics

October 24, 2012 • Tim Wilson

In "Understanding Segmentation in Google Analytics," my previous article, I explained the concept of analyzing traffic to a website in separate groups. This process is called "segmentation." Google Analytics offers several default segments, to automatically track common groups of vi...