Category

Marketing & Advertising

The marketing of an ecommerce business is paramount to its success. Our coverage includes insights on email marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest — affiliate marketing, video advertising, and much more.

Content Marketing | Email & Text Marketing | Google Ads | Influencers & Affiliates | Social Media

Social Media
How to Create a Google+ Community

December 11, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Google+ is growing. According to a Google executive, more than 500 million people have set up profiles, 235 million actively use Google+ functionality such as Hangouts (its video chat feature) and sharing links (via the +1 button), and 135 million use Google+ as a stand-alone social net...
Email & Text Marketing
Email, Mobile, On-site Driving 2012 Holiday Sales

December 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Retail holiday sales for 2012 from the first of November through Cyber Monday rose 16 percent year over year to more than $16.3 billion. Email marketing, mobile shopping, and on-site promotions have all played an important role in online sales. The 16 percent boost in early holiday ret...
Social Media
Designing a Facebook Marketing Campaign in 4 Steps

December 4, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Marketing on Facebook involves four basic steps: Build, Connect, Engage and Influence, a process Facebook now refers to as the BCEI framework. This article outlines these four steps and explains how ecommerce merchants can use them to execute an effective Facebook marketing campaign. ...
Social Media
6 Sites to Monitor Facebook Changes

December 4, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook is notorious for making changes to its platform. Often, such changes are made with little notice or fanfare, unless you know where to look. Staying abreast of such changes is important to any merchant who wishes to use Facebook marketing more effectively. In this article, I p...
Influencers & Affiliates
Launching a New Affiliate Marketing Program, Part 1: Tracking Platforms

November 29, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet

Editor's Note: This is "Part 1" of a three-part series on launching a new affiliate marketing program. "Part 2" and "Part 3" we published subsequently. There are four steps involved in launching an affiliate program. They are: (a) evaluating potential affiliate networks and tracking p...
Google Ads
7 Last Minute Holiday Marketing Improvements

November 28, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Christmas is less than five weeks away. Here are seven last-minute holiday marketing improvements you can make to maximize sales. 1. Shop Your Site from Mobile Devices Smartphone and tablet users accounted ...
Social Media
Amazon and Pinterest Add Business Pages

November 26, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ have their own versions of business pages. Now, Amazon and Pinterest do, too. Amazon Marketing Services Amazon has quietly launched what it refers to as Amazon ...
Marketing & Advertising
9 Creative Websites For Marketing Inspiration

November 23, 2012 • Kevin Webster

Your business's website needs to be fresh, bold, and worthy of a visitor’s time. Reading about your industry — or visiting business blogs — sometimes isn’t enough to inspire or help generate ideas. If you feel as though you are in a rut, there are many ways to generate creative thinking. Here’s a nine websites that can help.
Social Media
Top 10 Social Sharing Buttons for Your Website

November 21, 2012 • Paul Chaney

One of the best ways to get traffic to your website is through the use of social sharing buttons. The problem, however, is that while many social sharing options exist, their features vary. Some offer fewer sharing options, some only work on WordPress, and some require more technical ex...
Email & Text Marketing
Automated Email Marketing Drives Ecommerce Sales; 4 Tips

November 20, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

Email marketing is becoming increasingly automated. Recent acquisitions by ExactTarget, a leading email service provider, of iGoDigital and Pardot, for $21 million and $95 million respectively, illustrate this trend. iGoDigital is a platform that helps online retailers offer product re...
Social Media
Pinterest Releases Business Accounts

November 19, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Pinterest, the popular image and video sharing site, now allows for specific business accounts that have a separate set of terms and conditions and may eventually include promotional options not currently available on the platform. "Thousands of businesses have become part of our commu...
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 ...
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-...
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.
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...
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...
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. ...
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...
Social Media
How to Set Up a YouTube Channel

October 23, 2012 • Paul Chaney

A "Channel" is YouTube's equivalent of a Facebook page. You must create a YouTube Channel to upload videos, comment on videos, or create "playlists" — collections of different videos by topic. In this article I discuss how to set up a YouTube Channel, to help market your business. ...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: Analyzing J.C. Penney’s New Approach

October 22, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

J.C. Penney has received a lot of press for the many changes made by its new CEO, Ron Johnson, who came from Apple. As a J.C. Penney email subscriber, I have noticed its email program has become more engaging. The subject lines are more compelling. The emails contain unique and interest...
Social Media
YouTube’s Time Watched Algorithm Update

October 19, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

In the past, YouTube measured a video’s popularity based on the number of clicks it received. Last Friday the video search giant changed its algorithm — here's the blog post at YouTube — to take the time spent watching a video into account. As a result, ecommerce sites wanting to attrac...
Social Media
Pinterest: Tap Shared Interests for Ecommerce Sales

October 17, 2012 • Paul Chaney

How many times have you purchased a product just because one of your Facebook friends did? Likely, your answer is, "Not very often." As retailers, we make a mistake to think that people rely exclusively on their social graph — the network of friends on social networks. More often, they...
Social Media
Is Pinterest the Best Social Platform for Ecommerce?

October 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Pinterest may owe its popularity to human nature. Early this year, Monetate, the shopping-personalization firm, made headlines when it pronounced that Pinterest was reshaping social commerce and could be a leading source of social media traffic to online retail sites. And even if the M...
Social Media
17 Social Media Cheat Sheets

October 15, 2012 • Sig Ueland

These days, small businesses use a variety of social media sites in their marketing efforts. Cheat sheets are a helpful way to keep the functionality of each site straight. Here is a list of cheat sheets for the major social media sites. There are infographic tools to identify keyboard...
Social Media
LinkedIn Retools Company Pages

October 8, 2012 • Paul Chaney

LinkedIn recently launched a redesign of its Company Pages. It initially offered the redesign to a few select companies. But last week, it made the redesign available to all businesses. LinkedIn described it all in a blog post. Merchants should consider updating their company pages to ...
Social Media
The 4-Step Social Media Content Strategy

October 3, 2012 • Paul Chaney

In a crowded online marketplace where smaller retailers are forced to vie against large ones, creating useful content is one way to garner consumer attention and trust. This is especially true when it comes to attracting prospects in social media. At the recent Dreamforce 2012 confere...

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