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

    Twitter Advertising for Small Business

    September 12, 2012 •

    Twitter offers two affordably priced advertising options for smaller businesses: "Promoted Accounts" and "Promoted Tweets." Promoted Accounts. Twitter looks at your current followers and then finds people with similar interests. When it discovers a match, Twitter recommends you in th...

  • Social Media

    Google+ For Business Now in Apps

    September 11, 2012 •

    Recently Google released a set of Google+ features that encourage collaboration within an enterprise. These new features will be available to the company's current Google Apps for Business customers on a trail basis at least through the end of 2013. The Google Apps for Business suite i...

  • Social Media

    10 Brand Campaigns on Twitter

    September 5, 2012 •

    Twitter is about what’s happening right now. For companies, Twitter can be an effective platform to reach and to interact with an audience. Here is a list of brand campaigns on Twitter. Some of these campaigns use Twitter to deliver rewards to customers. Other campaigns use Twitter to ...

  • Social Media

    Facebook Launches Targeted Page Posts

    September 4, 2012 •

    Facebook continues to launch new features in an attempt to position itself as a marketing platform. The latest is targeted page posts, which enable retailers to create Facebook Page posts that reach specific audience segments. For example, if a merchant needs to market to women within...

  • Google Ads

    Google’s Product Listing Ads: Cheaper, More Profitable

    August 30, 2012 •

    I’ve previously written about why you should make Google’s Product Listing Ads a priority. If you’ve followed my advice in "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?" and, more recently, "5 Steps to Prepare for Google Shopping," there’s a good chance you’ve observed a sharp increase in pay-pe...

  • Influencers & Affiliates

    Affiliate Marketing: Recruiting Content Sites

    August 29, 2012 •

    In affiliate marketing, sites that feature unique content are highly valued. A few examples include product review sites such as Steves-digicams.com; blogs such as Icoulduseadeal.com; and online forums, such as ...

  • Social Media

    6 Tips for Selling Directly on Facebook

    August 21, 2012 •

    At a time when large retailers like Gap, Nordstrom and J.C. Penney have shuttered their Facebook stores, smaller ecommerce merchants appear to be finding success. In a guest article at Forbes, Rusian Fazlyev, CEO of social-media ecommerce platform Ecwid, said that Facebook commerce is...

  • Influencers & Affiliates

    3 Ways to Help Affiliates Pin Products

    August 20, 2012 •

    Merging affiliate marketing with photo sharing on social media sites may help online retailers boost site traffic and sales whilst earning loyal patrons. Affiliate marketing is pay-per-performance marketing wherein merchants reward affiliates — sometimes called "publishers" — that driv...

  • Social Media

    Barebones Social Media Marketing

    August 14, 2012 •

    How do you manage social media when you have little time or money? All too often that is the situation in which merchants find themselves. Faced with many demands, merchants oftentimes have little time or money to engage on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn. ...

  • Social Media

    34 People to Follow on Google+

    August 14, 2012 •

    Google+ is one year old. While the social network has not achieved the critical mass of Facebook or Twitter, Google+ hosts a large and engaged community that includes entrepreneurial giants, tech visionaries and social media super-stars. Here is a list of people to follow on Google+. E...

  • Social Media

    3 Pinterest Apps for Facebook Pages

    August 7, 2012 •

    Facebook and Pinterest continue to grow in popularity for social commerce marketing channels among retailers. Until recently, however, there was no convenient way to tie the two together. Two companies — Woobox and Tabfusion — have now developed easy to use apps that allow merchants to ...

  • Social Media

    5 Tips for Pinterest Pin-to-Win Contests

    August 6, 2012 •

    Pinterest is the most important new social sharing site in 2012, giving online marketers both a new way to engage potential customers and a means of boosting sales. Although there have been conflicting reports of just how Pinterest is impacting business fundamentals like sales, the gen...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Email Case Study: Moosejaw Adds Personality to Email Messages

    August 2, 2012 •

    The challenge with an ongoing email program is that people are busy. Unless they have a need for your product or service, they aren’t necessarily going to open your email and purchase from you immediately. To stay relevant and keep email recipients engaged, some retailers are turning to...

  • Social Media

    Understanding the 6 Facebook Post Types

    August 1, 2012 •

    There are six types of posts you can make to your Facebook page: Video, Photo, Link, Question, Event, and Text. This article outlines reasons why you would use them and best practices for each post type. 1. Video Videos are among the most compelling and popular formats for Facebook p...

  • Illustration of a newspaper reading "Press Release" Content Marketing

    How to Write an Online Press Release

    August 1, 2012 •

    Today’s web-driven world makes it possible for companies large and small to create news simply by writing and publishing their own newsworthy content. The way to get started is by writing and sharing powerful press releases online.

  • Google Ads

    5 Steps to Prepare for Google Shopping

    July 31, 2012 •

    In "Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?," I encouraged merchants to try Google's Product Listing Ads because they produce exceptional results. They are the paid version of Google’s free product listings, which for many merchants are a major source of sales. Google recently announced, in...

  • Influencers & Affiliates

    Affiliate Marketing: 3 Incentives to Drive Sales

    July 31, 2012 •

    Ecommerce executives often gauge the success of an affiliate program by how many affiliates have signed up. This is misleading. I’d much rather oversee a program with 25 active and engaged affiliates driving traffic and sales, than thousands of affiliates who aren’t generating any ac...

  • Social Media

    7 Tips for Pinterest Pinning

    July 30, 2012 •

    Social sharing site Pinterest has grown to 12 million users and sparked a new surge in social marketing. Some online businesses are hoping to use Pinterest as a way to engage customers and make sales. As with any form of marketing there are some best practices that may make a business'...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    Plastic Surgeon Drives Business With Social Media

    July 30, 2012 •

    Michael Salzhauer is a plastic surgeon with a passion for Internet marketing. He attributes virtually all of his new-patient business to it. His company, Bal Harbour Plastic Surgery, has posted videos on YouTube that have

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Sending HTML and Plain Text Email Simultaneously

    July 25, 2012 •

    With so many different smartphones and tablets, it’s important to be able to display your company's emails in the way that the mobile browser is best suited. Some mobile browsers will show your email in its full HTML form. Others will default to just plain text. How do you know which version to send to each recipient? The solution to this problem is to craft an email which has two parts: one that displays your complete graphics and the other made up of nothing more than conventional text, with no images and colors.

  • Social Media

    10 Strategies for Effective Facebook Posts

    July 23, 2012 •

    There are 901 million Facebook users, and the average user creates 90 pieces of content each month, according to the company. Filtering through this mountain of content to get your message seen by Fans and their friends can be difficult. Here are 10 Facebook posting strategies that ca...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    4 Ways to Improve Email Deliverability

    July 18, 2012 •

    For an email-marketing program to be successful, the message must be delivered. In this article, I'll explain email deliverability basics, and offer four tips to make sure your emails hit the inbox of your recipients. 1. Know Your IP Address An IP address is a numerical number for th...

  • Social Media

    9 Ways to Increase Twitter Engagement

    July 17, 2012 •

    A new report from social commerce company Buddy Media offers insights on how businesses can use Twitter to heighten engagement and produce favorable results. It states that to more effectively leverage Twitter as a marketing channel, businesses need to know "when to Tweet, what to Tweet...

  • Social Media

    14 Pinterest-Like Sites for Product Promotion

    July 9, 2012 •

    Popular photography and video tagging site Pinterest and its many clones have sparked a product-photo sharing frenzy that may present a good marketing opportunity for retailers. Pinterest and similar sites allow users to “pin,” “fancy,” “tag,” and “tap” images and videos in a manner ve...

  • Social Media

    20 Top Brands on Socialcam

    July 9, 2012 •

    Socialcam is a free video-sharing platform for iOS and Android. Socialcam creates fast and easy clip sharing in the same way that Instagram makes mobile photos instantly sharable. Brands are using the platform to share their stories, as well as deliver engaging entertainment. Here are ...

  • Google Ads

    Google Shopping’s Impact on SEO

    July 6, 2012 •

    Over the next several months, Google’s free Product Search feature will start costing ecommerce sites a lot more. Since the launch of Google’s Froogle in 2002, Google has provided a free product search service. The newly launched Google Shopping marks the first time that the company has...

  • Social Media

    ‘Promoted Stories’ Enables Wide Content Syndication

    July 5, 2012 •

    Syndicating blog posts, press releases or new product announcements can be time consuming, especially when you consider the number and types of channels available. Further, many small ecommerce merchants do not have the internal resources to effectively promote such content. They may po...

  • Social Media

    12 Resources for Custom Facebook Pages

    July 3, 2012 •

    Facebook has a whole lot of people to introduce your brand to. It also has a variety of third-party resources to create custom tabs and pages to present your brand. Here is a list of resources to create custom tabs and pages for your brand. Many of these resources offer social apps to...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    13 Sites with Personalized Social Media Icons

    June 29, 2012 •

    Many online merchants use social media icons to link their storefronts to social networks like Facebook and Twitter. While basic social media icons will get the job done, some merchants choose to customize their social media icons for a more personalized user experience. Here are thirte...

  • Social Media

    Putting a Dollar Value on Fans, Friends, and Followers

    June 27, 2012 •

    According to studies from diverse research and analysis firms around the globe, a Facebook Fan is worth $136.38, a Twitter follower is worth $2.00, and a would-be friend on Pinterest is worth, perhaps, $5.00. Unfortunately, as concise and direct as these figures might seem when used a...

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