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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
  • Marketing & Advertising

    For Quick Sales, Target Top PPC Ad Placements

    June 26, 2012 •

    For many retail businesses, summers can be a challenging time to maintain steady revenue. This week, I’m going to focus on a strategy that could bring quick revenue into your business. A lot of the marketing buzz for ecommerce businesses has been around using social media to build you...

  • Social Media

    Writing Social Media Press Releases: 3 Tools to Help

    June 25, 2012 •

    More than 3,000 press releases are issued each day. However, unless you have a public relations firm following up — making phone calls or sending emails to journalists and bloggers — it's almost impossible to get your release read by the media. But there are three ways press releases ...

  • Social Media

    Moving Beyond Likes on Facebook

    June 25, 2012 •

    A new study seeks to better understand how businesses may use Facebook to go beyond just acquiring Likes, to engaging and communicating with customers in effective and measurable ways. The study comes from Internet analysis firm comScore and includes data from comScore's "Social Essent...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    Collaborative Consumption Can Help Your Ecommerce Business

    June 21, 2012 •

    "Collaborative consumption" refers to the matching of suppliers with consumers in a large-scale manner. It could involve bartering services, renting resources, selling products, and more. The Internet has greatly facilitated collaborative consumption, by offering online platforms for ...

  • Social Media

    Installing Facebook’s New WordPress Plugin

    June 19, 2012 •

    Facebook has created a WordPress plugin that integrates the social network's functionality to a much deeper degree. It makes your WordPress site nearly an extension of Facebook itself. Once installed, each time you create a WordPress post, it automatically cross-posts to your Facebook T...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    5 Ways to Freshen Your Email List

    June 18, 2012 •

    Your email-marketing program depends on a quality list. It's easy for a list to stagnate over time. An email database that is left alone, without refreshing, combined with an email marketing program that is not stimulating, will lead to lower open and click rates. In this article, I'l...

  • Social Media

    Measuring Social Media’s Impact on Revenue

    June 15, 2012 •

    You can explore the impact of social media on your site’s revenue using data that is already available to you. None of this data is perfect, and none of it is comprehensive. But when used together, the data can inform how and where you invest. Organic vs. Campaign-Driven Social Media ...

  • Social Media

    Facebook Adds Post Scheduler and Admin Roles

    June 13, 2012 •

    Facebook recently added two new administrative functions to Fan pages: the ability to (a) schedule posts, and (b) set management roles for page administrators. Scheduling Posts Facebook page administrators can now schedule posts for publication at a future date. This long anticipated...

  • Social Media

    Facebook Promoted Posts: Getting Started

    June 5, 2012 •

    Facebook just launched a new advertising format called Promoted Posts, which allows Page administrators to turn any Timeline post into an ad that appears at the top of Fans' news feeds. Promoted Posts increase the chance that more Fans will see it, and that more of their friends will to...

  • Social Media

    Ecommerce Marketing on Google+

    June 5, 2012 •

    As Google rolls more features and functions into Google+, marketing on the new and fast growing social media network is increasingly important. Last week, Google announced the launch of Google+ Local, which provides users with recommendations and information about local businesses incl...

  • Social Media

    Who is Using Twitter and Why?

    June 4, 2012 •

    Mobile adoption may be driving a surge in Twitter use, according to a major research firm. A report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project released May 31, 2012 said, “Twitter usage is highly correlated with the use of mobile technologies, especially smartphones.” This find...

  • Influencers & Affiliates

    Affiliate Marketing: Optimize Creative Inventory

    May 31, 2012 •

    Managing an affiliate marketing channel is more than just getting affiliates to join your program. It is also about optimizing ad placements on affiliate sites. Building Your Creative Inventory Different types of affiliates have different creative needs. Coupon and deal sites such...

  • Google Ads

    Remarketing Renaissance Helps Ecommerce Merchants

    May 30, 2012 •

    The idea of targeting ads to visitors who leave a site and continue surfing the web always made sense to me. Until recently, however, this "remarketing" was an afterthought. It just wasn’t producing enough traffic or sales to be valuable. That’s likely to change. When Google got into ...

  • Social Media

    3 Ways to Integrate Tweets on Your Ecommerce Site

    May 29, 2012 •

    Twitter offers several ways to integrate tweets into a retailer's website. Showing tweets increases the number of followers. It also keeps the website updated with new content. And it serves increase the community around the retailer's brand. With that in mind, here are three of the m...

  • Social Media

    18 Tools to Develop Your Brand on Facebook

    May 24, 2012 •

    If you’re look for a place to develop your brand, Facebook is the spot. With over 500 million daily active users, it’s a great platform on which to engage followers and promote yourself. It’s also an ideal environment to monitor how successful you are at engaging and promoting. Here is...

  • Social Media

    Using Facebook’s Insights Analytics to Expand Your Audience

    May 22, 2012 •

    This article takes a closer look at ways merchants can utilize Facebook's administrative console and Insights analytics platform for marketing purposes. These newly revised sections contain information that can help merchants gain a deeper understanding into (a) who is visiting their ...

  • Social Media

    How to Install Social Sharing Buttons from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest

    May 17, 2012 •

    All major social networks provide merchants with the capability to incorporate social sharing buttons that allow visitors to share content. The process of embedding these buttons is simple, can be done in a matter of minutes, and requires only a basic understanding of HTML. Below are ...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    23 Tools to Research Your Competition

    May 16, 2012 •

    Sometimes the best way to improve your own business is by taking a hard look at your competitors. By understanding their most and least effective strategies, you can fine-tune your own marketing efforts. Here is a list of competitive research tools. There are tools to research your com...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    How to Choose an Email Service Provider

    May 10, 2012 •

    Selecting an email service provider can be a daunting task. With so many potential providers — and a vast range of pricing options and levels of service — how do you know which providers are the best match for your ecommerce business? In this article, I'll address five keys to help yo...

  • Social Media

    8 Social Shopping Sites for Ecommerce Merchants

    May 8, 2012 •

    Today's social shopping sites are the online equivalent of old-fashioned swap meets and flea markets. They bring thousands of buyers and sellers together in a social environment where shoppers can rely on friends to help them shop and connect with merchants. These social marketplaces ...

  • Social Media

    20 Most-Shared Marketing Videos

    May 7, 2012 •

    Online viewers share compelling content. A marketing video that makes an impact can go viral, whether the video is funny, sad, inspiring, or cheaply produced. Here is a list of the most-shared marketing videos, based on the amount of times content is shared on Facebook, Twitter and in ...

  • Social Media

    Using Twitter to Promote Your Ecommerce Products

    May 2, 2012 •

    Twitter is a largely untapped promotional channel for ecommerce merchants. According to social commerce company ArgyleSocial, only 26 percent of retailers include calls to action such as "visit a website" or "purchase a product" in their tweets — here's ArgyleSocial's infographic. In a...

  • Social Media

    Survey Says: Pinterest-like Sites Drive Sales

    May 1, 2012 •

    Some 32 percent of respondents to a March survey reported making a purchase after seeing a product on Pinterest or a similar picture and video sharing social media website. Bizrate Insights, which sells customer feedback and ratings solutions to online retailers, surveyed 3,741 online ...

  • Influencers & Affiliates

    Affiliate Marketing: Communicating with Your Affiliates

    May 1, 2012 •

    One of the important responsibilities of managing an affiliate marketing channel is communicating with affiliates. The most common form of communicating with them is an email newsletter. A question many affiliate managers ask is, “How often should I send a newsletter?” The concern is...

  • Social Media

    3 Examples of Contest Marketing

    April 30, 2012 •

    Contest marketing seeks to give shoppers a positive retailer-related experience, create an affinity for the products a retailer sells, and collect information about shoppers that may help with future sales-oriented marketing campaigns. The idea of giving away hundreds of dollars worth ...

  • Social Media

    10 Marketing Examples of Facebook Photo Albums

    April 23, 2012 •

    There are many ways for ecommerce merchants to use Facebook's photo gallery. My article last week — "Facebook Photo Albums: Maximize the Marketing Value" — outlined a number of them. Here are 10 examples of ecommerce merchants and small businesses that are taking advantage of Facebook...

  • Social Media

    Facebook Photo Albums: Maximize the Marketing Value

    April 17, 2012 •

    In last week's article, "Using Facebook's New App Icons to Promote Your Business," I discussed how to modify Facebook Page app icons, which are located just beneath the cover image. The first icon that appears in the row of four is "Photos." It cannot be moved from this first position...

  • Social Media

    23 Twitter Chats for Small Businesses

    April 16, 2012 •

    One of the best ways to harness Twitter is by participating in chats, scheduled hashtag discussions that focus on specific topics. Small businesses can utilize chats to develop a social media plan, discuss brand strategy, and take advantage of free legal advice. Here is a list of chats...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    5 Unique and Effective Email Offers

    April 16, 2012 •

    The offer in an ecommerce email campaign is key. Coming up with offers that stand out from the competition and get your subscribers' attention, however, can be difficult. A straight dollar-off discount gets boring over time, and email recipients will eventually ignore the same types o...

  • Google Ads

    Google AdWords Ad Extensions Basics

    April 10, 2012 •

    Google AdWords extensions give potential shoppers more information about a merchant and more options to engage with that merchant before clicking a search ad. Although ad extensions have been around for a couple of years, Google recently added conversion tracking data to extensions, ma...

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