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

Google Ads
How to Optimize a Pay-per-click Landing Page

February 29, 2012 • Armando Roggio

A pay-per-click landing page should be a sales conversion engine, tuned to help consummate an order. Landing pages “are one of the strongest tools you have to convert visitors to customers,” wrote Brandon Eley and Shayne Tilley in their book, Online Marketing Inside Out. “Much of your ...
Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: Segmenting Your Affiliates, Part 2

February 29, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet

Running an affiliate program often requires managing relationships with thousands of different advertising partners. This can be challenging, as different types of affiliates have different marketing needs. Last month, in "Segmenting Your Affiliates," I addressed two of the most commo...
Google Ads
3 New Google AdWords’ Features Worth Trying

February 28, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Google continues adding new features to AdWords. "Enhanced Ad Sitelinks," "Offer Extensions," and "TrueView" video ads are three examples. I have tested each of these, and recommend them to merchants. Online retailers who use them first can start profiting before their competitors. The...
Social Media
Using Amateur Videos for Marketing Success; 2 Examples

February 27, 2012 • Paul Chaney

In the past, if you wanted to make a video for your business, you had to hire a production company or ad agency, spend tens of thousands of dollars and, as often as not, end up with a product much different than you expected. Edits and retakes were costly, so you just left well enough a...
Content Marketing
Using Content Marketing for Your Ecommerce Business

February 27, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Content marketing seeks to publish high-quality content to engage prospects, earn business, and create repeat customers. In the Internet age, anyone — private or commercial — can publish articles, essays, white papers, newsletters, audio podcasts, games, or videos that have the potenti...
Social Media
Ecommerce Comes to Twitter

February 20, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Twitter has served as a marketing and customer service channel by small businesses for years. Now merchants can use it to promote ecommerce, thanks to a third-party platform called Chirpify and Twitter's own efforts to open its advertising platform to small companies. Chirpify, the Tw...
Email & Text Marketing
5 Steps to Effective Email Calls to Action

February 17, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

In email marketing, subject lines get recipients to open the email. The "from" line gives credibility and builds brand awareness. The creative message invokes the desire to know more, buy a product, or sign up for a webinar. But one of the most important and overlooked elements to email...
Social Media
5 Free Facebook Welcome Tab Apps; Pros and Cons

February 15, 2012 • Paul Chaney

A number of companies offer free apps that give merchants the ability to add custom content, such as a Welcome tab, to Facebook fan pages. In this article I review five of these apps, and discuss the pros and cons of each. 1. Woobox Custom Facebook Page Tab Facebook app provider Woobo...
Marketing & Advertising
How to Optimize Your Site for Google in Foreign Countries

February 14, 2012 • Anne Kennedy

As with SEO in your own language, attention to the basics pays off. Just as you would do when working in your own country, when working outside your home country and language be sure to build your site with algorithm-friendly architecture, load it with relevant content, and attract inbound links from authoritative sites.
Social Media
How Does Facebook Make Money?

February 10, 2012 • Marcia Kaplan

Facebook has finally filed its long anticipated SEC S-1 registration to take the company public. The filing is straightforward, lacking any surprises or innovative accounting techniques that other recent registration statements have offered. Nevertheless, the investment community and th...
Social Media
14 Brands on Pinterest

February 8, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Business is booming on Pinterest. According to data from Monetate, a testing and personalization firm, from September to December 2011 estimated unique visitors to Pinterest.com increased by 429 percent. Total same-store referral traffic from Pinterest to five specialty apparel retailer...
Social Media
10 Useful WordPress Plugins

February 7, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Many ecommerce merchants publish blogs to connect with their audiences and enhance their search engine optimization efforts. WordPress is a robust blogging platform. Part of its appeal is the thousands of plugins that enhance its functionality. Here are ten popular plugins that I consid...
Social Media
Google+ Scrapbook: Creative Examples from Top Companies

February 6, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Google's new social network, Google+, is woefully lacking in customization options. One feature, however, the Scrapbook photo album — the row of five images across the top of the business page — is something merchants can utilize to showcase products and build brand identity. This art...
Social Media
You Can’t Buy Real Followers and Fans

February 6, 2012 • Armando Roggio

You cannot buy real Fans and followers. The practice of purchasing Twitter followers and Facebook Fans is called "cherry blossoming." It will not improve an online store's business and could destroy a merchant's reputation. Social media marketing has become a requirement for many retai...
Social Media
How to Use Google+ Scrapbook Photo Album to Showcase Your Products

February 3, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Google's new social network, Google+, is experiencing phenomenal growth. In just seven months since its inception, the network has more than 60 million users, according to published reports. It took Facebook four years to reach that amount. At first, Google+ was available only for indiv...
Social Media
Facebook’s Open Graph and Timeline Could Help Ecommerce Merchants

February 2, 2012 • Paul Chaney

People don't go to Facebook to shop. Many large companies have accrued millions of Fans, but — with a few exceptions — retailers don't generate many sales there. Two recent Facebook developments, however, could change this. The launch of "Open Graph" may allow retailers to better inte...
Google Ads
Cheaper Clicks from AdWords Coming?

February 1, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Google's average revenue per click from AdWords' advertisers dropped for the first time in two years for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2011, according to Reuters. Analysts projected a 3 percent increase in cost-per-click revenue, but Google reported an 8 percent decrease. As a result, man...
Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing: Segmenting Your Affiliates

January 31, 2012 • Carolyn Kmet

As a retailer, you likely segment your consumers. The segmentation can be a formal exercise, where preferred customers get preferential treatment; or it can even be informal, such as when you greet your regulars with a friendly wave or a cup of coffee. Segmentation is the practice of ...
Social Media
Google Integrates Google+ in Search Results

January 27, 2012 • Paul Chaney

We all expected Google+ would factor into Google's search results. Now we know how. Google recently announced in its blog the integration of its new social network into search by including results from the searcher's Google+ friends and interests. This only works for searchers who ar...
Social Media
Top 20 Brands on Google+ for Jan. 2012

January 24, 2012 • Sig Ueland

Google+ launched brand pages in November. Already many companies, groups and organizations have established large numbers of followers on the social network. To check Google+ brand page rankings, you can now use Zoomsphere, a statistics site for major social networks. Track followers, ...
Content Marketing
3 Content Lessons from Top Performing Blogs

January 23, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Blogs are a good way to engage customers, offer more than products, and attract visitors to a site. Great blogs are often the result of great content in the form of a well-written post, an illuminating infographic, or an excellent video. People are attracted to the substance of the co...
Social Media
5 Ways Blogging Is Better than Social Networking

January 19, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Blogging has long been an online marketing staple among businesses. In recent years, however, many businesses have focused on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But blogging can benefit businesses in ways those cannot. This article outlines five such methods. 1. Blog...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: 3 Ways to Increase Relevancy

January 19, 2012 • Carolyn Nye

An email marketing message needs to be relevant to its recipients to achieve maximum results. Relevancy can be a simple as inserting the recipient's name in the subject line or salutation. But it can be much more dynamic than that, too. It can include recommendations based on past pur...
Social Media
6 Innovative Ecommerce Uses of YouTube

January 18, 2012 • Sig Ueland

With over 3 billion videos viewed every day, YouTube is a great place for online merchants to find customers. However, there are many different ways to engage those customers. Here is a list of innovative uses of YouTube by ecommerce merchants. Some provide product information; others...
Social Media
How to Use Pinterest for Your Ecommerce Business

January 16, 2012 • Armando Roggio

Learning the ins and outs of popular social sharing site Pinterest takes only minutes, but can have a positive effect on ecommerce marketing. Pinterest may be the hottest property in social media sharing, with a growth rate that rivals Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. It also has the po...
Social Media
4 Essential Social Media Tools

January 11, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Social media is an important marketing component for many ecommerce merchants. As such, effectively managing engagement on sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube is critical. The following is a list of four tools that I use for my own business — and my clients' businesses....
Social Media
Use Pinterest to Raise Consumer Interest

January 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio

The visually-oriented social bookmarking site, Pinterest, lets users share pictures and video, and presents a new opportunity for online retailers to engage potential customers. Pinterest generated more than 11 million visits during a single week in December 2011, according to Experian...
Social Media
Google+ Adds Multiple Administrator Capability

January 9, 2012 • Paul Chaney

Google's new social network, Google+, has added a much needed capability to its businesses pages: multiple administrators. This feature functions similarly to Facebook Pages in that it allows a business to have more than one "manager" — to use Google's term — who can update its Google+...
Google Ads
Creating a Killer Post-Holiday PPC Strategy

January 5, 2012 • Scott Smigler

Now that the holiday shopping season is over, here are some New Year's pay-per-click advertising tips to help you continue the growth of your online revenue. Review Cost-Per-Acquisition Data on a Category Level It’s often a good practice for online retailers to organize their pay-per...
Social Media
Using Social Buttons to Enhance Search Engine Optimization

January 4, 2012 • Jill Kocher Brown

Social "signals" increasingly influence search results in both Google and Bing. The search engines are coming to consider social signals as more indicative of how searchers value a page than traditional link signals — though links remain very important to search engine optimization. In ...

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