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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
  • Social Media

    How to Use Pinterest for Your Ecommerce Business

    January 16, 2012 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 •

    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 ...

  • Social Media

    Social Media Users Look for New Products and Offers, Survey Finds

    January 3, 2012 •

    Social media users connect with companies on sites like Facebook to learn about new products, find exclusive offers and contests, or just play games, according to a new survey of about 1,300 consumers. Consumers also have high expectations for online customer support. The Chief Marketi...

  • Influencers & Affiliates

    Affiliate-Marketing Events Worth Attending in 2012

    January 2, 2012 •

    Are you looking to launch your own affiliate marketing program? There are many good events that can help you get started. You’ll be able to meet affiliates and vendors in person, and find out what tools are needed to run a successful affiliate program. You’ll also be able to connect ...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Segmenting Email Lists for 2012

    January 2, 2012 •

    When ecommerce marketers make their New Year's resolutions, they should include improved email segmentation and personalization. Email segmentation is simply the idea of organizing email-marketing lists so that each group of recipients receives a relevant, even personalized, marketing ...

  • Content Marketing

    12 Sites for Ebook Publishing

    December 30, 2011 •

    Ebook sales will be $9.7 billion in 2016, more than three times this year’s $3.2 billion in sales, according to a recent report by Juniper Research. Online publishers and ebook distributors offer a growing opportunity to authors and small publishers, as well as affiliate marketers. He...

  • Social Media

    Facebook Replaces Profiles with Timelines; Implications for Merchants

    December 28, 2011 •

    Facebook will soon make a dramatic change to individual user Profiles, turning them into “Timelines,” which Facebook calls “a new kind of Profile.” Rationale for ‘Timelines’ Facebook says its motivation for the ...

  • Social Media

    Understanding YouTube’s New Redesign

    December 21, 2011 •

    The major social networks are all in redesign mode. Facebook is rolling out "Timelines," a more picturesque version of user Profiles. Twitter has completed a major redesign, which I covered last week in "Understanding Twitter's New Redesign." And now YouTube is changing its appearance a...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    4 Mobile Email-Marketing Tips

    December 20, 2011 •

    There are many mobile devices that consumers can choose from: basic feature phones, smartphones, tablets, e-readers and more. Consumers have their own preferences as to what combination of devices to use and whether to use them on cellular connections, Wi-Fi networks, or both. For ecomm...

  • Google Ads

    Formatting a Product Spreadsheet for Google Merchant Center

    December 20, 2011 •

    Google has created a service that helps online retailers list and submit products to Google's Product Search, Product Ads, and Commerce Search offerings. This service, called "Google Merchant Center," can accept a data feed of product information. In this article, you'll find a descrip...

  • Social Media

    Understanding Twitter’s New Redesign

    December 14, 2011 •

    Twitter has just launched several enhancements that include a major redesign of its layout, the introduction of Facebook-style brand pages, embeddable tweets and a redesign of its mobile and Tweetdeck apps. Dubbed “Let’s Fly” — Twitter describes it in a blog post — the goal of the rede...

  • Social Media

    21 Twitter ‘Brand Pages’

    December 14, 2011 •

    Twitter has launched "brand pages" as part of its recent redesign. Brand pages feature large customizable header images and highlight a top tweet with an embedded photo or video. Twitter is launching brand pages with 21 marketers: American Express, Best Buy, Bing, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola,...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Email Marketing: 3 Tips for Recovering from Content Mistakes

    December 13, 2011 •

    The email send button and the content of the message it represents are powerful marketing tools that launch a message directly to thousands of potential customers at once. But when there is a mistake in the email message — a broken link, misspelled word, an incorrect date — an emergenc...

  • Social Media

    5 New Social-Shopping Sites and Apps

    December 12, 2011 •

    When it comes to making product purchase decisions, customers are increasingly relying on each other for information and advice. That is not a new behavior, as people have always relied on the influence of friends. It's just that social media technology has given it wings. Consumers ar...

  • Google Ads

    The 20 Most Expensive Keywords

    December 8, 2011 •

    Google makes a lot of money from online advertising. In the twelve months ended June 30, 2011, Google made $33.3 billion in revenues. Of that, 97 percent ($32.2 billion) was from advertising. WordStream, a provider of software for keywords and pay-per-click marketing campaigns, has don...

  • Social Media

    Add the Twitter Tweet and Follow Buttons without Hiring a Developer

    December 8, 2011 •

    Twitter is an important site for ecommerce marketers that want to encourage shoppers to share products and pages. Fortunately, the service is easy to integrate into a retail site without even hiring a developer. In this article, you'll learn how to add both the Twitter Tweet and the Tw...

  • Social Media

    Using LinkedIn for Your Ecommerce Business: Pros and Cons

    December 5, 2011 •

    LinkedIn appeals primarily to business professionals. It does not have as many consumer users as Facebook. But its social media strengths can still help your ecommerce business. This article will outline the benefits and limiations of using LinkedIn as a social commerce marketing platf...

  • Influencers & Affiliates

    Affiliate Marketing Metrics: A Primer

    December 1, 2011 •

    One of the benefits of online marketing is all the data we have access to. Unlike brick-and-mortar establishments, an online retailer can determine product interest and then forecast sales based on how many people viewed a product. Take it a step further, and the online retailer can a...

  • Social Media

    3 Ways Social Media Affects Brands

    December 1, 2011 •

    The continued growth of social networking and blog sites is having an effect on brands and how those brands are marketed. According to an October study from The Nielsen Company and its social media affiliate, NM Incite, “60 percent of consumers researching products though multiple onli...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Email Marketing: How to Prevent, Manage Dormant Lists

    November 30, 2011 •

    Email marketing remains critical for many ecommerce merchants. But for those merchants with established ecommerce sites — and older email lists — maintaining healthy email open rates and click-through rates can be a challenge. We spoke recently with an email-marketing expert on how, ex...

  • Illustration of a person in front of a computer with video Marketing & Advertising

    Ask an Expert: For SEO, Better to Host Videos On-site?

    November 30, 2011 •

    "Ask an Expert" is an occasional feature where we ask ecommerce experts questions from online merchants. For this installment, we address a question about hosting videos for search engine optimization purposes.

  • Google Ads

    Pay-Per-Click Advertising Becoming More Important?

    November 28, 2011 •

    Ten years ago a business could thrive by focusing on organic search engine optimization. My rule of thumb then was that organic rankings garnered roughly 80 percent of the clicks on search result pages while paid listings garnered less than 20 percent. A smart SEO strategy seemed to out...

  • Social Media

    5 Content Curation Tools for Social Sharing

    November 28, 2011 •

    Many of us use popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Yet there are hundreds of others, most of which you likely have never heard of. Some of these lesser known digital outposts are worth discussing, however. Over the past few weeks I have reported on three: Stum...

  • 20 Top Brands on Google+ Social Media

    20 Top Brands on Google+

    November 25, 2011 •

    A new study by social management company BrightEdge found that 61 of the top 100 global brands had a Google+ page the week after Google let companies create brand pages.

  • Content Marketing

    Syndicating Content for SEO Benefit

    November 18, 2011 •

    When ecommerce companies think about content syndication, they typically consider acquiring content that others have written to beef up their own sites. Depending on the goal, placing content from other sites onto your own can be beneficial from a branding, partnership, or reference poi...

  • Influencers & Affiliates

    Celebrity Curators Help Personalize Ecommerce

    November 18, 2011 •

    How do you stand out in a crowded market with a sizeable number of players competing mostly on low prices and free shipping? By differentiating yourself. Several ecommerce websites are melding social media with personalization to create a more inviting and collaborative shopping experie...

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