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-
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: 3 Tips for Recovering from Content Mistakes
December 13, 2011 • Armando Roggio
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...
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Social Media
5 New Social-Shopping Sites and Apps
December 12, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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...
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Google Ads
The 20 Most Expensive Keywords
December 8, 2011 • Sig Ueland
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...
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Social Media
Add the Twitter Tweet and Follow Buttons without Hiring a Developer
December 8, 2011 • Armando Roggio
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...
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Social Media
Using LinkedIn for Your Ecommerce Business: Pros and Cons
December 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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...
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Influencers & Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing Metrics: A Primer
December 1, 2011 • Carolyn Kmet
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...
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Social Media
3 Ways Social Media Affects Brands
December 1, 2011 • Armando Roggio
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...
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Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: How to Prevent, Manage Dormant Lists
November 30, 2011 • PEC Staff
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...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: For SEO, Better to Host Videos On-site?
November 30, 2011 • PEC Staff
"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.
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Google Ads
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Becoming More Important?
November 28, 2011 • Scott Smigler
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...
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Social Media
5 Content Curation Tools for Social Sharing
November 28, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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...
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Social Media
20 Top Brands on Google+
November 25, 2011 • Sig Ueland
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.
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Content Marketing
Syndicating Content for SEO Benefit
November 18, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
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...
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Influencers & Affiliates
Celebrity Curators Help Personalize Ecommerce
November 18, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
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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Social Media
How to Create a Google+ Business Page
November 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Google announced last week that it has launched Pages for business in its Google+ social network. I addressed this topic in my "Social Retailer" blog last week and listed what I suggested are three possible benefits. Direct connection to search. Through the use of the "+1" button, ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Email Case Study: Toys“R”Us Gears Up for Cyber Monday
November 15, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
For online retailers, the days before and after Thanksgiving can determine a successful holiday season. Toys“R”Us, the large U.S.-based toy retailer, uses email marketing extensively during the holidays. I'll analyze Toys“R”Us's email strategies in this article — to help other merchants...
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Social Media
8 Businesses on Tumblr
November 9, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Of a Kind, the first store built on blogging platform Tumblr, is one year old. The site, which sells fashion items commissioned from emerging designers, is a mash-up of blog and ecommerce, providing personal content on its designers and their goods. While Of a Kind is still unique as ...
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Social Media
Using the New Delicious.com; 5 Advantages for Businesses
November 7, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Delicious is a longtime social bookmarking service for storing, discovering and sharing links to online resources. The site was founded in 2003, sold to Yahoo! in 2008, and sold again in 2011 to AVOS Systems, a company owned by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, the founders of YouTube. Soci...
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Social Media
13 Crowdfunding Sites for Social-Cause Entrepreneurs
November 2, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Crowdfunding websites help entrepreneurs fund small businesses with financing from the community. For social-cause entrepreneurs, who venture to create a positive change in the world, crowdfunding sites can also provide financing and resources. Here is a list of crowdfunding sites that...
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Marketing & Advertising
8 Steps to Developing Ad Revenue from Your Website
November 1, 2011 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
There are three primary ways to monetize (that is, generate revenue from) a website. Ecommerce . Receive profits from direct sales of products or services.Affiliate marketing. Receive referral fees from merchants when a product or service you linked to results in a sale as a result of your link.
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Social Media
StumbleUpon: Social Bookmarking Traffic Generator
November 1, 2011 • Paul Chaney
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking tool that allows users to share a website with others in their network. People use the tool to "stumble upon" web pages recommended by others that are matched to their personal preferences. How Does it Work? StumbleUpon uses a "thumbs up, thumbs do...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 Pointers for Using Facebook for Your Ecommerce Business
October 31, 2011 • Gagan Mehra
Many small retailers struggle with using Facebook to grow their business. Some have created Facebook pages, but are not seeing results. However, Facebook can work effectively for your business if it's used properly. Here are five pointers. 1. Make Sure Your Customers Use Facebook If...
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Google Ads
Pay-Per-Click Ads: 5 Tips for Higher Clicks this Holiday Season
October 28, 2011 • Scott Smigler
Google’s paid-click revenue grew by an astounding 28 percent last quarter, thanks in part to a 5 percent rise in click prices. It’s likely that Google will set ad revenue records this fourth quarter also, due to the increase in holiday ad spending. To online retailers, Google’s surge i...
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Influencers & Affiliates
Understanding Affiliate Marketing
October 27, 2011 • Carolyn Kmet
Editor's Note: We welcome as our newest contributor. She is director of affiliate marketing for Groupon, the deal-of-the day site, and the recent recipient of Affiliate Summit's "Affiliate Manager of the Year" award. Kmet's first piece — an overview of affiliate marketing — is below. ...
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Social Media
9 Tools for Mobile Blogging
October 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney
The world is moving toward an increasingly mobile lifestyle, and blogging is no different. No longer do you have to be constrained to a desktop or laptop to create posts.
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Email & Text Marketing
Writing Excellent Email Subject Lines
October 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A well written email subject line can increase open rates and, potentially, increase conversions. An email with a poorly written subject will probably get deleted. Subject line composition is as important to an email-marketing program as earning subscribers and providing great content ...
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Social Media
Understanding Facebook’s New ‘Insights’ Analytics
October 18, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Facebook recently launched a new, enhanced version of Insights, its analytics package for Fan pages. The old version contained lots of information — demographics, the total number of Likes/Unlikes, number of average daily users, and total page and post impressions — but nothing that hel...
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Email & Text Marketing
Email Case Study: Allrecipes.com Makes Daily Frequency Work
October 17, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
For many ecommerce sites, sending marketing emails every day may be scary, fearing that recipients will unsubscribe based on the number of emails they are receiving. However, sending daily emails ...
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Influencers & Affiliates
SEO: Using Affiliates for Search Marketing
October 13, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown
Working in the organic search industry, I’ve often had large search marketing clients who envied the success of their affiliates, which sometimes outperformed their own in-house search marketing efforts. But Carolyn Tang Kmet opened my eyes to the ways that search affiliates can actuall...
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Google Ads
Paid Search: Can Anyone Challenge Google?
October 12, 2011 • Marcia Kaplan
We can end the suspense right now. It's not likely that any other company is going to be a real contender in paid search anytime soon. The Search Alliance formed by Microsoft's adCenter and Yahoo! makes Bing the default search engine on Yahoo! pages. Although Microsoft has spent a good ...
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