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 Marketing | Google Ads | Influencers & Affiliates | Social Media-
Social Media
10 Tips for Marketing on Redesigned Facebook
March 7, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Now that Facebook has made a number of changes to its platform, such as the new design, new layout and the use of iframes to create custom tabs, an updated list of Facebook marketing tips could be helpful. This follows from my three-part explanatory series of those changes, at: "Part...
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Marketing & Advertising
How To Feature Your Products on Group-Buying Sites
March 3, 2011 • PEC Staff
Group shopping can increase revenue and introduce your brand to potential customers. But all group-buying sites are not equal. Merchants must select the right group-buying platform that best benefits their businesses — especially small business owners unable to mark products down enoug...
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Google Ads
Comparing Facebook Ads to Search-Based Advertising
March 2, 2011 • Scott Smigler
Could Facebook Ads become a viable alternative to traditional search-based pay-per-click advertising? Facebook’s investors seem to think so, given its reported $50 billion valuation. So far, however, Facebook Ads have not proven to be a scalable, controllable, or profitable source of ad...
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Marketing & Advertising
41 Google Blogs for Online Businesses
March 1, 2011 • PEC Staff
Google provides products and services that impact ecommerce businesses and, oftentimes, help those businesses run better, faster and more profitably. Google's employees blog about many of these products and services, offering free tips and tricks to get the most out of running a busines...
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Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 3: Sponsored Stories Ad Units
February 28, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: This is "Part 3" of a three-part series describing the recent changes Facebook made to its platform, and how those changes affect smaller companies. The series has ran in the following order. Part 1: Page Redesign Part 2: From FBML to iFrames In this "Part 3" instal...
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Marketing & Advertising
Customizing Blog Themes for WordPress and Blogger
February 25, 2011 • PEC Staff
Coming up with compelling content that readers will come back for is only half the battle of a great blog. The other half is all in the presentation and style. For a unique design, avoid the pre-made themes for your blog platform and instead customize your own theme. There are tools th...
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Email Marketing
Using Email for Customer Acquisition
February 24, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email is a proven marketing channel for many online retailers. It's relatively easy to implement, and inexpensive. Return on investment tends to be high when marketing to your opt-in subscriber file or to visitors on your website. But can email be used to prospect and acquire new custom...
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Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 2: From FBML to iFrames
February 22, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. In response, Practical eCommerce will publish "How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants," a three-part series aimed at addressing each of these changes. T...
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Marketing & Advertising
Social Media Survey Results: Few Sales Coming from Social Media Efforts
February 21, 2011 • Kate Monteith
Many social media platforms have evolved to integrate marketing, advertising and commerce. This got us wondering how many companies use social media for business purposes and how effective it has been. A recent survey conducted by Practical eCommerce polled our readers about the current...
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Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 1: Page Redesign
February 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. First, Facebook implemented a planned redesign of business-oriented "Pages" (also called "fan pages" or "business pages") to mirror the way personal Profiles — for individuals ...
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Email Marketing
7 Tips to Grow Your Email Subscriber List
February 14, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email is a unique marketing channel because it is permission based. That's one reason email has a high return on investment: If consumers raise their hands and say, “Please market to me;” they are likely to purchase in the future. But building a large opt-in subscriber base takes dedi...
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Social Media
5 Social-Shopping Sites to Help Retailers, Consumers
February 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney
I received an email recently from a friend asking me what type of vacuum cleaner he should purchase. I noticed the email did not come from him directly, however, but from ShopSocially, a social shopping website that is part of a new class of sites in which reliance on friends is at the ...
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Google Ads
7 Pay-Per-Click Advertising Mistakes to Avoid in 2011
February 1, 2011 • Scott Smigler
2010 was a big year for pay-per-click marketing. Google made significant changes to AdWords, and Bing integrated PPC advertising from Yahoo! into its adCenter. Now, much to the chagrin of advertisers who prefer a “set and forget” approach to their advertising campaigns, the bar for eff...
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Social Media
The Basics of Advertising on Facebook
January 31, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Facebook commerce has a long way to go before it's on par with traditional ecommerce. But many ecommerce merchants report that Facebook Ads, a self-service, pay-per-click advertising platform similar to Google AdWords, generates positive returns. In this article, I am going to outline t...
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Social Media
Tools to Build a Strong Twitter Following; Relevance Is Key
January 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Twitter is helpful for many small businesses. One key to maximizing its value is to find relevant people to follow in the hopes they will return the courtesy. Relevance is essential to growing a follower base that would most likely read your content, and eventually become customers. I w...
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Marketing & Advertising
Notable Views: Adgregate CEO Rebuts Criticisms of Retailing on Facebook
January 18, 2011 • PEC Staff
Editor's Note: "Notable Views” is a new series where we ask leading experts to address critical, ecommerce-related topics. For this inaugural installment, we corresponded with Henry Wong, founder and CEO of Adgregate Markets, a provider of Facebook-enabled ecommerce platforms. Social c...
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Social Media
Designing for the New Twitter Layout
January 17, 2011 • Paul Chaney
It won't be long before everyone is subject to the new, wider Twitter layout. Up to now, the new layout has been optional and Twitter users could switch back to the old settings. Though no firm date has been announced for the transition, Twitter indicates it will take place soon. Here's...
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Social Media
4 Realities of Selling on Facebook
January 11, 2011 • Paul Chaney
There are few who question Facebook's potential for ecommerce merchants. Access to a user base of nearly 600 million consumers — coupled with the targeting of specific audience segments based on users' Likes — are compelling reasons to experiment with it as a sales channel. However, li...
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Email Marketing
7 Email-Marketing Tactics for 2011
January 11, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email marketing is vital for many ecommerce merchants. What does 2011 hold for email marketing? Below are seven key email marketing tactics businesses should be planning for the upcoming year. Relevancy Craft email messages with increased personalization, through segmentation and tar...
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Social Media
Facebook Insights Helps Measure Social Media Efforts
January 10, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Social media marketing can be an effective way to engage customers and, ultimately, sell more products. There have certainly been lots of articles, publications, and webinars that describe tactics you can use in social media campaigns. But there may be comparatively few resources that h...
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Social Media
9 Twitter Productivity Tools
January 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Many people consider Twitter an enormous waste of time. "Why would I care what someone had for dinner?" is a question often asked by those who do not use Twitter for personal communications. Granted, if improperly managed, Twitter can be a huge black hole sucking up lots of time. What...
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Social Media
How to Rescue Posts from Facebook’s Spam Filter
January 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio
In October 2010, Facebook introduced automatic content filtering to business pages (sometimes called Fan pages) in an effort to help stop Wall spammers from successfully posting unwanted or dangerous messages to dozens or even hundreds of pages daily. For social media marketers, the fi...
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Business
10 Resolutions for Your Pay-Per-Click Account
December 30, 2010 • Scott Smigler
With a new year come new opportunities. It is also a good time to start looking forward to making 2011 more profitable. Here are ten steps to take for the new year to accelerate your pay-per-click advertising efforts. 10. Create After-Holiday Sales As we move into the new year, there...
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Social Media
Social Commerce Top 10 for 2010; Outlook for 2011
December 29, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Two social commerce topics that created the biggest stir this year were location-based social networks like Foursquare and Facebook Places, and group coupon deals championed by sites like Groupon and Living Social. Groupon became the year's leading social commerce newsmaker when it repo...
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Email Marketing
Ask an Expert: Which Email Providers Allow Purchased Lists?
December 22, 2010 • 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 email distribution providers that allow purchased ...
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Social Media
The 12 Ways of Facebook Commerce
December 21, 2010 • Paul Chaney
One of the most-loved songs associated with the yuletide season is "The Twelve Days of Christmas." In an effort to pay homage to the song and the season, here are 12 ways to market your ecommerce business using Facebook, during Christmastime or at anytime. 1. Create a Facebook Page C...
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Social Media
10 Free Facebooks Apps for Ecommmerce Merchants
December 13, 2010 • Paul Chaney
The best things in life are free. Or so The Beatles sang, in Money. Here is a list of ten free Facebook apps that I recommend for ecommerce businesses. I've divided them into four categories: Landing Page Creation, Email Marketing, Facebook Shopping Carts, and Other. Landing Page Crea...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Should I Register My Site with Search Engines?
December 10, 2010 • 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 registering websites with search engines. It comes from Lee Wright, president of Ma Mi Skin Care, a retailer of skin care products f...
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Social Media
Amplify.com Combines Blogging, Social Networking, News Clipping
December 9, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Blogging is popular among social media users. But many small businesses still do not use it for marketing. Most lack either the time or commitment required to make blogging a successful marketing strategy. But there is a now a way to incorporate blogging that doesn't require the same d...
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Email Marketing
How to Hide Email Addresses From Spam Bots
December 8, 2010 • Matt Ferner
Ecommerce merchants have several options to hide or obscure that email address from spam bot programs and still make it accessible and user-friendly for customers. Below is a listing of some of the more popular methods and simple step-by-step instructions on how to employ them, each one progressively more hidden, or "obfuscated.