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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 Marketing | Google Ads | Influencers & Affiliates | Social Media

Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Agoodyarn.net

February 6, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

I don’t knit, but around the holidays I was given a fantastic sweater knitted by the gift-giver. It’s warm and unique, and just to be in the spirit, I’m wearing it as I write this. Uniqueness, of course, is also an issue in terms of search engine optimization; every page of a website ne...
Marketing & Advertising
Choose A Platform And Blog, Blog, Blog

February 4, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Because search engines tend to reward blogs in several ways, corporate and ecommerce sites ought to look at the possibility of adding one or more blogs. As Stephan Spencer underscores "SEO: Blogging Your Way To The Top", search engines’ ranking algorithms revolve around links, and the b...
Google Ads
Negative Keywords For Your PPC Campaign

January 9, 2008 • Greg Laptevsky

Keywords are an integral part of any online advertising campaign. However, what is sometimes overlooked is the equal importance of negative keywords, which are word filters that disqualify ads from being triggered by users’ search queries. For example, if the term “iPhone” is one of you...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Juvieshop.com

January 7, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Juvie is a kid’s clothing store in Los Angeles, and it is balancing the hipness of Flash-based features (not particularly SEO-friendly) with the common sense of good textual content (always SEO-friendly) on the home page of its ecommerce site. The site focuses on hip, modern and stylish...
Google Ads
Pay-Per-Click Account Tools

January 7, 2008 • Greg Laptevsky

A daily pay-per-click management routine can sometimes be a source of frustration. Thankfully, there are a few tools out there to streamline the process. What follows is a list of software that every pay-per-click account owner should consider. AdWords Editor AdWords Editor is Google’...
Marketing & Advertising
Google Knol Looks To Take On Wikipedia

January 2, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Online reputation is an important part of any SEO campaign. It can drive traffic and promote links, and when a new opportunity arises for such reputation management, it should be explored sooner rather than later. A few weeks ago, Udi Manber, Google's vice president of engineering, ann...
Social Media
Social Media As A Marketing Strategy in 2008

January 2, 2008 • Paul Chaney

2007 was a good year for holiday shopping. comScore reported that online shopping totaled nearly $28 billion, up 19 percent from 2006. Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday all had record traffic compared to previous years, according to Hitwise. Hopefully, your business experi...
Email Marketing
Email Marketing Report Card: Accepted.com

December 10, 2007 • Ben Chestnut

Accepted.com provides admissions consulting and application-essay-editing services that help people get into top business schools, medical schools and graduate schools. It produces a free monthly email newsletter called “Odds ‘N Ends” and the staff of Accepted.com has requested that Pra...
Social Media
Social Media Comes Of Age

December 3, 2007 • Paul Chaney

Seemingly, everywhere you look these days, people are talking about social media online technologies and websites that people use to share content, opinions, insights and experiences. It's Facebook this or MySpace that, and those are only two of the myriad of such sites that comprise th...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Oreweb.ca

December 3, 2007 • Jeff Muendel

ORE stands for Office Resources and Equipment, and not surprisingly the website sells business office equipment. What is surprising about this Canadian company is the way its website is designed. It’s an interesting blueprint that uses JavaScript and frames to load pages into a single U...
Marketing & Advertising
If Website Is Broke, Don’t Go Broke Fixing It

November 28, 2007 • Jeff Muendel

Traffic down? Conversions starting to wane? It could be any number of SEO issues. Finding free online tools to hone search optimization for an ecommerce site can be tough. There are a lot of them out there, often promotional in nature, and they offer varying degrees of features and reli...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Back40books.com

November 7, 2007 • Jeff Muendel

According to the site’s “About Us” page, Back 40 Books is run by back-to-nature people and the books they sell on their site are predominantly focused on issues related to that lifestyle. It also sounds as if the website was put together by these same outdoor people with little help fro...
Marketing & Advertising
Baiting The Social Media Crowd

September 27, 2007 • Jeff Muendel

You may recall that Stephan Spencer (I am now taking over his two columns here at Practical Ecommerce) wrote about link baiting some months ago. To sum up his thoughts, inbound links are good. Search engines improve rankings of a given page or website based upon the number and quality o...
Marketing & Advertising
Google AdWords: Structure For Success

September 3, 2007 • Mat Greenfield

As I work with many companies to improve and refine their conversion rate from paid search efforts such as Google AdWords, I have noticed a general misunderstanding about how the structural elements of Campaigns vs. Ad Groups should be used. Correctly structuring your Google account al...
Google Ads
Critique Part Two: Pay-Per-Click Advertising

May 30, 2007 • PEC Staff

The Problem: A quick glance at Daddies Board Shop's Google account indicates in-depth keyword research was not performed. The Fix: It appears that the company chose keywords based on insider business knowledge but hasn't considered what terms people actually use to search. For example,...
Marketing & Advertising
How To Create ‘Buzz,’ Boost Traffic At Your Site

May 21, 2007 • PEC Staff

Over the last year or so, "social media" has quickly become the next "big" thing online. A plethora of social communities with names like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube have popped up to connect people who share common interests. As impressive as all that may sou...
Marketing & Advertising
Tutorial: Gaining Control of Search Engine Spiders

February 12, 2007 • Brian Getting

Introduction Most of us are familiar with the term “search engine spider” and at least understand that they have something to do with how search engines index websites. The purpose of this article is to help you make your web pages more accessible to spiders. After all, spiders are our...
Marketing & Advertising
Creativegood.com Consulting Director Ed Dawidowicz

November 20, 2006 • PEC Staff

Ed Dawidowicz, senior consulting director for Creativegood.com, provides a series of do-it-yourself tips to improve usability and customer experience at your website. He recently spoke with Practical eCommerce’s Mitch Bettis ...
Marketing & Advertising
The Truth About Optimization

September 11, 2006 • PEC Staff

Gaining good positioning with the search engines is one channel for increasing your online business — but it’s not an end in itself. Your ultimate goal isn’t to increase traffic, but to increase sales, and thereby, profit margins. Will Reynolds of SEO consulting firm Thinkseer.com, shed...
Social Media
Nine Things to Consider Before You Blog

August 20, 2006 • Paul Chaney

You’ve heard a lot about web logs or blogs. That’s because during the past six years blogs have evolved from a highly personal form of communication on the Internet to a powerful new medium for business. Not since Procter & Gamble invented branding back in 1931 has there been so muc...
Google Ads
Tips & Tricks for Discovering Lowcost Keywords

July 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Keywords are considered the lifeline of any successful pay per click campaign. If you select the wrong ones, you can zip through your entire advertising budget without getting anything in return. If you choose the right ones, you can beat your competition to the punch and get a better R...
Social Media
RSS Basics

May 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney

Want more traffic to your ecommerce site? Need an easy way to distribute news and updates? An RSS feed may be your answer. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a format for syndicating website content such as might be found on major news sites like CNN, as well as on blogs. ...
Social Media
Email Marketing: Tips for Success

April 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney

MAKE THE INTEGRITY OF YOUR LIST YOUR NUMBER ONE GOAL. "If you are serious about wanting to do email professionally, you need to be diligent in how you sign up contacts, using double opt-in techniques. Otherwise, you're building a list that will never perform at maximum levels," says Ji...
Social Media
Bullish on Blogging

March 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney

A few years ago the investment firm Merrill Lynch coined the term “We’re Bullish.” It became the company’s corporate mantra of sorts. In stock trade terminology, being bullish represents a rise in value. I’m bullish on blogging, and for a number of reasons. I think it is a technology to...
Marketing & Advertising
Pay-per-click Tools Maximize Your Time

February 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

As a business owner and entrepreneur, you know that there are two things you can always use more of - money and time. While you are likely to increase the first item by reading this column, you can also free up more time by automating the management of your search marketing campaigns. ...
Social Media
Blogs and Affiliate Marketing

February 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney

Blogs have typically not been thought of as direct response sales tools. In their brief history, blogs have morphed from being “personal online journals and diaries” to vital tools for business, but the focus has been more on using them for relational marketing or purely informational p...
Social Media
Successful Blogging: Utilize the Four

January 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney

Everyone remembers the three “R’s” from your school days: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic. These three areas are considered essential to building a good educational foundation. Similarly, there are also some basic essentials to strategic blogging. I would like to present the four “R’s”...
Marketing & Advertising
Be Careful of the Number 1 Spot

January 1, 2006 • PEC Staff

Pay-Per-Click advertising works in an auction-based format, since there are a number of advertisers competing for the same keywords. The higher you bid, the higher your ad will appear. Bids can range anywhere from a few cents to several dollars per click, based on how competitive the in...
Marketing & Advertising
Use Google’s Site Targeting

December 1, 2005 • PEC Staff

Google advertisers, rejoice! If you ever wished you could pick and choose which sites across Google AdSense network your ads will appear, now you can! In a recent development, Google AdWords introduced a new advertising model called Site Targeting, which gives you the ability to target...
Marketing & Advertising
Google AdWords: 3 Ways to Improve Your ROI

December 1, 2005 • Mat Greenfield

We manage a number of Google AdWord accounts for our clients, and I almost always find the same problems when we take over a new account. So “from the trenches”, here are 3 key principles that will help you have a prosperous new year with your Google AdWords. Split Test Your Ads Googl...

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