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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
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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, ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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. ...
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.
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
Social Media
Social Media: Become a ‘One Percenter’

October 10, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Years ago, usability expert Jakob Nielsen developed the "Community Participation Pyramid," which some observers now call the "90-9-1 Principle." It states: 90 percent of web users are lurkers — read or observe, but don't contribute; 9 percent of users contribute from time to time, bu...
Social Media
Facebook Platform Changes, Part 2: Pages

October 4, 2011 • Paul Chaney

At its recent f8 developers' conference, Facebook announced extensive changes to its platform, including changes to personal "Profiles" and business-oriented "Pages." I described the changes to Profiles in last week's article. This article, below, addresses changes to Pages. 1. Intera...
Google Ads
Ramping Up Holiday Pay-per-click Advertising

September 29, 2011 • Scott Smigler

The holidays are coming. For many online merchants, this means dramatically increased revenue and conversion rates. Start ramping up for holiday pay-per-click advertising now to ensure that you maximize your profits — and build momentum for 2012. Below I’ve provided six tips that shou...
Social Media
Facebook Platform Changes, Part 1: Profiles

September 26, 2011 • Paul Chaney

At f8 2011, Facebook's annual conference held last week for developers and entrepreneurs, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of changes to the social network's platform. Most of the changes affect personal profiles, but some have to do with how Fan pages work. I will o...
Social Media
5 New Facebook Shopping Carts

September 19, 2011 • Paul Chaney

It has been more than a year since I wrote about Facebook shopping carts. That article was titled “Six Facebook Applications to Sell Your Products.” In this article, I’ll review five ...
Content Marketing
15 ‘Light-Blogging’ Sites

September 16, 2011 • Sig Ueland

More people are light blogging. According to Quantcast, in the last year Tumblr tripled its visits per month to over 300 million, 8.5 times more page views per month than full-blogging counterpart Wordpress.com. Here is a list of light-blogging platforms. There are micro-blogging platf...

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