Category

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
Social Networking for Solo Entrepreneurs; 7 Suggestions

August 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Solo entrepreneurs wear many hats when it comes to running a business. One of these “hats” includes managing social media activities. To reach a point where social media engagement produces meaningful ...
Google Ads
Google Study Finds PPC Traffic ‘Incremental’ to Organic

August 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A new Google study reports that pay-per-click ads tend to generate new site visitors and do not simply divert traffic from organic search result links, as some marketers have feared. PPC ...
Email & Text Marketing
How Email Marketing Can Help SEO

August 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Creating valid HTML email newsletters and announcements with a canonical link element may help marketers boost search engine optimization. The canonical link element, which is often referred to as rel="canonical," (pronounced rel canonical, no "equals") is a way of describing the pref...
Social Media
12 Useful Ecommerce Blogs

August 8, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Finding marketing information specific to smaller ecommerce merchants can be time consuming. A Google search on the term "ecommerce marketing" returned 1,700,000 results at the time of this writing. Merchants can fine useful information on the following list of 12 marketing-related bl...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Case Study: Analyzing J.C. Penney’s Frequency, Subject Lines

August 8, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Online retailers often face decisions regarding their email programs. These include issues like determining ideal frequencies and crafting compelling subject lines. To help address these questions, I’ll be writing a ...
Social Media
50 Leading Google+ Users

August 5, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Google+ is one month old. So who’s using it? Many of the popular Google+ users are the founders and content-creators from others parts of web — even Facebook. Here is a list of the popular users on Google+. First are the top 20 users with the most followers. Then there are the users w...
Email & Text Marketing
How to Reduce Email Unsubscribes; 3 Tips

August 4, 2011 • Armando Roggio

When one considers that 93 percent of American online shoppers receive at least one permission-based email each day, it is little wonder that email marketing is a mainstay of Internet promotion and an excellent source of traffic and sales for ecommerce businesses. Sometimes, however, t...
Social Media
Google+: The Beginning of a Revolution?

July 29, 2011 • Jill Kocher Brown

The pieces are rapidly falling into place for Google’s increasing integration of “social signals” into its search algorithms. With the oddly isolated “+1” button launch at the end of March ...
Google Ads
For Google AdWords, It Pays to be on Top

July 27, 2011 • Scott Smigler

The new “Top vs. Side” segmentation report announced by Google has led my firm to valuable new AdWords’ insights. We confirmed just how important it is to ensure your ads ...
Social Media
How to Create Facebook Ads, Part 2: Campaign Management, Overall Best Practices

July 26, 2011 • Paul Chaney

In "Part 1" of this series on creating Facebook ads, I showed you how to set up a campaign, design an ad, and target the precise audience. In this "Part 2" installment, I'll explain how to manage your ad campaign, offering 10 best practices. Ads Manager Each Facebook ad has to be tie...
Email & Text Marketing
Using Surveys to Grow Sales; 4 Tips

July 19, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Ecommerce merchants frequently reach out to new and existing customers. Whether they use methods such as email, paid search, search engine optimization or banner ads, the goal is always the same: to drive qualified traffic back to their sites. Unlike brick and mortar stores, however, th...
Social Media
How to Create Facebook Ads, Part 1: Setup, Design, Targeting

July 18, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Facebook advertising is becoming more popular. In this article — “Part 1” of a two-part series — I will describe how to set up a Facebook ad using the self-service ...
Content Marketing
18 Writing Tools for Grammar, Style, Content

July 13, 2011 • Sig Ueland

Content is king. If you run a blog, most of your content is language. For an ecommerce site, you write promotional copy, product descriptions, policies, procedures, and more. You need ...
Social Media
How to Measure Social Media Marketing; 3 Steps

July 12, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Social media marketing, like other forms of online marketing, needs to produce a return on investment. Otherwise, its usefulness is marginal and the time spent on it is wasted. But social media's effect on the bottom line is not always easy to measure. In social media's case, ROI does...
Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing for Mobile Devices: 5 Insights

July 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Between 12 and 19 percent of email marketing messages are now read on mobile, Internet-enabled devices like smartphones or tablets. To continue to get good results from email, marketers should consider mobile user behavior and device capabilities. Last year, eROI, a digital agency, con...
Content Marketing
Write Better Blog Posts, Pyramid Style

July 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Use a classic writing technique popularized in the newspaper industry's heyday to improve blog content and communicate with precision. The inverted pyramid is a writing structure that places a summary of the most important information about an article in the first paragraph and support...
Email & Text Marketing
4 Tips for Encouraging Email Subscriptions

July 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Email marketing is one of the most potent promotional tactics available to online retailers when, in fact, those merchants have customers to send emails to. Email can boost site traffic, drive conversions, and help build strong relationships with shoppers. The hard part is getting thos...
Social Media
Google+: Overview, Ecommerce Use

July 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney

On the day news broke about the sale of MySpace for a mere $35 million, Google announced the launch of its new social network, Google+. The search giant is rolling out ...
Social Media
5 Influence Measurement Tools

June 28, 2011 • Paul Chaney

Prior to the Internet, if consumers were dissatisfied with a company, its products or services, they would tell a few friends who might also tell a few others. Maybe the consumer would write a letter to the company or call the customer service department to complain. For the most part, ...
Social Media
5 New Social Media Management Platforms

June 21, 2011 • Paul Chaney

A new class of social media management platforms for small businesses makes social media marketing — such as posting to Facebook and Twitter — much easier. In this article, I review five of these platforms: Postling, Breeze Social, Roost, Sendible and Social Guides. My review will add...
Email & Text Marketing
7 Steps to Improve Your Email Marketing

June 20, 2011 • Armando Roggio

A successful ecommerce marketing strategy is an ever-changing blend of techniques and tactics aimed at achieving specific, predetermined goals. If executed well, email marketing is often one of the most ...
Email & Text Marketing
4 Ways of Capturing More Email Addresses and Increasing Conversion

June 14, 2011 • Charles Nicholls

There is a very strong link between website conversions and email. A recent study by my firm showed that once traffic has gotten as far as the shopping cart email was the largest source of ecommerce conversions, ranking above a direct entry and search. This is a useful reminder that the...
Social Media
One Merchant’s Experience with LivingSocial and Groupon

June 13, 2011 • Paul Chaney

APARTStyle.com is a retailer that is focused on selling affordable fashion clothing to working women. The company — founded in September 2009 and headquartered in New York — sells ...
Email & Text Marketing
4 Tips for Improving Your Email Conversion Rate

June 9, 2011 • Carolyn Nye

Sending timely and relevant communications to your email file is a necessity in driving qualified traffic to your site. Simply increasing your traffic numbers may be the first step, but ...
Social Media
5 Good Reasons to Use Tumblr

June 9, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Tumblr is a social blogging platform that allows users to upload multimedia posts, follow other users, and engage in communities without some of the constraints found on Twitter or Facebook. As a platform, Tumblr has been growing rapidly, and some retailers are now using the service as...
Google Ads
How to Hire a Pay-Per-Click Manager; 10 Common Mistakes

June 7, 2011 • Scott Smigler

My firm is in the pay-per-click advertising business. We've managed PPC accounts for hundreds of companies for roughly a decade, and we've developed strong opinions as to what makes for a good PPC manager, and what does not. To be sure, there are many terrific PPC management firms othe...
Social Media
How to Install the Google +1 Button on Your Site

June 6, 2011 • Armando Roggio

Google is positioning its +1 button as a way for consumers to leave recommendations for their social media friends, just when those friends are in need. "Sometimes it’s easier to find exactly what you’re looking for when someone you know already found it," Google said on the +1 landing...
Social Media
12 Popular Retail Companies on YouTube

June 6, 2011 • Paul Chaney

The most popular YouTube videos involve talking animals, pop stars and news channels. But retailers have found a home on the site, too. Here is a list of 12 popular ...
Social Media
Selling to Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers

June 2, 2011 • Paul Chaney

One of the more controversial ecommerce-related topics is the use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter to increase sales. There is ample evidence to suggest that, in spite of its popularity, social media produces a dismal return on investment. Respondents to a January 2011 Pract...
Social Media
How to Use Facebook’s Photo Strip; 7 Examples

June 1, 2011 • Paul Chaney

When Facebook added the photo strip to the Wall on Fan pages, it left page owners and administrators wondering just how to make use of the new feature. Not only that, the Fan page version lacked one attribute present in the personal profile version: the ability to arrange photos in a ...

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