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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
  • Marketing & Advertising

    3 Crazy Ecommerce Marketing Ideas

    May 11, 2011 •

    Marketing may be the single most important task an ecommerce business must tackle. To paraphrase Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin, the authors of Radical Marketing: From Harvard to Harley, Lessons From Ten That Broke the Rules and Made It Big, an ecommerce business can survive using an Excel ...

  • Social Media

    5 Ways to Increase Ratings and Reviews

    May 9, 2011 •

    Today's Internet is largely driven by peer-to-peer interaction. When making a purchase, consumers seek out the experiences of others. This includes reading online ratings and reviews posted by other consumers, which can increase overall engagement and drive sales. With that in mind, he...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Creating Content for Email Newsletters

    May 9, 2011 •

    Content intensive email newsletters can provide potential customers with real value, present an opportunity to build trust, encourage sharing, and drive direct site traffic. In the old days of advertising and marketing, retailers would place ads in newspapers or magazines. The idea was...

  • Social Media

    5 Ways Merchants Can Locate Social Communities

    May 6, 2011 •

    Editor's Note: One of the marketing challenges faced by ecommerce merchants is finding online communities that have an interest in the merchants' products. Few observers dispute the potential of social media, provided merchants can find interested parties to be social with. We posed th...

  • Social Media

    16 Facebook Marketing Strategies

    May 3, 2011 •

    There are thousands of Facebook apps, including a growing class designed for marketing use on company Facebook Pages. Here is a list of 16 different marketing strategies — using apps — that can help your ecommerce business. 1. Facebook Send button Facebook recently launched the “Send”...

  • Social Media

    Have You Reddit? Surging Social-News Site Can Help Merchants

    May 2, 2011 •

    Reddit is a social media site that allows anyone to submit links to news articles, blog posts, pictures, or other web content. Once submitted, Reddit users vote content up or down, potentially driving hundreds or even thousands of clicks and visitors. Reddit has been around since 2005,...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Email Versus Social Media: 3 Key Points

    April 29, 2011 •

    With increased use of social media, many marketing professionals wonder if email will remain relevant. The question for ecommerce retailers then becomes where should they focus their efforts, and should they abandon email for social media? comScore, the tracking and analysis firm, publ...

  • Google Ads

    Mobile Pay-per-click Advertising: 5 Ways to Improve Performance

    April 28, 2011 •

    “Mobile” and “social” have received a lot of hype over the past few years. To a large extent that hype has been warranted. Sales of smart phones are setting records, and according to Alexa — the web-traffic-ranking firm — socially driven websites account for five of the ten most popular...

  • Social Media

    Sprout Social: Social Media Management Time-Saving Tool

    April 26, 2011 •

    There are a number of tools that help reduce the time required to manage social media engagement. We have reviewed many of them here, in "15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity" and "5 Time-Saving Social Network Tools." In this article, I want to review a resource that I have ...

  • Social Media

    8 Benefits to Facebook ‘Likes’

    April 18, 2011 •

    Last week, I addressed strategies for increasing numbers of Facebook Likes, in "15 Ways to Get Liked on Facebook." This week, I discuss 8 reasons why getting Likes can benefit your business, and I cite research that attempts to assign a value to each "Like." 8 Reasons to Encourage Like...

  • Social Media

    15 Ways to Get ‘Liked’ on Facebook

    April 12, 2011 •

    Once a business has established a Facebook Page, a key challenge is to grow its fan base. This is accomplished, in part, through the use of the "Like" button. By clicking the Like button, a person expresses affinity for the brand or its products. It is the Facebook equivalent of an emai...

  • Content Marketing

    5 Blogging Ideas to Engage Customers

    April 12, 2011 •

    Engaging customers with both informative and entertaining content can be a key to keeping them long term and making additional sales. After all, what's better, a customer that buys once, or a customer that keeps on making purchases because your blog content draws them back to your site?...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Segment Your Emails to Increase Effectiveness; 4 Potential Segments

    April 8, 2011 •

    For email marketing, the practice of "batch and blast" is dated. Companies should move beyond this strategy, into a segmented email approach that is more relevant to each individual subscriber and increases the overall effectiveness of an email-marketing program. But where do you start ...

  • Email & Text Marketing

    Irritating Your Customers with Facebook, Twitter and Email

    April 8, 2011 •

    Businesses have more tools to communicate with their customers than ever before. There's email, text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and websites — and those are just the most widely used tools. But with all those tools comes additional responsibility. Your customers should feel en...

  • Social Media

    Social Q&A: New Take On An Old Genre

    April 5, 2011 •

    The question-and-answer genre has been around for a long time in the form of bulletin boards, discussion forums and sites such as Answers.com and AskJeeves.com (now Ask.com). A new variation ...

  • Social Media

    10 Marketers You Must Follow on Twitter

    April 5, 2011 •

    Changing consumer behaviors are having a significant effect on marketing tactics and strategies. New social sites, mobile devices, or other advancements are fueling these changes. Just a few years ago no mainstream marketers had budgets for Facebook ads. But now Facebook is a leading o...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity

    April 1, 2011 •

    Social media can help ecommerce businesses. And although social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube — are cost-free, they are not time-free. In fact, managing just a single social network business page can be a full-time job, not to mention managing three or four on multi...

  • Google Ads

    Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising to Sell High-Ticket Items

    March 29, 2011 •

    Online retailers often overlook the potential of pay-per-click advertising to drive sales of expensive products. Campaigns that target these items often bring the double whammy of low conversion rates and a high cost-per-click. There are several ways you can adjust your PPC advertising ...

  • Social Media

    Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts; 8 Suggestions

    March 29, 2011 •

    Google’s so-called “Farmer” algorithm update emphasizes original, unique content for favorable organic search results. Frequently-updated, keyword-optimized, topically-relevant blog posts can provide your ecommerce site with original content, and improve its search engine rankings. I have seen it happen

  • Content Marketing

    3 Ideas for Generating Unique Content for Your Ecommerce Business

    March 24, 2011 •

    Unique and entertaining content can help engage customers, encourage site traffic and earn your brand top-of-mind recognition. But sometimes, ecommerce entrepreneurs and marketers struggle to find new content ideas. This demand for fresh and one-of-a-kind content may be even more imper...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    48 Facebook Pages for Businesses

    March 23, 2011 •

    Facebook is not just a social forum to share pictures with friends anymore. Businesses are pushing traffic to their ecommerce sites, increasing brand awareness and now making sales on Facebook stores. I looked at the top ten brands on Facebook with the most Fans as analyzed by All Face...

  • Social Media

    3 YouTube Advertising Options for Small Businesses

    March 21, 2011 •

    Online video has gone mainstream. Thanks to sites like Hulu, Netflix, iTunes and Amazon, more people are watching full-length movies and TV shows online than ever before. But no site has the video audience of YouTube. Consider these facts, which are from YouTube's Statistics page: M...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    What’s Your Facebook Strategy?

    March 18, 2011 •

    There are two sides to the growing discussion of how ecommerce merchants can best use Facebook. One side recommends the setting up a self-contained shopping cart on Facebook, where consumers ...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    5 New-Media Ecommerce Marketing Tactics

    March 14, 2011 •

    The growth of mobile devices, changes in search engines, social media sites, and new consumer behaviors are affecting the way that online retailers market. And often the creative and dynamic marketing plans win the customers. In this post, I'll describe five dynamic ecommerce marketing...

  • Social Media

    3 Tools to Create New Facebook iFrame Pages

    March 14, 2011 •

    March 10 was a big day for Facebook Page owners. On that day, Facebook upgraded Pages to a new layout and removed FBML — Facebook Markup Language — as the custom-tab-creation code, replacing it with iframes. The latter action spelled trouble for do-it-yourselfers because it required the...

  • Social Media

    10 Tips for Marketing on Redesigned Facebook

    March 7, 2011 •

    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...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    How To Feature Your Products on Group-Buying Sites

    March 3, 2011 •

    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...

  • Google Ads

    Comparing Facebook Ads to Search-Based Advertising

    March 2, 2011 •

    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...

  • Marketing & Advertising

    41 Google Blogs for Online Businesses

    March 1, 2011 •

    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...

  • Social Media

    How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 3: Sponsored Stories Ad Units

    February 28, 2011 •

    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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