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-
Google Ads
Google’s AdWords Tool Helps with Both Pay-per-click and SEO
February 9, 2010 • Jeff Muendel
Keyword research is one of the pillars of both natural and paid search campaigns. By following the keyword choices used by consumers in the search engines, websites can focus on those terms to capture traffic. This tenet of online marketing and search engine optimization is fairly well ...
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Social Media
Ecommerce News Around the Web for February 5, 2010
February 5, 2010 • Paul Chaney
"Ecommerce News Around the Web" is our weekly review of articles, blog posts and other news items that could interest ecommerce merchants. 11 Outstanding Online Resources for Web Developers - Mashable A web developer's job is almost never done. You are always looking for ways to impr...
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Email Marketing
Email Provider Looks Back on 2009
January 26, 2010 • Kate Monteith
Spammers were exploiting social networking sites and phishing was one of the top crimes around the globe in 2009, according to a study released by email service provider, ReturnPath. In a retrospective list of the top ten email trends for 2009, ReturnPath puts the proliferation of unwan...
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Marketing & Advertising
Pay-per-click Advertising: Five New Year’s Resolutions
January 25, 2010 • Greg Laptevsky
The beginning of a new year is good time to review your pay-per-click advertising campaigns and implement steps to improve their effectiveness. Here are five New Year's pay-per-click resolutions that I recommend. Resolution 1: Improve performance tracking Attached is a spreadsheet ca...
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Social Media
Accessibility and Social Media
January 21, 2010 • Joseph C. Dolson
Social media can be a terrific way to share information with your customers, provide them with crucial support, and otherwise communicate with them. But almost all social media sites have accessibility problems. Though they are fairly accessible as a group, they do have a variety of i...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: The Social Media Marketing Book
January 18, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Some 70 percent of shoppers trust consumer opinions posted online. Facebook has more than 350 million users. By some estimates, Twitter will have 26 million users by the end of this year. And YouTube is the third most popular website on the Internet, bar none. Social media cannot be ig...
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Social Media
Social Media Webinar Sparks Hundreds of Questions
January 14, 2010 • Armando Roggio
There was news this week that Pepsi planned to forgo a Super Bowl Ad in favor of investing $2 million into social media marketing. With so much focus on connecting to customers via social communities, it was little wonder that attendees to the Practical Ecommerce "Social Media 201: Ho...
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Social Media
Facebook, Twitter Help Online Food Store Extend Its Reach
January 13, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Bill and Louise Bowers are ecommerce merchants and owners of Classic Golden Pecans, a specialty products company located in Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country. Classic Golden Pecans sells pecans, candied pecans and confectionary items native to the region. Customers includ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Get More Traffic Without Spending a Fortune
January 8, 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 increasing site traffic from Rob McClintock, owner of Healing Leaves, an online store that sells natural health products. For the ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Five Innovative Facebook Examples from Ecommerce Merchants
January 6, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
With more than 350 million active users, Facebook’s population has exceeded that of the United States. According to its statistics page, the average user spends more than 55 minutes each day on this social media site, and he or she becomes a fan of at least two pages per month. Since ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Google Expands Personalized Search
January 6, 2010 • Jeff Muendel
Google’s announcement in December that it would be expanding personalized search to include users not signed in to Google certainly created some anxiety for companies and individuals that are dependent upon search results for income. What exactly does this change mean, and how does an e...
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Marketing & Advertising
Search Engines, Indexing and Copyright Law
December 14, 2009 • Brendan Gibbons
In 1998, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, intended to extend intellectual property rights to the web and to limit liability for online service providers. Since then, search engines have used their web crawlers to identify and copy millions o...
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Marketing & Advertising
Fans and Followers: The Social Media Numbers Game
December 14, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen
Momentum is a valuable force. A business owner that has customer-generated momentum is in a desirable position. Author Malcolm Gladwell famously described the point at which growth becomes exponential--and momentum becomes unstoppable--as The Tipping Point. Recently I listened as a s...
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Marketing & Advertising
Quick Query: SocialGrub Founder on Social Media Tools
December 7, 2009 • PEC Staff
Social media has become mainstream and businesses are increasingly turning to it to interact with their customers and boost the company bottom line. SocialGrub is a new service that brings social marketing tools to the restaurant and retail industry. For this "Quick Query" we spoke wi...
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Marketing & Advertising
Social Media Marketing: Four Steps for Getting Started
November 24, 2009 • Lawrence Cramer
Let’s take a moment to map out a cheap and effective social media strategy. Understand that cheap does not mean easy. This will take a dedicated effort and a lot of hours. But those hours could be more valuable than a high-priced advertising campaign. Step One: Commit Yourself to Co...
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Email Marketing
Emailer Provider GetResponse Releases Robust API Library
November 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio
GetResponse, an email marketing solution, announced a new application programming interface (API) aimed at helping small-to-medium sized businesses integrate their platforms with the company's email marketing tools. The new GetResponse Developer Zone includes some 30 API hooks that ma...
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Social Media
‘New Community Rules’ Is An Introduction to Social Media Marketing
November 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An increasing number of online retailers are recognizing that it is possible to earn more money and have happier customers simply by engaging those customers in authentic and personal ways. When an industry is in its infancy (such as ecommerce was just a few years ago) it is possible t...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ecommerce Know-How: Four Keys to Twitter, Facebook Success
November 9, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen
The debate over whether Twitter and Facebook are fads or sustainable businesses has yet to be resolved. Their popularity is indisputable but whether Twitter, in particular, can avoid erosion of its user base, let alone continue its impressive growth, has been questioned. But for the ec...
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Marketing & Advertising
Search Engine Rankings: Google Continues Dominance
October 15, 2009 • PEC Staff
Google continued to dominate the U.S. search market in September, according to comScore, the Internet tracking firm. Google sites accounted for 64.9 percent of the searches conducted, followed by Yahoo! sites (18.8 percent), and Microsoft sites (9.4 percent). The analysis focused on t...
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Email Marketing
Quick Query: Constant Contact Author on Effectiveness of Email
October 12, 2009 • Kevin Patrick Allen
An online merchant’s customer email list is typically a crucial part of his or her marketing plan. And Constant Contact is a leader in the email marketing field. Eric Groves is the senior vice president, global market development for Constant Contact. He’s written a new book entitled Th...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Consider YouTube Promoted Video
October 7, 2009 • Armando Roggio
YouTube Promoted Video lets ecommerce merchants combine the power of television commercials with pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Internet video is one of the fastest growing media forms in the world. From June to August 2009, American Internet video consumption grew from 19.4 billion to...
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Social Media
Book Excerpt: Niche Online Communities Can Benefit Your Business
September 24, 2009 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: Paul Chaney is a longtime contributor to Practical eCommerce. He's an expert in social media marketing and he's written extensively on how ecommerce firms can best utilize social media to grow sales. Chaney is also the author of a new book on social media called The Digi...
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Social Media
Book Excerpt: Social Media Helps Overcome Consumer Skepticism
September 10, 2009 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: Paul Chaney is a longtime contributor to Practical eCommerce. He's an expert in social media marketing and he's written extensively on how ecommerce firms can best utilize social media to grow sales. Chaney is also the author of a new book on social media called The Digi...
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Marketing & Advertising
Search-engine Success: Don’t Forget Description Tags
September 2, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
The description tags in search engine snippets have improved in recent years. Years ago, many search results would include snippets in the top results that were just plain nonsense. However, search today usually returns more quality snippets even in deeper results. Part of this may be d...
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Marketing & Advertising
Bloglist: Full Sail University’s Jake Johnson
August 20, 2009 • PEC Staff
Staying abreast of Internet marketing trends and information is no easy task. But following several leading blogs can help. “I mainly focus on the topic of SEO, so I visit ...
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Social Media
PeC Traffic Report: Generate Buzz and Traffic With Contest Marketing
August 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce marketers can use contests to boost traffic and improve sales. If I guaranteed you an additional $10,000 in annual sales just for reading this article and posting a comment, would you do it? What about if I said you had a 1-in-100 chance of getting an additional $10,000 in a...
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Marketing & Advertising
Social Media Sites Are Also Search Engines
August 4, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
Blended search results by the major search engines sometimes include postings to social media sites in search engine results. But some of the major social media services are themselves becoming search tools, which increases the need for ecommerce sites to get involved with social media....
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Email Marketing
The PeC Review: GetResponse Is A Capable Email Campaign Tool
July 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio
GetResponse 6.0 is an easy-to-use email campaign management tool that makes customizing HTML newsletters and email promotions relatively simple. It will also automatically update a blog or Twitter account with newsletter content. GetResponse has an impressive design and a number of fe...
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Google Ads
Survey Results: Online Merchants Likely to Use Bing Pay-per-click Advertising
July 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Two thirds of respondents to a June 2009 Practical eCommerce survey said they were either using or would use Microsoft's Bing search engine for pay-per-click advertising, and an additional 25.3 percent said they would consider Bing. Altogether, some 92 percent of survey respondents sai...
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Marketing & Advertising
Blogging Builds Trust, Demonstrates Expertise
July 9, 2009 • Sarah Worsham
Blogging is extremely important to ecommerce businesses. It's one of the easiest ways to update the content on your website, and it also demonstrates your expertise about your products. When done correctly, blogging can complement your products and offer a reason for people to return to...