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
15 Ways to Get ‘Liked’ on Facebook
April 12, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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...
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Content Marketing
5 Blogging Ideas to Engage Customers
April 12, 2011 • Armando Roggio
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?...
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Email & Text Marketing
Segment Your Emails to Increase Effectiveness; 4 Potential Segments
April 8, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
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 ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Irritating Your Customers with Facebook, Twitter and Email
April 8, 2011 • PEC Staff
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...
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Social Media
Social Q&A: New Take On An Old Genre
April 5, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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 ...
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Social Media
10 Marketers You Must Follow on Twitter
April 5, 2011 • Armando Roggio
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...
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Marketing & Advertising
15 Services to Manage Your Social Media Activity
April 1, 2011 • PEC Staff
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...
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Google Ads
Using Pay-Per-Click Advertising to Sell High-Ticket Items
March 29, 2011 • Scott Smigler
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 ...
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Social Media
Writing SEO-Friendly Blog Posts; 8 Suggestions
March 29, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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
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Content Marketing
3 Ideas for Generating Unique Content for Your Ecommerce Business
March 24, 2011 • Armando Roggio
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...
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Marketing & Advertising
48 Facebook Pages for Businesses
March 23, 2011 • PEC Staff
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...
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Social Media
3 YouTube Advertising Options for Small Businesses
March 21, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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...
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Marketing & Advertising
What’s Your Facebook Strategy?
March 18, 2011 • PEC Staff
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 ...
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Marketing & Advertising
5 New-Media Ecommerce Marketing Tactics
March 14, 2011 • Armando Roggio
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...
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Social Media
3 Tools to Create New Facebook iFrame Pages
March 14, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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...
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Social Media
10 Tips for Marketing on Redesigned Facebook
March 7, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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...
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Marketing & Advertising
How To Feature Your Products on Group-Buying Sites
March 3, 2011 • PEC Staff
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...
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Google Ads
Comparing Facebook Ads to Search-Based Advertising
March 2, 2011 • Scott Smigler
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...
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Marketing & Advertising
41 Google Blogs for Online Businesses
March 1, 2011 • PEC Staff
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...
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Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 3: Sponsored Stories Ad Units
February 28, 2011 • Paul Chaney
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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Marketing & Advertising
Customizing Blog Themes for WordPress and Blogger
February 25, 2011 • PEC Staff
Coming up with compelling content that readers will come back for is only half the battle of a great blog. The other half is all in the presentation and style. For a unique design, avoid the pre-made themes for your blog platform and instead customize your own theme. There are tools th...
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Email & Text Marketing
Using Email for Customer Acquisition
February 24, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email is a proven marketing channel for many online retailers. It's relatively easy to implement, and inexpensive. Return on investment tends to be high when marketing to your opt-in subscriber file or to visitors on your website. But can email be used to prospect and acquire new custom...
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Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 2: From FBML to iFrames
February 22, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. In response, Practical eCommerce will publish "How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants," a three-part series aimed at addressing each of these changes. T...
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Marketing & Advertising
Social Media Survey Results: Few Sales Coming from Social Media Efforts
February 21, 2011 • Kate Monteith
Many social media platforms have evolved to integrate marketing, advertising and commerce. This got us wondering how many companies use social media for business purposes and how effective it has been. A recent survey conducted by Practical eCommerce polled our readers about the current...
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Social Media
How Facebook Changes Impact Ecommerce Merchants, Part 1: Page Redesign
February 16, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Facebook recently announced significant changes to its platform that impacts small-business marketing efforts. First, Facebook implemented a planned redesign of business-oriented "Pages" (also called "fan pages" or "business pages") to mirror the way personal Profiles — for individuals ...
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Email & Text Marketing
7 Tips to Grow Your Email Subscriber List
February 14, 2011 • Carolyn Nye
Email is a unique marketing channel because it is permission based. That's one reason email has a high return on investment: If consumers raise their hands and say, “Please market to me;” they are likely to purchase in the future. But building a large opt-in subscriber base takes dedi...
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Social Media
5 Social-Shopping Sites to Help Retailers, Consumers
February 9, 2011 • Paul Chaney
I received an email recently from a friend asking me what type of vacuum cleaner he should purchase. I noticed the email did not come from him directly, however, but from ShopSocially, a social shopping website that is part of a new class of sites in which reliance on friends is at the ...
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Google Ads
7 Pay-Per-Click Advertising Mistakes to Avoid in 2011
February 1, 2011 • Scott Smigler
2010 was a big year for pay-per-click marketing. Google made significant changes to AdWords, and Bing integrated PPC advertising from Yahoo! into its adCenter. Now, much to the chagrin of advertisers who prefer a “set and forget” approach to their advertising campaigns, the bar for eff...
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Social Media
The Basics of Advertising on Facebook
January 31, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Facebook commerce has a long way to go before it's on par with traditional ecommerce. But many ecommerce merchants report that Facebook Ads, a self-service, pay-per-click advertising platform similar to Google AdWords, generates positive returns. In this article, I am going to outline t...
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Social Media
Tools to Build a Strong Twitter Following; Relevance Is Key
January 24, 2011 • Paul Chaney
Twitter is helpful for many small businesses. One key to maximizing its value is to find relevant people to follow in the hopes they will return the courtesy. Relevance is essential to growing a follower base that would most likely read your content, and eventually become customers. I w...
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