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
Four Apps to Create Facebook ‘Welcome’ Pages
August 31, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Thousands of ecommerce businesses have Facebook Fan pages. But making those pages stand out from competitors' pages is a challenge. One of the ways to distinguish yours is through the use of a custom landing page, also known as a Welcome tab. In the past, to create a landing page you ...
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Google Ads
Pay-Per-Click Advertising: Six Metrics that Drive Performance
August 30, 2010 • Scott Smigler
Editor's Note: We welcome Scott Smigler as our new pay-per-click advertising contributor. Smigler is a pay-per-click expert, and he's the president of Exclusive Concepts, a prominent pay-per-click, search-engine-optimization and ecommerce-conversion consultancy. If you are committed to...
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Social Media
Facebook ‘Places’ Helps Local Businesses
August 24, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Facebook recently rolled out "Places," a location-based sharing application popularized by such startups as Foursquare and Gowalla. Much has been written about Places, but in this article I'll review the possible business uses for it. When a user arrives at a given location–a physical ...
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Social Media
Profile: Retailer Spends Little Money for Big Social Media Impact
August 18, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: For the past few weeks, Paul Chaney, our social media director, has addressed the integration of Facebook with ecommerce. He has reviewed a number of applications, including Wildfire and Fan Appz, both of which provide sweepstakes and coupons. He's also reviewed fully-emb...
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Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing: The Three-Part Plan
August 16, 2010 • Carolyn Nye
Editor's Note: We welcome as our new email-marketing contributor. She's marketing manager with S&S Worldwide, a direct marketer of arts and crafts, sporting goods and educational supplies. She is responsible for the planning and implementation of S&S's email marketing programs,...
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Social Media
Social Bookmarking Helps with SEO, Product Sharing
August 11, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Social sharing and bookmarking have taken a back seat to Facebook and Twitter. For most of us, using sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, or Reddit rarely crosses our minds. Yet, these and other such services can provide a number of benefits to your ecommerce site, and here’s why....
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Google Ads
Transitioning from Pay-Per-Click to Organic Search
August 10, 2010 • Bill Hartzer
If you are spending too much money for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, then you likely have considered moving away from PPC and towards organic search results. After all, if you rank well in the organic, or natural, search results, you can spend a lot less money on PPC. But how do you ...
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Social Media
Facebook Encourages Ecommerce; App-Makers Respond
August 4, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Facebook designates Fan pages for businesses to engage users. And to help these businesses, Facebook now provides a series of resource guides for Fan page development and Facebook Ads development. It has also greatly improved the Fan page analytics component (called Insights), and it ha...
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Social Media
Ecommerce News Around the Web for July 30, 2010
July 30, 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. Ecommerce SSL is Broken, Says Conference Founder - The Inquirer Black Hat 2010 conference founder Jeff Moss is adamant that commerce's secure soc...
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Marketing & Advertising
SEO: Managing Inbound Link Equity
July 28, 2010 • Amanda Barnes
Links point to your website from all corners of the online world. Some links, like friends, come and go. However, some are very rare, and making sure you keep them current and connected is critical to your website success. I’m not talking about new links. I’m talking about links that ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Will My Facebook Store Help with Search Engine Optimization?
July 22, 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 the search engine implications from selling on Facebook. The question comes from Brian M. Almashie, vice president of ecommerce for ...
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Social Media
Six Facebook Applications to Sell Your Products
July 20, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: This is the third installment in our series on social commerce, the process of linking ecommerce with social media sites, such as Facebook. In the second installment, we reviewed the Facebook apps of a number of shopping cart providers. These apps extend the Facebook reac...
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Email & Text Marketing
Tools to Combine Email Marketing with Social Media
July 19, 2010 • PEC Staff
If you’ve been selling online for any amount of time, you know how valuable email marketing can be, especially among existing customers. And you may also have pages set up on at least a couple of popular social networks, and you might have a blog. Once separate, these forms of marketi...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Why Isn’t Google Indexing All of My Site’s Pages?
July 15, 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 getting pages from an ecommerce site fully indexed by Google. It comes from Robert Mobberley, CEO of Performance Motorcare Products,...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: Facebook Pay-Per-Click Ads
July 12, 2010 • Armando Roggio
There may be a positive relationship between ecommerce spending and social network participation. Internet trend tracking firm comScore recently reported that Facebook and Twitter users spend more money online than non-socialites, and that some 23 percent of Twitter users follow busine...
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Social Media
Twitter to Offer Early Bird Advertisements
July 8, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Twitter, the microblogging site, said that it would soon begin tweeting special, time-bound deals and offers from advertisers to its users. The program, called "@earlybird," would allow "select" advertisers to offer exclusive, short term deals on Twitter, potentially putting the social...
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Marketing & Advertising
Language Translation: Man Versus Machine
July 8, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
Anyone who has visited a foreign country knows the difficulty of buying products in a foreign language. This confusion can be overwhelming, whether haggling on the street or buying online. But, for ecommerce merchants considering language translation, determining which countries and l...
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Content Marketing
Free Blogs vs. Hosting Your Own: Pros and Cons
July 6, 2010 • Lorrie Thomas Ross
Should you host a blog on your own website with your own domain name, or use one of the excellent free blog sites? There is no universal "right" choice There are pros and cons to each option to consider for immediate and long-term blog success.
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Social Media
The PEC Review: Dlvr.it for Social Media Distribution
July 5, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Blogging, social marketing, email marketing, onsite merchandising, and search engine advertising are just some of the tasks that an ecommerce marketer must manage on any given day. Dlvr.it is a new online service that can help you automate at least one portion of that marketing worklo...
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Marketing & Advertising
Ecommerce Redesign: Five SEO Pitfalls to Avoid
June 24, 2010 • Amanda Barnes
A new website launch or redesign requires the integration of management and marketing staff, as well as members of your design, content and tech teams. Each of these groups plays an integral role in the site’s overall success. A new or redesigned website will also want to drive traffi...
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Email & Text Marketing
Tips for Formatting HTML Emails in Microsoft Outlook
June 23, 2010 • PEC Staff
Roughly one-third of all email recipients use Microsoft Outlook. But that program famously distorts HTML-formatted emails when other email clients, such as Yahoo!, Gmail, and Thunderbird, render the same email messages differently. The result is that email marketers, such as ecommerce ...
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Social Media
Social Commerce: Shopping Carts Extend Reach Into Facebook, Other Social Sites
June 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: This is part two of “Social Commerce Spotlight,” our series on the mix of ecommerce and social media. Part one, "Payvment, a Facebook Storefront Provider," we published previously. With the growth of social commerce, especially on Facebook with its 500 million members, a...
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Social Media
In Social Media Era, Nine Techniques to Improve Conversion Rates
June 21, 2010 • Pamela Hazelton
With the ever-growing popularity of social media, online sweepstakes and contests, just how important is the actual conversion rate of an online store going to be in the future? In simple terms, the conversion rate is a measure of the number of unique visitors (potential customers) tha...
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Social Media
Ecommerce News Around the Web for June 11, 2010
June 11, 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. Shop.org and NRF Weigh in on Boucher Privacy Bill - Shop.org Online privacy is a hot topic these days, both among consumers and in Washington. Con...
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Email & Text Marketing
Email Marketing Has Always Been Social
June 10, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social marketing is one of the most important new trends in online retail promotion. It is effective, builds customer relationships, and offers a better return on investment than some other marketing techniques. But often, online merchants don't realize that they are already engaged in ...
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Email & Text Marketing
Six Pointers for Formatting Your Ecommerce Emails
June 10, 2010 • Janine Popick
Ecommerce merchants from all industries are utilizing email as a valuable retail sales channel. However, some merchants may be confused about how to optimize their emails for the dozens of different email programs now available, as well as the plethora of mobile devices that their custo...
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Social Media
Social Commerce Spotlight: Payvment, a Facebook Storefront Provider
June 8, 2010 • Paul Chaney
Social commerce, the use of social media in the context of ecommerce, is becoming commonplace. Over the next few weeks, Practical Ecommerce will examine ecommerce platforms and applications that allow merchants to take advantage of this new trend. In this installment, we will discuss ...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: Twitalyzer Offers Analytics for your Twitter Accounts
June 7, 2010 • Armando Roggio
As more online retailers invest marketing dollars and time into social marketing, it is becoming increasingly important to measure the return on that investment. As with any concerted marketing effort, social marketing has real costs in terms of hourly labor expenses for time spent twe...
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Social Media
The PEC Review: TwitPic, for Sharing Photos on Twitter
June 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Social media marketing is one of the most potent new promotional trends available to ecommerce businesses. Services like Twitter allow you to build two-way relationships with your customers wherein you can get nearly instant feedback about your product offerings and promotions, and gain...
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Marketing & Advertising
The Skinny on Google Maps Street View
May 26, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons
For years, Google has sent its search bots to crawl the web, indexing content and images in order to rank search results. As Google Maps has become more complex and accurate, however, Google has been crawling the streets, as well, using vans topped with 360-degree cameras. The goal is t...
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