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 Marketing | Google Ads | Influencers & Affiliates | Social Media

Email Marketing
The PeC Review: MailChimp is a Full-Featured Email Campaign Manager

January 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio

MailChimp offers a complete email marketing solution that is simple and inexpensive enough for small businesses but powerful enough for fairly large Internet merchants with sales of $5 million per year or more. According to its staff, MailChimp has over 60,000 users. It manages lists...
Content Marketing
Ecommerce Know-How: Customer-Centric Content as Link Bait

January 26, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Online shopkeepers can use good customer-oriented content to improve PageRank and increase sales. In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), link baiting is the practice of creating web content that is virtually irresistible to bloggers, Diggers, or other members of the linkerat...
Marketing & Advertising
Ecommerce Know-How: Start a Buzz with Word-of-Mouth Marketing

January 20, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Consumers talk. There is nothing you or anyone can do about it. The shoppers who visit your store and purchase your wares will tell their friends and acquaintances about it if they are given a chance. This phenomenon is nothing new. But marketers are starting to understand how to use th...
Marketing & Advertising
PeC Traffic Report: Advertising in the Post-Interruption World

January 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio

Advertising has changed. Companies can no longer simply interrupt consumers with advertising messages and expect them to march off and buy something like little credit-card wielding lemmings. But ad tactics that reach out to customers when they're already interested or that tell authent...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: SolsticeSupply.com

January 5, 2009 • Jeff Muendel

This month’s report card is SolsticeSupply.com, an ecommerce site dedicated to closeout winter goods ranging from skis and snowboards to winter apparel. The site is very pleasant to the eye with large, expansive photos of wintry scenes and skiing action. But how does it do in terms of S...
Marketing & Advertising
Voice Recognition Software: Just "Talk It Out"

December 29, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Having good content on a website is always important because it is that content upon which both search engines and customers make decisions about your website. The better it is – with regards to focused keywords, information, and style – the more likely a website is to draw search users...
Google Ads
My Favorite Pay-per-click Blogs

December 18, 2008 • Bill Hartzer

It seems as though there are a million blogs. In fact, last time I checked, Technorati was reporting that over 120,000 new blogs are created every single day. That's about 1.4 new blogs every second. With so many blogs out there, which pay-per-click blogs are the most helpful? To help...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Pkging.com

December 5, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Packaging becomes particularly important at this time of year when many of us are shipping gifts for the holidays. I’ve lived in several parts of the country and I don’t much do cards. I’m the type to either ship a gift package or send an email greeting. With that in mind, the website f...
Google Ads
Advertising in Recession Leads to Competitive Advantage

December 3, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Economic anxiety and a lack of insight have prompted some online retailers to slash their advertising budgets. However, when fewer of your competitors are investing in advertising, you can step up and command a market, improving sales now and in the long term. In a notable study that i...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Socialcouture.com Stresses Social Media

November 13, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

I like parties, and Social Couture is a high-end party supply website. On its corresponding MySpace site (always a good thing to have, but especially important if your gig is party supplies) Social Couture says, “whether your style is traditional or modern or whether your guests are you...
Google Ads
Interview: Pay-per-click Expert On 2nd Tier Ad Sites

October 8, 2008 • Bill Hartzer

Recently I sat down with Jeremy Mayes, the author of PPCDiscussions.com. In addition to writing the PPCDiscussions.com blog, Mayes has used paid search to sell millions of dollars of products and has generated millions of leads for various industries. I asked him about 2nd tier pay-per-...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Icewraps.net

September 29, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

I went on a hike this weekend and it was a lot of fun—until the next day when I began to feel as if I had participated in something more like a death march. My leg muscles were so sore, it was tough to trek through the grocery store in search of ibuprofen. In honor of my pain (it’...
Google Ads
Seven Tactics to Boost Online Banner-ad Response Rates

September 26, 2008 • Armando Roggio

Ecommerce has been the great equalizer for retailers—a small book store in Iowa can oftentimes compete with Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Amazon for customers in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or the world, but equality isn't always good. There are times when it's good to have a comp...
Marketing & Advertising
Coordinate Pay-per-click Advertising With SEO Efforts

September 19, 2008 • Pamela Nelson

The goal of a pay-per-click advertising campaign is to attract qualified traffic to a website in an effort to have searchers convert on a desired action. That action could be a sale, filling out a lead form, requesting information and so forth. The goal of search engine optimization i...
Social Media
Social Media Marketing

September 9, 2008 • Paul Chaney

Something my employer at Bizzuka said recently sparked my thinking. "What you're doing (in terms of marketing) will not just help us create greater awareness among prospects, but among those considering coming to work for us," he said. It caused me to realize that marketing, especial...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Starwest-botanicals.com

September 8, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

Starwest Botanicals’ home page begins with this statement: “Starwest Botanicals is your on-line supply source for bulk herbs and natural products. Bulk organic herbs, organic spices, loose leaf organic teas, organic essential oils and aromatherapy supplies are part of the almost 3000 na...
Marketing & Advertising
Cleverbridge VP On Selling Digital Products

September 5, 2008 • PEC Staff

Craig Vodnik is vice president, North America, for Cleverbridge, an ecommerce platform that helps online merchants sell software, music and other digital products. Vodnik joins Practical eCommerce’s Kerry Murdock,
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Littlepixiegifts.com.au

August 5, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

I don’t spend a lot of time shopping on baby-oriented gift sites, but I get a lot of requests for report card reviews from them. This will not only be the first time I’ve reviewed a baby site, but an Australian site as well. I was taken with the pleasant design, especially the cute baby...
Marketing & Advertising
Google Knol: An SEO Perspective

August 4, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

I first wrote about Google Knol here at Practical Ecommerce in January 2008, before it was open to the general public. Now that it is live, the Knol project is worth revisiting because of its potential search engine optimization ramifications. As has been well documented, Knol is a n...
Email Marketing
Growing Your Email Subscriber List With Contests

July 28, 2008 • Ben Chestnut

Cultivating a solid, permission-based email list can take a lot of time. So some businesses understandably get impatient waiting around for their lists to grow. For these businesses, online contests may be an attractive quick fix. As an example, let’s say a newly launched shoe e-retail...
Social Media
Ratings And Reviews Engage Your Visitors

July 24, 2008 • Paul Chaney

Trust in word-of-mouth recommendations is at an all-time high. Public relations firm Edleman says in its 2008 Trust Barometer study that “a person like me” is still the most trusted source for information about a company and its services or products. While the most influential form of ...
Google Ads
Pay-per-click Advertising: The Top 100 Keyword Phrases

July 22, 2008 • Bill Hartzer

Last time I checked, Spyfu.com is reporting that someone is bidding $51.66 per click for phrase “conference calling companies.” Are you bidding on words like this, which is one of the most expensive keyword phrases? Let’s take a look at the most expensive pay-per-click keywords and wha...
Social Media
Social Media Wheels Keep On Turning‚ And Fast!

July 16, 2008 • Paul Chaney

My social media journey started with blogs, then LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, a few other social networks, social sharing and bookmarking sites thrown in, then Twitter and now, Plurk. Sound familiar? How the wheels of social media evolution do turn. It's hard to keep up. Aft...
Social Media
Never Edit Your Own Stuff

July 15, 2008 • Paul Chaney

How many times has this happened? You compose a blog post, usually in a hurry, then hit the submit button, only to read it later and wonder how in the heck you missed what is a glaring error. I am the world’s worst. Years ago, a veteran magazine editor gave me this advice, “Never edit y...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Music123.com

June 17, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

I’m a musical gear-aholic. My apartment is littered with instruments leaning against walls, stashed in corners, and propped up in closets. I’ve never met a guitar or keyboard I didn’t like. Having said that, while I frequent online music malls, I’ve never shopped at Music123.com. That s...
Google Ads
Paid Search With Online Yellow Pages

June 17, 2008 • Bill Hartzer

You are probably familiar with Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter, the three largest paid search advertising opportunities. However, have you considered running a paid search campaign using the online yellow pages? Even if you’re an online retailer that does not h...
Marketing & Advertising
Yahoo! Glue and You: How Blended Search Affects eCommerce

June 4, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

More than likely, you’ve heard the terms “blended search,” “federated search,” or “universal search” (Google’s name for it). They refer to a new form of search engine results that especially affect anyone concerned with search marketing. The term blended search has become the most neutr...
Social Media
Blogs and Email: A One-Two Marketing Punch

May 21, 2008 • Paul Chaney

I have long been an advocate of using blogs and email as complementary online marketing strategies. Blogs serve a customer acquisition function, while email serves a customer retention role. That belief was recently reinforced when I attended a webinar jointly sponsored by a new company...
Google Ads
Pay-Per-Click Tools Improve Productivity

May 19, 2008 • Greg Laptevsky

Daily pay-per-click management routine is not a lot of fun. Thankfully, there are a few tools out there that make the work much more efficient and allow search engine marketing professionals to look at the big picture. Below is a list of software tools that every pay-per-click account o...
Marketing & Advertising
SEO Report Card: Pawleyfarm.com

May 12, 2008 • Jeff Muendel

This month's report card website is Pawleyfarm.com, a small site that sells personalized country photographs and note cards. The home page says, "Just as a home-cooked meal nourishes body and soul, our custom matted and framed artwork carries along a bit of peace and contentment." The d...

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