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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

Social Media
Facebook Limits Fan Pages and Introduces Community Pages

April 20, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Facebook Fan pages are changing. This is due to the Facebook's desire to ensure that only individuals and organizations with official permission to do so create such pages. To replace those Fan pages created by, well, fans, Facebook has now introduced what it is referring to as Communit...
Social Media
The PeC Review: Firefox TwitterBar Add-on

April 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Social media is one of the most cost effective ways that an online merchant can attract new customers and build relationships with existing ones. In social media, the aim is to become generally interested in your customers, including what they do and how they feel about the world. That...
Marketing & Advertising
Social Media: Selling on Facebook

April 15, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons

Facebook is set to allow developers to create shopping apps directly on merchants’ fan pages. This means that fan pages, which were once mainly marketing channels, can now be used as a point of sale, if merchants are willing to pay a developer to implement the apps. The first step in ...
Marketing & Advertising
Video Strategies to Increase Your Site’s Exposure

April 1, 2010 • Michael Stearns

The cost of producing and deploying a reasonably high-quality video has dropped dramatically. Most every ecommerce business owner would therefore be smart to consider working video into his or her marketing mix. Assuming you can overcome the initial hurdles of video creation, let's look...
Content Marketing
Make Friends and Boost Sales with a Content Marketing Strategy

April 1, 2010 • Armando Roggio

More than half of consumers surveyed in a 2009 study said that how much they trusted a merchant affected how likely they were to make a purchase. The findings, which were part of a ChannelAdvisor survey, are not surprising. In fact, it is almost common sense that shoppers don't like to...
Email & Text Marketing
Think Twice About Buying Email Subscriber Lists

March 24, 2010 • Ankush Agarwal

Buying email subscriber lists is seemingly the quickest way to build your email list. But acquired lists frequently present problems that merchants should weigh carefully. First and foremost, the email list you plan to acquire must be obtained from a reputable company. There are many c...
Social Media
Social Media: The Mississippi Gift Company Uses Multiple Channels

March 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: Each month we highlight how an ecommerce business uses social media. This is the second of the series. I hail from the great state of Mississippi. Not only is my native state noted for its arts and culture, it is also the home of a very successful, long-standing ecommerc...
Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Tools to Encourage Customer Feedback?

March 11, 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 how to encourage customer feedback. It comes from Rita Perdue, CEO and owner of Pick My Decor, an online store that sells home décor...
Marketing & Advertising
February Survey Results: Social Media in Ecommerce

March 9, 2010 • Kate Monteith

Social marketing experts have been trumpeting the advantages of using social sites such as Twitter and Facebook to promote ecommerce businesses. We wondered how many of our readers are using social media sites as a marketing channel and whether it has helped or hurt their businesses. ...
Marketing & Advertising
Microsoft, Yahoo! Search-engine Partnership: Frequently Asked Questions

March 8, 2010 • PEC Staff

The agreement for Yahoo! to use Microsoft's Bing search platform has been approved by U.S. and European authorities. We wonder what this agreement means for ecommerce merchants. Greg Laptevsky, a Practical eCommerce contributor and a seasoned search marketing expert, provides some answe...
Marketing & Advertising
Visual Search to Grow with Mobile Commerce

March 4, 2010 • Brendan Gibbons

Visual search is a new technology that's likely to impact the mobile commerce space. It allows mobile users to snap pictures of just about anything on their devices and then search for relevant online content based on the photo itself. This technology is useful for mobile users who ar...
Marketing & Advertising
Ask an Expert: Examples of Social Media Marketing Success?

February 25, 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 social media marketing. It comes from Theresa Fox, managing director of direct and digital initiatives at Sounds True, an online sto...
Business
Quick Query: Covario’s Stephan Spencer on Mobile Commerce

February 24, 2010 • PEC Staff

An increasing number of consumers access the Internet via mobile devices. This has looming implications for ecommerce merchants who must decide what platforms their customers will use in the future. Third party services can help owners migrate their sites to mobile devices and one of th...
Social Media
Social Media: OTC Sports Uses Facebook, Twitter to Engage Like-minded Consumers

February 23, 2010 • Paul Chaney

Editor's Note: This is the first in series of interviews with ecommerce merchants on their use of social media. OTC Sports is a family-run specialty dealer of premium baseball and softball equipment. It targets serious, tournament-level ballplayers. We spoke with the owner, Jeff LeRic...
Marketing & Advertising
The PeC Review: Google Buzz a No-brainer

February 15, 2010 • Armando Roggio

Google recently announced a new social media tool that is integrated into the company’s popular Gmail service. Google Buzz seeks to make it easier to start and follow social media-like conversations ...
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 ...
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...
Email & Text 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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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