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-
Social Media
RSS Basics
May 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
Want more traffic to your ecommerce site? Need an easy way to distribute news and updates? An RSS feed may be your answer. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is a format for syndicating website content such as might be found on major news sites like CNN, as well as on blogs. ...
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Social Media
Email Marketing: Tips for Success
April 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
MAKE THE INTEGRITY OF YOUR LIST YOUR NUMBER ONE GOAL. "If you are serious about wanting to do email professionally, you need to be diligent in how you sign up contacts, using double opt-in techniques. Otherwise, you're building a list that will never perform at maximum levels," says Ji...
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Social Media
Bullish on Blogging
March 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
A few years ago the investment firm Merrill Lynch coined the term “We’re Bullish.” It became the company’s corporate mantra of sorts. In stock trade terminology, being bullish represents a rise in value. I’m bullish on blogging, and for a number of reasons. I think it is a technology to...
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Marketing & Advertising
Pay-per-click Tools Maximize Your Time
February 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
As a business owner and entrepreneur, you know that there are two things you can always use more of - money and time. While you are likely to increase the first item by reading this column, you can also free up more time by automating the management of your search marketing campaigns. ...
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Social Media
Blogs and Affiliate Marketing
February 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
Blogs have typically not been thought of as direct response sales tools. In their brief history, blogs have morphed from being “personal online journals and diaries” to vital tools for business, but the focus has been more on using them for relational marketing or purely informational p...
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Marketing & Advertising
Be Careful of the Number 1 Spot
January 1, 2006 • PEC Staff
Pay-Per-Click advertising works in an auction-based format, since there are a number of advertisers competing for the same keywords. The higher you bid, the higher your ad will appear. Bids can range anywhere from a few cents to several dollars per click, based on how competitive the in...
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Social Media
Successful Blogging: Utilize the Four
January 1, 2006 • Paul Chaney
Everyone remembers the three “R’s” from your school days: Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic. These three areas are considered essential to building a good educational foundation. Similarly, there are also some basic essentials to strategic blogging. I would like to present the four “R’s”...
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Marketing & Advertising
Use Google’s Site Targeting
December 1, 2005 • PEC Staff
Google advertisers, rejoice! If you ever wished you could pick and choose which sites across Google AdSense network your ads will appear, now you can! In a recent development, Google AdWords introduced a new advertising model called Site Targeting, which gives you the ability to target...
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Marketing & Advertising
Google AdWords: 3 Ways to Improve Your ROI
December 1, 2005 • Mat Greenfield
We manage a number of Google AdWord accounts for our clients, and I almost always find the same problems when we take over a new account. So “from the trenches”, here are 3 key principles that will help you have a prosperous new year with your Google AdWords. Split Test Your Ads Googl...
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Social Media
eCommerce Marketing: Use Email, Blogs and RSS Together
December 1, 2005 • Paul Chaney
Think of things that just naturally go together and what comes to mind? Peanut butter and jelly for one, ham and cheese for another. How about a hammer and nails or a table and chairs? In terms of online marketing, two strategies go together equally as well: email and blogs. Email is t...
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Social Media
Blogs Are One Way to Get Consumers
November 1, 2005 • Paul Chaney
Are you “stuck on style?” If so, you may already be a fan of online retailer’s blog, Flypaper. Those three words describe the audience Bluefly, a discount women’s apparel e-tailer, is attempting to attract via the blog: women who care about fashionable clothing but who do not want to pa...
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Marketing & Advertising
Search Engine Indexing with Sitemaps
October 1, 2005 • PEC Staff
One of the most common problems ecommerce websites have with rankings is that portions of their websites are not included in the search engines. The cause can be any of a variety of reasons that range from complicated URL strings to slow server response or lack of a proper internal link...
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Social Media
Ten Things to Consider Before You Blog
September 1, 2005 • Paul Chaney
You’ve heard a lot about web logs or blogs. That’s because during the past six years blogs have evolved from a highly personal form of communication on the Internet to a powerful new medium for business. Not since Procter & Gamble invented branding back in 1931 has there been so muc...
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Social Media
Blogging: Your Kids Do It, and Your Business Should Too
August 1, 2005 • Paul Chaney
Doubtless, you have heard the term "blog." Bloggers, as they are called, have been credited with bringing down key political and media figures like former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and CBS news anchor Dan Rather. Your teenager might use a blog as a way to chronicle his or her d...
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Email Marketing
Words and Phrases that Trigger Some Spam Filters
December 3, 2002 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
I built this list of some 250 words and phrases from two spam filter lists. It is not complete. I have left out porn trigger words. Most spam filters work on a point system, so that the occurrence of just one "spam phrase" probably won't trigger rejection -- except some which the filter considers notorious.
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Marketing & Advertising
The Eight Essential Types of Internet Promotion
June 12, 2000 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Sometimes your head can be so abuzz with all these Internet marketing details that you feel overwhelmed. You don't know where to start. You can't see the forest for the trees. While there is a lot of depth to be understood, I think that Internet promotion can be distilled down to eight essential types.
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Email Marketing
A Simple Way to Format HTML E-Mail Newsletters
January 1, 2000 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
I hesitate to provide a guide to formatting HTML e-mail for one reason: there's little else about this on the Web, and the article is likely to produce a torrent of phone calls and e-mail inquiring about further details.
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Influencers & Affiliates
How Does an Affiliate Program Work?
October 1, 1999 • Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Web Marketing Today. Practical Ecommerce acquired Web Marketing Today in 2012. In 2016, we merged the two sites, leaving Practical Ecommerce as ...