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
Book Excerpt: Social Media Helps Overcome Consumer Skepticism
September 10, 2009 • Paul Chaney
Editor's Note: Paul Chaney is a longtime contributor to Practical eCommerce. He's an expert in social media marketing and he's written extensively on how ecommerce firms can best utilize social media to grow sales. Chaney is also the author of a new book on social media called The Digi...
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Marketing & Advertising
Search-engine Success: Don’t Forget Description Tags
September 2, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
The description tags in search engine snippets have improved in recent years. Years ago, many search results would include snippets in the top results that were just plain nonsense. However, search today usually returns more quality snippets even in deeper results. Part of this may be d...
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Marketing & Advertising
Bloglist: Full Sail University’s Jake Johnson
August 20, 2009 • PEC Staff
Staying abreast of Internet marketing trends and information is no easy task. But following several leading blogs can help. “I mainly focus on the topic of SEO, so I visit sites ...
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Social Media
PeC Traffic Report: Generate Buzz and Traffic With Contest Marketing
August 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce marketers can use contests to boost traffic and improve sales. If I guaranteed you an additional $10,000 in annual sales just for reading this article and posting a comment, would you do it? What about if I said you had a 1-in-100 chance of getting an additional $10,000 in a...
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Marketing & Advertising
Social Media Sites Are Also Search Engines
August 4, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
Blended search results by the major search engines sometimes include postings to social media sites in search engine results. But some of the major social media services are themselves becoming search tools, which increases the need for ecommerce sites to get involved with social media....
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Email Marketing
The PeC Review: GetResponse Is A Capable Email Campaign Tool
July 28, 2009 • Armando Roggio
GetResponse 6.0 is an easy-to-use email campaign management tool that makes customizing HTML newsletters and email promotions relatively simple. It will also automatically update a blog or Twitter account with newsletter content. GetResponse has an impressive design and a number of fe...
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Google Ads
Survey Results: Online Merchants Likely to Use Bing Pay-per-click Advertising
July 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Two thirds of respondents to a June 2009 Practical eCommerce survey said they were either using or would use Microsoft's Bing search engine for pay-per-click advertising, and an additional 25.3 percent said they would consider Bing. Altogether, some 92 percent of survey respondents sai...
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Marketing & Advertising
Blogging Builds Trust, Demonstrates Expertise
July 9, 2009 • Sarah Worsham
Blogging is extremely important to ecommerce businesses. It's one of the easiest ways to update the content on your website, and it also demonstrates your expertise about your products. When done correctly, blogging can complement your products and offer a reason for people to return to...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Optimize the New Subscriber Experience
June 24, 2009 • Matt Carroll
Response rates are almost always higher for new subscribers to an email list. According to the "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide" by MarketingSherpa, subscribers click through at a 25 percent higher rate in their first month than in their second, and 67 percent higher in the first month ...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Use Twitter to Build a Community of Loyal Customers
June 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Microblogging site Twitter has the potential to be a powerful marketing and brand-building tool for ecommerce businesses interested in engaging their customers and being part of a community. But successful marketing on Twitter, or any microblogging site, requires more than just posting ...
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Marketing & Advertising
Wolfram|Alpha: A Search Engine Not Ready for eCommerce Merchants
May 29, 2009 • Jeff Muendel
Wolfram|Alpha is a search engine that aims to deliver answers to factual queries. Many search-engine-optimization blogs have referred to Wolfram|Alpha, and one colleague of mine – a sharp SEOer, and evidently a total SEO geek – even professed on Facebook to having “Wolfram|Alpha Fever.”...
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Social Media
The PeC Review: Tinker Sorts Your Twitter Tweets for Brand-Safe Marketing
May 27, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Tinker sorts and organizes Twitter.com tweets around brands, products, and other topics or events. This potentially gives ecommerce businesses a new, brand-safe way to market via social media and a means of monitoring popular trends. Tinker allows users to create so-called events based...
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Email Marketing
Email Marketing: Split Testing Improves Results “Up to 191 Percent”
May 26, 2009 • Matt Carroll
Split testing of email marketing campaigns can improve open rates, click through rates and even purchase conversion rates. More email service providers are offering split test functionality, making it possible to upload two or more versions of a single broadcast and send them to random ...
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Social Media
The PeC Review: Share This Makes Adding Social Media a Breeze
May 14, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Share This is a JavaScript-based widget that merchants can easily be embedded on their websites, allowing visitors to email web content to friends, send links as text messages, or post the content to a couple dozen social sharing sites like Facebook, MySpace, or Digg. Each week, "The P...
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Marketing & Advertising
Negative Keywords Improve Pay-per-click Performance, Save Money
May 5, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky
Implementation of negative keywords to your paid search account is one of the most effective methods to improve its performance. Negative keywords allow you to filter out unwanted traffic and only pay for clicks that have a higher probability of converting. Here’s how it works. Negativ...
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Google Ads
The PeC Review: Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool Lets You See What Spiders See
April 24, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool can help ecommerce merchants find pertinent keywords specific to a given URL, potentially improving search-engine-optimization and pay-per-click-advertising campaigns. Using URLs from your AdWords account, the Search Based Keyword Tool (SKTool) "dis...
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Marketing & Advertising
8 Tips for Choosing an SEO Professional
April 21, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky
Editor's Note: Greg Laptevsky is a longtime Practical eCommerce contributor and a professional search-engine-marketing consultant. We asked him for tips to help ecommerce companies hire SEO firms. What follows, below, is his response. The checklist below will help you choose the right ...
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Social Media
Quick Query: Comodo CEO on Hiring a Social Media Officer
April 16, 2009 • PEC Staff
There's much talk about social media sites and there's also talk of how companies can use social media for marketing purposes. One company doing just that is Comodo, a firm that provides online security solutions. Comodo has recently created a “social media officer” job position and Com...
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Email Marketing
PeC Traffic Report: Six Measurements to Improve Email Performance
April 16, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Good ecommerce merchants know that email campaigns built around opt-in lists are an effective way to reach potential customers. But more than 18 percent of email marketers in the U.S. either don't or cannot measure the return on investment for their email campaigns, according to a new s...
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Marketing & Advertising
The PeC Review: The SOC Exchange Offers A New, Inexpensive Selling Channel
March 24, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Selling online can take many forms and merchants can use several channels to market and sell their wares. The SOC Exchange is a new online storefront that lets merchants post and sell products for as little as $10 per year with no hidden fees. The site allows ecommerce businesses to ...
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Social Media
The PeC Review: Elgg Lets Any Business Create an Online Community
March 17, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Elgg is an open source platform to power any kind of social media community, and it is a tool that online merchants can use to help develop a loyal flow of site traffic. Social media communities similar to Facebook and MySpace are extremely popular. For example, eMarketer, a marketin...
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Influencers & Affiliates
The PeC Review: Google Affiliate Network is an Effective Marketing Tool
March 3, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Affiliate network marketing offers online retailers an effective, performance-based advertising channel with good conversion rates and a propensity to boosts sales. Like many affiliate programs, the Google Affiliate Network connects merchants with a network of website publishers. Aff...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Use Facebook, LinkedIn to Promote Your Store
February 23, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Online communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tangle allow members to join groups, post content, and respond to other's activity. While some marketers have tried to exploit the media, there are positive ways for online merchants to participate in linking networks and build stronger re...
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Social Media
Social Media: Listening is the New Marketing
February 18, 2009 • Paul Chaney
Marketers are known for talking, not listening. That is not to suggest we have not used tools like focus groups, user surveys or other research instruments in the past. It's just that, in the era of the participatory web, listening is not an option; it is a mandate. It provides great ...
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Social Media
Ecommerce Know-How: Social Media as a Marketing Tool
February 9, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An integrated social media marketing strategy can help you and your ecommerce site increase brand visibility, improve customer loyalty, and gain important insights about the markets you serve. And with the dramatic growth in social media traffic, ecommerce merchants would be smart to in...
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Google Ads
How to Expand Your PPC Keyword Portfolio
February 3, 2009 • Greg Laptevsky
Paid search is all about keywords. The more targeted keywords you have in your accounts, the more sales you are likely to realize from pay-per-click advertising. Invest just 10-20 minutes per day reviewing new keyword ideas – it will pay off big time in the long run. Below is a list of...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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