Posted December 13th, 2011
by Roger McGershen
Have you tried sponsoring or doing your own contest on your website? If you haven’t, let me tell you, it is one of the most underrated methods of online marketing. A contest can really create buzz for your brand and is just a great way to get consumers interacting with your brand.
Besides contest being a great thing for your brand and buzz, believe it or not, a contest can have very positive benefits for search engine optimization.
If you create or sponsor a contest, you can see an immediate response in buzz. Contest now a days, with the social web, can spread quickly. Facebook and Twitter are a great way to really push contest.
So, you’re thinking, how can we (or I) create a contest? There are currently three contest platforms that I am aware of that can help you create and manage a contest for your website:
1. ContestCore: This seems like a very simple contest platform to use. The layout of their own site is great and seems very use friendly. You can request a demo and good for small businesses, brands, non-profits, bloggers and more.
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Posted in Ecommerce Essentials & Tips, Online Marketing Strategies
Posted November 3rd, 2011
by Pablo
As an internet retailer, your focus should be on having the most exposure possible. You can accomplish this of course by a number of ways on the internet. Microblogging is a great strategy to build up another property on the web and sometimes it’s easier to generate traffic through a microblogging platform than starting a blog on your own domain from scratch.
Tumblr offers a great opportunity for those seeking a bit more traffic and also link building.
TUMBLR TRAFFIC AND DEMOGRAPHICS:
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted October 18th, 2011
by Pablo
It’s important to always follow what the ecommerce industry is focused in terms of online marketing. Following trends and research, we can prioritize some of the things we need to do for our own websites. Having said that, it’s also not always about following what other are doing, but if you ask enough ecommerce merchants where their focus is in terms of online marketing, you have to look at the data as a whole which will give you a significant signal of maybe where we should focus our internet marketing ourselves.
From a survey in one of our blog post titled, “ecommerce trends to watch for in 2011,” and an email to some customers, we asked where the focus was in terms of online marketing for their ecommerce marketing efforts (exposure, sales, etc.)
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted October 11th, 2011
by Pablo
Get 5 online marketing strategies for your ecommerce website during the holiday season. This is the time to really capitalize on consumers flocking on the web to find the best deals and shop!Â
We love the holidays, don’t we? For us online marketers and internet retailers, the holiday season is crunch time. What some internet retailers do however is make the mistake of waiting for the holidays to start promoting. Holiday promotions should start pre-holiday season to get consumers and customers ready to start buying FROM YOU FIRST.
5 Strategies to Implement for Online Marketing (Holidays)
DEVELOP PROMOTIONS: People love promotions, so, you have to have them. Promotions can be anything from implementing free shipping on certain items or site wide. Also, you can do a buy 1 and get a certain percentage of another pair which is always a consumer favorite and works well.
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted September 6th, 2011
by Pablo
Want to have the #1 spot for a specific keyword(s) to capture the most possible traffic searching for it? Google now gives you a top position bid estimate which can help you reach the #1 position for a specific keyword!
I remember the days when you were able to see how much your competitors where bidding on for specific keywords using the omniture keyword tool…aaahh…the good ol’ days of Pay-Per-Click. Quality score didn’t really exist then and PPC, overall, was pretty basic and a simple idea. Over the years, as the engines developed, now it takes a strategy to make sure you have the best possible campaign running for your website to have a positive return on investment.
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted August 3rd, 2011
by Pablo
If you are allocating some of your marketing / advertising dollars into PPC (pay-per-click) then you know how important it is to make sure you have a well optimized campaign to maximize opportunity and increase your return on investment.
One factor that is crucial to the success of your PPC campaign is your keyword and ad CTR (click-through-rate.) Why is CTR so important and vital to your campaign as a metric? CTR does two things for Google and for you of course.
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted June 30th, 2011
by Pablo
Product data feeds are one of the most important elements that an ecommerce business has to promote the products they carry online. Here, we describe some of the key elements of the product data feeds to get the results from your product data feeds.
[Check out our Google Base Product Feed Optimization Basics Tips]
If you’re an internet retailer, you’ve surely already tried or are currently advertising in channels such as shopping comparison websites such as BizRate, Nextag and many others. If you don’t, then I’m sure you’re including your products in free sales channels such as Google Base.
Creating your product data feed the right way can have huge implications on the results you get from these channels.
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted June 21st, 2011
by Roger McGershen
If you’re an internet retailer and haven’t heard of a flash sale website or haven’t thought about starting a flash website for your business (if you carry inventory on hand and a lot of it) you may not be a thinking forward or by now, thinking about the current state of ecommerce and consumers.
Flash websites have been a hot commodity for certain large internet retailers to get overstock or excess inventory off their hands. One of the examples I can think about that I personally got an email for is MyHabit from Amazon which isn’t really a flash sale website but more of an exclusive overstock sale site which you need to subscribe for. I think the pioneer of the flash sale business model may have come from Woot.com which, yes…got bought out by Amazon by a whooping $110 million dollars.
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted May 18th, 2011
by Pablo
As we know, the web is developing in what is the social web and content is what fuels this phenomenon. There has never been an infusion of content that spreads as quick and as abundant as it does in today’s cyber world. No matter who you are, if you have a platform and have something interesting to say, whether an individual or brand, your content can be shared by hundreds, if not thousands and if lucky, by millions of users.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter help fuel the spread of content 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Here is where we have a great opportunity to make sure to get the most exposure possible from the content we put out. The important thing to putting together a content strategy is understand how consumers are sharing information on the web.
In April 2011, AOL and Nielsen Online had a report called “content is the fuel of the social web” which analyzed more than 10,000 social media messages to see how consumers share content online, reports Emarketer. Personally, this data is a goldmine for us online marketers and those who put forth a strategy for our websites to make sure we can get the most out of the content we put out. Remember, while it is important to develop a good amount of content on the web, it is just as important to make sure you are putting out good content. Quality matters.
Let’s take a look at the following illustration of how users share online content by method from a sample in December 2010:
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
Posted May 13th, 2011
by Rafael Solorzano
Do you spend money in online marketing? Are you doing anything to make sure that you bring your visitors back to your website after their first visit? Remarketing as an online marketing strategy is a great way to bring customers back to your website after their initial visit. Remarketing online advertising can not only help you bring back visitors to your website, but it’s a sure way to improve branding and sales conversion rates.
For those internet retailers who spend a considerable amount of money, or any amounts of money for that matter in online advertising, it’s important we make the most of our visitors. Each visitor is a potential sale…and if you don’t have that mentality in place, you need to get there.
Think about your visitors for a second. Once they land on your website, most likely, they may go elsewhere to compare. What actions are you taking on your site to capture SOMETHING from your visitors? If your answer is nothing, than you’re wasting some of your advertising dollars.
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Posted in Online Marketing Strategies
