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 ignored. It is just too pervasive, too ubiquitous. But from an ecommerce marketing standpoint, social media is often too little understood. The need for a clear explanation about what social media is and how to include it in your marketing was made clear to me last week, when Practical Ecommerce and HubSpot hosted a social media webinar. The event attracted dozens of questions before the broadcast and hundreds of...

Continue reading The PEC Review: The Social Media Marketing Book

Although Meta descriptions are no longer part of the ranking algorithm they can affect your site's positions in the personalized search results. Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History. Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results...

Continue reading Your Meta Descriptions Now Affect Your Google Rankings Again

Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter make it easy for people to come together and share opinions, experiences and thoughts on a number of topics. Smart companies understand this and are using the power of social media to connect and inform their customers, and potential customers. Referred to as "Social Media Marketing", it's a smart way to open the lines of communication between you and your prospects. Social media activities run the gamut from Blogging, micro blogging sites such as Twitter, social networking communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook, video and music uploading sites, discussion forums, photo sharing and more. With so many different sites and ways to participate, it can be difficult to keep track of all your efforts. Participating in social media doesn't take a lot of money, but it is very time consuming and businesses want to know that all of this investment in...

Continue reading Are Your Ears Burning? - 20 Tools for Tracking Social Media Marketing

One of the most useful tools to come along in recent years for online marketers is URL shorteners.There are sites where you can paste a long, ugly URL into a form, and the site will give you a much shorter URL to use in your emails, newsletters and promotions.There are also scripts that you can install on your server, that allow you to generate shortened URLs, which is what I prefer, due to the great control it gives you.In case you are not using the tiny urls, you're probably losing a lot of sales and traffic. The benefits of using shortened URLs typically include: • They allow you to conserve space when posting to micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, where each of your posts is limited to a mere 140 characters. • They look more professional than long, unwieldy affiliate URLs (especially if they have your domain name in them)....

Continue reading URL Shortening Services are Holding You Hostage - Fight Back!

Written by Brendan GibbonsWith 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 Facebook opened up its platform to developers, the apps and pages available for commercial use have greatly increased in number and influence. Many online retailers have used it as a marketing technique or, in some cases, even as an online storefront in itself. There are many options for using Facebook to market your business, and in this article we'll be looking at five examples of merchants who have used this popular social media tool to bring more traffic to their online stores. Victoria's Secret PINK on Facebook Screenshot of Victoria's Secret PINK page on Facebook. With...

Continue reading Five Innovative Facebook Examples from Ecommerce Merchants