A jaw-dropping 212 million shoppers showed up to take 
advantage of Black Friday sales in 2010, with an even more astounding $39 billion being spent on merchandise. What this means for your business, of course, is a healthy competition to draw in as many of those 212 million shoppers and as much of an “in the black” profit as your organization can manage going into the first day of the 2011 holiday season.
With tech trends evolving from year to year, advertising has done so as well. Attracting your customers is, to the dismay of shop owners everywhere, going to require more than a simple flier or word-of-mouth campaign. Luring in customers means intelligently implementing a social networking strategy into your business’ marketing plan, which may include ubiquitous sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and various other sites with mass followings scouring the Internet in search of which retailers have the greatest deals, and what exclusive offerings businesses like yours have made available online.
Continue reading “Appealing to Consumers on Black Friday”
Tags: black friday, business to consumer marketing, holiday marketing tips
What gets more attention from prospects: listings with images or those with customer quotes?
As it turns out, the answer is “yes.” Mediative recently completed a study watching people interact with search results in Google Places listings. They wanted to know where people look, whether listings with reviews influence people and if/how people use the maps.
The study involved 12 in-person participants using eye-tracking software and another 90 participants online. The premise was that each participant took an imaginary road trip across Canada, choosing a place for a friend to get a tattoo in each of 4 different cities: Hamilton, London, Winnipeg and Edmonton.
Continue reading “Research Shows Which Google Places Listings Get More Clicks”
Tags: google maps, google places, mediative research
An interview with Larry Block of RUtxting.com
Larry shared some interesting statistics on text message marketing: according to Nelson Ratings the average text message gets a response within 2 hours.
He also shared that any B2C business who offers any kind of coupon can benefit from text message marketing and they are always finding new and creative ways to use this technology to do marketing.
Continue reading “Text Message Marketing Tips”
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Tags: text message marketing
An interview with Ileane Smith of Basic Blog Tips.
Many people get started blogging with lots of enthusiasm only to give it up a few months later because no one seems to know about it or show any interest in the discussion.
Continue reading “How to Blog Successfully – Tips From Ileane Smith”
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Tags: audience engagement, blog ideas, how to blog, ileane smith
The Experian Hitwise Black Friday 2011 Webinar provided marketers with plenty of useful data and implications for the fast approaching Black Friday 2011: November 25.
Visits to the top 500 retailer sites during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday increased from 2009 to 2010. Additionally, the graph below shows that visits to the top 500 retailer sites is higher and picking up through mid October 2011 as compared to the same period in 2010.
Continue reading “Ecommerce Tips for Black Friday 2011″
Tags: black friday, ecommerce, holiday marketing tips, online retail
Many businesses have a blog but don’t use it because its time consuming to write a good article that they would want to publish. I’ve heard lots of different excuses about not producing good content for the company blog.
But, here’s the fact: a blog that publishes useful content regularly draws more and more attention even to the point that it generates business development leads, including b2b lead generation.
Last year HubSpot published “101 Marketing Charts and Graphs” from a survey of numerous businesses and in it was a chart entitled “Leads by Indexed Web Pages” which clearly demonstrated the ratio of search engine indexed web pages to leads generated. It climbed from 60 pages indexed to 120 pages to 200 and so on. The most dramatic increase in lead generation came when a site moved from 200 or so pages indexed to over 311 pages indexed. The number of leads jumped by well over 200%! So adding quality content to your site or blog can produce real business development leads if your target audience uses the Internet to find solutions to problems related to your business.
Continue reading “Generate Business Leads By Producing Useful Content”
Tags: audience engagement, authoritative content, business development, link building, social voting
Although a completely underused tool, 
audio streaming can actually improve the communication that you currently have with your customers. If you also happen to use WordPress at the moment, then you are definitely in luck. WordPress happens to have several plug-ins that can help you add audio onto your website with ease.
Now, a lot of people seem to face audio problems because they have no idea how to make the audio to begin with. Some people are scared of using microphones, for example, while others have simply never talked at a computer before and just aren’t fond of the concept. So, although it is great news that recording messages nowadays is very affordable and easy to do, the actual recording of the messages might require some practice before you can succeed. Think about it, though: what new things out there don’t require practice?
Continue reading “Adding Audio in WordPress”
Tags: audio blog, mp3 blog, wordpress, wordpress audio plugin
An interview with Adam Berke, President of AdRoll
What is remarketing?
How does remarketing work?
How long has remarketing been around and how has this industry grown?
What are some indicators for businesses that might mean remarketing could work for them?
What are the key criteria for businesses to consider when evaluating remarketing companies?
Continue reading “Remarketing: Is It Right for Your Business?”
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Tags: remarketing, retargeting
Few organizations have the resources for a 
full-time dedicated employee to handle emerging trends like social media. For most, it falls into the purview of an already totally slammed communications department…or single communications person. Either way, it’s a social media time crunch.
Have no fear. Your organization, no matter how resource-strapped can engage in social media successfully. Here’s how.
Continue reading “Social Media Crunch Time”
Tags: crunch time, facebook, google+, LinkedIn, twitter
This article is intended for SEOs who 
want to stay fresh, but others may find it useful as well:
- Companies hiring for a web project
- SEOs on the job hunt
- Businesses who want to do better with SEO
Continue reading “Top SEO Skills for 2011″
Tags: authoritative content, link building, market research, search engine optimization, seo professionals, seo providers, seo skills
photo credit: Bev Lloyd-Roberts
Do you want your blog to succeed? Well, you can’t just expect it to do so without putting in any hard work or effort, can you? So, here are the 6 steps of blogging that you need to follow in order for your blog to succeed. Continue reading “6 Blogging Steps to Success”
Tags: audience engagement, seo
SEOmoz’s 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors offers some interesting details about Google’s current algorithm as it relates to individual page features and their correlation to search rank based on 10,000+ pages they tested earlier this year.
The correlation chart below outlines how features on a page tend to relate to higher rankings on a scale from 0 to 1. There are also negative correlations which means the more the particular feature showed up on a page, it tends to relate to lower rankings. But, remember these are correlations, not causes and based on a test of 10,000 pages. So, don’t run off and change your site just because you see something here that correlates to higher or lower rank, but do consider it especially in light of the Panda updates.
Tags: algorithm, google+, link building, organic seo, panda update, seo, SEOmoz
Website design is becoming more and more 
important in the internet boom which has become a money making phenomenon. A well developed website that encourages user activity to promote products or services is what people are looking for, and what they need in order to make an informed decision. When you are designing a website for your business you have two routes. Use template theme designs like WordPress, or have a custom built website. WordPress is a great way to conjure up a website quick, and start competing in your niche as soon as possible. However, a custom website that requires amazing interactions and specific preferences is going to require a little more. Maybe you have a website design in mind and just need to outsource the coding. If this is the case, you more than likely have been hearing a lot about HTML 5 and Flash going head to head.
Continue reading “Flash vs HTML5: The Race Is On”
Tags: flash, html5, web design, web development
An interview with Matt Williams of No Possum Consulting
- What challenges do businesses face today with online conversion?
- You’re really competing with yourself, not your competitors
- Classic book on entering the shopping cart: “Don’t Make Me Think”
- Shopping cart abandonment
- ROI for online conversion is usually high and on going
- Increase your traffic, optimize your conversion process, up selling and cross selling opportunities
- Where do you invest your $1000?
- Forecasting is key
Continue reading “Online Conversion With Matt Williams”
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Tags: conversion rate optimization, ecommerce, market research, return on investment, shopping cart abandonment
The 21 of the 50 best tips for ecommerce; 
have you implemented these yet?
1. Using any home digital video camera, you can shoot and now edit an effective video to complement your website’s product presentations. If your lighting is even and audio clear, you can create an effective online video. As a rule of thumb, keep videos short. For beginners, less than a minute is best. If you’re going over two minutes, your name better be Francis Ford Coppola. Don’t let an individual scene run longer than
10 seconds.
George Hague, HAGUEdirect
“5 Free, Fantastic Web Marketing Tools,” May, Retail Online Integration
Continue reading “Best Money-making and Cost-saving Tips for Online Retail from Last Year”
Tags: ecommerce, money making, online retail
An interview with Emory Rowland
Emory, it’s great to have another interview! The last one was on cost per action marketing and it was popular, but today you have something else on your mind, specifically digg. When did you get started with digg and what kind of success did you have with it?
I started using digg on 4/22/06 and had zero success. I loved the idea of reading news stories that had been voted into popularity rather than picked by editors. But, I admit in the forefront of my mind was the possibility of nudging some of my underappreciated content toward the top of the digg front page. So, like any noob would, I submitted my own posts to digg, sat back, and watched them fall flat, rarely if ever getting out of the single digit range.
Continue reading “Will Digg Ever be Shovel-ready?”
Tags: digg, seo, social bookmarking, social voting
If you’re looking to break into the field of web design, 
there are a few essentials that will vastly increase your productivity and earning potential.
Monitors
Continue reading “6 Essentials for Web Designers”
Tags: web design, web designers
The infographic covers:
- A users timeline
- Social media visitor growth
- facebook
- twitter
- LinkedIn
- Flickr
- Wikipedia
- Companies using social media
- The World
Continue reading “The Growth of Social Media [infographic]“
Tags: facebook, flickr, google+, LinkedIn, social voting, stumbleupon, twitter, wikipedia
I know Holiday 2011 isn’t even here yet, but if you 
are a retailer and/or e-commerce store owner it’s not enough to get ready for Holiday 2011, but also for next year’s season – especially if this is your first year in business. Here’s how…
Start a journal to log your observations about what went right and what can be improved upon in your planning, forecasting and inventory performance. Then start the new year with a post-mortem of your results and develop a strategy for improvement. Here are some potential topics to consider: Continue reading “Are You Ready for Holiday 2012?”
Tags: ecommerce, ecommerce forecasting, holiday marketing tips, sales forecasting
