Showing posts with label online business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label online business. Show all posts

Friday, 31 August 2012

Mobile marketing and the power it holds - Statistics included

While everyone tends to use email marketing to advertise their online business and the products they sell, many business tends to overlook mobile marketing as they believe that this form of marketing bears very little results. In fact, in some cases mobile marketing can be a much better promotional tool than it's email counterpart.

Here are a few statistics that may help to open your eyes about how successful mobile marketing could be for your business:

  • 61% of local searches on a mobile device then result in a phone call
  • 52% of all advertisements seen on a mobile device result in a phone call
  • 91% of all mobile phone owners have their phones within arms length
  • By 2016 mobile marketing will make up 15.2% of all global online advertising 


Although pretty much everyone has an email account, some people may only check their inbox once day. In comparison, the average user checks their mobile phone over 100 times a day. This means that when you are sending out a mobile marketing campaign, you have a greater chance of your message being seen by a user than you would if you were to send it out by email.

Following on from this, to view an email, the user has to actually willingly click on the on the link to then open it up. This means that your email needs to be successful in two different stages, the subject heading and the message itself.  When a person receives a SMS message on their phone, generally the users will first have to open up the message to then delete it from their inbox. Not only does this give your message instant exposure, but it also increases the likelihood of your message being successful, as the will be instantly exposed to your message. Even if they decide to then delete the message, they will still have become aware of your brand. 

Another benefit of mobile marketing is the ability to incorporate other forms of marketing into the device. With over 835 million smartphone users worldwide all using their phones to send messages, view websites and interact through social media, the ability to reach your audience has never been greater. It isn't just SMS marketing that can have success of a mobile phone. With 44% of Facebook's 900+ million users accessing the platform on their mobile devices, if you decide to run a promotion on a social media site such as Facebook and Twitter, the user will receive a notification on their phone regarding the post, if they already follow you. This 44% are also twice as active on Facebook as those who access the social media site via their desktop computers. While this is not strictly mobile marketing, more social media marketing, it just gives you an idea of the potential all forms of mobile marketing hold in gaining a brand image for your ecommerce store.



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Thursday, 30 August 2012

How to find the right domain for your business

When you are setting up your own ecommerce store, finding the right domain is important in allowing your customers to easily find your site, as well as helping you market your brand much easier. 

When it comes to selecting a domain name for your business, there are a number of different factors you need to consider:

Length - The shorter your domain name, the easier it will be for customers to remember, aswell as increasing the chance of customers coming across it during search engine queries. Although having a longer domain name may give customers a better idea about what it is your online store offers, it is very unlikely that they will remember the name to then enter it into a web address at a later date.

Keywords - This is probably the most crucial part of selecting a domain address. When you select a domain address, you want it to contain keywords that are related to what your business does. To find out what the most popular keywords are in search engine queries, you can use free applications such as 'Google Keyword Tool' to see which are the most popular in terms of being searched for, both locally and globally. The better the keywords, the higher your website will be placed in search engine rankings, improving the levels of traffic your site will generate. However, you need to remember that the more popular a keyword is, the more likely someone will have it within their domain name. This means that when you come to try and find a domain name that includes this keyword you may find that most of them are taken. The better a keyword is in terms of generating traffic, the more you will most likely have to pay to purchase that particular domain.

What you also don't want to do is just try and cram as many keywords into your domain address as you possibly can. The key is to try and include keywords into the address, while still having it make sense and keeping it catchy.

Think outside the box - If for example, you are setting up an electronics store, there are going to be a wide range of stores already out there meaning that you are not going to be able to get a domain that is straight to the point in terms of what it is you sell. For this reason you need to start thinking outside the box. Come up with a name that is not only related to what it is your business provides, but is also catchy and something that other people probably haven't heard of. This will not only help your store stand out from the rest, but will increase the chance of a customer remembering your name, creating brand awareness right from the start.

Get a '.com' address - You may search for a domain and find that although '.com' is taken '.co' or '.net' is still available. These are available for a reason. Websites that end in '.net', '.co' or any others apart from '.com' receive substantially less traffic. When setting up your only online store  you must ensure that you have a '.com' web address. Even if you only sell within the UK using a '.co.uk' domain, you should also look to purchase the '.com' equivalent of that address as although you aren't using it now, there may come a point in the future when you expand to sell internationally and by then you may find that the domain has already been taken by someone else. 

If you are struggling to find a domain that you really want for your business, you could try using a hyphen, although I would only do this as a last resort. While using a hyphen gives you access to a whole new crop of domain names, it isn't as memorable to customers as you will specifically have to tell the customer where the hyphen goes for them to enter the the web address themselves. 

If there is a particular domain that you really want for your business but when searching for it you find that it is taken, check the lease for the domain using the "whois" feature from the domain provider to see when it expires. If the lease on that particular domain is set to expire soon, you can look to back order that domain which means as soon as it comes available you will be able to purchase it. But don't wait too long, each day you wait for a particular domain is a day when you aren't selling your products and missing out on a potential profit. 

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Wednesday, 29 August 2012

Monday the best day to sell?

According to a study carried out by Play.com owners Rakuten, the day when the British population buys most of there items online is a Monday, based on traffic and sales made through their various marketplaces.

There are a number of theories as to why this could be. It could be because people are disappointed to be back at work on a Monday after having time off over the weekend, so they look to purchase items online in order to make themselves feel better. Another theory is that they have more energy at the beginning of the week than they do at the end, so they are more willing to make the effort of browsing through online stores in order to find a product they want to purchase

While these are only figures taken from platforms owned by Rakuten, it gives you an insight into the buying behaviour of certain individuals. So if you run a small online business how can you take advantage of this?

Although you can't directly control when a customer will purchase from your store, you can have some influence on their decisions through your marketing. If you currently look to send out your email campaigns and other marketing tools during the week, you may want to start looking to send these out during the weekend, with a focus on Sunday evenings to target these shoppers first thing on Monday morning. 

The study also found that the British were the most impulsive taking shoppers on average around 40 seconds when deciding whether to buy a product or not. This underpins the need for all online stores to have a streamlined purchase process which allows customers to easily navigate through your store, find a product they wish to buy and complete the payment process. 

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Fake Twitter followers and how to find them

When creating a Twitter account for your online business, you want to try and get as many followers as you can because as we all know the more followers you get, the more people will become aware of your business. Well actually this isn't always true. There are a number of fake accounts on Twitter, who each have different reasons for being there. Some are just bots, while others are looking to possibly scam Twitter users.

There are also a number of fake accounts who claim to be people they aren't, meaning that if you are looking to follow an important figure within your industry, you can often find it difficult to as there are numerous accounts claiming to be a specific person.


While it does look better for your business from an outside perspective if you do have a number of Twitter followers, if the majority of those followers are fake accounts or bots, your messages aren't going to reach many people. So, how can you find out if you do have any fake followers on your Twitter account?

Check their followers

If you see that they are following a large amount of people but only have a small number following themselves, this is a clear indication that the Twitter account is in fact a bot. What I mean by large and small is that if for example, if they are following 2,000 people but only have 20 followers themselves, this tells you that their own content output is pretty much non-existent and that they are indeed a bot.

Check their direct messages

Looking at their direct messages is another clear indication of whether an account is a bot or not. While most people send various messages on different subjects to a variety of users, a bot will simply send the exact same message to everyone they are following. While this isn't subtle, it is one of the clearest indications that the Twitter account is an automated bot. 

Wait it out

A lot of fake accounts who are looking to gain a number of followers will start following a number of different accounts. They will then wait 24 to 48 hours to see if you begin following them. If you decide that you don't wish to follow them, they will then unfollow you. If after 48 hours they are still on your Twitter account, you can then use some of the other steps to determine whether they are fake or if the account is a bot. 

Use a tool

There are a few different tools out there such as "Status People", which you can use for free to check how many fake followers you have on your account. This will then allow you to manually remove these fake users from your Twitter account. The website also provides you with names of accounts that are 100% fake so that you can look out for them in case they start following you in the future.

Look for a verification

If you are looking to follow your favourite celebrity or figure within your industry, there may be a number of different accounts that claim to be theirs. In order to find the one that is actually really, you should look for the small image next to their Twitter name which signifies that it is a verified account. This image consists of a white tick within a blue bubble. Once you see that image you know that it is the real account of that person and has been verified as real by Twitter. 



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Tuesday, 28 August 2012

How to give your emails the best chance of success

When creating emails advertising your online business and the products you have for sale, having the right subject heading is going to make or break your email. When deciding on what your message will be, the subject heading should be one of the first things you consider. If the subject heading isn't right, it's not going to encourage customers to open it and your email is not going to be seen.

An infographic created by email marketing company, Mailer Mailer, looked at the different aspects which make up a successful email. They found that having a subject line of between 4 and 15 characters gives you the best chance of success when compared with other subject headings of varying character lengths. The heading between 4 and 15 characters was by far the most successful with an open rate of 15.2%. This means that for your online store, you should look to create an appealing message that is within this character limit. However, you do not want your email to sound spammy as it will put people off opening it. This means try to not have a subject heading such as "Buy, Buy, Buy" as it may seem, from the point of the recipient, to just be random junk mail rather than a great opportunity to purchase from your store.

While these statistics suggest that it's something that every business should be trying, it is very much something that is dependant on who your customers are. Some small businesses, such as eBay stores, tend to find that short subject headings don't work, discovering that they engage with their customers though more thought provoking headings, consisting of well over 30 characters. By all means you should try out the 4 to 15 character subject heading to see if it is just as successful for your business. However, if it doesn't work out well for you the first few times, don't keep doing it in the hope that it will eventually work. Sometimes less isn't always more. 

If you are able to come up with 3 or 4 different subject headings and just can't decide which one you would like to use, this is where split testing comes into play. This means sending out small test batches of emails containing the various different subject headings. You then measure the success of each different heading and then send the most successful to the rest of your customers. This ensures that you are using the most success subject heading you can, rather than sticking all of your eggs in one basket and just randomly trying with one message to see what happens. 

Once you have sent out your email marketing campaign, the best time to measure its success is generally within the first 16 hours. The research carried out by Mailer Mailer found that around 70% of the total opens for your email occur within the first 16 hours. This means that if after 16 hours you have not achieved round about the number of opens and click throughs you were looking for, you email message may not have been correct. If this happens don't panic, analysing where your email let you down is easy enough. If your message had a lower open rate than you initially wanted, it is an indication that your subject message is what let the message down and something you should look to change for future emails. If it is the click through rate that was low, then it is the message contained within the email and the external links you provided.

Here's something that may surprise you. The research carried out found that the best day to schedule your emails in order to achieve the best opens and click throughs is in fact Sunday. Now the reason for such a high success rate on the supposed day of rest could be because people simply have more free time on Sunday than they do on any other day of the week, so are more likely to take the time checking the emails and purchasing products from various ecommerce stores. 


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Friday, 24 August 2012

How to maximise your blog followers

No matter what online business you run, the majority of people will have their own online blog to help improve their SEO standing and create a platform to regularly engage with and inform their audience. 

As there are so many people producing a steady stream of content on a daily basis, how do you help your blog stand out from the rest and tell people that they must come to your blog because your content is a must read for anyone?

Originality

This is the most obvious aspect of any online blog. The content needs to not only be entertaining to your readers, it also needs to be as original as it possibly can. What you don't want to do is simply look through other peoples blogs, find an article you like and then copy it into your own blog. This is extremely bad for three reasons: 

  • Duplicated content is frowned upon by Google and will result in your search engine ranking going down
  • Readers won't want to visit your blog to read an article that they have just read on another website.
  • It will damage the whole credibility of your business as customers will see this plagiarism, instantly making you seem untrustworthy.

When producing content for your online store, you are going to find that whatever subject you choose to write about, it has pretty much been covered by someone else previously. However, blogs are a great platform for personal opinion. So taking this into account, look to put a different spin on the subject. Look at it from an angle that others previously haven't considered, including any personal opinions you have on the subject. This will give you the best chance to make your content as original as you possibly can. 

Place your content everywhere

If your content is interesting and appealing to an audience, you are going to get people who will specifically come to your blog to read your latest posts. However, you shouldn't just post a blog article then sit back and wait for them to come to your site. Like any good salesman, you should be out there advertising your content, encouraging them to come to your site and take a look at what you have on offer. 

This doesn't just mean sharing your content with fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter, you should be playing your content on social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon. The more external links you can create to your blog, the greater chance you have of people visiting it. You can also look to promote your content as a rebuttal on other blogs. For example, like I said earlier, you should look to create content that looks at certain aspects of your profession but at a different angle. You can then visit another blog that has a post on the same particular topic and link your blog post in the comments for readers to gain another point of view. 

Encourage interaction

When you place content out into the public domain, you can often be worried about any criticism or negative opinions it might generate. You need to get past this and understand that interaction on your blog is not only a great way to gain readers, but it is also a superb way to gain some exposure for your blog and your business as a whole. If someone disagrees with a point that you have made in your blog then reply to the comment with response to their opinion. This then encourages others to get involved and creates a platform for discussion, improving your relationship with these users. This is how you will build up some of your regular blog followers. 

When replying to a comment, you should always remember that you are seen as the authoritative, professional source. Even if someone's comment infuriates you, keep your cool and don't launch an attack on the user. This will just alienate a number of users from your blog and damage your public image. Reply in a manner that is professional and courteous, keeping your cool and explaining your side of the discussion in a clear, concise way.  

Be selective with keywords

 A large part of SEO comes in having the right keywords in your text and writing a blog is no different. The more relevant your keywords, the more likely your article is going to be found in search engines. When writing an article about a particular topic, you should always consider what keywords you wish to place in the text. This will then allow you to write the article in a way that includes these keywords, while still making sense to your audience.

If you are unsure which keywords to use in your blog, you can use a keyword program such as Google's Keyword Tool to find out which are the most searched for words both locally and globally. You can then incorporate these words into your articles to ensure that you have the best chance of people finding your article through a search engine and then visiting your ecommerce business as a result.

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A guide to gamification and how it can improve consumer interactivity

Gamification is the process by which you use game mechanics to influence and encourage users to take part in non-gaming activities. This concept is something which has been increasingly more prevalent in the world of online selling. 

These techniques are great for online stores and other sellers as they can help improve traffic, sales, interactivity and ROI. However, if you are running a small business, which gamification techniques can you use to try and encourage customers to regularly purchase from your store?

Reward points

Success for any online business is going to come in the ability to turn customers into repeat buyers. While good value and product quality is going to play a huge factor in allowing them to return to your store in the future, you can encourage them to regularly purchase from your store with reward points. How this works is that when a customer purchases an item from your store, depending on how much that product cost, they will receive a certain number of reward points. As they make more purchases, they gain more points which they can then exchange for money off future products.

This gives customers more of a reason to shop at your store than a rival competitor. Even if the customer does find the same product cheaper elsewhere, the money they could save from using their reward points at your store could by the deciding factor in helping them make up their mind as to which store they want to purchase from. 

Survey rewards

This is something we have seen become increasingly popular on social media platforms like Facebook where users can complete surveys in order to gain Facebook credits which they can then use to purchase items within the social media site's app games.

If you run an ecommerce store, while you don't have applications that require credits to play, these surveys can make a huge difference for your business by allowing you to improve the overall customer service and efficiency that your business provides, enabling you to entice future customers to your store. As customers are generally reluctant to fill in surveys, you can look to provide some sort of incentive that gives them a nudge to complete the forms. 

Level or badge System 

If your online business has a forum, blog or other form of community communication, you could reward users based on their levels of interaction. The more a user posts a comment on a blog or forum, the more points they get. The points then work as a level system, meaning the more points you gain the higher level you achieve. Each of these levels could also consist of a different badge which allows users to separate themselves from each other in some form of social hierarchy system. If you wish, you could then reward individuals who reach a certain level with a prize or discount on a particular product. What this does is encourage all users to regularly engage with both yourself and others through your communication channels. 

However, while gamification is a great way to increase competition between your customers and encourage them to carry out a range of activities related to your business, there are a number of aspects that you need to watch out for. Whenever you carry out gamification, you need to ensure that the different techniques you employ have some form of substance to them. For example, there is no point giving out random badges that don't really have any meaning to customers. While this will result in a short term increase in activity on your site, known as the "shark fin" effect, the real lack of effort in achieving the badges will fail to satisfy customers and will most likely result in them becoming bored and leaving your site. 

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Facebook features that can give your business an extra boost

Everyone knows that to take full advantage of social commerce and increase your business's brand identity you need to have a Facebook business page. However, this is not the only way you can increase your brand exposure through Facebook. There are a number of other features that you can use to display your content to people who don't necessarily follow your fan page.

Promoted posts allow you to pay to have your content displayed to users who do not follow your business. While this is currently in the testing phase, it is a great promotion platform for a small online business who are looking to increase the number of fans they have. However, this option is only available to small businesses who have between 400 and 1000 fans. If this feature does get implemented into Facebook, they will then appear in the newsfeed Facebook users. To ensure that these adverts do not appear in the newsfeeds of people who have no interest in your business, you can choose specific parameters for your adverts such as geographical location, age and gender.

You can also pay Facebook to sponsor search results. This means that when a user searches for something related to your business, your business will appear at the top of the search results as a "Top Hit." This allows a large number of people who are interested in things to do with your business to become aware of your company and possibly visit your business fan page. However, if a user does not wish to see your sponsored link in the future, they can simply click on the 'X' next to the sponsored link and tell Facebook why they no longer want to see it.

Trending articles is another way that you can increase your business's exposure. When numerous friends on Facebook read the same article, that article will appear at the top of a newsfeed as a trending article. If you produce a blog for your business or write articles related to your field of expertise, that article could appear as a trending article, meaning that everyone else on a person's friends list will become aware of your article and may then read it. If they find your article interesting they could then visit the Facebook page or travel to your online store.

 eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk

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Wednesday, 22 August 2012

Create a personal brand to develop your ecommerce business

Many businesses spend time and money looking to create a brand for their online business. However, some businesses find success in creating a brand image for a single person within the business rather than the business as a whole.

The best example of this would be through the social networking site, Twitter. Many brands such as Google, Microsoft and Twitter themselves, have members of staff who achieve a substantial amounts of followers, becoming a brand in their own right. While many of these people do get followed because they work for these large brands, you can use this concept to help great a personal brand for yourself, which in turn will help boost your business's exposure.

So how do you go about this? Well basically what you have to do is get yourself out there and interact with people on a number of different platforms. This means creating an account on every social media site you can think of and begin producing content, interacting with users and generating followers. This should be a personal account, not an account that you as part of your company's social commerce campaign. The key to success with this is to not sound like you are trying to sell them anything, you need to just be like anyone else who users Twitter, post personal updates as well as informative content.  Once you have built up this rapport with your audience, you can then begin to provide them with extra information regarding your business which then encourages them to transform from a simple social media follower to a valued customer.

Another way to develop this personal brand is through creating blogs and article content that relates to your business. This means that as more people read your articles, they will begin to come familiar with your writing style and content, making them interested in future blog posts. However, isn't just about producing the content and then leaving it alone for people to read. Like social media, you need to actively engage with your audience. When someone posts a comment on one of your blog posts, you should reply either with thanks or a response to try and generate some sort of debate.

While online networking is a very important part of helping create a personal brand, you shouldn't overlook the benefits of offline networking. Attending events, functions, trade shows and other events will allow people to interact with you on a personal level while being able to hear you speak on a personal level. This will all people to see that you are an expect with your particular field, meaning they will then call upon you or your business in future for any insight. This will give you a great opportunity to turn these people from individuals who are interested in what you have to say, to people who you can pitch your products and services to and hopefully turn them into customers.

Creating a personal brand for your business gives your a business a face and makes you seem much more approachable to your customers. Having a regular point of contact through social media and blog content also makes you seem much more trustworthy and you are not just some faceless business who could disappear over night. There are many benefits to creating a personal identity and they shouldn't be overlooked when looking to increase your ecommerce store's exposure.


eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk

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Tuesday, 21 August 2012

Create the perfect SEO and user friendly website for your business

When building an online store from scratch, the layout of your store is everything, not just to appeal to visiting customers, but to also make your website SEO friendly, bringing more customers to your website through search engine rankings. Generally, when people look to set up an online store, they are eager to set it up as quickly as possibly in order to begin selling straight away. While getting your website up and running as soon as possible is important, it should be done in conjunction with ensuring your site is well designed rather than in sacrifice of.

As most people are now aware of, the most important part of on page SEO for your website comes in placing keywords that relate to your business throughout your site while still making sure all of the content is readable. If you are unfamiliar with keywords and how they can significantly help your website move up the rankings, check out my previous article on basic SEO for everything you need to know. (New Businesses Guide to SEO Success)

However, while SEO on your website is of vital importance, you need to make sure that the aesthetics of your website are as appealing to visiting customers as your keywords are to Google. It's no good having great SEO which moves your site high up search engine rankings, bringing a number of new customers to your site, only for those new customers to then be put off by the layout. When a customer first visits your site, they spend just under three seconds quickly scanning the whole page from top to bottom. This means that they spend around 180 milliseconds on one area of your site before moving on to the next. This emphasises the importance of making a good impression right from the get go or else they may leave your site and never return.  

Generally, people tend to read a screen the same way they would read text, moving from left to right. Therefore, you may want to have your business's logo placed in the top left corner of the page, meaning when customers visit your site, the logo is the first thing they see. This instantly creates a brand identity for your business as customers will become familiar with your logo. 

Although you want to have as much information as you possibly can on your pages to keep your customers informed, you simply do not want to flood your page with text. You may think "if I have a lot of text, it means I can put a load of keywords in there for SEO making it a good idea, right?" If you look at all major brand websites, their layout tends to be clean and uncluttered, meaning they have only the most necessary information on a page. As a person spends 2.6 seconds scanning a website before focussing on a particular area of interest, having huge chunks of text through the page is going to be rather off putting as they don't want to have to read through reams of text pick out the information that is of interest to them. 

As the only saying goes  "A picture paints a thousand words" and this is never truer when creating a website for your online store. If you run an ecommerce business that sells products such as clothing, electronics and other goods, images of your products and promotional animations are going to be much more appealing than text, as they instantly tell customers information that may have taken you a couple of paragraphs to relay through text. 

What most websites tend to do is have one focal image at the top of the page, underneath the navigation bar. This works as an appealing image to draw the viewers eye, encouraging them to work their way down through the page.

This idea of making your website as easy to navigate as possible should also be taken into account when displaying images of your products for customers to purchase. While it would be easier to just lay out your items all on one page and have customers choose from them, in terms of navigation, it can make it rather difficult to find the item they want. Breakdown your products into different categories in terms of what you sell with a separate page for each category and links to those various categories placed on either the top of side of each page.

First IMPRESSIONS of your website
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The best way to boost your blog reads

Creating a blog for your online business is a great way to make your website SEO friendly, improving the likelihood that people will see it at the top of search engine rankings. However, with the number of people who produce their own blogs, getting readers to consistently visit your blog can be difficult. Rather than waiting for them to come to you, there are ways for you to go to them, show them your work and hopefully bring them back to your site. Social bookmarking websites are a great way to help give your blog that extra boost in terms of reads.

StumbleUpon

One of the best social networking sites around in terms of boosting the number of readers your articles can achieve. However, these reads aren't necessarily from people who are interested in reading your content. How StumbleUpon works is that you sign up and select a certain number of categories that you are interested in. Once you click the "Stumble" button, you are then sent bounced to random webpages that are to do with one of your specific interests. If you have your blog content within StumbleUpon, it means that your article will be one of these pages that users see. 

When you use Stumbleupon, you need to make sure that you don't use it as a one way street to only promote your own content. If you continually submit pages from the same URL address, StumbleUpon will tag you as being a spammer and will block you from submitting future pages from that URL. To avoid this you need to make sure you use the bookmarking site to its full potential. Visit different websites that are of interest to you and like their pages. This will not only tailor your Stumble feed to show articles that are of interest to you, but will also allow you to keep posting your own blog articles without being seen as a spammer.

Digg

Digg is a social bookmarking site that has stood the rest of time, still ranking in the top five of all bookmarking sites despite being one of the first created. While it is harder to get reads on Digg as opposed to the previously mentioned StumbleUpon, if you manage to get your blog posts on to the front page of Digg you are guaranteed to have people reading your article in droves. Posts that tend to do better than others on Digg are news articles and niche articles. What I mean by niche is articles that stand out from all others, creating humour and touching on a topic that previously hasn't been touched on much by other users. 

Delicious

The first ever social bookmarking site to go live on the Internet and it's still going strong today. Delicious allows you to simply add links to your blog article and then add as many tags to that post as you like. The more tags you place on a post, the more chance that users are going to come across it in their search. LIke Digg, your blog post will only really receive significant amounts of traffic to your blog if it manages to make the front page. There isn't really anyway to artificially enhance this, you simply need to wait for people to like it and move it up the ranking.

Reddit

Unlike the previous two social bookmarking sites, Digg is a site that you need to work hard at in order to make your posts a success. You cannot simply add your post to the site and then be done with it until you next wish to add a page. In order to achieve the best levels of success, you need to regularly engage in conversation with other users and help them by providing content and other information that could be of use to them.

Inbound

A bookmarking site aimed at people interested in Internet marketing posts. However, the site does allow you to post articles that are to do with related topics such as ecommerce, advertising and other forms of marketing. The website is very much in it's infancy but is full of potential. If you are someone who regularly creates posts on these subjects, it will allow you to create gain a number of dedicated number of followers who will become interested in any future posts you make. 

Other notable mentions

While these sites aren't considered social bookmarking sites, it would be crazy not to use them to promote your blog posts and articles. Twitter, Google+ and Facebook are still some of the best ways to promote your blog, articles or anything to do with your business through social interaction and social commerce. With over a billion combined users, the potential audience you can reach is simply staggering, meaning that one single post could be shared between your friends and other people who are interested in your site, allowing you to gain a substantial number of reads in a short space of time. Not only that, it allows you to promote your online store and brand image easily, enticing users to visit your site.

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Monday, 20 August 2012

eBay's grand gesture or cunning advertising ploy?

eBay have announced that they are making all sports collectable items free to list until the end of the year. This will come as great news to some online stores as these items can be listed for free on both auctions and buy now listings.

The sports collectibles section on eBay contains items such as signed photographs of sports stars, shirts, match day programs and various other sporting memorabilia. 


It has been touted for many months that eBay could drop listing fees from some items in an attempt to gain an advantage in their battle with rival marketplace, Amazon, who have seemingly been improving their standing with sellers as of late. 

The new setup for sports collectable sellers means that store owners under the "Basic" account setting can list up to 5,000 items without having to pay insertion fees, with "Premium" and "Anchor" packages able to list up to 10,000. Sellers who do not have an online eBay store are able to list 500 sports collectable items without having to pay the listing fees.

However, while this does seem like a grand gesture on the part of eBay to offer some online sellers the chance to list products on their eBay store for free, other believe that this is part of a greater revenue scheme. One theory is that the removal of the listing price for this item category will result in sellers listing more items. The more items that are placed on eBay, the more advertisements that are going to be seen by buyers, which in turn will result in great advertising revenue for eBay.



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Creating the perfect social media strategy for your business

From a purely SEO perspective, social media is a fantastic tool for any online business to help create backlinks and  get more traffic to your business, moving your site higher and higher up the search engine rankings.

A recent study found that the more posts you have, the more shares you are going to get, which isn't rocket science as the more options in terms of content you give an audience, the more chance the audience will find some of it interesting. However, while placing as much content you can, across as many places as possible is going to help your website grow, to get the best possibly results you need to analyse what you post and when you post it to help generate as many likes, shares and reads as possible.  

Statistically, the more prominent types of posts placed across social media are picture and text based as they are much easier to create than say, a video. As I highlighted in a post two weeks ago (Boost your brand identity with Instrgram), it's not about how many pictures you can post across social media, but more what these images contain. One imaginative and entertaining image is going to get a ton more shares and clicks than a whole host of generic photos. Now when it comes to having text based posts, the balance between quantity and quality is much more tricky depending on what your posts are and what type of business you run. If the posts you regularly place on social media are regarding offers, sales and products on your online store then the more posts you place on social media, the better, as this is all content that people are definitely going to be interested in. If the text based content you post is more SEO orientated, consisting of articles and blog posts, you need to be more selective. While you can post as many blog posts and articles are you like, as there will be different people who are interested in reading different articles, users may become increasingly annoyed with a constant barrage of article posts appearing on their feeds. If the aim of your social media content is to purely create as many shares and possible, helping to increase customer's awareness of your business, then you need to focus primarily on pictures and videos. Videos are a much trickier form of social media than text or pictures, but if done correctly it can be the most rewarding. When you create a video for your social media site, it can be something to do with your business i.e. a promotional advert, or it could be nothing to do with your business whatsoever. The more original the idea, the more chance you have of that video becoming viral, meaning literally thousands of people will see it and become aware of your brand identity. While I have broken down each of the various types of social media posts, the best social media accounts are those which use all of these in equal proportion to produce unique and appealing content.  

Right, now we've looked at what to post and how often to post it, the next stage is to figure out when to post it. You could have a fantastic article, picture or video, but if you post it at the wrong time, then not many people are going to see it and it is not going to achieve its potential. What I mean by this is, there's no point posting content in the middle of the night when pretty much no one is going to see it. To achieve the most number of likes and shares as you possibly can, you should look to post your content any time between 6pm and 8pm in the evening. This is the time when people have come home from a busy day at work and are catching up on all the activity on their social media account. Although the evening is the most profitable time to post, you will find that you have more success during this period from Monday to Wednesday as opposed to Thursday and Friday. 

If you are willing to put in the hard work to make the social commerce section of your business as successful as possible, you should look to post content during the weekend. The weekend is the most popular time for social media activity, with pretty much everyone checking their social media accounts numerous times over this period. Take advantage of this and get your content out there for people to see. If you run an online or eBay store that sells goods, then perking someone's interest with a social media post could be the best way to encourage them to visit your site and make a weekend purchase.



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