Secure your customers’ credit card transaction is a must!

Okay guys, we know the drill – offering more payment options can attract new customers. Particularly in retail, accepting credit card payments can make a real difference – as well as an added credibility to your store. In e-commerce arena, this is also the case. But you should pay more attention when you accept credit card payments for online purchases – why?

The first and foremost answer would be security. The number one concern when people are buying online is whether the online retailers are legit. Getting your credit card details stolen is the least thing you want when shopping online. As an e-commerce site owner, it’s your job to make sure that your customers’ credit card details – as well as other personal information – are well-secured.

So, how to accept credit card payments in the right way? Here are a couple of things to think about in your effort securing your e-commerce site’s credit card transactions (apologise if any of these is a bit technical):

Use HTTPS; even better, use certified SSL

Surprisingly, some of the sites I’ve ever visited ask for credit card details WITHOUT securing the page! They are using the unsecured HTTP – it’s risky at best, and you should not buy from such sites! The solution: Use HTTPS – or HTTP Secure – to encrypt your communication to prevent online eavesdropping and authenticate your online store’s web server.

Indeed, using https://www.your-online-store.com is definitely more secure than using http://www.your-online-store.com. However, you should not be stopping there!

HTTPS is good, but it’s uncertified; you might want to consider using certified SSL, which definitely can secure your online store better. What’s more, SSL certificates typically come with seal of approvals or badges, from which your customers can validate. Those badges will help ensuring your customers’ sense of security – and making your online store more trusted and credible at the same time.

VeriSign, Thawte and Comodo are some of the leading SSL certificates with strong reputation. SSL certificates are pretty similar from one to another, but be sure to shop around for the best value for money.

Partner with trusted merchant services

Accepting credit cards, you need to ensure customers that entering their credit card details is safe and secure. Using the SSL certificate I mentioned above can definitely help, but it’s not enough; partnering with Merchant Services offering enhanced security to online transactions is a must.

ChargeNational is one of the leading merchant services – which include online merchant services – serving more than 60,000 merchants, including big names such as Harley-Davidson, Applebee’s and Hostway. ChargeNational’s E-commerce merchant service include tokenization technology, as well as offering secure hosted checkout with no coding required on your part; it is also integrated with third-party payment gateways, such as Authorize.net.

Let your customers know your effort!

Offering the perk of accepting credit card payments online comes with a responsibility to secure them. Be sure to do it in the right way.

While doing so, be sure to let your customers know that you have taken extra measure to secure their purchase payments. This will help your online store gaining trust and credibility.

Ivan Widjaya
Tips on accepting online payment
Image: sixninepixels

Article source: http://www.noobpreneur.com/2012/05/14/e-commerce-how-to-accept-credit-card-payments-in-the-right-way/

Business-to-business selling on the Internet, or B2B e-commerce, is one of the fastest growing segments of the small-business marketplace. As businesses flock to the Internet to find vendors for essential products and services, B2B e-commerce is rapidly expanding, both in terms of total revenue and the number of small B2B firms operating in the digital space.

Since approximately two out of three new jobs are created by small businesses, the rising influence of B2B e-commerce in the small business sector has important implications for the economy.

But how is B2B e-commerce really impacting small businesses? And what are some of the specific benefits small businesses are capturing from B2B e-commerce strategies?

How B2B E-commerce Benefits Small Businesses

Consumers are drawn to e-commerce because it allows them to create digital connections with the brands and businesses that are important to them and offers opportunities for seamless customer experiences. In addition to connecting with e-commerce providers via traditional Internet connections, today’s consumers are relying on a sophisticated array of tools and resources, integrating mobile and social channels into their online shopping behaviors.

In response to consumer demand, brands large and small are ramping up their multichannel strategies. Familiar e-commerce giants like Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) are major players in the consumer e-commerce market, and countless brick-and-mortar retailers, have captured consumers’ attention in the digital space.

While the consumer side of the e-commerce marketplace has garnered most of the attention, the B2B side has been largely neglected. Yet for every small business that markets their products and services to consumers, at least three other small businesses sell primarily to other businesses.

By adopting B2B e-commerce strategies, small businesses gain several important advantages, many of which level the playing field and allow them to compete with larger companies.

• Operational Efficiency. B2B small businesses have historically struggled with labor-intensive processes that are inefficient and hinder organizational growth. Multichannel commerce technologies help B2B small businesses save time and resources through the automation of online and offline transactions. B2B e-commerce also allows these companies to streamline warehouse, call center and other functions that have the potential to become choke points in the company’s efforts to achieve targeted growth objectives.
• Market Scale. In many cases, B2B e-commerce creates the impression of a much larger business footprint. Multichannel marketing tactics, social media campaigns and other strategies allow small businesses to appear (and function) like larger organizations. By scaling up market presence, B2B e-commerce makes it easier for small companies to reach global networks, mobile audiences and the extended online community. As a result, small businesses gain the ability to react more quickly to market trends and to leverage a more professional industry presence.
• Sales Cycles. As a selling tool, e-commerce technology helps B2B small businesses streamline the sales process and generate higher ROI from their sales program investments. Conventional B2B sales cycles are labor-intensive and require sales teams to guide customers through a series of mundane tasks — tasks that can be automated in a B2B e-commerce environment, enabling sales teams to reallocate time toward new customer acquisitions.
• Cost Savings. B2B e-commerce has the potential to create substantial cost savings for small businesses. Many smaller companies have discovered that the implementation of e-commerce initiatives has resulted in lower operational cost thanks to the automation of customer setup, order management, credit card processing, shipment tracking, email campaigns and other activities that would otherwise require the attention of sales or customer support personnel.
• Customer Experiences. It’s important to note that by leveraging e-commerce strategies, B2B small businesses gain the ability to capture cost reductions and other benefits without sacrificing the quality of customer experiences. In fact, a multichannel e-commerce strategy typically results in vastly improved customer experiences by allowing prospects and leads to connect with the company using their preferred channels and technologies.

Level Playing Field

By effectively leveling the playing field for small businesses, B2B e-commerce allows smaller companies to leverage technology as a competitive advantage in today’s global business-to-business marketplace. With the right strategy, small companies can leverage affordable B2B e-commerce strategies to enhance brand appeal, reduce operational costs and broaden the impact of the organization’s sales agenda.

Even more importantly, B2B e-commerce frees up resources to offer an achievable pathway for small organizations to target and accomplish substantial improvements in the customer experience. For many B2B sellers, e-commerce is the key to small business success and revitalization in today’s multichannel marketplace.

Article source: http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/Putting-a-B2B-E-Commerce-Twist-Into-the-SMB-74978.html

1. “Can you describe your business in a few sentences?”

By distilling your business into a sentence or two, you are essentially giving your designer your “elevator pitch.” This is great information and can be used to quickly describe your business on your homepage for instance. After all, when it comes to writing for the web, brevity is your new best friend, as most of your users will never read as in-depth as you would like them to. You have to capture their attention right away.

2. “Who are your main competitors?”

By knowing who you are competing against,  your designer can conduct the research needed to see how others in your field handle their websites. He or she can then determine what seems to be working well for some of them, and not as well for others. The intent here is not to copy what others are doing, but rather to learn from the benefit of their experience, as well as from their mistakes.

3. “What sets your business apart from your competitors?”

This is your chance to really distinguish your business from the others. If you have something unique to offer, then your designer should know about it, so that it can be played up and specifically called out on your site. It doesn’t have to be anything earth-shattering.  In fact, it can be something incredibly simple, such as offering a complimentary consultation, for instance.

4. “Can you describe your target customer?”

Knowing exactly who your main audience is affects almost every aspect of the design.  After all, a site that would appeal to teenage boys would not be very visually interesting to women over 60. Other than the visual concerns, these breakdowns would also make a big difference on search engine optimization(SEO) efforts, as well as social media integration. It is very important to be as specific as possible: gender, age, and annual income are major things to be considered in order to design the most appropriate site for your audience.

5. “What is your deadline for completing the site?”

You have a deadline in mind, right? Well you should! Having a deadline not only keeps your designer on track, but it will keep you focused as well. All too often, website projects start with a bang and fizzle out over a span of months because a timeline was never established. It’s a good sign if your designer asks because in most cases that means he or she respects your time and is interested in getting the website finished when you need it.

6. “What are some other sites on the Web that you like and why?”

This is where your designer can get a sense of your own personal tastes. Since personal preferences are so subjective, it really helps me as a designer to know what visual style you respond well to. Again, this question is not designed in order to copy anything that someone else has already done, but it serves as a great jumping-off point. If a designer doesn’t ask this, then you run the risk of them designing a (possibly) amazing site that just isn’t your cup of tea.

7. “What specific functionalities would you like included on your site?”

This is something that you may not have thought very much about. You may not even be fully aware of all the options that are out there. Many of my web design clients know they want a Web presence, but they aren’t always sure about what they want to get out of it. And that’s ok. It is up to your web designer to get to the heart of your business, and suggest new ways to leverage all the technologies that are available and appropriate to your site. For instance, if you run a restaurant, you probably know that you want to have your menu, contact info and directions on your site. But what about adding an option for customers to book their reservation via your website?

8. “Who is going to be responsible for the website’s content?”

This is a question that often catches clients off guard. It is a bit easier to answer in the case of a redesign, but what if you are a new business starting a website from scratch? Do you plan on writing the copy for your own site? Unless you have experience writing for marketing purposes, I wouldn’t recommend it. The first reason is, good Web copywriting is a skill that can greatly improve user engagement when done right. Secondly, (and I say this in the nicest possible way,) it will probably take a very long time for you to get around to it, if at all. I can’t tell you how many projects that have either stalled, or been abandoned altogether because a designer hasn’t received the content promised to them by a client. If your designer works with a copywriter, by all means, spend a little extra and go that route. It will take a lot of pressure off of you, the project will be completed faster, and you will end up with a much better product in the end. Well written copy sells. Period.

9. “What key search phrases would you like to be found for?”

Search engine optimization (SEO) is your key to being found on the Web. Your designer should be asking you this because your answers could have a big impact on not only the copy, but the overall site structure as well. Let’s say you run a photography business in Boulder, Colorado. You might want to be found for the terms “wedding photography boulder colorado,” as well as “yearbook photography boulder colorado.” It would be a good idea to design two different landing pages for those different keyword phrases, rather than relying on being found through a more generic homepage.

10. “How much time do you want to put into new content creation per week?”

Another key element to SEO strategy is keeping your content fresh. This means adding brand new content to existing pages, and/or adding new pages altogether on a fairly consistent basis. This can be done any number of ways, including a blog, user generated content if appropriate, or even a podcast. When I ask a client this question, I am looking to find out how I should design their site to make the most use out of the time they are willing to spend. If its only a few hours per week, a blog would be sufficient in most cases. If it is a company that employs someone who can work on content creation full-time, I would start thinking of new areas that would attract users. A video page perhaps? Or maybe a twitter contest? The ideas are endless, but it all comes down to how much time you are willing to spend on such efforts.

Final Thoughts

There is much more to your new website than just the visual elements. A good web designer knows this and will go beyond the basics. The questions on this list each serve a very important purpose, and your web designer should touch on all of them in order to make fully informed design decisions that will positively impact your business for years to come.

Article source: http://www.businessinsider.com/ten-questions-your-web-designer-should-be-asking-you-2012-4

Many who are eager to “get ahead” with their search engine optimization (SEO) program are typically consumed with the latest and greatest SEO techniques, how they are sure to work as well as fantasizing over their list of targeted keyword terms.

Competitive analysis should also take a position of high importance. Don’t get me wrong, proper keyword research, the predecessor to competitive analysis, is important. We know where we want to rank and we know who is ranking there, but how will we get there?

At the onset of your dive into SEO competitive analysis, it’s important you segment your analysis into three areas: content, authority, and opportunity.

Content

Content is king, right? You betcha, and the more you or a competitor have the more likely it is to have enhanced visibility in search engines.

The starting point is your keyword target list. Find the most important terms to your company/site theme and review the search results.

Who comes up consistently in organic results? You may find that your online competition may be quite different than your brick-and-mortar competitors.

Once you’ve found the top 3-5 regularly appearing sites, review their results to identify if they have a keen grasp on title tags, meta description, and URL naming convention best practices. Are they obviously targeting the terms they are showing up for?

Utilize a tool such as SEMRush or Spyfu Kombat to assess what other terms they rank for and that drive traffic. Are these terms also on your targeted keyword list?

Next, take a deeper look at their online presence as there is much more than just the organic SERP. Are they supplementing their SERP presence with PPC? Perform site:www.competitorname.com queries in Google Images, Video, News, Places.

Content isn’t just text. Have they optimized these digital/local/press contextual elements to take advantage of universal search?

Don’t forget channel coverage. Take a look at their social profiles (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and assess for presence, content delivery, engagement, and their fan base. Since citations are an algorithmic factor there is more now to the process than simply feeding the engines.

Authority

Your competitor has tons of content, but let’s see if it’s good content that gets links and shares, and if it has authority via inbound links.

This is also an important stage as we have to decipher competitor engagement with link building. A tool here is Open Site Explorer simply because you can easily review several competitors across multiple trust/authority factors.

Compare the domain authority of the competitors’ sites as well as the page authority of top pages. Also consider the amount of links coming to the site and the number of unique linking domains.

Is the content on the site shared, tweeted, etc.? Is there an overabundance of a certain anchor text phrase or a dominance in any one type of linking site, directories, forums, news, etc.?

Judging these metrics closely is going to tell you what types of content you may need, how well you need to push your content, and where you may need to make up any ground between you and the competitors.

Moving forward you can use a tool such as the SEOmoz Competitive Link Finder to find potential linking options to help even the score.

Opportunity

This is basically an on-site review. This is an opportunity to assess the structure of the site to see where improvement is needed.

Look at on-page keyword targeting of site pages in areas such as titles, copy, heading, alt tags and internal link anchor text. What is the overall hierarchy of content on the site? Is this an advantageous information architecture? Do they utilize sitemaps to deliver content to search engines and are they using up to date techniques such as HTML5 and schema markups?

To gauge their SEO savviness it may also help to review their robots.txt to see if they are withholding certain content accidently or making other flubs such as duplicate content. This can be a good indicator of how in touch they are with SEO and their site.

Moving Forward

The elements of review for competitive analysis can vary from marketer to marketer based on how deep they want to analyze competitors. The areas above are a good way to not skimp on competitive insight but to not exceed a few hours.

It will be imperative moving forward that you continue to monitor your competitors. This provides content topics and channel ideas as well as a way to stay ahead of the game. It can help to decipher content by type gaps whether they are digital or textual, blogging, articles, how-to’s, etc.

You should use competitive link tools as mentioned above, but also utilize tools such as Linkdex that can monitor changes in your competitors’ rankings and traffic estimations.

If you’re extremely strapped for time, spend 30 seconds and set up a Google Alert for your competitor’s name. You may find that Google is noticing them more than you think, showing you that you need to spend more time on the offensive.

Article source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2171188/3-Pillars-of-SEO-Competitive-Analysis

There are misconceptions about how important branding it is to success, how much work it takes, and the best ways to approach it. But every company, from a fresh-faced tech-startup to Apple, knows good branding can make a product or service.

Branding is how you present your company — your name, imagery, reputation — to the world through logos, ads, marketing materials, websites, apps, and social media. Left-brained business types may see it as simple graphic design, like choosing a logo color, or as a mysterious art. But experts know successful branding is hard and the best results are based on research, facts, and a well thought-out road-map.

Do your research

The most important work for successful branding takes place before a designer or agency is even hired: research, planning, introspection, and difficult decision making by the client. The worst thing a company can do is go to a design agency without having collected key pieces of information and expect the designers to fill in the blanks.

First, decide exactly what you want to communicate and who you want to communicate to — who is most likely to buy your product? Then, break down what your company does and identify its strengths and weaknesses so you can develop an approach that promotes its former and diminishes its latter.

If you don’t have this level of understanding of your own company, you won’t be able to engage with the agency enough to have their work be beneficial.

Pick a specific goal

Once you’ve done the advanced research, settle on a specific, actionable goal. Instead of saying, “We want to make more money,” try “We want to increase our market share with rural females between 18- and 25-years-old.” A scattershot approach will be less effective than a tightly focused strategy and will make it harder for you to gauge your success.

You can ask your branding agency to suggest a direction, but this is ill-advised. The third-party team you’ve hired to work on branding has only known your company for a short period of time, but you’ve been living and breathing it for years. You have the best understanding of your company and what it is trying to accomplish.

Communicate to your agency exactly what you’re trying to do over the next six months or a year. That way it can completely optimize what it’s trying to do for you.

Don’t be a copycat

A common first instinct it to replicate what a successful company, like Apple, has already done, which is short-sighted and not to anyone’s benefit. Blindly imitating another company’s branding strategy never works out.

Just because another company has already “perfected” an approach, doesn’t mean doing the same thing will work again for a different product or service.

Just as ill-advised as copying the big companies is emulating your competitors. You want to set yourself apart from competitors. Branding should explain, in tone and visuals, how you’re different from them, not how you’re similar. This is a hard leap for many people.

Embrace technology

Today, there’s no limit to how you can promote a product or service. Technology offers companies incredible opportunities to do things in a whole new way, such as using Facebook to target a very specific demographic. But you must understand the technology (or hire an agency that does) and be willing to go in unexpected directions.

Traditionally, ad agencies just want to make print ads and TV spots, and marketers want to put logos on frisbees and swag. But the landscape is changing; interactive and social media agencies are being added to the mix, and everyone is starting to use technology creatively to reach potential customers.

Social media is the technology that gets all the attention, and while it is an incredibly important part of branding, it’s also not the most complicated. The key to social media is putting in the work and being active in a space. The best social media plans are often the domain of content directors, as they’re the best at promoting their company’s own intellectual prowess.

Keep it simple

It’s possible to overwork brands. Take logo design: a smartly designed logo doesn’t try to convey every aspect of a company, just give an impression. Attractive design should come ahead of cramming in literal representations of what the product does, or hunting for the perfect color to make someone want to spend money.

Symbolism is another equally over-thought element of logo design. Sometimes it works, like when banks try to communicate stability with Grecian pillars. But don’t believe an agency that shows you a shiny object and tells you it communicates synergy. They are just trying to sell you on their design, and that’s a disservice to your company. The focus should be on making the design look contemporary.

Step back and let the agency do its work

If you have done all of the research and strategy work, step back and let the people at the design agency do what you have hired them to do. Don’t try to micro-manage the process. If they don’t do a good job, don’t hire them again. But if you’re constantly derailing their work, you’ll never get the best out of them or the experience.

Article source: http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/01/the-art-of-branding/

The email newsletter is a powerful marketing tool that can remind subscribers about you, inform them about your products, tell them what you have been up to and help build relationships with them.

But the inbox is a busy place. Just think — dozens or even hundreds of other emails could already be on the pile by the time your message gets there. When your email does arrive, the trick is to make sure it doesn’t look like you might be wasting your readers’ time.

It’s important to stress email is a “scanning” environment. Subscribers won’t necessarily read your emails — at least not before they’ve skimmed over it quickly to make a flash judgment about whether what you have to say will be worth their while. If your content seems interesting, they may choose to devote more than just a few seconds — but only if you’re able to grab them in the “scanning” phase.

With this in mind, here are four easy design-oriented tips to help you get to the point and maximize readability:

1. Design for the Preview Pane. The human eye normally scans an email from top left to right, and then down. So while it’s a good idea to have a banner graphic for visual impact, don’t make it too big. That is, try to get your key “text” message as close to the top left corner of your email as possible so it is visible within the preview pane, without the reader needing to scroll around. Don’t bury the value of your marketing email under a mountain of trivia. Get to the point quickly.

2. Don’t forget “alt” text. Since all the email clients out there on the web don’t conform to the same set of visual standards, images are often blocked by default, with image “alt” text displayed instead — unless you haven’t provided any. Therefore, remember to populate “alt” tags for every image, so subscribers who have blocking on will at least see a short description of your pictures, which may encourage them to click the “display images below” action.

3. Fall back on colors. If you want to use a background image in your design, just remember some email clients don’t support them, so it’s wise to provide a background differentiated from your text color for the email client can fall back on. The simple point here is to enable your subscribers to read your message no matter what.

4. A link can save the day. It’s a good idea to provide a link to a web-based alternative to your email at or close to the top of the HTML newsletter in case, despite your best efforts, there are still display issues. This will let each reader view your email in his or her browser if they can’t see it properly in their inbox.

Article source: http://www.adotas.com/2012/05/four-everyday-newsletter-design-tips-to-save-your-email-campaign/

Why is the way a website is built so important?

Business websites today are not only the first impression of your business to the world but a critical tool in marketing your products or services and delivering leads and sales. To effectively compete, a business website needs to be easily found via search and deliver a visitor experience that informs, assures and influences.

Here are some major considerations to address before you start building your company website, so you end up with a web presence that is capable of and fit to deliver the business growth performance you expect.

Ensure core code fitness

There are a variety of ways that websites can be coded. Some approaches result in more efficient and consistent processes and rendering of a website. The way a site is coded can dramatically affect the time it takes to load or view a web page. Load time is a key element of any search engine’s algorithm. The faster your website presents itself, the higher up on the list of search results it will appear.

There are a staggering amount of development intricacies involved in programming the features and functionality of a website. Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requires code-level arrangements and additions to enable the optimization that makes your website competitive in search engines. Knowing that the finished website will be marketed via SEO and other digital marketing tactics alerts the development team to anticipate and allow for the integrations, arrangements and ongoing code updates the website will need.

How does your developer plan to accommodate your website for the digital marketing tactics you will use? If he or she can’t answer this specifically, you should be interviewing a different website development company.

Keep it device agnostic

Most search engine spiders and Apple iPhone and iPad devices do not read Flash code well, if at all. Yet Flash is a very popular way to accomplish impressive visual design used by many Web designers.

Today, a website built entirely or mostly with Flash design may look fantastic, but it is severely crippled in its chances of being found by your target audience, especially those using an i-device. If your Web design must incorporate Flash, what is the plan to present an equally impressive visual experience to your non-Flash-reading website visitors?

This same audience accommodation principle applies to your website visitors who use a mobile device. The visual and functional experience of your business by visitors using a mobile-device grows more important each day as more and more people are using smartphone, tablet and mobile technologies. Your website’s presentation and feature functionality need to be tailored differently to a mobile visitor. What is the website development plan to not just accommodate but elate your website visitors’ mobile experience?

Build website flexibility

SEO and digital marketing are ongoing processes with dynamic, ever-evolving tactics and best practices. Web marketers need to access, update and publish changes to web pages quickly to take advantage of and stay on top of market dynamics that affect your business. These types of items include keyword refinement, pricing changes, call to action alternatives, message and page layout edits, timely campaigns and promotions, etc.

Access to editing and updating website content is mission-critical to effective Internet marketing. Integrating a Content Management System (CMS), to your website enables this. Insist that a web content management system be a part of your website development. Some CMS systems are more SEO friendly and more administrative user friendly than others. Take care to select a CMS that accommodates your Internet marketing needs in an easy-to-use format.

Incorporate cross fit integration

Points of integration that need to be considered for optimized development of a website include data-processing platforms or eCommerce shopping carts and payment modules. Each has critical security measures that are required to make your business a trustworthy online store or information bank.

Another basic business website integration to plan for is your Customer Relations Management (CRM) platform. Determine what type of information integration you will need and how this will be accomplished as part of your website development requirements.

Social media platforms, including blogs, social networking profiles and content syndication channels can be greatly enhanced with proper integration, capability for RSS feeds, etc. Enabling and achieving these connections with your website design may require extra development effort but is a key differentiation in effective web marketing.

In today’s digitally marketed world, as you understand the strategic importance that your website has in your ability to grow your business, it is clear that your website needs to be purposefully developed with fitness for SEO, user experience and Web marketing.

Article source: http://www.sbnonline.com/2012/05/how-to-make-sure-you-are-building-your-website-with-the-marketing-end-in-mind/?full=1

Online retail seems to develop a new flavor every season. This time, it looks like Social Gifting is the latest buzzword in e-commerce. Here, consumers on social media channels like Facebook can individually, or in groups, purchase gifts (e-gifts) for their friends. Participating retailers are finding this type of customer engagement to be particularly effective.

Social applications like Wrapp allows Facebook users to buy gift cards that can be stored on handheld devices. These can be redeemed later, i.e. in the physical or online store. The lure for advertisers lies in low marketing costs and an ocean of consumers to attract. Apps like Wrapp are essentially an amalgamation of the most contemporary trends, i.e. social networking, online gifting and mobile shopping.

E-gifting is still believed to be in a nascent stage. It accounted for merely $1 billion out of $100 billion recorded for the gift card marketplace, last year. E-commerce is increasingly becoming more social where Facebook recommendations and purchase history across networking sites influence sales. Thus, the biggest of brands like Starbucks are endorsing social gifting. Social e-gifts developers are also on the rise with CashStar providing such services to nearly 200 retailers.

Also referred to as “Facebook Commerce”, this advertising and business model is deemed potent enough to take the sheen away from Groupon whose online discounted deals was last year’s e-commerce flavor.

Retailers are realizing that social gifting gives them the chance to engage targeted shoppers by paying peanuts as compared to conventional advertising methods. For instance, Wrapp doesn’t even charge its retailers until an actual transaction is completed. This is like a perform-and-pay platform that would appeal to any retailer. Another part of the hidden utility of social gifting is that when e-gift recipients log onto the site or walk into a store to reclaim their gift, they are highly likely to purchase something more.

Article source: http://www.dailydealmedia.com/897new-e-commerce-trend-in-2012-social-gifting/

By now, most savvy companies have launched blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, mindful that actively engaging online audiences is essential to the survival of any business. But social media
offers a major benefit that is too often ignored: the ability to monitor the online space to glean information about your customers, your competition, and even your own company.

Twitter, for example, allows businesses to quickly detect a problem with a service or product before that problem turns into a full-blown crisis. But social media monitoring is not limited to keeping a lookout for sudden online developments. It also involves tracking data that are both quantifiable (the number of times your information is shared or retweeted) and qualitative (the tone of the conversation surrounding your brand). Here are just a few of the benefits of social media monitoring, as the practice is called:

●Develop insight into how your brand is perceived. No matter how you feel about your company, the perception that the market has of it — the only perception that matters — may well be different. Social media monitoring can help you to gain some real perspective on how others see your company and how passionate they are (or are not) about your service or product. It is a great way to take the pulse of your audience and identify your brand strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

●Build new business relationships. Social media monitoring enables you to identify like-minded business owners who may want to combine resources for a cross-promotional marketing campaign or a joint project.

●Scout your competition. Companies sometimes divulge information on their social networking pages that provide insights into their priorities. The information may be as simple as your competitor’s online fans and followers. But sometimes the information can be more telling than that — like photos and names of your rival’s investors on, say, a Facebook page. By monitoring the social media space, you can learn as much about your competitors’ weakness as you can about their strengths.

●Improve customer service. Social media monitoring provides another platform for you to have a direct one-on-one exchange with the customer. That kind of responsiveness is not only a way to earn brand loyalty. It also gives you an opportunity to turn satisfied customers into brand ambassadors. A study conducted by Maritz Research shows that customers who received responses after tweeting about a company improved their perception of that company 83 percent of the time.

●Achieve a competitive advantage. Anyavid social media user can tell you that online audiences are enthusiastic critics of everything, from service at a restaurant to the usefulness of a new product. This kind of constant appraisal and feedback can be valuable to business owners trying to assess the strengths of their own company or industry. Indeed, the conversations occurring online could shine a light on potential voids your company might be able to fill, thus providing a competitive advantage.

●Manage your online reputation. Social media monitoring enables businesses to manage their online reputation in real time. That is important because social media can serve as a kind of echo chamber for consumer opinion, both good and bad. It is essential that you react quickly to any opinion that undercuts or distorts your brand before that opinion spreads suddenly.

If you have a presence in the social media space, incorporate monitoring into your overall strategy. The information you gain may be just what you need to take your business to the next level.

Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-small-business/post/how-to-use-social-media-monitoring-to-keep-tabs-on-your-competition/2012/05/02/gIQAIlSnxT_blog.html

After you have been working with SEO in your own for some time, you have been trying for long to get higher ranking on search engines and it didn’t work! Or maybe it is working and you are already ranking well but SEO applies takes much of your time while you have other things to take care of, in this case you just have to hire someone to take care of your business and to do SEO for your website.

There are many Companies doing SEO practices, but here is the question, how can I choose trustable reliable company? For your guidance, here are some tips that must be taken into consideration while choosing your SEO Company or consultant:

1. Get recommendations from friends and business partners: use the positive word of mouth that will be given from your friends or business partners who had a past experience with SEO Companies, if they have done it before so ask them about what result they get? Friends will not cheat you.

2. Ask online: there are many forums that are talking about SEO and online marketing as well, read about some one’s experience with performing  search engine optimization practices, ask what result he got and which company he used to deal with?

Now you have got many names from friend’s recommendations or asking and searching online for SEO companies, then how to decide which of them will be your Ferrari!!

3. Use Google, Google is the master, so you might have to ask him, just use Google search for the name of a company, if its reliable company you will find it easily and you may find a lot of information about it.

4. #1 Ranking Guaranteed! while you are searching you just found a link that is guaranteeing #1 ranking in search engine,  if they do then you have a big serious reason to doubt this company and their credibility, because As Google SEO selection tips  say, NO ONE can guarantee #1 ranking in Google, and this is true.

5. Show their clients browse the company profile and see their clients or projects they have been working for, you may find a trusted credible brand that is listed on their clients list.

6. Check their own SEO; it’s a search engine optimization company so if their own website is not optimized well, do you think they will optimize yours?

7. Check the PR of their own website, you can use Google PageRank checker to check at least the PR of their home page, if they can get their website a good enough PR(3-5) they are not worth hiring.

8. Ask them which keywords their site ranks for, if they don’t rank for the keywords from their choice, then they will not rank for yours.

9. Any automated submissions? This is a very important question that you have to get it’s answer from any of SEO companies , Automated submissions will easily get you banned by search engines, so if they do , just stay away from them.

10. Where do they get backlinks from? Backlinks are the most important part of off-page SEO, so try to make sure that they are not collecting backlinks from link farms and other similar untrusted websites.

11. Check their Prices,  high price doesn’t always mean high quality SEO, also cheap prices doesn’t mean bad or inefficiently work, but try to look for the realistic price depends on what exactly will they do for you? And remember #1 ranking is not guaranteed.

12. Google webmaster guidelines and blog, finally it’s recommended that you read on Google webmaster guidelines and Blog to get more information and updates so you can use them while asking SEO companies some tricky questions about what is the latest update Google applied…etc.

For now you have the most important factors while selecting or hiring an SEO company to work with, keep them in mind and enjoy the experience of applying them on your chosen Company.

Article source: http://www.promotionworld.com/se/articles/article/120503-seo-tips-12-tips-for-hiring-your-seo-company

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• Off Topic
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• Companies using email marketing should integrate social media
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• Amazon to make website ‘tablet friendly’
• Online video, when used properly, will help with web promotion
• Google Shopping Fraud
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• Gmail to overtake Outlook
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• Google updates infamous Panda algorithm
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• CSS3 @font-face font import
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• Google Internet advertising market grows extraordinarily
• Yahoo announces impressive results
• SSH Tunneling, Private Secure Encrypted Browsing over SSH
• Integrated social media reaps benefits for business
• Internet Advertising doesn’t have to cost the earth
• BuddyPress
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• Online Advertising shows highest ever spend
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• Consumption of Online Video exceeds 770 billion
• Facebook crackdown on bespoke advertising
• F-Commerce goes from strength to strength
• Internet advertising grows year on year in the US
• Social media remains the least trusted advertising platform
• Cyber Monday brings in consumer spending of $1billion
• Choosing a web designer
• Email marketing trend will please internet consultants
• Twitter plans major revamp
• PPC providers are seeing increasing numbers of potential consumers
• Google has released figures on most popular search terms
• 2012 Internet Marketing Trends Forecast
• Important Information for all Google Adwords Users
• SME’s should take note of advised metrics
• Its not just marketers that need to learn about social media
• Sharing in 2011
• Companies may be surprised at what website promotion entails
• Companies employing digital marketing techniques make savings
• Display Advertising expenditures jump 15.8%
• More and more companies will begin to explore social media in 2012
• Google Panda receives more algorithmic updates
• New Google Analytics Interface will provide deeper insight
• Logging on seemed to be the shopping favourite over High Streets
• WordPress becomes the most popular platform for Bloggers
• Blogging becomes an undeniably strong platform
• Social media trends have been outlined for 2012
• Elder Statesmen of business now getting more involved with social media
• Changes to Google’s algorithm will directly affect marketers
• Mixxx
• Droid Smart Phones
• Mobile search trends are being utilised across all areas of Business
• Businesses begin to embrace mobile at scale
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