Maggie Patterson says, “The days of using your website as a brochure for your business are long gone. Now your website has to do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to connecting with your visitors and moving them into action towards becoming a client or customer. But this isn’t easy. As a copywriter who specializes in website and sales... [Read more]

Jerry Low says, “According to McKinsey iConsumer’s 2012 survey, emails are still an effective way to acquire new customers. In fact, when compared to social media, they are 40X more effective. Our experience matches up to these statistics. I did a survey a year ago here at WHSR and asked bloggers what was the biggest mistake they’d... [Read more]

Ashley Johnston says, “No consumer wakes up and says, “today I am going to be a mobile shopper.” Consumers don’t think in channels. Despite understanding the agnostic consumer environment and having an overwhelming array of data and technology at our disposal, marketers continue to take a very wide-angle approach when targeting consumers. A... [Read more]

Video Turbo Store integrates video with text and graphical sales content#ad It’s been nearly a week since Peter Beattie released Video Turbo Store. This new video player for WordPress sites can boost sales through immediacy. While your visitors are watching your videos, they see scrollable pictures of samples and sales text in the video window. If... [Read more]

Daniel Burstein says, “How can you attract more traffic to your ecommerce store? How can you improve conversion on the traffic you’re currently getting? At IRCE (Internet Retailer Conference + Exhibition) 2014, we sat down with 39 marketers and ecommerce experts to bring you actionable ideas to improve your results. To help you prepare for... [Read more]

For a long time, now, the FTC has required marketers to inform their readers of any partiality (due to an affiliate relationship, for example) when they endorse a product. Well, they have decided their rules aren’t stringent enough. Now, they want to make sure you don’t “bribe” people to be your ambassadors, by giving a reward... [Read more]

Carly Stec says, “Imagine that a couple of your friends convince you to give speed dating a try. “It’ll be fun,” they insist. The next thing you know, you’re sweating your way through a seemingly never-ending carousel of two-minute dates. And when the hour finally winds down, you find yourself left with two options... [Read more]

It used to be that only the marketer with deep pockets could make high quality green screen videos. It required expensive: • Equipment • Studio • Software But, fortunately, as technology improved the required hardware and software are going down in cost. In today’s climate, there are no tech barriers; all it requires is an enterprising... [Read more]

Roman Lenzen says, “Data science is in the midst of transformation, with Big Data technologies starting to significantly encroach on the market share of traditional RDBMSs (relational database management systems). Spending worldwide on Big Data is forecast to hit $114 billion by 2018, growing at an annual rate of almost 30%. With an ever-increasing... [Read more]

Chow says, “Unless Social media has always been one of the best ways to build traffic and user engagement. On popular social media platforms, you can find millions of relevant people in your niche and great content ideas by narrowing down what’s trending. I’m currently using Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and Google+ for my social marketing and... [Read more]

Martin Beck says, “Based on HubSpot’s “State of Inbound 2014–2015” report, the companies with the highest ROI focus on blogging, organic search, and content amplification. As the need for these three revenue-generating tactics has grown, Google Trends shows interest in content marketing and native advertising mirrors the growth of interest... [Read more]

Mario and his business partner, Cameron, say they have developed a process that is so exact and predictable that they can create a website for a local niche, rank it on page 1 and sell it for thousands of dollars every time, a 100% success rate... [Read more]

Kath Pay says, “It sounds obvious but so many of us forget to focus on the objective whatever we are working on, an email campaign, a newsletter series or a solus email. If you state your intent from the off, your path and destination (usually to conversion) are set. It often helps me to think of my objective as being two sides of the same coin.... [Read more]

Christina Warren says, “Prepare yourselves — Facebook now has serviceable GIF support. That’s right children, you can now post GIFs to Facebook and have them display not only inline, but in the mobile app as well. Longtime Facebook users (read: old people like me who have been using the service since it was for college students only),... [Read more]

Kristen Dunleavy says, “Have a healthy fanbase on Facebook? High-five! But how many of those followers are real, paying customers? If you want to start converting customers, you’ve got to get them engaged. And one of the most effective ways to do that is with email marketing. Facebook can help turn casual followers into loyal subscribers, and... [Read more]

Facebook and YouTube both have their strengths, but each has its weaknesses, too. In fact, they complement each other and the marketer who uses them in combination reaps the reward of higher sales... [Read more]

MOZ team says, “A frequently asked question in the SEO world is whether or not branding plays a part in Google’s ranking algorithm. There’s a short answer with a big asterisk, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains what you need to know“. Is Brand a Google Ranking Factor? MOZ Blog  [Read more]

Amy Gesenhues says, “What’s a video view worth these days? YouTube says 30-seconds, but Facebook counts a video view at the three-second mark. Just last month, the Media Rating Council and IAB both defined a video ad as viewable as long as 50 percent of an ad’s pixels are visible for a minimum of two-seconds. But, do any of these metrics matter... [Read more]

Mark Bergen says, “Google has grown up. At least that was a popular verdict from Day One of I/O on Thursday — that the major presentation lacked Google’s renowned childlike weirdness. That it was dull. Unlike prior years, there were no new device giveaways or skydiving, Glass-wearing founders. (Although Day Two brought some magic.) But the... [Read more]

You can spice up your videos, your squeeze pages and other web pages with this new collection of background videos that have poetry in motion... [Read more]

Leslie Ye says, “My freshman year of college, I had a roommate who participated in an internship program in Washington, D.C. At the end of the internship, the students in the program attended a networking event with alumni in the city. She told me that she and the other interns competed to collect business cards — the “winner” was the... [Read more]

Stefan Tornquist says, “With apologies for the inflammatory headline, marketing is fooling itself about customer experience. In research over the last two years, we’ve seen a consistent over-estimation of how good things are and the results to come. Some of the most compelling evidence comes from our recent study in partnership with IBM, The... [Read more]

Isaiah Jackson says, “We don’t need to sell you on the power of using video in your digital marketing strategy. The proof is in the numbers: ? of all online activity is spent watching videos 75% of people visit a marketer’s website after watching a video Website visitors are 64% more likely to buy a product online after watching a video Click-thru... [Read more]

Ginny Marvin says, “E-commerce sales for U.S. retailers grew 13.6 percent to $261 billion in 2013, up from a revised $229 billion in 2012, according to the latest annual report from the U.S. Census Bureau. Taken from a compilation of survey data, the E-Stats 2013: Measuring the Electronic Economy report shows retail sales accounted for 5.8... [Read more]

Jami Oetting says, “This week, Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, released her annual Internet Trends report. It’s the 20th edition in a series spanning back to 1994 — the year Yahoo launched and three years before Google.com was registered. This year, internet growth rates are slowing down, but the re-invention... [Read more]

Aaron Agius says, “We all know content marketing is today’s de facto digital promotional strategy, but do you know just how big it is? According to a 2012 study from AOL and Nielsen, 27 million pieces of content are shared every day, and this volume is only expected to continue growing as more brands recognize its value. However, while content... [Read more]

Carly Stec says, “Does it feel like your Facebook Page‘s organic reach is slowly slipping away from you? You’re not alone. According to Ogilvy, organic reach for brands on Facebook has seen a shocking 49% drop from peak levels in October 2013. While it’s easy to point the blame at the Facebook News Feed algorithm and assume... [Read more]