Most UK online retailers are struggling to gain any traction on Pinterest. They are slugging it out to get their pins repinned, to get new followers, let alone sales that justify direct or indirect ROI. Pinterest is a somewhat different beast to tame as compared to Facebook or Twitter.  Knowing how to get the most from a social media marketing channel starts with an understanding of how people actually use the channel in ordinary life.  Which begs the question; how do people use Pinterest? Lets start off with

Press coverage for products in your store can be an extremely powerful way to reach your target demographic and drive up sales. It is also a great way to expose your products to a wider audience, so people remember seeing or hearing about your brand and product(s) from a news source they trust and recognise. The ideal way to achieve this will obviously vary with product, niche, and location, to name just a few variables. But all successful approaches have some principles in

The internet is awash with window shoppers; casual browsers who just happen to be dropping by your store with little or no intention of purchasing at the particular moment in time, but who may just as well make a purchase at some point in future. Do you some how wish to engage with these sort of visitors – getting in a micro-conversion by at least managing to get their email addresses to help kick off an email marketing courtship that could

Can an etailer acquire majority or a significant number of new customers from video content hosted on its YouTube channel? Majority or the time, the answer is No! The most effective Ecommerce customer acquisition channels are typically paid search, organic search, social media (Pinterest, Facebook & Twitter), email, affiliates and referral traffic. So why isn’t there a significant amount of focus on YouTube, the second largest search engine? Probably because it is a tough nut to crack. Well, I am glad to say

As an e-tailer, you are likely swimming with a shark. Amazon is huge and getting bigger all the time. Sure, when I say ‘Amazon’, I partly mean any given ‘big box brand‘ ecommerce store like Tesco, Walmart or Toys R Us. But considering Amazon’s tendency to either eat or kill smaller fish, its exponential growth rate and it’s vast near infinite amount of inventory – it’s also the number one competitor for almost any consumer-ecommerce business. So how do you cope? As an ecommerce entrepreneur, how

Customer reviews are a common feature in online retail. It’s not just site owners looking for decoration, or feeling that since everyone else has them, so my site should too. In fact, customer reviews are one of the best-researched and supported ways to improve the credibility of your store and drive up revenue and conversions. One statistic says it all: Reviews produce an average 18% uplift in sales. How? 61% of customers check reviews before they buy online. (Some surveys put this

Duplicate category or product pages in an online store can have quite devastating negative effects in the store’s organic search rankings as well sales. Issues such as the wrong pages ranking for your desired target search phrases on the light end of the scale to triggering an algorithmic Panda penalty on the more severe end of the scale are reasons you want to weed out any potential culprits of duplicate content early as well as over the course of scaling the size of your store.

If you’re running a social media campaign you are probably not doing it for fun – you are most likely looking for results. In most cases, the intended outcome of a social media campaign is to strengthen and increase awareness of your brand. In the past, traditional marketing efforts in this arena were difficult to evaluate due to the complications of determining the link between a campaign and brand awareness. One of the appeals of social media marketing is the

Over the last few years, outreach SEO (or Link Building) and PR have witnessed a digital convergence.  The wild open ranges of old style grey and black hat SEO have to a significant extent been fenced off by Google updates intended to cut down on spammy sites that add little or no value (or even make sense); those black hats have mostly been hung up, and the few survivors are in their Butch Cassidy years.  PRs, meanwhile, are learning their

Facebook will offer you several options when you set up a page for your organisation. Usually, though, you’ll find yourself choosing between a ‘Company, organisation or Institution’ page, and a ‘Local Business or Place’ one. While in some cases the choice is obvious – if you’re a university, you’ll be wanting to be an Institution, not a Local Business or Place – for other organisations the decision can be a little more complex.