Friday, November 30

Social Media Commerce: Make it Easy for Your Customers to Do Business with You

December 4th, 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST  - Live Chat with Marsha Collier

Are you struggling to gain new customers or earn repeat business from existing customers? It could be because you’ve made the process of doing business with your company too difficult – everything from product discovery to customer service to ordering, payments, delivery and merchandise returns. Join us to discuss how social media commerce can make doing business with your business easier for customers. 

Submit your pre-chat questions, and add the event to your calendar so you don’t miss the conversation. The conversation will take place at the Endicia Thinking Forward Website on December 4th, at 11 AM PST / 2 PM EST.

This Live Webcast precedes the publication of my latest book, Social Media Commerce For Dummies. It's one that will help your business build revenue and customer base through social media. Please join me - and be sure to post some pre-chat questions on the Endicia website.

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Thursday, November 15

8 Simple to Apply SEO Tips for Your Online Store

    

If a consumer searches Google for one of your products, what would they find? Would your online store be at the top of the results? If your site doesn’t appear within the first few pages of search results, you’ll lose the opportunity to earn additional traffic and potential customers. While you may advertise your store through social media or paid advertisements, if your ecommerce site isn’t properly search engine optimized, then you’re missing a big piece of the pie.

By implementing SEO techniques, you help search engines like Google and Bing better crawl and index the content on your site. This means your website and product pages are more likely to show up when users search keywords relevant to your online store. While search engine optimization can be a full-time job, there are eight steps you can take right now to improve your site’s standing and increase its visibility:

  1. Create unique, user-friendly content on each page. Search engines are placing more value on quality content that results in lower bounce rates, longer time spent on the site, better user experience, and diversity of site traffic. Be sure that you’re using relevant keywords on each page, but write content that’s meant to be read by humans, not just search engines.
  2. If you have different URLs that lead to the same product page, avoid getting dinged for duplicate content by indicating a canonical (preferred) URL. See more on canonicalization here.
  3. For each product page, include the product name in the URL, title tags, text, and the titles and alt text for images. Since search engines can only index what they can crawl, try not to leave any element “unreadable” by search engines.
  4. If you sell a coffee mug in black, red, or green, state the color options on the product page in addition to having color swatches (with alt text), since users might be searching for “coffee mug” or “green coffee mug.” A warning about creating different pages for each variation of a product: this can result in “thin” content that could be penalized by search engines.
  5. Be smart in the long-tail terms you include in your copy, since these keywords can drive better quality traffic (i.e., consumers closer to making a purchase). Plus, your site is more likely to rank high for detailed keyword phrases like “tan Italian leather loafers” rather than a very popular and general term, like “loafers.”
  6. Allow your customers to leave feedback, reviews, comments, photos, etc., so you get additional content on each page that could help drive more long-tail traffic. Including reviews on your site also improves the user experience and builds better customer relationships.
  7. Use rich snippets to display additional information underneath your URL and meta description in search results. Rich snippets provide additional information such as a product’s price, availability, and ratings, which could help users decide to click your link. See more on rich snippets here.
  8. If you are serious about your SEO efforts and don’t mind spending a little money, you could take advantage of Google products, such as AdWords and Google Shopping, to help boost your web traffic.

Saturday, November 10

10 Must-Know Holiday Tips for eBay and Online Sellers

Thanks to Dymo Endicia, you can download a free Holiday Selling Tip-sheet: Maximize your holiday shipping success with ten tips from Marsha Collier, eCommerce authority and one of Forbes' Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers in 2012. According to Accenture, up to 59% of 2012 holiday shoppers will buy more than half of their gifts online–up more than 18% over 2011.* And to make sure you're prepared, DYMO Endicia asked Collier to put together a list of ten ways to help you. Visit http://dymoendiciaforward.com/tips/ to download.

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