As the Christmas season fast approaches, it’s time to start preparing your online eCommerce store. If you’re uncertain about where to begin, here are 10 valuable tips to help you get started: Planning ahead Landing pages SEO Gift cards Personalisation Graphics Gift wrap Returns policy Marketing Testing 1. Planning ahead Thinking ahead is key particularly when organising events like Christmas, […]
A few years ago I had to sell my beloved Honda S2000, a car which was as bonkers as it was beautiful. Despite the occasional leak of the soft top roof and an annoying habit of trying to kill me on roundabouts, I desperately loved that car and miss it daily. There was however one issue with the maintenance of […]
Search engines like Google use a number of different ranking factors to determine where to place pages in search results. These ranking factors can number into the hundreds (in Google’s case), but roughly speaking these ranking factors come into three main areas: on-site factors, off-site factors and hosting related factors. Traditionally the biggest influence in rankings for Google have been […]
Way back in the dying months of my time at University I started a business with one of my friends, focussing on web design and marketing. Even back in 1998, competition for domain names was tough and we spent many evenings trying to find the perfect name for the business and of course the perfect domain name. Many vicious cycles […]
It’s hard to imagine that the search engine behemoth Google started trading in a small suburban garage in California. Back then (1998), supported by a loan from Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim Google was solely focussed on organising the massive amount of information already available on the fledgling World Wide Web and there wasn’t even a hint of the corporate monster […]
If any of you have ever heard me speak at retail events or marketing conferences then you’ll know I have a fairly ingrained hatred of bad website content. To me, if you can’t be bothered to provide your website visitors with something to look at and read then you shouldn’t be too surprised if nobody visits and your bank balance […]
It’s funny how no matter what direction technology pushes us in, people always default to what they know works. If you’re a ‘bricks and mortar’ retailer and you’ve been trading for many years, you will probably remember a time before all this Internet malarkey when ‘word of mouth’ was the key to getting sales. People would travel from miles around […]
Do you remember Jedward? Personally, I’m desperately trying to forget about the two lads from Ireland who seemed to dominate the headlines back in 2009 but there’s no doubt the gruesome twosome had something which stirred emotions, good and bad. Some ridiculed John and Edward Grimes, after all why would you go onto a singing contest like The X Factor […]
Online marketing is a confusing profession sometimes. At various times of the day I’m asked to be statistician, author, business analyst and programmer and that’s before we get started on actually putting together campaigns, dealing with copywriters and managing multiple clients through various communications systems. The phrase ‘octopus on stilts’ springs to mind if you want a visual clue as […]
Those associated with Online Marketing will know that before embarking upon any kind of online campaign, keyphrase research must be undertaken. If this vital step is not done then how will you ever know if you are targeting the right keyphrases for organic optimisation of a website or for a Pay Per Click campaign? What most retailers don’t realise though […]