Tag Archives: ecommerce

Is Your Web Site Working For You?

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If you are a pr client, or have an eCommerce web site, is it getting traffic? Is the traffic converting to sales, or leads for your business? Is your site listed on the first page of Google, or Yahoo? Do you know the Page Rank?

These are important questions, and you as a pr client, or an eCommerce client should take seriously. If any of these are problems, then re-think your web site. Here are a few tips to make sure that your web site is consumer, or B2B ready.web site media

1- DESIGN. Believe it or not, a poor design will actually hurt you. The SEO”s reject poor design sites for indexing. Also, customers will run away fast if the site is hard to read, confusing, and the graphics are screaming for attention.

2- WEB LAYOUT. If you have a lot products, or services to offer, make sure customers can find everything easily. And your content needs to be something your customers will enjoy reading.

3- NAVIGATION. This goes hand-in-hand with the design and layout. When those are done correctly, then the navigation should be clear and concise, or customers will get lost and you will loose business.

Bottom-line– have a professional work on your web site. If you already have a site then package design and printingmake sure it meets these simple tips. If not, contact a web designer, one who understands marketing. Otherwise, they may just create a nice design for them to enter in a web site contest, and doesn’t meet your needs. After all this is completed, then the optimizing is next. If you are serious about building customers on the web, make sure web marketing is part of your advertising and marketing plan.

And this all relates to publicity. A great looking site will generate positive publicity. A poorly designed and difficult site will also generate publicity. Which type of publicity do you want for your web site?

Beauty Source Selects Carson Marketing for Web Site Development

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A retail store, Beauty Source, recognizes the need to have an eCommerce web site in addition to their retail outlets. Why? Because consumer activity of eCommerce is still growing and the need to keep customers is greater today than it was just four years ago.

Web marketing is no longer for the part-time designer, or artist. It requires savvyretail store for cosmetics marketers who understand how to grow a company and what eCommerce is about. That is just one of the many reasons why the PR Client, Beauty Source, chose Carson Marketing, Inc for their web site development. Creating the site is one small segment to a successful site. You need to have a clean design, the right placement of products, create an easy navigation system, and above all establish a solid optimization program that is constantly updated.

PR Clients rely on marketing professionals, like Carson Marketing, Inc. to help guide them with their pr marketing strategies. Unlike vertical agencies who specialize in one area, such as web development, or media advertising, Carson Marketing was chosen for their complete knowledge of all areas including publicity, promotions, web marketing and the ability to recognize trends when other competitors are learning where the industry is going. Since 1980, Carson Marketing, Inc. has been instrumental in helping pr clients and manufacturers discover how to increase business. The “core branding” approach is what makes Carson Marketing successful in helping pr clients reach their goals. This includes a pr marketing strategy plan that ties directly into the overall business plan. If you don’t have a direction, it makes it difficult to know where you are going. Carson Marketing will show pr clients the path to success.

How To Market eCommerce Web Sites

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web marketing and pr marketing strategiesAfter your company has developed an eCommerce web site, you now need to attract people. Not an easy task. You probably learned the hard way, the web company you contracted doesn’t do optimizing, or web marketing. And you spent all the budget to get a great looking site. Or worse yet, you hired what you thought was a pr marketing strategy agency to do the web marketing and that turned out to be a failure. A lot of traffic, but no conversions to sales isn’t what you need.

So what do you do now? First you need to understand what web marketing and pr marketing strategies are all about.

Let’s define web traffic. This is the amount of visitors to your web site and the pages they visited. It also refers to the amount of data that visitor received from your site. You need to make sure you get reports to review the specific pages visitors viewed and how long they visited each page.

Many pr clients and web marketers get confused with “hits” and “visits”. Hits are those times people will view your site, but may move on quickly because they came upon your site by accident, or were surfing and found the site, but did not stay. This is also how you are charged when you “buy keywords” from Google, or Yahoo. They don’t care if the person clicked on your ad and didn’t buy or stay. They got paid because of the “click rate”. Don’t misunderstand these types of visitors.

Learn how to measure the visitors. For example, a) the number of page views for each visitor, b) duration of the visit, c) duration of page viewed, d) most viewed pages by the visitors and e) the source of links that lead them to your site.

Develop a solid pr marketing strategy for you eCommerce site. Here are a few tips to improve your web traffic. It should include links to and from your web site. Create promotional programs as well. Establish a newsletter for visitors to register. This can build a database of potential customers.

If you need help with any of these areas, of want to discuss your eCommerce needs, give us a call. We’re ready to help your company grow.

How To Extend Your Marketing

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RSS is still a powerful marketing tool, check it out

There are many ways pr clients and publicity agencies can extend the reach into markets and drive traffic to their sites. By using RSS Feeds you can distribute time-sensitive information. And if done correctly, you can control how consumers find you and land on specific pages in your site to increase sales.

An article I read discusses the 10 different ways to use RSS in e-Commerce. I just mentioned one above. I’ll give you a few more.

• If you are an advertiser, pr client, or a manufacturer, consider advertising on content providers’ feeds. This can be done through FeedBurner and Pheedo.

• Another suggestion is to create channels for affiliate communications to distribute marketing content. When you use RSS, develop links that allow you to automatically push updates.

• You can extend your awareness by adding feeds from other sites and blogs. This is actually using syndicated information to supply related content on your site. Search engines like this.

That’s a few more suggestions. When used, you can then see the power RSS can provide your company and pr clients to gain more visibility and build traffic to your site.

RSS is trackable, and most pr clients do not realize this. This tracking does not identify the customer, but reports available through FeedBurner and SimpleFeed can give you detailed analytics. And don’t get disappointed at first if the results a small. Like everything, it takes time to get higher rankings, and time to build traffic.

So get RSS Feeds on your site. Or create a blog within your site and start talking about how great your company is.

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Web Sites and Publicity

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Get the most from all your media

It’s time to tear down all those walls in the office that keepPublicity and web sites departments separate. For example, let the IT people, or web people work with the publicity staff. If you source out any of these to a pr firm, or agency then have a meeting where they can discuss their projects and objectives and what plans are set for the future.

Let’s start with your company’s existing web site.

Maybe it is an eCommerce site, or an informative site to explain your services and products. Even if it is a B2B site, you need to break down the walls in your office (figuratively that is) as well as those in your mindset. The site needs to improve sales and visibility. Publicity can help if given the chance. Not all pr clients and professional publicity people can relate or understand how to make this work. Why, because everyone is caught up in doing business as usual, or old school thinking. The saying " don’t fix it if it isn’t broken" does not apply here.

I am trying to get you to think out of the box. There is a simple test to do for analyzing your web sites home page. Jamie Roche wrote an article telling people how to improve their home page visibly. After reading this you may say, well I don’t have an eCommerce site; we sell to distributors, or dealers, etc. You’re missing the point if you think like that.

It’s time to have this meeting I discussed with the PR department and IT department. Need help in trying to find how PR can make things happen for the web site? If you need help, then it’s time to bring in an outside pro. We can discuss this with you and show how to make things happen. I’m only a call away, or an email away. Just click on the Contac Us on the left of this page. And we’ll be right over.

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Where is Search Going

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Search Engines Build Momentum

Search engine marketing is not something that just happens by chance. It is an art, a science, and a lot of work.

Many clients think the old ways of adding meta tag descriptions, or key words and submissions to all the search engines will get results. Not true anymore.

The search engine (SE) battle to be the biggest and best is heating up again.

More companies are finally realizing they can build an ecommerce web site while maintaining a traditional storefront. With this attention, the SE’s are getting more sophisticated on how they list a web site.

I saw an article by Kevin Ryan titled "Search and the Brand". He mentioned a lot of interesting things, besides the awards stuff for this event.

For example, at the Advertising Week event, Mr. David Verklin, CEO of Carat Americans, pointed out a study that was completed in December of 2004 showed 92% of consumer electronics and other computer purchases. This is only one category. But it illustrates how consumers are using the net for more ease of purchasing. That means they will be using SE’s more often to find products, companies and places to make purchases.

HP saw their click volume increase 45% and the transactions increased 65%.

At this Advertising Week event, it was noted that keyword purchasing hit an all-time high as well. Some advertisers were now purchasing odd words, like "possum". Popular words such as "automobile" or "Honda Element’ are still expensive.

So what’s the other solution to fighting this marketing battle? Try "street smart marketing". By this I mean it’s time you have a plan that includes a blog site with back end tie-ins. Publicity should be part of that overall plan. Together, these become powerful marketing tools and can build a brand name within a few months.