Juliet Stott says, “Mobile first is not a luxury but a necessity if your ecommerce business is to keep pace with the rapid growth in mobile use.   One in five people in the world own a smartphone and one in 17 own a tablet, according to BI Intelligence. Revenues from mobile sales in Europe and the US continue to grow dramatically too. In the last four years they are up from 2.2% in 2010 and predicted to grow to 23% by the end of 2014, meaning transactions made on the go will be worth $101bn. Research from Intelligent Positioning showed that mobile and tablet traffic is also set to overtake... [...]

Outlook, Microsoft’s email management system, has been around for over 10 years, and is used by many of us to keep our email under control. Well, “control” is relative. I have had 500,000 emails in Outlook, and have only managed to whittle the number down to 390,000. And Outlook has many features to assist you in making your email easier to manage. But one man, David Gewirtz, decided that it wasn’t up to the task any longer. He has decided that Gmail is a better solution for him. Today, ZDNet.com published his story detailing why, after using Outlook from its early days... [...]

Tara Chilla says, “Writing for a website is different from other kinds of writing. You have to make it short, sweet, and explanatory—and focus on communicating benefits, benefits, benefits. Oh, and also make sure you nail down relevant keywords and scatter them enough (but not too much) in the text. Writers who are new to writing copy for the Web have to learn what works and what doesn’t, and they have to learn fast. To make all that a bit easier, I’m going to discuss a few cardinal rules of business writing and effective online copy. Titles and search results snippets are... [...]

Lee Odden says, “Marketers are really jumping on the content bandwagon while the definition of what “content marketing” really means varies greatly between the SEO, PR, advertising and custom publishing industries. For example, I recently read a very clever post about content marketing on a popular SEO website providing an impressive array of content types, tactics, tips and shortcuts for content to be created and used as a marketing asset. But not once were “customer journey”, “buying cycle”, “customer insight” or related concepts mentioned”. The Power of Empathy for... [...]

Allison Howen says, “Twitter is flying high, as the social network revealed a 16 million increase in monthly active users during the second quarter of 2014 when compared to the first quarter. This growing user base further cements Twitter as a top social network and represents new opportunities for brands and business professionals to grow their audiences on the platform. Just because Twitter’s user base is growing, however, doesn’t mean that yours is growing too. In fact, growing an audience on Twitter typically takes a lot of time and dedication, regardless if you are just starting... [...]

Don VanFossen and Andres Tobar are releasing the latest version of Serp Shaker. These two are a natural pairing. People have made money with Don’s products. And Andres has proved that he build useful tools, too. In fact, using Serp Shaker (not selling it to other marketers; using it himself) he reports that he made over $600,000 last year. Serp Shaker evolved from an original plugin that was released byTobar and VanFossen, along with a former partner. That original plugin was called Local Page Ninja.. Thousands of copies of Local Page Ninja were sold. In many cases, buyers were excited... [...]

Benjamin Spiegel says, “Historically, consumers have used Google for research in every step of the purchasing process, all the way up the sales funnel — starting with lifestyle search terms like [grass stains] to product consideration terms like [Tide reviews] and purchase decision terms like [where to buy Tide online]. In recent years, however, we have observed some interesting changes in customer behavior — one of the main ones being that consumers are starting to favor native search over Google search for lower-funnel terms. This is something retailers can take advantage of during... [...]

Allison Banko says, “When software company Lumension needed cut its costs, its marketing budget suffered the biggest blow. “Marketing is always a real easy place to look at, because unfortunately, it’s still considered — and has the perception of being — more of a cost center versus a revenue center,” explained Ed Brice, Lumension’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. Though the department had to decrease its spend 30%, it needed to realign its strategy to protect its demand gen. Discover how Lumension leveraged retargeting online ads to increase leads... [...]

John Bonini says, “I can remember the first time a blog post I published generated over five thousand views. Feels like it was only yesterday. I mean, the endorphin rush makes it pretty hard to forget. It was a post I wrote on Millennials – the cool thing to write about at the time – and people loved it. And while my initial reaction was to romanticize, it wasn’t until later that I self-evaluated and asked myself, “so what does five thousand views actually mean for this article?” Turns out, it meant very little. Sure it garnered a lot of attention which is always... [...]

Derrick VanDyke has just announced his new WP Sales Copy software. It’s for any marketer who wants to sell something (even an affiliate product) or build a mailing list; that includes just about all of us. With this software, you can easily (using point and click actions) build an entire sales funnel for your site. WP Sales Copy builds pages that look great on any device, from desktop computers to cell phones. The screen is automatically adjusted to fit the device the visitor is using. When you see the sales page for this plugin, you are seeing the plugin in action. The sales page was made... [...]