Maggie Patterson says, “The days of using your website as a brochure for your business are long gone. Now your website has to do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to connecting with your visitors and moving them into action towards becoming a client or customer. But this isn’t easy. As a copywriter who specializes in website and sales copy for entrepreneurs and startups, I’ve noticed too many websites simply don’t deliver what they need to convert visitors into customers. The breakdown typically comes from a lack of understanding. Every element of your site — from the... [...]

Jerry Low says, “According to McKinsey iConsumer’s 2012 survey, emails are still an effective way to acquire new customers. In fact, when compared to social media, they are 40X more effective. Our experience matches up to these statistics. I did a survey a year ago here at WHSR and asked bloggers what was the biggest mistake they’d made in their blogging career. Hands down, the #1 regret these bloggers had was that they’d not built a strong email list from the time they started blogging. I think the #1 blogging mistake I made from the get-go was to not build an email list right... [...]

Ashley Johnston says, “No consumer wakes up and says, “today I am going to be a mobile shopper.” Consumers don’t think in channels. Despite understanding the agnostic consumer environment and having an overwhelming array of data and technology at our disposal, marketers continue to take a very wide-angle approach when targeting consumers. A broad level of segmentation used to be enough for a brand to stand out, but as consumers increasingly express their individuality, they expect brands to interact with them on a more personal, one-to-one level. Research from The 2015 Digital Marketer... [...]

Video Turbo Store integrates video with text and graphical sales content#ad It’s been nearly a week since Peter Beattie released Video Turbo Store. This new video player for WordPress sites can boost sales through immediacy. While your visitors are watching your videos, they see scrollable pictures of samples and sales text in the video window. If they like the demo or sales presentation, they can immediately click the embedded buy form. The result is more clicks than if they had to leave the video to take action. Beattie didn’t invent this “Shop while you Watch” concept,... [...]

Daniel Burstein says, “How can you attract more traffic to your ecommerce store? How can you improve conversion on the traffic you’re currently getting? At IRCE (Internet Retailer Conference + Exhibition) 2014, we sat down with 39 marketers and ecommerce experts to bring you actionable ideas to improve your results. To help you prepare for IRCE 2015, today on the MarketingSherpa blog I’m taking a look back at a few of the key lessons I learned from the interviews at last year’s event. Lesson #1: User-generated content is not free labor for marketers User-generated content. Community-sourced... [...]

For a long time, now, the FTC has required marketers to inform their readers of any partiality (due to an affiliate relationship, for example) when they endorse a product. Well, they have decided their rules aren’t stringent enough. Now, they want to make sure you don’t “bribe” people to be your ambassadors, by giving a reward for an endorsement or, in what amounts to the same thing, by withholding something until they do endorse you. What constitutes an endorsement? Ah, that’s where they are enlarging the scope of their rules. They say that a “Like” on... [...]

Carly Stec says, “Imagine that a couple of your friends convince you to give speed dating a try. “It’ll be fun,” they insist. The next thing you know, you’re sweating your way through a seemingly never-ending carousel of two-minute dates. And when the hour finally winds down, you find yourself left with two options — accept a dinner invitation from the person who wouldn’t let you get a word in edgewise or the person with whom you had a good back and forth. The answer seems obvious, right? Aware that the one-sided approach is less than desirable, why... [...]

It used to be that only the marketer with deep pockets could make high quality green screen videos. It required expensive: • Equipment • Studio • Software But, fortunately, as technology improved the required hardware and software are going down in cost. In today’s climate, there are no tech barriers; all it requires is an enterprising marketer to see the market for less expensive versions of the ingredients of high-quality green screen videos. Matt Houghton (with the help of video star Todd Gross) has created a training course that shows you how to make professional, attractive... [...]

Roman Lenzen says, “Data science is in the midst of transformation, with Big Data technologies starting to significantly encroach on the market share of traditional RDBMSs (relational database management systems). Spending worldwide on Big Data is forecast to hit $114 billion by 2018, growing at an annual rate of almost 30%. With an ever-increasing number of SaaS and mobile app offerings being born in the Cloud, organizations will invariably need to adapt to new, non-relational paradigms for extracting, analyzing, and securing data. That said, the RDBMS slice of the data market is still... [...]

Chow says, “Unless Social media has always been one of the best ways to build traffic and user engagement. On popular social media platforms, you can find millions of relevant people in your niche and great content ideas by narrowing down what’s trending. I’m currently using Facebook.com, Twitter.com, and Google+ for my social marketing and they have been awesome in driving enormous traffic to my blog. However, it’s important you know how to search and engage with the right people on these platforms. This obviously is NOT a problem because you have millions of resources that guide... [...]