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Blogging for customers!

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

The buzz word of 2006 was web 2.0. ‘Oh its so Web 2.0′ you might hear at conferences and seminars. My take on web 2.0 is building a community for your buyers based on the product type on offer. Your customers are moving to on-line sales but they need your advice. Truthful, simple advice without the hard sell. First magazines, gossip columns and newspapers caught onto the blog wave, but now product sellers are paving the way to help the customer make the right purchase.

Adverts may be boring and invasive at times but Blogs are not, take ‘Innocent smoothies‘ they have a web log that provides an interesting insight to their origins, ethics and the people in the company. A blog like this takes of the lid off a large company letting the consumer take a look inside. This is what corporate blogging is all about.

For instance Bluefly.com a fashion designer and retailer launched their blog http://flypaper.bluefly.com to raise awareness and keep customer informed of new styles and movements in the fashion industry.

Top free blog providers out there include Blogger.com, Typepad and WordPress. WordPress is also one of the most popular open source blogging software, with a new release at the end of January and a unique ‘Multi-Blogger’ system dubbed ‘WordPress Mu’ so you can provide your employees with a blog of their own linked to your main domain.

As a new ‘blogger’ I would suggest a free hosted blog before you integrate a blog into your main domain. A ‘news’ blog needs to be updated with new content everyday, but a corporate blog only needs feeding 3-4 times a week. If you don’t update your blog your customers interest will wane and the point of the blog will eventually be lost.

We hope to see you in the blogging revolution!

Liz Kidson – Frooition Support

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Google Analytics to increase your e-commerce performance..

Friday, January 12th, 2007

Matt Cutts, A Google employee currently heading up Google’s WebSpam team, has recently posted a good article on Google Analytics, giving you a sample of the depth of information you can access using this free web based service from Google.

This data is interesting to look at for sure, but for those of you who run an e-commerce business, knowing your statistics (top keywords, referring URLs, traffic trends, etc) can help you to save time and money. For example, Google Adwords is implemented within Google Analytics, so finding what your top keywords based on your site data, and implementing these into your Google Adwords campaigns in order to increase performance is a much more straight forward process.

You could also use the information to assist making business decisions like choosing products, targeting customers & increasing the performance of your marketing campaigns – all based on real life accurate data from you own site(s).

Google Analytics is also integrated into ChannelAdvisor Merchant, a well known and widely used multi-marketplace e-commerce platform, allowing businesses to sell product to marketplaces like eBay, amazon, yahoo, as well as a whole host of Shopping Comparison Sites like Kelkoo, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com & Google Base to name but a few.

This powerful web based application, along side Google Base & their Web Developer Tools suggests a hint at Google’s direction for 2007, and baring in mind the last three or four Google Acquisitions (which include Jotspot {A wiki with a number of collaborative tools for business users, and includes applications such as spreadsheets, calendars, and forms}, writely {Web-based word processing that allows online document collaboration}, and of course YouTube {A community driven social networking site, allowing users to upload, share & broadcast videos, which is now one of the busiest destinations on the web}), I’m very excited to see how these platforms, ideas and technologies will interact with each other as future development rolls out.

What other areas would you like to see Google tackle, and what other kinds of application could they offer to assist e-commerce traders?

Mic Burns
Frooition Support

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Posted in Google Commerce, Search | 1 Comment »

Google & Yahoo collaborate in Sitemaps.org

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

Incase you haven’t yet heard, Google & Yahoo have launched a collaborative site www.sitemaps.org. Sitemaps provide webmasters and content providers to submit new and existing content to search engines. Unified

As any webmaster will know, publishing content to multiple search engines can be a somewhat tedious task, so this unified approach will bring a new standard, and a more efficient approach to submitting your website(s), and the search engine industry as a whole.

Just because a level playing field has been agreed in the form of www.sitemaps.org, don’t expect to see the exact same result rankings when searching Yahoo or Google, as each of these companies still have their own search algorhythms and ranking criteria. However, submitting content to all Search engines that subscribe to this new standard will now have a common ground, making it both easier for publishers and for search engines to crawl and update your site.

Both google and Yahoo will continue to crawl websites and index using their own bots (slurp(yahoo) and googlebot(need I say it?)), but each engine will also use the sitemap submissions to assist this process.

Rumour has it Microsoft (MSN) has also accepted an invitation to support the new project, which now brings together the three big players in the search industry.

Links: www.sitemaps.org
Create a sitemap: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
Submit your sitemap to Google: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps
Submit your sitemap to Yahoo: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

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eBay and Myspace.com

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

The massive optimisation of myspace of late means that in around 2 days, your myspace account is optimised within google and showing up within search listings! Just search for frooition in google and two myspace accounts will appear where two employees have marked frooition as where they work. That happened in 2 days! What else gets into googles search index in a mere two days? Many sellers are now promoting their auctions through myspace and adding ‘freinds’ from relevent groups of people. The primary age for myspace is between 16 and 34. So if your product hits that age range then a bit of free myspace advertising can’t go a miss can it?

Whaaaaat? I hear you say? Well companies such as Red Bull are using myspace to attract new customers to their product. Want a bigger example? Adidas are also giving myspace a whirl!

Since the auctionbytes article ebayers have been taking advantage of this new channel to gain brand control ( you would not want anyone else to use your brand!)

Myspace has a networking feature also which will help you market too and reach new customers.

With myspace attracting 200,000 new registrants a day who can afford to miss out on this marketing and SEO oppotunity.

Join the race, get on myspace! ( I really could be a 70′s children’s TV presenter sometimes)

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