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UPS and FedEx now using DIM Weight (Dimenional Weight) Pricing

DIM Weight Pricing

Larger e-commerce retailers have been prepared for this for a long time. Smaller organizations, probably not so much and it’s likely to hurt their bottom line because they will not be able to immediately switch their packaging materials and processes. This is good news for USPS though, who is still shipping based on weight and announced some price cuts, in July (2014), to…

These are tricks I have noticed being used quite regularly in the email marketing world. They are not necessarily bad or underhanded, but they are not what I would call above board either. The reason they are being used is they normally will go completely unnoticed by most.

1. The OOPS Followup E-mail.

This trick is so easy to pull off because the marketer is asking for forgiveness upfront. A…

Choosing and Buying a Domain Name

The title of this article sounds like it’s from the 90’s. The world wide web as we know it was just hitting it’s adolescent phase and venture funded .coms were appearing like zits only to be popped shortly thereafter. Many ‘millionaires for a year’ were made …

Back then you could buy virtually anything you could think of, and if it wasn’t available you could…

The rules are as simple as in anything – Don’t Be A Jerk! (or, please, don’t be a jerk, rather.)

What prompted me to write this was a personal experience from a online company/website who I won’t mention, not to protect them, but to avoid giving them any exposure at all.

(They deserve to be shamed, actually, so I will give you a hint … If you were to need a babysitter and searched Google, they…

[tweetherder]Organic Search still Reigns Supreme![/tweetherder]

According to a recent study by BrightEdge, Organic Search results are a 51% driver over all other non-organic channels for traffic generation.

This may be a bit surprising considering there are over 1.3 billion facebook users and my recent writing regarding SEM being the Preferred way to spend ad dollars. Even more surprising is…

AdWords Exact Match Dead - The Good and Bad News

Adwords Exact Match Option is Dead. All Campaigns will be forced to include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants.

Starting in September (2014) Google will remove the option for allowing Exact Match ONLY for your AdWords ads. Ads will now, by default, show up for the exact keywords and close matches. For example, when performing a search for “Kids Roller Skates” your search results…

URL Length and SEO

URL Length and SEO

Does URL length effect SEO?

As far as I know, there’s no theoretical length limit, but we recommend keeping URLs shorter than 2000 characters to keep things manageable. – John Mueller (Google)

Thanks, John! — 2000 characters is quite a long URL:

http://www.qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm1234567890.com/qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm1234567890qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm1234567890qwertyuio…

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is still the preferred tool for Customer Acquisition

… according to a recently released study by Forrester and Shop.org.

The State of Retailing Online research study, through a survey of 81 retailers in May and June, found search engine marketing (SEM) is preferred by 85% of them as one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics.

CPA on the Rise

Retailers…

What is Web Analytics?

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. (source)

According to Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0, Analytics is defined as:

The analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your website and the competition

To drive a continual improvement of the online experience…

Why you should Exclude Semalt (crawler.php) from Google Analytics and probably steer clear of it altogether.

Located in the Netherlands, the website claims it is a webmaster keyword ranking analytics tool and seems to provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services. This Semalt crawler highly inflates your visitor/user numbers and so weakens the strength and accuracy of your reporting.

If that…

Enclosed Checkout

Increase you checkout conversion rate overnight! Here is a simple, tested, and proven method to reduce your abandoned cart rate.

I previously mentioned Enclosed Checkouts in my Guest Checkout article and I promised a bit more on that.

Enclosing your checkout page involves removing everything that is not necessary to the act of checking out. A good checkout page follows the…

Subject Line A/B Testing for Email Campaign - Nix the Word SALE

SALE: Add it to the list of words NOT TO USE in your Subject Line.

We all know it doesn’t matter how well written, designed, or crafted the content of your email is if you don’t write a great Subject Line. It’s simple: Bad Subject Line = No Open = No Click = No Conversion.

A client had a saleover the weekend and sent out a number of emails to two different lists. Two different subject lines, one…

This is something very useful and helpful. They are all changing so often it seems so I thought I would keep a definitive and ever-updated list. It’s a full list of image dimensions for the top business social networks. This will help while you are building your great social media campaigns. There are many more, but I covered the top ones including social networks like instagram, facebook,…

Login or Checkout as Guest?

I’m guessing this is the turning point for around 50% of your would-be customers. Shopping cart abandonment can be a bit frustrating. While it is good to get customer information you can use later, many people have privacy concerns, don’t want another account on yet another website, and don’t want to have another password to remember just so they can buy some tube…

Canada is set to enact the what is possibly the toughest anti-span legislation in the world, Bill C-28. The new law, which takes effect July 1, 2014, prevents businesses from sending commercial electronic messages — emails, texts or even social media messages — to Canadians without their consent. Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation or CASL will fine individuals up to $1 MIL and businesses up to $10…

In true Facebook fashion, after creating a clone app, Poke, then offering a boat-load of cash for SnapChat ($3 Billion) but getting turned down, they decided to try yet again with one small change and this time it’s brilliant!

Slingshot is the second release from Facebook’s Creative Labs, the division that created the Paper app for reading news. Everyone has those one or two friends that are…