A friend of mine at a software company was lamenting the trouble with email marketing, and how spam has caused an extremely low click-through and open rate. Whether trying to email his own list of customers - which is one of the most cost effective ways to increase sales and get conversions - or renting/buying [...]

It’s easy to lump RSS into the blog category, as another way to have people interact with your blog. Subscribers are valuable, and signing subscribers to your RSS feed is important. But here at Internet Retailer Conference 2008 I witnessed a speaker tout the wonderful benefits of Web 2.0 technologies for e-commerce retailers [...]

Wired editor Chris Anderson coined the term “the long tail” in his 2004 book of the same name. Anderson hit upon one of the best reasons you should be publishing a business blog: the long tail. In the book, Anderson talks about the way information is sought on the Internet. The “long tail” refers to [...]

Google is deploying “universal search” – a comprehensive search result that provides semantic results from multiple content sources. Given that a Google search will produce relevant Web pages, blogs, photos, videos, audio clips and other media types when a user types in a search term, can you really optimize for semantic search?
In a word, yes. [...]

Corporate blogging is quickly coming into its own. The Internet is an awesome medium because it’s so good at putting people directly in touch with one another. Solid corporate blogging strategy takes advantage of this ability, but if not executed well, the results can be disappointing at best, and disastrous at worst.
Corporate blogging is just [...]

I’ve written about the importance of comments when it comes to blogging. As a blogger, you’ll be known by the comments you leave and receive. Comments, after all, are a great way to get important user feedback from your readership. Unfortunately, rogue blog comments on a blog can also be a source of frustration for [...]

Although many people are now turning to blogs for information and opinions, blogging has been around for about ten years. If you blog, you know that one of the benefits of blogging is the RSS feed that alerts your readers to a new post. Depending upon your niche, you and your readers may benefit from [...]

Earlier this month, Starbucks launched a new Web site. Launching a business Web site is nothing new, but this Starbucks site was established to capture consumer feedback and ideas about how the company should modify itself to perk up its US coffee sales. The comments have rolled in by the hundreds to the MyStarbucksIdea.com.
The site [...]

Adweek covered a recent study conducted by Universal McCann that shows some interesting things about US consumers and social media. The survey was a repeat of one done in September 2006 by the research firm. The second survey showed that the number of survey respondents who regularly read blogs jumped from just over 50 percent [...]

SEO is a big determinant of how high your site ranks in search engine results pages. Making sure your site is spider-friendly can help visitors discover your site and your blog more easily.
Search engine spiders “crawl” your pages to find out what’s on your site and to categorize it for placement in search engine results. [...]