Oneupweb

For an interesting look at the inner workings of the customer service industry, try Emily Yellin's "Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us."

The 2007 holiday selling season likely will be remembered as the year social marketing hit the mainstream. A Oneupweb study of the 12 hottest products for the upcoming holiday season shows a remarkably creative variety of social media strategies and tactics being employed by savvy online marketers as they successfully generate advanced buzz and ensuing engagement. For the multichannel marketer who has yet to adopt a specific social-marketing strategy, it may appear a daunting, if not impossible, task to jump into during this holiday selling season. But here are four social tactics you might want to consider. 1. Participate in existing social networks.

Oneupweb in December 2006 conducted a study to determine trends relative to traffic, conversion rates and total sales among e-commerce sites during the holiday season. The resulting whitepaper, 2006 Holiday Online Retail Buying Trends: A Study of the Consumer Behavior Online during 2006 Holiday Season, offers up some useful information for 2007’s sales season. Based on its research, Oneupweb came up with five best practices for paid-search advertising: 1. Be ready by Halloween. 2. Back-to-school triggers testing. 3. Protect peak season opportunities, e.g., develop bid strategies with higher conversion rates in mind (to offset seasonally high keyword prices), and develop inventory strategies. 4.

As holiday sales results continue to roll in, now’s the time to start thinking about ways to improve your online preparedness for the 2007 holiday season. Search marketing firm Oneupweb offers four best practices based on data from the past holiday season in its recent whitepaper “2006 Holiday Online Retail Buying Trends”: 1. Be ready by Halloween. Consumers start thinking about the holidays in October, making this holiday a good milestone to keep in mind, the whitepapers’ authors note. During the final full week of October (23-29) in 2006, retail site traffic went up 14.2 percent, conversion rates grew 15.7 percent and sales rose

If you’re on the fence about developing a podcast for your customers, consider the following: From April to August this year, there’s been a 71 percent increase in podcast downloading, according to a report released last month by Pew Internet Research. But how can you make sure your podcast is found by listeners looking for the topics you cover? Natural and paid search marketer Oneupweb offers the following tips to increase search traffic to your podcasts in its recent whitepaper, “The Value of Podcasting to Search Marketing”: 1. Offer your podcast as an XML feed. Creating an XML file that automatically uploads your

Tech Talk • Maximize Search Visibility E-commerce technology provider MarketLive has released MarketLive 5.2, an upgrade to its e-commerce platform. The upgrade features the ability to create spider-friendly URLs, overcoming obstacles such as query strings, database characters and session IDs to enable every page on a Web site to be fully indexed by search engines. Keyword-relevant terms are embedded in the URLs to improve search rankings. Other features include the ability to customize the URL, page title and metadata configurations for each page of the site, and automatically create keyword-rich alternate descriptions for images. For more, visit www.marketlive.com. • Print Labels Faster Office products manufacturer Seiko

You’ve no doubt heard the increasingly loud buzz of marketers encouraging Web marketers of all kinds to try podcasting as a means of drawing and engaging customers. But as with any emerging technology, don’t just fly in blind and expect to succeed. Online services firm Oneupweb offers the following tips on on podcast production in its recent whitepaper, “Consider Podcasting”: 1. Identify your target audience: The first step in determining whether or not to develop a podcast is to determine if your customers will use it. Are your customers Web savvy? Do they use their computers on a regular basis? If not, a podcast

Like any successful marketing initiative, a pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing campaign requires careful planning and regular maintenance. But should you perform campaign maintenance in house or outsource it? Oneupweb, a natural and paid search marketing firm, outlines the following triggers to help catalogers know when it may be time to seek outside help for their PPC campaigns in its recent whitepaper,”Fresh Google and Yahoo! Paid Search Strategies for C-Level Execs.” 1. Your current search budget runs out before the month ends. There are a few areas to look at if you’re having this problem. You could be the victim of click fraud, or your

Traffic from Google to your Web site for a given keyword will triple the first month your site appears on the first search results page, according to a recent study by search marketing firm Oneupweb. To help get your site on Google’s first search results page, here are some tips shared by search industry experts at Search Engine Marketing Day held last month at eTail 2006 in Palm Desert, Calif. * Build a sitemap. Even if it’s not accessible by visitors to your online store, a sitemap always should be included on your Web site, said Stephan Spencer, founder and president of Madison, Wis.-based Web