Ecommerce Blog

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Alistair Croll

Choosing a profile picture is a self-branding exercise. There’s no right or wrong way to present yourself online but many avatars are boring, forgettable. Here’s a gallery of 99 remarkable, creative, funny and memorable social media avatars. Why did we pick these pics? Check out how to choose an avatar to find out.

 

The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group
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Original post by Linda Bustos

Are you in a mono-”logo”s relationship, or play the field when it comes to social network avatars?

Many of us take a number of images for a spin before we settle on “the one.” Some have joined themselves to one and will never look back. While others seem to have a new photo every week.

If you’re tired of the avatar-scene and are looking for a long-term commitment, perhaps it’s time to settle down with a single avatar. Or if you feel your avatar is going nowhere - maybe it’s time to break up.

Decisions, decisions. There are a few questions you must ask yourself:

• Is this just a relationship of convenience? Maybe you selected your profile from the social network’s default. You really gotta believe there is a better avatar out there, even for you.

• Is it purely sentimental? Have you had the same avatar since 2001? Familiarity is comfortable, but you may have outgrown your avatar. I mean, I’ve had many lovely walks along the beach with my Discman, but come on.

• Is your avatar a cheat? It seemed all fine and dandy when you turned yourself into a South Park character, but now you see your picture in other places, wearing other clothes, and with slightly different hairstyles…and you’re beginning to get suspicious.

• Does your avatar share your interests and future goals? An avatar is a personal brand, don’t waste your time if you’re not compatible. Eventually there will come a time when you will inevitably move on.

• Do your friends like your avatar? In a way, your avatar is a reflection of you - your avatar shouldn’t be boring or rude. In fact, if you have an outgoing avatar, it can introduce you to a LOT of new people.

• Can you bring your avatar home to mother? I think this is self-explanatory.

• Is your avatar high-maintenance? Does your picture need constant fussing and resizing for it to look good every time you take it somewhere new?

If you answered yes or no to one or more of the above questions, you may or may not need to break up with your avatar. But if you’ve read this far, please read on for some tips on what makes attractive, long-term avatars:

Logos

Logos are a great way to brand your blog or business, for obvious reasons. If you’re familiar with a blog or company, you’ll recognize the logo as a representative of that brand right off the bat. The risk here is there’s always a possibility you change jobs / careers and your avatar or user handle becomes outdated.

Examples

SEMvironment and Ecogeek’s logos communicate the green focus of their businesses. If your avatar somehow ties into what you do, that can be even more effective.

Another downside of using your logo is if your company has multiple people, it’s confusing if more than one person uses the logo. Who gets to use the logo? How will others in the company brand themselves?

I have yet to see this, but think it would be a neat idea if a company that gets its team to take similar avatar photos. Perhaps all wearing funny hats, tuxedos, team jerseys, doctor’s uniforms or even bobbleheads…

Characterize Yourself

I don’t mean Simpsonize yourself. I mean create a persona like The Mad Hat, Fantomaster, Slightly Shady SEO, Google Tutor, Incredible Help, OnReact or John Cow:

Caricaturize Yourself

Chris Hooley, Rohit Bhargava, Joost de Valk, Barry Schwartz, Andy Sernovitz, Shawn Collins and Jeffrey Zeldman are a few examples of personal caricatures.

Brand Yourself as a Celebrity Character

If you’re lucky enough to share a name with a popular cartoon character like Sebastian or Duff Man, you can go this route.

If you don’t have a name-connection, it’s less effective just to borrow a character. Chances are there are six or seven or eight others who had the same bright idea.

Use an Unusual Headshot

Black and white headshots can stand out because they’re less common, but stand out more with any interesting angle of your head. Examples from Bill Slawski, Muhammad Saleem and Shana Albert.

Bright colored backgrounds work, too. Examples from Ciaran Norris and Lyndon Antcliff:

Lyndoman also uses a half-head, a great technique shared by Wiep Knol and Matt McGee:

Or turn your head, touch your face, rotate your photo, paint your face…or use a prop!

Combine Logo with Photo

Best of both worlds. Robert Raught and Stefan Juhl do this well. Their choice of white background also makes it easier to see. In Robert’s case, you also know his occupation without clicking through to his profile page.

Adopt a Pet

Advertising execs know you can’t go wrong with baby animals. In social media, monkeys are particularly effective (perhaps because they’re almost people?) The pros are that animals are memorable and often funny. The downside is an animal doesn’t say anything about you or your business, unless it ties in with your name (maybe your name is Cat or your nickname is Bart the Bear).

Use an Inanimate Object

Attention-grabbing, stands out amongst the sea of faces and easy for people to remember, a single object can be a good avatar choice. Robert Gorell goes retro with a cassette tape (although this will alienate anyone born after 1985), Wendy Piersall has her red stillettos (would be neat to where those to the conference!) and “Wingnut” has his…wingnut.

Want more inspiration? Check out more amazing avatars.

The Key to PPC for Online Retailers
Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET
Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group
Register to Attend

Original post by Linda Bustos

Original post by Guest Column

Greetings from the Rocky Mountains! I’m away this week in beautiful Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada for the CWC/Corus Digital Media Career Accelerator workshop.

This morning I will be presenting to a select group of women in the broadcasting industry a session on blog promotion through new media. I thought I’d give you a peek at the slide deck anyhow as the ideas can apply to ecommerce blogs also. (You may also download it from Slide Share)

They’re not the sexiest slides but I made them a bit more textual so the deck is somewhat understandable on its own.

| View | Upload your own

Blog Promo and Social Media For Ecommerce

I’d like to go into a bit more detail here on Get Elastic with an ecommerce focus:

Why Blog?

• Open up for conversation with your customers, gather feedback and attend to reputation management concerns

• Establish a personality for your company, employees or brands
• Attract long-tail search traffic and pre-sell your company or products
• Build backlinks to boost your overall link profile (if the blog is a sub-folder or sub-domain)
• Landing page for contests and promotions
• Information resource for customers, employees, partners, investors and affiliates

Blog Traffic Sources

• Offline awareness (your brick-and-mortar stores, print or TV/radio advertising, word-of-mouth)

• Link from your estore
• Links from other websites and blogs
• Search engines
• Blog search engines
• Social networks
• Email campaigns with blog call-outs

Basic Search Engine Optimization

• Keywords in the right places

• Links from relevant sites
• Blog plug-ins
• Good content / more content

Where to Place Keywords

• Title tag

• Page title
• Body text
• Link text (on your site and when others link to you)
• Post tags
• Alt attributes (images, video)
• Headings / bolded text
• URLs (keyword relevance in search engine and when people link to you)

Why Links Matter

• Search engines need a measure of authority or popularity

• Blogs are more “linkable” than static business sites
• Deep links look more “natural” to search engines (don’t look purchased or bartered for)
• Links send traffic and help branding

Examples of Link-Baity Content

• Humor: Jockey Stop Squirming
• Controversy: Dove Evolution campaign
• Contest: Target dormroom contest in Facebook
• Amazing: Ray-ban sunglasses
• Emotional: 1-800-Flowers mother’s day
• Informative: Sephora makeup how-to’s
• Timely: Ice.com - Mr. Cupid
• Ongoing: Blogs (Ecommerce Blogs of the Top Online Retailers)

SEO Plugins

• SEO Plugins for Wordpress from Michael Gray

• Best SEO Plugins for Wordpress from The Blog Joint

Other “Search Engines”

• Video sharing: YouTube, Google Video etc.

• Google / Yahoo News (Tips for getting into Google News from Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Guide)
• Blog search: Google / Technorati / Ice Rocket & more

Why StumbleUpon Rules

Because this is a fairly short session (45 minutes) and there are so many things I could say about the subject, I only had time to address one social network - StumbleUpon. In my opinion, if you do no other social media sharing, you should at least be on StumbleUpon. It’s a good entry-level social network for a number of reasons:

• Drives a ton of traffic (often more than Google)

• Don’t have to be a “power user” to get results (according to Dosh Dosh)
• Drives traffic long-term (as opposed to Digg-style sites where stories are hot for a day)
• General site but you can get very targeted (specific tags, groups etc)
• Toolbar makes submission easy
• Tech-savvy users often have their own blogs (link opportunity)
• You can discover things to blog about

StumbleUpon is a social network where members can surf tags related to their interests to discover sites, photos, videos and articles relevant to them. Rather than using a search engine and letting a machine decide what’s good content, StumbleUpon shows you sites others thought were cool. You can also follow members interested in your topic/industry and when you log in, you see a feed of relevant recently “thumbed” content that you can start checking out yourself. If you like it you thumb up, if you don’t like it you thumb down or hit the “Stumble” button again. Simple.

You can also share items with your network. This can be powerful when you have a network of like minded people who will thumb up content you share with them. Their recent thumbs may appear in Facebook profiles and newsfeeds as well as their StumbleUpon profile page and friends’ feeds. Here’s a StumbleUpon Networking Guide with screenshots for further reading.

You can friend a maximum of 200 people on StumbleUpon (but more than that can subscribe to your Stumble feed). Neil Patel gave us a tip back in October when he joined us for a webinar on social media marketing strategies: friend as many people as you can initially, and if they don’t friend back within a week, move on and friend some more.

I suggest looking for a group on a niche topic and adding friends from within that group or looking for people who have indicated their interest in a certain topic by tag. You can find niche groups by browsing http://group.stumbleupon.com or typing a tag keyword in the search box.

StumbleUpon users are techsavvy and are often bloggers themselves. They may be using their SU account to discover blog fodder and your content can reach more people (the blog’s RSS subscribers and search engine traffic). The back links also benefit you.

SU is also a social bookmarking tool. When people Stumble your content there’s a good chance they’ll come back later to view it again.

Other social media sites like Digg have algorithms that skew towards “power users” that submit topics that go popular. It takes a lot of work to build up your Digg history and friend following. StumbleUpon takes less effort – you can get traffic just for submitting stories to the StumbleUpon system. But you can get more mileage if you make use of the social features available to you: friending, joining groups, tagging and reviewing sites and members.

Original post by Linda Bustos

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Original post by Robert Scoble

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Original post by Om Malik

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Original post by Robert Scoble

With the tagline “Strength in Numbers,” Bodybuilding.com’s own social network “BodySpace” has attracted over 120,000 active members to date. Members can create profiles, post progress pics, blog about their goals, progress, training routines and diet and connect with like-minded people.

In just a little over a year, the result has been a boost in average order size of almost $10 and an increase in conversion rate from 7% to 8% which CEO Ryan DeLuca describes as “huge.”

“We are building something that is not just based on making money. Everything we add to our site is based on helping visitors reach their goals. Helping our visitors stick to their programs and reach their goals will ultimately lead to much higher revenue, a much more valuable brand based on emotional connections, and more profitability based on increased customer loyalty.”

(more…)

Is Your Affiliate Program Your Top Sales Generator? If Not…
Free webinar: Thursday, December 6th, 9am PT / 12pm ET:
Affiliate Marketing: What Every Retailer Ought to Know
Guest Panelist: Shawn Collins, Author, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

Original post by Linda Bustos

With the tagline “Strength in Numbers,” Bodybuilding.com’s own social network “BodySpace” has attracted over 120,000 active members to date. Members can create profiles, post progress pics, blog about their goals, training routines and diet and connect with like-minded people.

In just a little over a year, the result has been a boost in average order size of almost $10 and an increase in conversion rate from 7% to 8% which CEO Ryan DeLuca describes as “huge.”

“We are building something that is not just based on making money. Everything we add to our site is based on helping visitors reach their goals. Helping our visitors stick to their programs and reach their goals will ultimately lead to much higher revenue, a much more valuable brand based on emotional connections, and more profitability based on increased customer loyalty.”

(more…)

Is Your Affiliate Program Your Top Sales Generator? If Not…
Free webinar: Thursday, December 6th, 9am PT / 12pm ET:
Affiliate Marketing: What Every Retailer Ought to Know
Guest Panelist: Shawn Collins, Author, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

Original post by Linda Bustos