BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

These are the features ranked according to the number of top 500 retailers that are using them (as per Internet Retailer Magazine):

1. keyword search
2. daily/seasonal specials
3. enlarged product view
4. what’s new
5. affiliate program
6. advanced search
7. online gift certificates
8. rich media
9. outlet center
10. email a friend
11. coupons/rebates
12. top sellers
13. site personalization
14. alternative payments
15. store locator
16. wish list
17. customer reviews
18. catalog quick order
19. mapping
20. product customization

Interesting enough as well that most consumers (according to Forrester) are willing to decline paying for “flare”:

Fewer consumers are willing to pay for extras such as gift wrapping, or overnight delivery.
(26% of respondents said they would pay for expedited delivery prior to the holiday season, down from 45% who said they would do so in 2006.)

Generally, what this means is that consumers want to get their purchase faster, easier and with less extras then before. For most of the prospective clients that call us, top five requests for web site are:

1. Large pictures/ability for visitor to enlarge product image
2. Search engine optimization/marketing
3. Ability to quickly add and remove inventory items
4. Ability to post featured/for sale items
5. Ability to use various discount codes to track promotions

It is obvious that trends for small and large businesses are almost the same. The slight difference is attributed to overall approach to ways of doing business for small business owners and large retailers.

Popularity: 32%

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Short and comprehensive guide - how to create a link bait on your site. Thanks to members of SitePoint and DigitalPoint forums this all have been gathered.

1. Put together a list of web resources (forums, blogs) that are relevant to your topic
2. Put together a good post or article or eBook or anything of the real value. Give it out for free from your resource
3. Write a brief about your value post. Call it a press-release and submit it to proper catalogs (they called press release web sites)
4. Contact blogs you have gathered in step one. Give them the link to your content and press release.
5. Register or open new thread on forums you gathered in step one. Provide link to the content you have created. Answer questions. Be a good forum member. Don’t forget to put a link to your content in your signature.
6. Write couple of articles about whatever you have created. Use title of your free content as anchor text. Submit these articles to article directories.
7. Stumble, Digg, Reddit, put it on del.icio.us. If it’s a video, can be shown on video or can be featured in video - put it on YouTube. Don’t waste your time on Netscape, by the time you read this it’s probably long gone dead.
8. Guest-post on other blogs. Explain what and why you have created your content. Create buzz.
9. If you have ties via social web sites (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Jaiku, LinkedIn, etc.) promote your content there.

Most of these bullet points are very obvious to anyone who ever tried to get a decent amount of traffic to the web site. Still, not everyone manages to follow through these simple steps. In any case - this would be a good reference point.

Popularity: 35%

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There is a huge number of posts on this blog that have a very high chance of never being read again. There is also a very high need to increase a PR, Alexa rank, Compete Rank and so on. There must be a way to reuse the content, at least that part of it that could be reused. So far I came up with the following tricks:

• Posts that make sense apart from the blog - submit them to article databases
• Posts that make sense without sponsored links - repost them once sponsorship expires
• Posts that make sense apart from the blog - repost them to other web sites with backlinks to main blog. This could be guest posts or just reprints.
• Posts by certain tag - mix them with posts from other blogs of similar nature to create new content-rich site.

Well, I have couple of more ideas as well. I will try them with Zealus Community Forums and will report on the progress. Most of this will be automated, so I won’t have to spend huge amount of time on that.

Popularity: 16%

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