The benefits of using the right pictures with products are innumerable. They can also trigger something very important in prospects’ minds- the idea that what you are selling and what they are buying is real. In the world of ecommerce, separating yourself from the intangible and duplicitous is crucial to padding your conversion rates.

It’s been said that, amongst other things, pictures inspire emotion in viewers. For this reason, pictures are a marketing tool that online businesses shouldn’t treat lightly. After all, connecting with your buyers and prospects is exactly what you should be doing and using pictures is another …

These are troubling economic times. That much can’t be denied. Consumers feel the pinch as they find that it costs more to buy things. But now businesses are hurting, too. It’s also expensive to sell things.

Skyrocketing fuel costs have turned consumers to the Internet for their shopping needs. After all, it can be easier, quicker and cheaper to order something online if you find a good price and if shipping is cheap or even free. But therein lies the problem. While expensive gas has made shopping on the Internet more attractive to fuel-conscious consumers, it’s also made the …

Many business owners erroneously believe that gathering information about target markets is enough to build their buyer persona marketing arsenal. Not so! Think of getting to know buyer personas as slicing through a cake- you can’t cut a perfect piece without cutting through all the layers first.

The usual marketing questions don’t suffice when creating buyer personas. Using educated guesses can have your marketing team working overtime and just plain guessing can leave you confounded. While knowing certain descriptors of your target market (age, sex, location) can get you started in the right direction, you’ll need to go that …

I feel compelled to comment on a new trend perpetuated and identified by other marketing bloggers. Amazingly, there seems to be an anti-buyer persona movement. That’s probably a little dramatic. What’s really happening is that some marketing bloggers have begun to question the effectiveness of using elaborately detailed buyer personas to market and sell products. It just so happens that they’re doing it at the same time and it appears like an avalanche in the marketing blogger world.

We don’t think about emotions much when we consider optimization. But isn’t it conceivable to say that no decisions you ever make are based purely on reason? I mean the basis of your reason is driven by several emotional factors in your mind. Sometimes your brain completely eliminates certain decisions choices based on emotional factors. When we’ve discussed personas in the past, we’ve noted how important it is to get understand the user, but more importantly is getting inside a user’s head. We like to dig deep and  understand what works and what doesn’t and how they “FEEL” about certain …

Note from Khalid: This is a guest post from Samantha Gonzales

Business is war. Any serious entrepreneur will tell you so. But businesses with online presences face especially difficult battles because of how easy it is for potential customers to choose competitors’ businesses over their own.

The Internet has made it easier for prospects to find your business, but it’s also made it easier to leave it. Gone are the days when customers had to visit brick-and-mortar establishments and make decisions to do business on-the-spot. Also absent are the business owners, sales people and other representatives that could sway …

Note: this post is a guest post by Ms. Katie Gatto . Your feedback is really appreciated.

When most people think about how they will measure the success of their blog they look to the numbers that are provided by their analytics.  While these numbers can be a helpful in figuring out your blog’s traffic and its sources, far too many people rely on the measures provided by analytics as a sole source of data.  By doing this you are cheating yourself out of a complete measure for your blog’s success.

Creating a successful e-commerce operation is no easy task. Take the grueling process of creating a successful company offline and add to it a multitude of complexities from online marketing challenges to technical issues and you have an ecommerce operation. When I reflect back on my experience during the last 12 years in creating ecommerce websites and online portals, it is difficult to contribute the success or the failure of an ecommerce operation to a single issue. It is usually a culmination of several issues that can make or break the company. And I’ve learned from seeing ecommerce sites fail …