The term "strategic marketing" is frequently misused to the point where its real meaning has become diluted and confused with other marketing terminology. There is a difference between a strategy and a tactic.
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If you have a web site that focuses on interesting topics, it is fairly easy to earn some passive income from the web site by placing Google AdSense ads on your web pages. AdSense is a context-driven system, which means that the ads displayed should be related to the theme of the content on the page. (more…)

If you own a web site that displays an e-mail address or if it has a form that people can use to submit comments or questions, or your e-mail address is listed in a visible WHOIS record, you undoubtedly have received requests for link exchanges. These are also called reciprocal links. What most people do not realize is that the vast majority of these requests are fraudulent and provides no benefit to your site. (more…)

Web site performance, page loading and rendering is one of the first impressions a user observes when visiting a web site. Fast web pages appear much more professional. Web pages that load slowly, especially if the pages take 5 or more seconds to load, cause users to abandon a site pretty quickly. Think about it. How many web sites would you continue to visit if each page takes 5, 10 or more seconds or more for each page to load. There are steps that you can take to assure that your web site performs well and helps to retain users. (more…)

Every on-line merchant needs to develop a list of transaction issues that should trigger deeper scrutiny of an order. Let’s face it, due to the anonymity of the Internet e-commerce fraud hits almost every merchant to one degree or another. Even if a credit card company approves a card as valid, if the card is later found to be stolen or the card owner claims he or she did not order a product, the online merchant most often gets hit with a chargeback and must absorb the loss. (more…)

When starting an e-commerce Web site or any type of business on the Internet, selecting the very best domain name can sometimes make the difference between the success or failure of the business. This task should therefore be given serious thought and not performed haphazardly. (more…)

Once you have a working Amazon store script, you must populate it with products. To do that, you need browse nodes. Browse nodes are Amazon’s category codes. There are browse nodes for parent categories, such as DVDs (130), Photo (502394), Kitchen (284507) and all of the major categories displayed on Amazon.com. There are also child-nodes representing all the subcategories within a parent node. (more…)

Almost every large, successful online merchant uses an affiliate marketing program to drive new business to their sites. Affiliate marketing allows web site owners to post links, logos, product images and banner ads on their web site with a link to a merchant’s site. Every time a user clicks on the link, visits the merchant’s site and buys something, the affiliate gets a commission on the sale. It’s a win-win-win scenario for all involved. The user finds what he or she is looking for, the affiliate gets a small reward for sending a customer to the merchant’s site and the merchant picks up new customers and business. (more…)

Pay-per-click advertising is becoming a necessary part of the Internet marketing mix for most companies when there is a need to drive immediate traffic to their Web sites. Google AdWords is the most popular pay-per-click program on the Internet. However, if you are not attracting a very select targeted group of users who are specifically looking for what you offer, the costs can quickly get out of control and may be prohibitive. Many Google AdWords users do not know that they can take steps to drive down the cost of an AdWords campaign by using an AdWords feature called negative keywords. (more…)

Google finally clarified a much debated issue about the use of images to draw attention to AdSense ads. AdSense is Google’s advertising program that allows web site owners to place ads on their sites. AdSense is a revenue sharing program where the web site owner receives a portion of the ad revenue whenever a user clicks on an ad. (more…)