Is there any online retailer out there that has the following situation……I have a retail site and my biggest quarter is Q4. I’m about to ramp up my Pay-Per-Click spending so my margins will drop significantly. What should I do? Pay my SEO firm more money to do things that don’t affect my rankings or should I put some of my ad budget into offline advertising. I may do some local or National Ads on Radio and TV. I know I’ll be spending a ton on advertising but it’s what everybody else in my industry is doing and I need to keep up. Does this sound like you?

Solution: The companies that do well online are well ahead of the curve and they adapt themselves into different marketing programs to do so. If you had a Retail Blog, you’d be able to attack what so many in your industry don’t know about, Like,

1. 57 million readers in the United States

2. Starting the Viral Marketing Process

3. Stabalize your Reputation

4. Exploiting Keyword Niches

5. Video Advertising and Poscasting
Your time is now for a strategic gameplan to get in front of your audience. A business blog is step one.

Over on BBM there is a quick article about web 2.0 and how it may impact retail marketing as the web evolves. Check it out.

Blogs are becoming a powerful B2B presence.  In a study done by Knowledgestorm, blogs are becoming even more critical for any website business. In the study, 53% of the respondants claim that content from blogs has an impact on a buying decision.  80% read blogs and 51% read blogs once a week.  More…….

I came across a few new search engines that bear a little investigation. They will not bring in anything close to the kind of traffic as the big engines, but when and if they catch on they may be useful to some etailers looking to expand their internet presence.

Kartoo is a meta engine that displays results in a unique way. Instead of being in a list the relevant websites are displayed graphically.  If you conduct a search for “retail blogging” you will see our website in the first position, along with a description of what we do and other related topics.

Inquisitor is an engine that lets you search multiple sources like Yahoo, Google, UTube, Technorati, A9, Digg, Amazon and Flickr. The impressive thing about this engine is it is very fast, and actually displays results as you type. Not sure as to the usefulness of that function, but it is impressive none the less.

The most interesting one to me was Mr Sapo, an engine that aggregates results from other engines. You can search over 30 search engines, and multiple topics such as images, video audio etc. You can also search for blogs on 16 different blog search engines.

So how do you get your site listed on these engines and use them to boost sales? The same way you get on Google. Build an easy to use website with a lot of good information, then write about what you do to establish yourself as an expert in your field. These things can be accomplished with a blog.

Online Ad spend was up 49% in the first half of 06 compared to the first half of 05.  The Spanish market increased 21.8% during the same period.  It’s apparent that radio and cable tv are not the markets they were once before.  It’s becoming increasingly important to advertising online and grow your business.

Read More: Online Ad Spend 

I saw something the other day that I hadn’t seen in a while. In talking with a client, I found around 20 lines of hidden text at the bottom of his homepage. This purpose of this text is to fool search engines into believing that the clients homepage was relevant for a long list of keywords that did not appear in the visible text. It can result in a penalty from the engines as it is an obvious attempt to game the system. I thought that it had disappeared years ago along with doorway pages, cloaking, keyword stuffing, link farming and all the other tricks that were so popular back in the day.

It got me thinking about spam in the world of blog marketing. It is estimated that a fairly high percentage of blogs are “splogs” an affectionate term for using blogs to spam search engines. The splog is basically a bunch of meaningless content with hundreds of links.

The key to avoid being labelled as a splogger is to write good content. Plain and simple. If you write valuable and interesting articles, you will be seen as an authority in your industry by both the search engines and by your readers. Then you will get more business and grow your brand. Here at Retail Blog Marketing we show our clients how to blog, not splog. We also show you how to turn your blog into a vlog, but that’s for another article.

Move over myspace, there’s a new sheriff in town and it goes by the name of MUGSHOT.  What is Mugshot? Mugshot is an open project to create a live social experience around entertainment…Mugshot makes it easy to share web pages and show off your music tastes. You can learn about Mugshot feautures as we introduce them on our Mugshot Features page.

How well will they do?   If it’s anything like Linux, they’ll do very well.  It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens in the next 12 months.  Stay tuned….

One of the interesting things that we are starting to see with our retail blog clients is that their blogs are showing up on search engine results pages, many times alongside their main company website. This is the trend that is becoming more and more apparent every day. Blogs are going to be much more important than most companies’ websites in the future.
We have a real estate client in the happy position of having four rankings on a major search engine for one keyword phrase; two rankings for his site, and two for his blog. His blog marketing campaign is helping him dominate his market.

It was just a matter of time and You Tube has focus on yet another stream of Revenue by allowing advertisers to promote their brands via customized channels on the site.  The first try is with Paris Hilton and her music album.  They have created the “Paris Hilton Channel” to promote her debute album “Paris”.  This online “stuff” keeps gettig better and better every day.

Consider you have a well branded site amongst the “powerhouse” search engines, do you have a brand in the Blogosphere? Now is your chance to compete with your powerhouse rivals and grow your business online. Having a Retail Blog is extremely important because it connects you with people you never had a chance to connect with. If I’m searching for a cheap shirt online, I may visit overstock. Do you know how many people blog about “buying a shirt online” in the blogosphere? Now is your chance to get in the online game and grow your business. You must have a good Blog Marketing gameplan to succeed. It’s up to you. It’s now or never.