According to the latest figures from Comscore, online retail spending cracked the $100 billion mark for 2006. The last week before Christmas alone accounted for $2.5 billion in sales. Comscore also highlighted the importance of online retail spending for the overall health of the US economy, noting that it accounted for 7% of all total retail spending.

Those are some pretty impressive numbers. $100 billion. E-tailers should ask themselves a couple of questions in January. What percentage of that huge retail spending pie did you get for your company, and what will you do in 2008 to get a bigger slice? One prediction I will make: the pie will be bigger, search engine positioning will be increasingly more valuable and blogs will be a crucial part of the marketing mix.

There has been a lot of talk recently about click fraud rates. Advertisers think they are being gouged by search engines, the engines deny it, and consumers don’t really care either way, as long as they are getting relevant results and minimizing the time they have to spend shopping online.

One alternative to traditional ppc is Turn.com a fully automated CPA or cost per action platform. According to them, they “blend site analysis, past performance, categories, audience, and over 60 other variables to select the most relevant graphical and text ads”. They also claim to be completely pay for performance in that the advertiser sets the bid price and pays only when a specified action occurs. Whether it’s a site visit, product purchase, email signup, or lead, the advertiser is in total control of both what they pay and when they pay it. I think this bears further investigation. If you are wasting 20% of your spend on fraud this platform could be very beneficial. Of course it is no alternative to being ranked in the natural search results, and in order to do that you need to have a blog and engage in blog linking.

This won’t come as a great surprise, but according to Comscore, online holiday spending continues to increase. Through the first seven weeks of the holiday season; beginning November first, US consumers spent $21.7 billion online. What I find of interest is where this increased traffic and sales is coming from.

Luxury items were more popular this year, there was a longer period of shopping and there was an increased amount of niche sites. There was also a large increase in shoppers coming into retail sites from blogs and social networks. So the early lessons learned from this year would be; develop your brand in the blogosphere, and make sure that you are ranked on search engines for niche products.

An interesting study done by Leichtman Research Group recently in regards to the US market for internet access, found that over 2.5 million subcribers added broadband service in the third quarter of 2006. There are now over 50.9 million broadband subscribers in the US.

This is great news for etailers in general and those using online video in particular. One of the constant complaints about using video as a promotional tool is that it takes too long to load, or is of poor quality. With more and more people using broadband and high speed internet, the video optimization market can only grow. Companies who do not tap into this new method of promotion will simply be left behind.

I saw a recent article concerning online spending by local auto dealers. Cars.com polled all of their dealers trying to discern where they were planning on spending their marketing dollars in 2007. Two thirds said that they were going to increase their spending on online advertising. This contributes to a broader trend, with spending by auto dealers rising from $1.4 billion in 2005 to a predicted $2.7 billion in 2007.

I am not sure where these dealers are planning on spending their money, but if the results that we get for our realtors are anything to go by, they would see a tremendous return from blog linking and blog marketing campaigns.

I came across an interesting article the other day from a direct mail marketing firm, Vertis. They have a tech savvy study, which looks at buying trends amongst generation Y’ers. The main point I looked at was the kinds of media people use in order to make a buying decision. According to the study, 38% of those polled said they turned to the internet as their first choice to assist them in making a decision to purchase. This is an increase of 21% from 2004.

This strengthens my belief that no matter what you sell, whether it be consumer oriented, or BtoB, you have to be found on the search engines. More and more people will research buying decisions online, whether or not they actually intend to buy products or services from a website. If you are not showing up on the search engines, you’re not even in the running for that consumers’ business. And the best way to secure that cherished spot in the first five results on Yahoo, Google, AOL and MSN is to conduct a blog marketing campaign.

As a company that continually tests new ways to serve our clients, we have been experimenting with blog linking for quite some time. Once we were completely sure that it would work, would not be viewed as spam by the search engines, and would help clients’ rankings in a cost effective way, we started promoting the service to selected customers. We have been very happy with the results, and so have our clients.

In a short space of time we have seen very solid increases in natural search traffic, coupled with increased conversion rates into sales. It really should come as no surprise to anyone who has been following the effectiveness of our programs. Search engines in general, and Google in particular value relevancy and backlinks. Our propietary network of blogs provides both. Companies that initiate a blog linking program today, will see more natural search traffic tomorrow. If only every aspect of online marketing was so simple.

According to the Consumer Internet Barometer, shoppers are becoming increasingly accustomed to incentives like free shipping and free return postage. Over 90% of shoppers said that free shipping would incent them to buy, while 65% mentioned that if they had a special incentive availble online that was not available in brick and mortar locations, then they also would be more likely to make their purchases online. Return postage was also mentioned as a prime motivator.

What does that mean for your e-tail business? Are you offering these kinds of incentives? How are you telling your clients? Are you using viral marketing? If you have a blog with subscribers, you can inform your buyers via email or RSS, that you are offering a special or incentive . They in turn will tell their friends and people in their sphere of influence. You announce a great promotion. Spread the news using subscriptions and RSS. Even better, do a video product release, and spread your message or promotion using video optimization.

We got an email today from a client who has been tracking his traffic sources. He has been a client for around three months. When he first started, all of his traffic was coming from paid search. He submitted to the Yahoo directory in an effort to boost his natural traffic. He initiated a blog marketing campaign with us.

In September, 80% of his clicks came from paid search, 9% came from natural search. By November, 71% was coming from paid, 19% from natural search and 4% was coming from his blog. To date in December, 66% of his traffic is coming from paid search, 23% from natural search, and around 6% from his blog.

That’s a pretty nice trend and one that we expect to continue and strengthen as we  institute our blog linking campaigns, which we fully expect will have a dramatic effect on his natural search traffic. Six months into the campaign he will be getting most of his traffic from organic search and will use paid search sparingly.

It looks like Firefox is getting involved in delivering Fan Based TV commercials to select local markets in the US. The ads will be done by advocates of the browser, of which I am one, and will focus on spreading the message that the user experience on Firefox is superior to that of other browsers, notably Internet Explorer. Obviously this is a smart move by Mozilla, as they will undoubtedly increase market share by embracing new marketing methods. Retailers should pay attention to what is going on here. Video and video optimization is here to stay. US households have the bandwidth and they want to see and share videos that they find interesting. It is the purest form of viral marketing around. All retailers need is an expert in the field to make sure they are taking advantage of this competitive edge. Triangle Direct Media is that company.