As an e-commerce merchant, you already appreciate the power of search engines like Google to funnel clients to your products. You know that optimizing your site for the search engines can help extend the reach of your sales campaigns to a national or even global audience. Directing search engine traffic to your site through search [...]

So now that you’ve gotten yourself a fantastic website, you’re ready to start stuffing your wallet with the results. If you’re wondering how to get the right customers to your site at the right moment, you might consider starting a pay-per-click campaign. One of the fastest and easiest means of driving prospective clients to your [...]

“Placement targeting” (known in its last AdWords life as “site targeting”) allows AdWords advertisers to select specific places in the Google content network where they want their ads to appear. Google revised the “site targeting” term to highlight the ability of AdWords to place your ad within a specific section of a site, such as [...]

A recent Wall Street Journal article lambasted Google for its weak response to the “piggybacking” maneuver that many of its smaller advertisers use to lure people to their sites using larger companies’ brand names, slogans, or other trademarked words in their ad text. Google and many other search engines post policies against smaller advertisers using [...]

Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. Larry Lessig calls law professor Yochai Benkler “the leading intellectual of the information age.” He studies the commons — including such shareable spaces as the radio spectrum, as well as our shared bodies of knowledge and how we access [...]

A client of the Maryland-based web design company McCord Web recently had an AdWords account hijacked to the tune of $10,000. The client caught the incident early, allowing McCord Web to work with Google to reverse the charges and get the client back in business with a new AdWords account; however, it took nearly a [...]

Yet again we have had an example of the single biggest pitfall in building an online business. The unfortunate thing is that many times this pitfall must be explored in the business building process. But note I said explored, not depended upon. The platform on which you run your business must not wholly depend [...]

I believe one of the scenarios (in a future world faceted with scenarios) will be the transparency of the Internet in daily use. As usage becomes more ubiquitous, sitting down at a computer will be less prevalent. Bill Gates put it on the line last month when he announced he was preparing Microsoft for voice [...]

This is an area of business operations I am personally beginning to learn a lot about. We have spent the last 4 years building a firm that works very closely with small businesses. There are distinctions in service needs and allowances for those businesses and they can be grouped. Specifically for our web marketing [...]

For most small businesses, the only thing they think about when it comes to shipping is cost. But there are some great resources out there on how to improve not only your bottom line, but to improve your business operations and client relationships with best practices shipping techniques. Mark Taylor is the Shipping Coach and [...]