A new trend in online shopping, which is getting increasingly popular is “Social shopping“. Success of social networking sites is an easy indication of how popular social shopping is going to be in 2010.
Online shopping has varying trends and customer demands. To create satisfying experiences, when a customer visits your site, a jazzy looking online store is no longer enough. Online reputation cannot be ignored at all. In fact, it is getting more serious than ever.
Your online reputation is going to set the reputation of your physical store, as well. Things have reached this far and is going ahead in full stream.
Strong growing trends and figures indicate that 85% shoppers will shop online and majority will continue to do so, this coming holiday season!
A deep understanding of online retailing, with easy to use & implement technologies, compelling, enticing e-commerce solutions, may not take you where you want to head.
Majority of shoppers, including me, even if I buy the product later in the shop, search the internet to find everything about the product. Most consumers rely on opinions of other consumers to make the final decision. And here is where the “Social shopping sites” factor streams in.
Social shopping is a group effort. Friends & strangers get together at Social Shopping Sites; they form groups and comment, discuss, review, deal hunt, vote, poll etc., all for shopping!!! World’s favourite activity.. Shopping!!!
Top Social Shopping Sites are listed under “Pages” on top right hand side of this page.
A well planned marketing strategy must include Article Marketing, which can be an extremely effective mode to market your business and bring thousands of customers to your website.
Here are 10 Most Effective Tips.
1. Check directory guidelines and strictly follow them.
2. Limit your article within 600 words. Something concise & focussed, within 450-500 would be most apt. Must be informative and helpful to the reader.
3. Layout: Use short paragraphs, use numbers & bullets, use sub-headings, use graphs & pictures.
4. Keep the title of the article within 6-8 words. It must include your main keywords. It must be eye catching, attention grabbing and inspiring.
5. Be diligent in choosing the most appropriate category and sub-category. Avoid submitting to irrelevant directories.
6. Do not stuff your keywords more than 5% of the total word count.
7. Do not insert too many links. Insert links only after the first paragraph, if you have to.
8. Good resource box is very important. You get your link here and also here is where the reader will decide to visit your site or not.
9. Do not include your e-mail address anywhere. Do not publish your article on your website. Could be mistaken for duplication.
10. If you have more than one article, submit one at time.
Grabbing video sites user base is a very effective way to promote your online content or business. It could be through the creation of your own video clips or the promotion, aggregation and discussion of other people’s videos in your niche.
Content-targeting features of video sites have a very good chance of maximizing your conversion rate of viewers to website visitors. But even the best videos can become lost if you don’t take advantage of the opportunities to promote them. There are millions of visitors that you can tap into to boost traffic to your site, but there are also millions of videos for them to choose from.
Here are Top 10 Most Effective Tips to Video Marketing:
1. Create & Customize Your Own Channel: Create a profile for yourself and your content, and link back to your website URL.
2. Account Types – Choose Your Niche: Narrowing the focus of your channel, automatically reduce the competition from other videos.
3. Create Short Form videos: Your best chance of creating a highly viewed video is to make sure that your running time is around the five minute mark or less. Have a particularly exciting longer piece? Break up into segments and combine together in a playlist.
4. Tags & Categories: See how other popular videos in your niche are tagged & placed within the categories. More time & effort on this will finally pay off. Consider less popular categories if they fit your content, as it will reduce competition and easily become most popular or most viewed within your specific category. Feel free to add as many keywords as you can, and again, see if you can match them to other existing content.
5. Create your Niche targeted Playlists: First of all, you can gather individual clips into a niche-targeted context. This way, viewers can find related content quickly and easily without having to search for individual items themselves. By putting in optimum time & research you can provide this service and boost your web traffic without ever recording a single video of your own.
6. Promote with YouTube Email & Bulletins: YouTube provides you with a number of self-promotion opportunities, and among them is the option to send emails to other users, and create bulletins from your profile or other users’ channel pages.
7. Video Responses: Another effective way of getting yourself seen is to leave a video response to another user’s clip. Choose your target video well, Keep it relevant, Keep it civil; Strike at the right time.
8. Join or Create Groups: All video sites have a strong community of groups that exist for users to discuss and share videos. You can browse for groups to join by category, or create your own group from the Groups page. Both ways, you will be benefited much! it will provide you with a very nicely segmented, targeted audience for your content.
9. Chat in the Streams: This gives you an opportunity to share your videos in a niche-targeted live environment and communicate with the people watching them.
10. Active Sharing: A new great feature in YouTube, to drive traffic. If you choose to turn on Active Sharing, every time you visit a video, your username will appear next to that video clip for 30 minutes. All of your videos will then be added to a ‘videos I’m watching’ section on your profile page. Thru this service, curious viewers may click through to your profile, knowing that you are are watching the same video. Then they will check out other videos you have been watching, as a form of recommendation. While doing so, they will already be on your profile page, complete with the links to your websites.
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You can see the top ranked Video Networking sites on top right hand side of this page.
