I’ve been quiet here lately because I’ve been crazy busy getting ready for the holidays. It might seem eons away, but in retail terms, the holidays are almost here. I am trying to wrap up my website enhancements for my own ecommerce website this week and I’ll be sharing my changes next week.

In the meantime, I want to call your attention to holiday advertising. As many of you know, I run co-op advertising websites though Smaller Box. These co-ops allow indie designers to share the cost of advertising and buy expensive ad space we can’t afford on our own. For my own ecommerce business, this form of advertising has been tremendously successful. That’s why I’m looking for partners to advertise with for the holidays.

My goal is to set up a special holiday advertising co-op website and gather enough members to split the cost of ads on sites like  Dlisted, Cute Overload, and Design Sponge. These blogs get millions of views during the holiday months and would bring a deluge of new customers, Facebook fans, newsletter subscribers, word of mouth, etc. It’s the kind of reach I could never afford to deliver for my brand on my own, which is why finding partners is a priority.

My goal is to offer membership to this co-op for a flat rate around $500.00 for the full year. (Meaning this one time payment gets your brand into the co-op for 12 months.) Those dues would be used to run ads from early October to end of December. Members would have their products featured on the co-op website all year long, even after the ads stop running. Members would also be able to promote on the co-op newsletters all year long.

Speaking of which, I plan to use the new co-op to get a new mailing list together. All co-op members would be welcome to share their promotions on this new mailing list, plus my existing lists (which go to thousands of indie shopping fans each month). I will be doing a special Cyber Monday mailing in November to the lists and all co-op members will be encouraged to share promotions. I will also be establishing a Twitter account and Facebook fan page for the new co-op so you’ll have even more avenues to promote all year long.

If you’re interested in becoming a part of this new co-op please enter your email address below. Once I get enough co-op members together I’ll email you with more details.  Space will be limited so if you’re interested please sign up now:

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• One Online Merchant Discusses His Success with Google TV Ads
  
• Self-Service Critique Tips for Your Etsy Shop
• 6 Pointers for Formatting Your Ecommerce Emails
• Strategic Spending to Boost Your Profits (or, you gotta spend money to make money)
• Top 10 Small Biz Mistakes

Ecommerce sales have their peaks and valleys. Sometimes you’re overwhelmed with business and other times it’s crickets. During those slow periods it can be frustrating and feel like you’re at the whims of the web. While you could sulk or make virgin sacrifices to the Google gods, there are other more practical and effective options. Below are four ways to stimulate sales during a slow patch.

1. Alert the Press
Making up a press-worthy event is a great way to drive media attention, which often results in sales. Donate to a charity, host a contest, tie your brand to an event like Mardi Gras or Independence Day. Come up with a way to put an interesting spin on what you’re up to and pitch it to media outlets.

2. Focus on Your Fans
Turn to your loyal customers for a sales boost. Offer a special coupon, launch a customer loyalty program, or host a private sale. You can promote an event like this through your mailing list and social media.

3. Launch a New Product
Launching a new product is a great way to generate interest in your existing line. It gives you something to share with press contacts and fans. It also creates new pages on your site for search engines to index. This is also a good way to branch out to a new customer demographic. If you’ve always sold items for adults, why not create a kids version of your product. If your customers are mainly women, add something for men to your line.

4. Experiment With New Ads
Advertise in a new place or design new ads for your existing ad venues. New ads can help reach customers who were previously unaware of your brand. This can bring sales, new social media followers and new newsletter subscribers, not to mention lots of new word of mouth. If you’re nervous about investing a large chunk of cash up front, consider programs like Adbrite, Google Adwords or Project Wonderful which allow you to try things out on a day-to-day basis with a small budget. Co-op advertising sites like ishopindie.com and cutique.com also have day-to-day memberships for just $4.00, so you can try before you make a longer term ad commitment at a discounted price.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• How to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment: 10 No-Brainers
• Don’t Run Someone Else’s Business – Thoughts on why doing things the way other businesses do things may not be to your advantage
• SEO Guide: How to Hire a Good SEO Company
• 10 Tips on Advertising on Blogs
• A Really Big SEO Checklist
• 6 Tools for Optimizing Web Page Load Time
• PR Tips: How to Come Up With Pitch Ideas
• Image Formats: The Difference Between JPG, GIF and PNG
• 6 Things You Can Do To Improve Your SEO
• Getting The Most Out of a New Product Launch

Be sure to tune in next week for the rest of special series “The Best Thing I Did For My Business”

If I said “You need to move your social media links ATF and lower your CPC to improve your ROI.” You might reply “WTF?!” There are certain acronyms that are used a lot in the online marketing/ecommerce world and it is helpful to understand what they mean. Below is an explanation of 10 common ones:

1. ATF/BTF
Above the fold or Below the Fold. Refers to anything on a website that appears on screen before the user has to scroll down. Items that appear ATF tend to get more attention so things like links to your Twitter account or your newsletter sign up form will get more action if they’re ATF.

You’ll also sometimes hear these in advertising lingo. BTF ads tend to be cheaper than ATF since ATF is a more valuable/visible slot.

2. SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. There are a lot of elements to SEO including your urls, your title tags, your h1 tags, your keyword density and links to your site. SEO can refer to any of those things. You’ll see people talking about doing this or that to improve their SEO.

3. SEM
SEM stands for search engine marketing. It is commonly a reference to things like Google Adwords (a service Google provides that allows you to pay for your text ads to appear to users when certain keywords are searched) but can refer to any kind of activity that involves marketing with search engines, including SEO.

4. SMO
Social media optimization is a fairly new catch-phrase but it’s starting to get thrown around more and more. It refers to things you can do to optimize the value and performance of your social media accounts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, Flickr, etc.)

5. USP
Unique selling position means the thing that makes you different from your competitors. If you don’t know what your USP is it’s time to think about it.

6. ROI
Return on investment means how much you’re making on various expenditures you have in the growth of your business. If you buy an ad for $500 and sell $10,000 worth of product that’s a good ROI. If you buy a $500 ad and sell $500 worth of product you saw very little ROI (although it may still have been worthwhile if you acquired a lot of new Facebook fans, newsletter sign ups, Twitter followers, etc. since those people might buy stuff later.)

7. CTR
Click through rate accounts for number of people who saw your ad, media placements, etc. online and clicked through to your site. If you had an ad display 1000 times and got 100 click throughs that means your CTR was 10%.

8. CPM
Cost per mille actually means how much you pay for 1000 impressions. Ad units are often sold at a CPM rate so you might buy a $50 ad with a CPM of $1.00. In which case your ad will get 50,000 impressions.

9. CPC
Cost per click usually refers to how much you pay every time your online ad is clicked on. This is how Google Adwords and many other online ad units are sold.

10. CPA
Cost per acquisition refers to how much you pay for customers to do something. It can refer to how much you pay for people to sign up for a newsletter, enter a contest, make a purchase, etc. If you bought a $500 advertisement and got 50 sales from it your cost per action would be $10.00. If you got 500 newsletter sign ups from the same ad you’d have a $1.00 CPA for your newsletter sign ups.

One of the biggest mistakes I see smaller businesses making online is that they often don’t understand who their target market is. As a result they don’t actually market to them. Developing a successful small business means having a very clear understanding of who your target audience is. You might be saying “duh” right now but consider these questions:

Does your media list mostly contain indie blogs?

Do your Facebook statuses say “Just found a new source for fabrics on ebay.” and “Trying to figure out how to use Quickbooks for small business”?

Do you blog mainly about going to trade shows and how to put in a perfect dart?

If you’re guilty of these faux pas, you probably aren’t marketing to your target audience and you may not even understand who your target audience is. Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to pitch indie blogs. There’s nothing wrong with giving customers a little behind the scenes peak at your day to day life. The problem is that’s all some small businesses do. Unless you sell supplies, most of your potential customers probably aren’t small business owners or artisans. They’re people who admire unique products, but can’t necessarily produce them on their own, and aren’t even terribly interested in how you do your magic. They just enjoy the end result.

So here are four places you can change your ways immediately and start marketing to potential customers instead of, well, yourself.

1. Blog
Blog about things that are interesting to your customers. If you sell dog leashes, blog about cute dog videos from Youtube. If you sell cosmetics, blog about how to achieve the perfect smokey eye.

2. Social Media
Stop spending all day on Etsy’s self-promotion forums. Stop tweeting about new Ebay seller policies, troubles with your merchant account and CPSIA all day. Start Tweeting and Facebooking about stuff your customers will find interesting, amusing or informative. If you want to socialize with fellow artisans or small business owners create TWO social media accounts, one for customers and one for peers.

3. Advertising
This is a biggie. There is a giant world of advertising to be had out there. There are niche publications for nearly everything. So stop spending all your ad dollars on publications mainly read by other artisans and business owners (again, unless you sell supplies or services for business owners or something). It’s okay to do a little marketing to that audience, but make sure the bulk of your ad dollars are being spent on publications that reach potential customers and not just your peers.

Check out sites like Blogads, explore Google Adwords and Adbrite. Think about who your target customers are and what publications they read and what websites they visit. Speaking of which…

4. Media List
Make sure your media list contains press relevant to your brand. A press list for a jewelry company should be different than a press list for a company that mainly designs housewares. Make sure you’re thinking about niche audiences that might like your products. A company that makes jewelry out of circuit boards should be pitching to geek publications. A company that makes pendants featuring different dog breeds should be pitching to pet publications.

Giveaways and contests are a popular way to market your business. They engage customers, give them a reason to take a desired action and help get your business noticed. That said, contests and giveaways aren’t magic   bullets. They won’t rocket your unknown business to superstardom over night. If you want your contest or giveaway to perform at its peak, you’re going to have to apply a little elbow grease. All too often, a business owner will come up with a contest and then wonder why no one’s participating. The answer: no one’s heard about it…

Read my tips on how to get your contest noticed over on Indie Fixx, where I posted this article as a guest contributor >>