The latest article on ‘MarketingProfs’ is titled “Online Shopping Trends 2013: Most Popular Categories, Top Purchase Drivers”. Ayaz Nanji says, “More than half (62%) of US consumers with Internet access now shop online at least once a month, and just 1% say they never shop online, according to a recent report by Walker Sands. The most common types of products bought online in the last year include electronics (69% percent of consumers surveyed purchased online in 2013), books (67%), clothing (63%), household goods (38%), and office supplies (30%)”. Online Shopping Trends 2013:... [...]

The latest ‘Econsultancy’ blog post is titled “Six ways to make the most of data feeds in affiliate marketing”. Robert Durkin says, “Here are our top tips on the best ways that affiliates can use data feeds to increase their sales commission. 1. Work your content hard for sales commission We all know that ‘content is king’ but in practice accessing this content is less straightforward than it seems. Some networks operate within quite a narrow schema for product submission and not all product features and attributes are available to affiliate marketers. The good... [...]

The latest post on ‘Mashable’ is titled “How to Recruit a Good Developer When You Don’t Code”. Kevin Galligan says, “As a startup founder, hiring your first developer will be one of most crucial decisions you ever make. And if you can’t tell the difference between PHP and Python, the decision will be one of the most precarious, too. Without any tech game of your own, how do you know what kind of developer to look for? How can you find someone who’s going to do the job right?I’ve been on both sides of the developer hiring process. Over the course of my 15 years... [...]

The latest article on  ‘Marketing Land’ is titled “Not Who, But What, Is Driving Google?”. Kevin Ryan says, “With the depth of attention given to Google’s broken promises lately, the natural-language-processing, sometimes-sponsored-content-identifying engine clearly has some ‘splaining to do. For those of you who haven’t read Danny Sullivan’s excellent piece from a few weeks ago, let me elaborate on those broken promises. Google at one time decried paid inclusion — but then, in 2012, it turned its once-organic shopping search engine into a pay-to-play... [...]

Jay Baer‘s latest ‘Convince & Convert’ blog post is titled “How to Capture the Excitement That’s Already There″. Baer says, “Kevin Hunt, Corporate Social Media Manager at General Mills, joins the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss bringing social power back in-house, managing multiple brand stories at once, and figuring out how to capture the excitement that already surrounds a brand and its products. Read on for some of the highlights and tweetable moments”. How to Capture the Excitement That’s Already There Jay Baer’s ‘Convince & Convert’ Blog  [...]

The latest article on Business Insider is titled “Advertising: Nothing More Than Feelings”. The Economist team says, “Admen have made a marketing guru of Daniel Kahneman, a prizewinning psychologist FIRST, you realise it’s a gorilla. The opening strains of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” are playing; the beast is enraptured. As the camera pulls back, you see that he’s seated at a drum kit. He flexes, raises his drumsticks, then brings them resoundingly down. Only in the final frames do you discover that the gorilla is pitching Cadbury’s... [...]

The latest post on ‘Mashable’ is titled “Google: We’re Winning Against Phishing and Spam Emails”. Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai says, “Google can’t say “mission accomplished” just yet, but the search giant made it clear that the Internet is winning its decade-old war against phishing and spam emails.In a blog post published Friday, Google said the Internet-wide efforts against unauthenticated emails, which can be used by spammers and phishers to fake email addresses and deceive users, are working. In fact, the vast majority of non-spam email that Gmail... [...]

The latest ‘Econsultancy’ blog post is titled “Harper Collins: from publisher to creative content business”. Ben Davis says, “Harper Collins and its business development team are a great example of how publishers are adapting to the business of content, not simply bound sheaves of pulped wood. In an indicator of how service-based the UK economy has become, Harper Collins now sums up its business as following: “We create bespoke content based on products and campaigns for our clients.” “We work with content, not just books, across print, digital, mobile... [...]

Denise Wakeman’s latest blog post is titled “Counting Down to a New Year…Do You Have a Social Marketing Plan?”. Wakeman says, “Can you believe there on only 28 days left in 2013? With all that’s going on during December, sometimes it’s difficult to focus on your business, what’s important to get done before the year ends andcreate a social marketing plan for the new year. Thinking about what might support you to take the time to look at where you are and where you want to go, I decided to experiment with a way to make it easy and accessible for you to get a kickstart for the new... [...]

The latest ‘Web Marketing Today’ blog post is titled “Google Analytics, AdWords, and Return on Investment”. Kevin Webster says, “Pay-per-click costs can be expensive to many small business. While the Google AdWords interface can show significant amounts of data around conversions, to really understand the impact of your advertising expenditures, it’s useful to track results in Google Analytics. To begin, you simply need to connect your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account via the latter’s admin section. Once that is complete, the section of the Acquisition tab will begin... [...]