7 Tips for Making Your Web Store Stand Out During the Holidays

The holiday season is probably the best time of year for you to really cash in on your web store.  But, making the most of the holiday shopping rush takes some careful consideration and planning on your part.  If you want to really make this holiday season special for your business, then read over these seven tips for making your web store stand out during the holidays:

The holiday season always proves to be a very stressful time when it comes to getting gifts to their recipients on time – not to mention the added cost of shipping when purchasing from online stores as opposed to local retailers.  Advertising free shipping is a great way to bring holiday customers in and inspire them to choose from what you have to offer.

Your SEO should be tweaked for the holiday seasons.  After all, holiday shoppers generally conduct searches using holiday keywords.  Therefore, it pays (literally) to add some keyword-rich, holiday-themed content to your web store, as well as update your titles and tags to reflect the holiday theme.

Create a holiday newsletter and send it out to your email contacts list in order to attract holiday shoppers to your site.

Make it super-easy for shoppers to find a suitable gift (and hang on to shoppers who can’t make up their minds)by offering gift cards.  Gift cards are also a great way to gain new customers (as some recipients of your gift cards might never have heard of your store before).

Give your website a holiday makeover.  If you can’t afford the time or money to deck the whole site out, then at least give your home page some holiday flair.

Be sure to add a special menu for holiday items.  Also, take note of what you feel are best-selling holiday items and feature them on your home page for easy customer access.

Shopping for the holidays is hectic.  There is a lot to buy – and a lot of people to buy for.  Make it easy on your customers by laying it all out on line in a way that is easy to find and understand.  Include shipping dates, return/exchange policies and refund information in plain sight on your home page.

There is a lot to do to prepare your web store for the holiday season, but it is well worth it.   The existence of your website won’t matter if you don’t make sure people know about it. Make the most of your online presence by following these tips and watch the holiday cash roll in.

About the Author: Donna Collins loves doing her holiday shopping online and is always looking for the most user-friendly web stores around. This year she’ll be shopping for Samsung phones, tablets, and other tech devices for her teenage sons!

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Personally Deliver Recommended Links to Your Friends with Handpick

Handpick is a simple tool with a huge benefit: it lets you personally handpick links from the Web and deliver them to your friends via a daily digest. If you’re someone who is often sharing links with specific friends individually, you’ll love the convenience of using Handpick. It stops you from bombarding your friends with numerous emails of recommended links service, plus it lets you email all of your friends at once.

Let’s see just how Handpick works.

Of course you’ll need a way to actually “handpick” links on the Web, so you’ll need to install the bookmarklet or Chrome extension.

You can also add a Handpick bookmark to your iPhone or iPad. Just visit this page on your device and follow the directions so that you can “handpick” links on your mobile device.

The second step is to create a group of people to “handpick” for. These should be all people that will like the types of links you’ll be sharing; therefore they should have a common interest. You’ll be able to create as many groups as you want. Each group will show up as a check-box when sharing and you’ll be able to choose which groups you want to share to.

All that is needed to create a group is a name and time that you want the group members to receive their daily email digest.

Next you’ll need to add members to your group. As mentioned above, those members will receive a daily email digest of all of the links that you handpick for the day. Members are added by manually entering their name and email one-by-one. Just keep adding members until you’ve got everyone that you want to share with in that specific group. Since Handpick is in early beta, I’m sure that this method of adding members will change since it would surely be so much easier to import your email contacts or choose friends from Facebook or Twitter.

You can also manage your group and change the name, delivery time, and email subject for the daily digest. Additionally, you can choose to turn on/off delivery via BCC. If you turn it on, all members of the group will be able to see the email address of each group member. This is a very bad idea if the members do not know each other. However, if you’re all friends then this shouldn’t be an issue since you’ll more than likely have each others email addresses and probably correspond with each other frequently.

There is also a feature called “Contributable” which you can also turn on/off. With this on, you will allow all members in the group to handpick content for that specific group. So if they have a Handpick account, your group will show up in their accounts as well so that they can also send links to it.

All that’s left is to browse the Web and “handpick” links. When you find something you want to share, click the bookmarklet or browser icon in Chrome and you’ll get a small window with sharing options.

You can change the title and enter a description. Don’t forget to choose the group that you want to share to! Finally click on “share” and you’re all done.

As you can see, it has never bee easier to share links with specific friends. I not only love the concept of Handpick, but I love how easy it is to set up and share to people that I usually have to email individually. I do, however, hope to see an improvement in the design of the site and also in the way that you add members to the group.

Handpick is currently in private beta, so you will need an invite to try it out.

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Logo Design Process Case Study – How to Create a Logo

A few weeks back I wrote about having a logo designed through LogoNerds, and how happy I was with their service. Compared to other design services out there, they are much cheaper, faster and professional than what I have experienced elsewhere. With that said, I went back to them again to have a few more logos created for my sites.

I thought it would be a fun idea to break down the logo creation process of my latest design. I’m working on a new pet food coupons and review web site that I needed a dog and cat related logo for. I filled out their design information form with a bunch of ideas, and here are the first set of logos I received from LogoNerds.

After you’ve filled out your initial design information for LogoNerds, you will have to wait a couple of days for their first set of concepts. I always go with their $47 “Professional Business Logo” package since it comes with 6 different draft designs (and print ready images). The most exciting part of the logo design process is when you get those first drafts and have an idea where your logo is headed.

Depending on the web site or job, sometimes I will just select one of their first drafts and go with that logo. This time around I knew I wanted something really great for the site, so I worked with LogoNerds to create the perfect logo. After looking at all of the logos for a couple days, and asking friends and family which logo they liked best, and why, I decided to go with CONCEPT 1 (top left). I thought it was simple enough to get the point across, but also fun and brandable at the same time.

I told LogoNerds that I would like to see if they could play around with the bone structure in the background and if they could create a new variation of the dog and cat faces. You can see their revision update below.

The new bone looked much better, and I liked the new cat and dog face even more. From there I gave the LogoNerds team a few ideas on how what colors to add into the logo. Their color update is shown below.

The logo is looking pretty good now, and could be considered finished, but I still wasn’t loving the “PetFoodia.com” text beneath the logo. I then requested the team try and create something nice that would go along with the logo.

The next set of finished logos with a new font design can be seen below.

While some of the font designs looks nice, none of them blew me away. I like the concept on the bottom left logo, but it just didn’t look right. Once again, I went back to the LogoNerds team to request another text revision set, this time with “more simple” text concepts. Within a couple days I had another set, which you can see below.

I was much happier with this set of designs. They were much less advanced and colorful as the previous set, but I wanted something simple and to the point. I decided on the bottom left logo with, and to remove the tagline from the logo.

After the thorough design and revision process, I was extremely happy with the end result. You can see the final logo below.

LogoNerds would complete the order and send over a final design zip with a variation of different sizes, colors and file types.

After looking over the whole process, and how many times I asked LogoNerds for a revision, it’s quite amazing the service they can offer for only $47.

I’ve already purchased four different logos from LogoNerds over the past couple of months, it’s just way to cost effective and easy to end up with a quality logo. I’ve used other services and design contest sites in the past, but most of them will cost you in the $99 to $199 range, and may drag on for weeks. Through a partnership with BloggingTips and LogoNerds, we are able to offer you an extra $10 off on the $47 “Professional Logo Package”, which brings the total to only $37. Use coupon code B10OFF to save $10 off your $47 purchase, that’s over 20% off!

- Order your custom logo from LogoNerds

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Advantages of Affiliate Marketing

There are a lot of people, especially bloggers, making good money from affiliate marketing. If you don’t have time to create your own products or maybe you’re not sure what type of product you should create, you can supplement your income by promoting other people’s stuff.

Chances are you use a lot of products, take a lot of online courses, or even use plugins on your blog. Most of the things you use to build your own business can be offered under an affiliate program. It just makes good sense that you should earn a little bit of money from sharing these “must haves” with your readers.

One of the easiest ways to promote products is by writing reviews and posting them to your blog. At the end of the review, simply add your affiliate link so the reader can purchase the product.

Here are some benefits to using affiliate marketing.

* Little to No Risk.  Since you’re not technically responsible for the products you promote, this is a very low risk business. Plus, you’re not losing time and money by creating your own products. However, it is good business sense to only promote products that you use personally and that you like. You do have that much responsibility to your followers.

* Small Start-Up Costs.  You probably already have your website set up and paying for a hosting plan. Other than that, and the money you’ve already spent purchasing products, you really have no other cost involved. Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn back the money you’ve invested in quality products.

* No copywriting experience necessary. Writing sales copy can suck, especially if that isn’t your strong point. However, your job really isn’t to sale the product, per se, but to share it. Sharing honest information is a better way to make sales than using sales copy in a blog post. Your blog posts should never seem salesy or look like a product ad.

If you do need some copy material, many affiliate programs already have some sales aids in place. You can simply do a few tweaks and use it. Some even offer graphics you can place in your sidebar.

* Passive income. This may be one of the best benefits of all, passive income. Once you’ve written a review it will be online for a long time. It can continue to draw traffic when people search for specific product reviews. Plus, you can also keep linking to your reviews from other content on your website.

You may even want to set up static pages for your reviews. This makes them very search engine friendly and easier for people to find when they’re at your website. Which ever way you choose to do product reviews, it can keep adding to your income month after month.

* Flexibility. Affiliate marketing is extremely flexible. You decide how much time you want to work on affiliate promotions or how many days per week. It can be done in only a few minutes per day leaving the rest of your work time for your own product creation or for building up your own site.
Income from affiliate marketing is not limited. The more time you put in, the more money you can make. This is especially true if your readers have learned to trust you and your recommendations.
Affiliate marketing can be part time or you can even turn it into a full time job if you’d like. It’s not only flexible, but the possibilities are endless.

Another great benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can fit it into just about any niche or topic you’re interested in. There are affiliate programs in almost every niche out there. No matter what your topic of choice is, whether it’s health, fitness, blogging, marketing, SEO, social media—I’m sure you can find products to promote.

Not all topics are profitable, but if you only share products that you use yourself to grow your own business, this can still earn you some nice affiliate commissions.

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In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic

A caustic expose of the deeply state of our colleges-America's most expensive Ponzi scheme.

What drives a former English major with a creative writing degree, several unpublished novels, three kids, and a straining marriage to take a job as a night teacher at a second-rate college? An unaffordable mortgage.

As his house starts falling apart in every imaginable way, Professor X grabs first one, then two jobs teaching English 101 and 102-composition and literature-at a small private college and a local community college. He finds himself on the front lines of America's academic crisis. It's quite an education.

This is the story of what he learns about his struggling pupils, about the college system-a business more bent on its own financial targets than the wellbeing of its students-about the classics he rediscovers, and about himself. Funny, wry, self-deprecating, and a provocative indictment of our failing schools, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is both a brilliant academic satire and a poignant account of one teacher's seismic frustration-and unlikely salvation-as his real estate woes catapult him into a subprime crisis of an altogether more human nature.

Price: $25.95

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Complete Bengali with Two Audio CDs: A Teach Yourself Guide (Teach Yourself Language)

It's easy to teach yourself Bengali!

Complete Bengali: A Teach Yourself Guide provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Bengali, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Bengali with confidence.

Within each of the 24 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues. You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society. The accompanying audio CDs contain all dialogues that appear in the course book, recorded by native speakers.

Features:

One and five-minute introductions to key principles to get you started

Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience

Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress

Extra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of the basics of the language

Price: $46.00

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Complete Arabic with Two Audio CDs: A Teach Yourself Guide (Teach Yourself Language)

It's easy to teach yourself Arabic!

Complete Arabic provides you with a clear and comprehensive approach to Arabic, so you can progress quickly from the basics to understanding, speaking, and writing Arabic with confidence.

Within each of the 25 thematic chapters, important language structures are introduced through life-like dialogues.You'll learn grammar in a gradual manner so you won't be overwhelmed by this tricky subject. Exercises accompany the texts and reinforce learning in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This program also features current cultural information boxes that reflect recent changes in society.

The accompanying audio CDs include audio exercises--performed by native speakers--that reinforce communicative skills.

Price: $29.95

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