Get your sporting goods and sports equipment at discount prices from Donnelley Sports. Our online sports store also carries team uniforms, sportswear, sports gear and apparel, and sport training videos.

We built a multi-agent site(s) for them with some very cool back-end functionality and Intranet.

Blogging Builds Trust
Ecommerce sites often focus on attracting visitors for the immediate sale, but sometimes you have to court a customer before they’re ready to turn over the cash. With a traditional brick-and-mortar store, consumers know they can reach you if they have questions. It’s more difficult to find the same level of trust with an online store. By providing valuable and free information to potential customers, you’re building trust that you know what you’re talking about and you’re in it for the long haul.

Show Off Your Expertise
Consumers usually purchase from companies that have expertise with their products and in their industry. A blog is an opportunity demonstrate this expertise, and to discuss issues of interest to your customers and provide them with valuable insight and information.

Easy Search Engine Optimization
Search engines like sites that constantly update their content. Blogging gives you an easy way to update the content on your site, while still providing something of value to people. If you are sure to include top keywords for your industry, you’ll also have a way to build valuable links to your site.

Have a Conversation
Blogging gives you the opportunity to have a conversation with customers and others in the industry. If they have a blog and you have something to say, you can comment on it (with a link back to your blog), or you can post a more lengthy response on your own site. Pointing out other places to check out great content in your industry is a good way to start having a conversation with other bloggers.

Get Feedback
Not every blog will get comments, but if you spend some time connecting with your readers and other bloggers, you’ll probably get some feedback. Once you’ve been blogging for a while, you should have an audience you can tap into from time to time with short, one-question surveys. And people are more likely to give feedback if they feel you’re interacting and not just advertising your wares.

Show Some Personality
Many great ecommerce sites have a personality that is associated with the company. People are more willing to purchase from another person. They want to know a little bit about you and the company. The days of the general store where the clerks knew your name and everything you’ve ordered are mostly gone, but you can still connect with your customers by showing a bit of personality on your blog.

Blog Examples:
Zappos is well known for its use of social media to promote its products and website. Not surprisingly, there are several blogs on Zappos. Different people blog for the company, and they write about what they’re passionate about, which helps to create connections with different segments of Zappos’ customer base.

Threadless Tees has built an entire business on engaging customers for its design creations, and the company has several different blogs. Interviews spotlight different designers or artists and tell the story behind their designs and what influences them. Sightings and sponsorships are about celebrities spotted with Threadless tees and companies that have used the T-shirts for promotions. News and updates keeps customers updated about Threadless events and promotions.

SEO
Blogging does take a bit of patience and time. Ideally, blogs should be updated on a regular basis, and it may take a bit of time for the blog to gain traction. But, the return on the blogging investment is quite high in terms of content, SEO, and, most importantly, trust and reputation.

People sometimes talk about landing pages in one capacity only, paid search advertising. Certainly, landing pages are extremely important with regard to pay-per-click advertising because the search engines include the quality of the pages to which paid search ads point in their overall evaluation of when and where ads are displayed. In theory, the better a landing pages is with regard to focus and keywords, the better the placement of an ad will be.

But landing pages can be used for much more. Not only can they affect conversion, they also allow for traffic measurement via website analytics.

Email Marketing Campaigns
A landing page can be a great way to measure the effect of an email marketing campaign, especially if you use an entry-level email service that provides limited analytics. The page’s appearance has a definite effect on click-through rates. If it is well designed, it can prompt people to continue on to a purchase or perform another action within the website, while a bad design will likely prompt users to go away.

Social Media Outreach Campaigns
The most basic way to measure the effect of a social media outreach campaign is to create unique landing pages for each campaign combined with website analytics. A landing page focused to each campaign is the most plausible tool for conversion, and, again, good landing page design will usually improve conversion rates.

Banner Ads
A banner ad landing page shouldn’t be much different from a paid search landing page, except that there is no search engine policing its quality. You can police it yourself – the more focused the landing page is to your banner ad, the more likely it is to convert. Additionally, the page can offer secondary analytical information to augment ad server numbers.

Press Releases
Most online press release services offer some form of analytics, but they are rarely enough to fully measure the actual effect. Placing links to well-defined landing pages in press releases can, like banner ads, offer improved analytical information.

External Blog Links
Participation in the blogosphere can pay big dividends, whether through comments, guest blogging, or garnering mentions of your website on external blogs. Although analytics can track traffic from individual blog addresses, a landing page can augment this analytical information and offer content focused to the blog post, thus enhancing the likelihood of maintaining interest or converting a visit to a sale.

Offline Marketing
A landing page can also be a great tool for traditional, offline marketing. Print ads, postcards, promotional items, and other physical marketing entities can be hard to track. But a unique landing page for each item, tied-in with the specific offer, can help to define some representative numbers.

Summary
While landing pages are extremely important for pay-per-click ad campaigns, they can also be used to track your online and offline marketing tactics. In situations where a marketing campaign seems hard to track, use landing pages as a multipurpose tool for both tracking purposes and conversion.

From Practical Ecommerce