Why did the use of video to promote online products skyrocket by 20% last year? Because it works.

Video is educational, entertaining, and enables consumers to have a better visual understanding of the product they are purchasing, which serves to increase sales.  Video also has a far greater chance of being spread via word of mouth and attracting a much larger audience to your website.

“Will it Blend?” and a 5x Sales Increase
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You’ve got a great new website. You have visitors coming in daily. You’ve seen your traffic report. But you can’t help wondering “how do I compare to everyone else?” Google Analytics Benchmarking can show you.

Google Analytics Benchmarking service provides a look at your Website’s statistics compared with industry verticals. Simply put, it can show you how your site compares to other sites of similar size in your industry.

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In an earlier post, we talked about using the Extension Data field as extra storage space for additional product information.

But what if you need a more organized version of that information, in a hierarchy of sorts?

Most of the time, that would mean adding an additional table to the database, and adding an additional field in the Admin site so users can store that information. This can be tricky to do, and may also take your site off the upgrade path.

Fortunately, we’ve got a great way to store extensible structured data in the ExtensionData field, but there’s no way to directly manipulate and query text in XSL.

This tutorial will show you a quick way to get that extension data out as pure transformable XML. Before reading on, you should already be familiar with XML Packages, and have a basic knowledge of SQL.

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Marketing your product with social media is cheap and easy compared to its mass media counterpart. Once social marketing has become a habit, you probably won’t realize you’re doing it at all.

In Part 1, I showed how people trust social media now more than ever.

Now, I’ll show you how to capitalize on it.

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The goal: don’t make your visitors think.

The plan: create a navigational system that makes it simple and intuitive to find everything on your site.

If you are in the process of building a new navigational structure for your site, or looking for some ideas to improve your site’s current information architecture, take a look at the best practices below to reduce the amount of thinking you make your visitors do.

You Are Here

Provide your visitors with a “You Are Here” by making it obvious where they are on your site.

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Web sites that aren’t using Web analytics are missing out on a wealth of customer data. This data can help them outstrip their competitors and grow into an online powerhouse.

Web Analytics isn’t anything new. In the 1990’s webmasters monitored the number of page requests, or “hits”, made to their servers.

Then websites grew to encompass multiple pages, images, subdomains, and other manner of web technologies. As websites evolved, so too did analytics. Today website tracking codes provide an almost overwhelming amount of traffic data.

Here at Vortx, we love Google Analytics. It’s free, easy to install, and the dashboard is intuitive and user friendly. Yet, we know that many of our clients, indeed many websites out there in general, do not possess any sort of analytics tracking.

So, why analytics? (more…)