Web 2.0 Tools And Ecommerce And How They Can Be Used, Marketing

Dec 1
08:04

2008

Rose Lee

Rose Lee

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The internet has changed a lot in the last couple of years, here is how one ecommerce operator, wholesale company Chinavasion has used it to its advantage.

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The internet has changed a lot over the last five years and for once change is good news for small ecommerce operators with Web 2.0 marketing tools. Just ask Chinavasion.

Marketing is possibly the most opportunity most frequently noticed by e-tailers online. The ability to get news out about their products and their services without subjecting themselves to the increasingly greedy.... er business savy practices of eBay or without going overboard on pay-per-click advertising is often attractive to many and can be quite an effective way of gaining page rank and extra traffic if handled correctly.

Article marketing techniques are nothing new but what is a new development is how much weight some of the web 2.0 sites have in search engine algorithms.

One such site is the material posting service Squidoo. As you can see from this lens on Chinavasion there's quite a lot you can do to drive business to your site and custom to eBay and Amazon listings as well as creating page rank for your site.

What most people like about Squidoo is how it caters to both experts and novices by giving 'noobs'  numerous WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) functions while allowing writers with coding experience leeway to use limited HTML and CSS coding.

You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that videos have become a major part of marketing campaigns. Product videos are fairly easy to put together if you're involved in e-commerce and can serve two functions,Web 2.0 Tools And Ecommerce And How They Can Be Used, Marketing Articles drawing people to your site and creating traffic for your site.

While YouTube is the biggest video site with the most traffic it doesn't always have the best quality pictures and some sites like Metacafe (the video sharing site with the second biggest volume of traffic) actually give users a better experience than YouTube, as can be seen by user pages like the one used by Chinavasion.

So what do you do with all these people once you attract them to your service and get them signed up as customers? Traditionally you'd have to get some friendly programmer to build you a forum which would let you interact with your clients, help them cope with their issues and give them good deals.

There are several web 2.0 services that will let you do that now without going through the time and expense of setting up and monitoring a forum. However it can sometimes be difficult to decide which platform your customers are most comfortable with.

Thankfully some services have come up with mash-ups which allow you the company, and your customers to discuss company news and post interesting websites in one group.

Friendfeed, a service launched by Google this year is one such service which actually can carry a lot of weight within Google and generate good page rank as well as helping you maintain a good customer record. The Chinavasion roomis a good example of this.

While these are great new platforms to launch marketing campaigns from there's rules and accepted behaviors that you have to learn and abide by to get good results from marketing campaigns based on web 2.0 platforms.

These accepted behaviors, no matter the site can usually be summed in three axioms:

1) Provide great content

2) Enter into dialogues with your potential customers and customers and develop relationships with them

3) A loss of credibility is a serious problem

So what does it mean for you when it comes to marketing?

Provide great contentDon't spam or pack keywords into a document without thinking about how it reads. Try to give customers something that they can use and something that they are searching for.

If something appears to be poorly written or lacking in useful information you risk getting a bad reputation.

Develop relationship with customersOn sites like YouTube or in the case of Chinavasion Metacafe check up on videos from time to time and answer any questions that clients and potential clients have. It doesn't mean you've got to deal with every flamer or troll, in fact it is probably more beneficial to ignore the people who seem to be just posting a comment to get someone arguing with them.

A loss of credibility is a serious problemEssentially if you cut corners or try to trick a customer it's going to hit you hard in the long run. Treat people fairly and they will remain loyal to you.

Those are just some of the excellent web 2.0 posting tools out there on the internet that make great marketing tools for up and coming e-commerce operators strapped for cash.

Want to learn more about the opportunities ecommerce offers to you? Check out Chinavasion and the Squidoo page for Chinavasion [ http://www.squidoo.com/chinavasion ] for more information about how you can better manage your e-commerce business.