It may be July, but online stores are already gearing up for the holiday shopping season. Whether you are a first time store owner or a seasoned pro hopefully these tips will help you to organize and prioritize your holiday efforts to achieve the maximum effect this holiday season.

Based on feedback we have received from our customers the best way to get your online business “holiday ready” is to follow these three general steps: look pretty, get your name out there, and communicate with holiday shoppers.

Look Pretty
In terms of appearance, many online store owners are planning on making eye catching holiday specific design changes to their websites to bring shoppers in. Others are also considering spotlighting their most popular products with a “Seasonal Favorites” or “Holiday Must Haves” section on their homepage.

Get your name out there
To get the word out about their sites online store owners are running the gamut of advertising options from traditional media like magazines and holiday shopping guides to newer social media like Facebook.

Communicate
Communications with customers this holiday season will range from text-based newsletters and emails to interactive live chatting. The goal will be to announce holiday promotions that are running and give consumers the information and resources they need to get their gifts.

But even if you know what you will be doing this year, you may need some help deciding when you should you be doing it. Here is a rough time schedule of these crucial months leading up to the holiday shopping season: (more…)

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As many of our customers know, a portion of their monthly hosting fees are donated to The Volusion Foundation, which works with the non-profit organization World Vision to make a difference in our backyard and beyond.

Contributions from The Volusion Foundation to World Vision have gone to a number of worthy causes and it’s important to point out that it is our customers that have been the driving force behind making a positive impact in the lives of countless people across the globe.

Continuing our partnership with World Vision, Volusion CEO Kevin Sproles left for Ethiopia on Saturday to see how The Volusion Foundation has changed the area. As Kevin explained, (more…)

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It’s been above the fold of business blogs since the middle of June. Marketers are talking about it over the water cooler. Social media forums are exploding with user comments. In case you haven’t heard, Facebook has surpassed MySpace in number of unique visitors. Let’s take a deeper look and find out what all online businesses can learn from this power shift.

MySpace
When MySpace originally launched, it was designed for young people and caught on with the music scene. Shockingly though, MySpace’s offerings have not changed much since, leaving it stuck with the stigma of being a place just for teens.

Additionally, MySpace’s early public scandals regarding its illegal use by sexual predators and lax control over raunchy online pictures and behavior have established it as more of an online night club than a legitimate social community.

With all of MySpace’s sparkly profile backgrounds and flashing text, the page load times were slow, causing current users frustration. With its confusing home page, potential new users tended to get discouraged and leave the site.  After market and usability research, MySpace determined that these were barriers to proper use and in mid-June of this year, they gave their homepage a face lift and re-launched it (ignoring the load time gripes altogether.)

But it seems it was too late. Users had already begun jumping on the Facebook bandwagon (more…)

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Congratulations on creating and maintaining a blog for your business! Now that you have taken the steps to create a blog that people actually want to read, make sure that they can find it by submitting it to the top blog directories. These are the best blog directories online right now (sorted by PageRank- a numeric value that measures the importance of a webpage on Google): (more…)

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While it used to be true that retaining customers was cheaper than acquiring customers, an increase in ad channels over the last few years has made the acquisition of new customers more attainable than ever before.  With marketers hyper-focused on cost-efficient strategies to bolster sales, acquiring customers has become the name of the game.

The Numbers
A study conducted in October, 2008 showed that 58.2% of US marketers considered acquiring new customers (expanding their target market, generating new sales leads, and taking customers from their competitors) their most important marketing objective. In comparison, only 26.6% of US marketers cited lead generation and 15.4% cited brand building as their primary objectives. Further research done earlier this year shows that B2B companies have an even wider gap, with 62.2% focusing their marketing strategy for 2009 on acquiring new customers, 20.6% focusing on customer retention, and a mere 12.4% focusing on brand building. (more…)

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