2011 August

Take a walk through the local shopping center, and the challenge is to find a retailer that is not having a sale. Sales and discounts in the past were a special event in retailing, but since the G.F.C. they have become the main way of retailing for many businesses. A perpetual discount offer results in the customer becoming bored and the retailer becoming less profitable.

As most of you know, running an AdWords campaign can be very competitive depending on the popularity of your keywords. It can also be very confusing for small business owners (SMBs). Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool where you could compare your campaigns to your competitors or find out what’s wrong if yours aren’t performing? There’s a new free tool that does just that and can also tell you how to improve your campaigns. This is a review of the AdWords Performance Grader, which lets you audit your PPC accounts to improve your campaign performance.

Since the U.S. government and most states are running short on tax revenue due to the weak economy, proposals to do away with the moratorium on Internet sales tax have been introduced in Congress. A bill currently in the Senate called the Main Street Fairness Act has been proposed to require Internet merchants to charge sales tax on web purchases.

LinkedIn currently has 119 million members, having increased its membership over 60 percent since last year. The popular business-related social networking site had a very successful IPO in May and presents an excellent opportunity for wholesalers and general merchandise vendors to engage customers.

Wholesalers and general merchandise vendors can now submit their new and updated URLs to Google for indexing with the Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools, as announced in the Google Webmaster Central Blog August 3. This new feature allows your site to be reviewed faster than waiting for Google’s regular crawling process.

Things looked good for Baidu when Google moved off the mainland because of its disagreement with the Chinese government over censorship. While Baidu owns the market in Chinese-language searches (83 percent), it has been trying for years to improve its English-language search capability without much luck. Chinese searchers prefer Google despite the hassles of government censorship. Baidu’s new partnership with Bing brings the promise of improving its English-language search results. The partnership also brings opportunities for marketers.

Google Caffeine in 2009 was the beginning of Google’s need for speed. Google decided to revitalize its algorithm with the Caffeine Beta where webmasters tried out the experimental Caffeine algorithm and gave feedback on its effect on their sites. Ultimately, Google included site speed as a ranking factor. How important is site speed? No one knows, but many sites report a boost in rankings when they improve loading time, so it’s something retailers can do to improve their site rankings.

Our partner, 1st PMF Bancorp, provides resources for wholesalers and general merchandise vendors that can help finance their business in today’s economic climate. One way PMF can help suppliers is with invoice factoring, and another way is by providing lines of credit or trade financing. With many years of experience in the U.S. and Asia, PMF Bancorp has the kind of knowledge you can use to help manage your capital and increase your profits.