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Online merchants know it’s important to interact with consumers and expand website traffic to increase sales. Online sellers use may Internet marketing tactics to this end. An excellent tactic for building traffic and interest in your products is to post and network on social media sites, which can result in many interesting conversations and more qualified traffic to your site. Below is TopTenWholesale’s list of social media sites for building traffic.

Our article about Mobile Marketing got a lot of interest from wholesalers and general merchandise vendors last month. While integrating social, mobile and email campaigns can yield great results, we know many merchants are not yet using integrated online marketing campaigns. Therefore, we’d like to provide information about social, mobile email integrated campaigns for your online marketing strategy as these media are used daily by consumers and marketers alike.

Since the advent of social media, wholesalers and general merchandise vendors have seen a significant change in B2B buying behavior, especially over the past few years. People are using social networks to access and share many different kinds of information about companies, brands and products. As a result, wholesalers are using social media marketing tactics more and more on sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

A recently published Government-sponsored report in Australia revealed that, in the view of the author, small retail businesses would not exist in five years. No more independent bookshops, news agents, garden centres or travel agents. I can accept that we are seeing dramatic changes, but the disappearance of these sectors in retailing takes some digesting.

As a wholesaler or retailer, you likely have a lot of images of general merchandise and all kinds of products on your site, and many of you also have videos. If you’re not optimizing these digital assets, you are leaving top rankings on the table for your competitors. By using SEO tactics to optimize your images and videos, you can attract more traffic and sell more products. Below are seven tips for optimizing the images and videos on your site.

Wholesale businesses and small businesses with limited resources in time and money are beginning to use low-cost marketing tactics on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to increase sales. A survey by MerchantCircle’s quarterly Merchant Confidence Index recently reported social media marketing has increased by 40 percent over the past 12 months. Some of the key conclusions of the survey are outlined below, as well as a list of social media marketing tips.

While much has been said about the rising numbers in the male demographic for online spending this year, little has been covered in the area of their female counterparts. In particular, the younger, more “switched on” teenage market segment of the female consumer population has attracted a great deal of interest from Internet marketers everywhere, as they continue to spur a growing trend in mobile buying power that was perhaps unexpected.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock in the middle of a remote desert for the last few years, you are probably noticing some huge, eye-catching, and powerful changes to the Internet as we know it. We’ve seen things like the deployment of sophisticated VPNs and proxies to help honest businesspeople thwart countless awkward attempts to hamper communications in Internet-restrictive countries like China, and all of us have marveled at the array of new technology like simple-looking but completely Earth-shattering tag clouds, cutting-edge SEO devices, and interoperability features of Web 2.0 environments as they come to the surface. It’s looking like the floodgates are not only opening up… they’re virtually blasting apart, and the Internet community is ready to rise to the challenge, as the torrents of fast-flowing waters of technology surround us. In this kind of situation, there are only two kinds of Internet-based businesses: those who will sink, and those who will continue to swim as they find themselves surrounded by countless new opportunities!

It’s been a rough ride, in an online climate that has seen a dizzying number of historic events in the last few years. There have been political coups allegedly spurred on by twittering and tweeting revolutionaries; the Beijing Olympics, and the uproar caused by promises broken to bring more “openness” to Internet coverage of the Games, and subsequent media interaction; video has exploded onto the mainstream media outlets; newspapers and traditional journalism have apparently finally accepted the fact that online content is nudging them out of the race; and for expats and a growing number of citizens in China, there is still no legal access to sites like facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, to name only three. What’s the good news?

Is it the mother of all trade shows for 2010, or will it be a collision of cultures, as thousands of professionals in a wide variety of industries get together for this monster of an event? Here’s a quick preview of what’s to come in the upcoming Shanghai Expo, and perhaps a few questions and answers that may help to narrow your own search for the right information as you consider the possibilities – and realities – of making a trip out to this historic event for yourself.