Official Blog

How’s your Halloween marketing going? Great I hope! On Smarter.com we have a homepage feature called, “What’s Hot” - so, if you haven’t seen it yet, please check out some of the best Halloween decorating buys and creative costumes online by visiting this area of Smarter! This is what our “What’s Hot” Halloween area looks like from our homepage:

Only a week and a half until November!

I hope you’ve been able to visit and download the Holiday Survival Kit that I gave out the link to awhile back! If anyone missed it, it’s an annual guide put out by National Retail Federation and its full of great information and tips for maximizing your site’s potential during the holidays! You can find this kit for free downloading at the NRF “Holiday Headquarters” here:

Click here to find the full Holiday Headquarters report for downloading!                                                                                 

Also available on the NRF site is the latest Holiday Shopper survey, if you haven’t seen it yet!

2008 Holiday Consumer Spending Survey

Smarter.com is looking forward to working with you for the holidays! In fact, as a little pre-holiday gift (for those of you that have read this far!) I am offering an incentive to any account that signs up before noon on Oct. 31st! We’ll be having our office Halloween party that day, so make sure your account is in-place before noon and I’ll credit you with $50 in bonus clicks! Here is our account sign-up link!:

Sign Up Here to Begin a Smarter.com Account!

No Trick, just Treat!

I found a great comparison study poll for you this week from our friends at eMarketer.com and Universal McCann:

So, this begs the question: If your products are on the list above, how well are you optimizing your online reach? Reach is key; your products need to be found and your site name and brand re-enforced when shoppers are researching! What Smarter offers is another avenue for your site to pull in highly educated online shopping traffic. So basically, if you aren’t participating in comparison shopping sites like Smarter.com, you are neglecting a whole range of shopping traffic that we pull in!

Opening an account with us is simple and inexpensive (you can begin an account with as little as a $100 deposit, and this comes back to you in your first $100 worth of clicks) and there is no long-term obligation if you are not happy with your results! You can give me a call and I can help you set up your account or you register online here:

Register Here for your Smarter Account!

Lastly, knowing how important Q4 sales are to our eTail merchants, I want to include this link to a very practical article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Small Business section, especially the part about optimizing NOW for the search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN:

Read the full Wall Street Journal article here!

I look forward to hearing from you!

 Image Source: (eMarketer.com)

Of course when it’s mid-August and you’re an online retailer staring down the calendar toward the inevitable season of green & red, the question to ask is, “is our site READY for the holidays??” If you haven’t done that yet this month, lets pause together and ask that question now…

…Okay! I know here at Smarter our answer is ‘not quite’! We have a LOT of initiatives in the queue that we are still planning on launching this fall! (Go Green! anyone? More about that later!) Of course I will let you know about each exciting feature/opportunity as soon as the information becomes available! In the meantime – what was your answer?

Here are a few articles from this week with good suggestions to help you get ready!
Turning Web Clicks Into Purchases from CNN Money

What is SEO Anyway??
It’s FREE Traffic, You Need It - click here for 10 great SEO tips!

So read on, make sure you have an account with Smarter.com – and if you already have an account with us, keep in-touch so that together we can be sure that your account is optimized for its greatest performance potential on Smarter!

I won’t wish you a ‘happy holiday’ yet – it’s not even Labor Day, but let’s just say I hear the distant sound of jingle-bells jingling!