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ECommerce

The International ECommerce Guide To American Holidays

  Are you an ECommerce entrepreneur outside the United States who sometimes depends on working with Americans?   And who isn't these days?  Perhaps your virtual remote team includes a few staffs hired over UpWork?  And have you ever been mystified by the panoply of American holidays?    Then this post is for you. Because I'm in Iowa (it doesn't get any more American than that) and have worked with people all over the globe, and I'm always running into confusion as to which holidays are significant and which ones are a blow-off. I've had clients who offered me Groundhog Day off at one extreme, and clients who were shocked that I wasn't expecting to pull a sixteen-hour shift Thanksgiving Day at the other.  So bookmark this and save it for the year!  I will be rating the holidays from 1 to 5, "1" being "no big deal" to "5" being "everybody in the country is either at a big family banquet or getting sloppily toasted, so forget getting anything done until this blows over." All paid days off get at least a…
Score: 1.39

Are You Ready For Amazon Prime Day?

  Amazon prime day 2019, July 15th and 16th  A mote back we put up our guide to US holidays for the benefit of people from other countries, so you can tell whether your American staff need the day off or not. But one day got left off the calendar because it's such a new concept that has yet to be fully recognized. That day is Amazon Prime Day. It's a new kind of "holiday" being pushed by Amazon as a kind of Internet shopping festival.  This year, they even decided to do a full blowout by having a "Prime Day Concert 2019" hosted from the Hammersmith Ballroom in New York City. It was broadcast on Amazon Prime Video and headlined Taylor Swift, among many celebrity guests.    It's a good time to step back and ask: What's happening here? Can a corporation, with no other cultural anchor point, force a holiday into existence? Well, while this sounds like a portent of cyberpunk mega-corp behavior, the commercial impetus for holidays actually goes back much farther than you'd think.    A Brief History Of…
Score: 1.54

Top SEO Factors BESIDES Keywords

  Hi, I'm "Penguin" Pete Trbovich, and you overthink SEO!  That phrase is a tag on my own blog, for the occasional content marketing post. Really, I don't measure my expertise by my own website's ranking; I'm a freelance writer for the web who only needs a website as a virtual business card. Instead, judge my SEO expertise by the writing I do for clients - linked from my site on a regular basis.  In 20 years of freelance writing for the web, I have had the same argument with the majority of clients. That argument is that clients never stop making demands on how I write, while completely ignoring all the non-text factors on their site that are tanking their traffic, conversions, ad impressions, sales, and so on. I posted that argument on Reddit's r/freelancewriters forum and got a lot of agreement, so I know this isn't just me.      SEO (Search Engine Optimization if you just started playing along at home) is supposed to be the science/art of attracting web traffic through search engines. But…
Score: 1.36

Amazing New SEO Method Discovered : Write Like A Human Being!

    Are you an eCommerce entrepreneur depending upon content marketing to gain exposure for your product or service on the web?  Do you want to know the secret of having your site rank high on Google?  Do you want your website to shoot to the top of a Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) like greased lightning?  If you answered "yes" to all of the above questions, TAKE A NUMBER, because everybody in the whole wide world answered "yes" to all of the above questions too!      No, but really, SEO content marketing is the field within which I have based a 20+ year career in freelance content hacking for the web. And yet, it is the one discipline which is jam-packed with more hoodoo, voodoo, snake oil, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and outdated alchemy than any other tech field. Thanks to this topic being saturated on the web, you can scream about it all day every day and not get heard over the noise.  Let's start with some obvious, concrete logic. For once, everybody can drop their wacky schemes…
Score: 1.33

Social Media Optimization - The Other Digital Marketing

  Hi, I'm Penguin Pete Trbovich, and you overthink SEO.  You overthink SEO because everybody has told you that Search Engine Optimization is the only kind of marketing in the entire universe. SEOSEOSEO! Just churn out text copy for the Great Lord Google, because Google gobbles keywords like a goblin.  Seriously, why do we even make media visible to human beings? Why do we even have an Internet? They should just have it set up where every morning we all take a bucket of keywords and walk it to Google headquarters and dump it into their volcano, and later they mail us a postcard with our organic search stats for the day. The humans in this equation are superfluous.    It's not like there's an alternative way to get visitors to your website. Not like people click links shared to them by trusted peers, confidants, family, influencers, and the occasional hashtag. Oh wait, there is a way to do this!    SMO - Social Media Optimization!  Now you have SEO on your eCommerce website squared away, from my…
Score: 1.29

Freelance Writing in a Post-COVID-19 World

    How long will the shadow of the Corona Virus pandemic darken future history?   We do not know. Therefore, there's no way to know how much I should exposit COVID-19 in this here paragraph. Obviously, if I'm talking to readers in the short term, you're all sick of hearing about it. But did the pandemic gets cured by, say, 2021? Do I have to go back over what it was like for audiences in the 2030s? Or is it indelibly ground into the pages of history textbooks like the 1918 Spanish Flu was?  Just from this point, you can already see how Corona Virus affects media. There are things we could normally talk about that we can't talk about now. In my freelance online writing career spanning its third decade now, I've seen disruptions that I never would have seen before. Yet insight from my experience has helped me maintain a grip on the situation, and I'll start bypassing some of these aphorisms on to you:    Disaster-Proof Freelance Axioms:      #1: Money always goes SOMEWHERE.  No matter how much the…
Score: 1.38