Selling Online #37 : Summer Reading

While I know that most of you see me as the ultimate guru of all things web (right?), the truth is, there’s a wealth of places out there other than me where you can (and really should) find out a lot more about things like e-commerce, internet advertising, and integrating social media into your overall internet marketing strategy and so on.

The truth is, this area of technology (especially social media) is forming and re-forming so fast that if you blink you’re likely to miss a development or a breakthrough that becomes the next “big thing.” You don’t want to be the one that misses out on the next hot trend do you?

If you answered “No!” then read on. If you answered “Yes!” then I’m not sure we have anything else to talk about frankly.

So, without further ado, this month I’m going to save you some time in filtering out the wheat from the chaff (ooohhh… an 18th century reference in a 21st century column!) and point out some of the resources that I find pretty valuable in keeping up with what’s hot, happening, and now.

E-Commerce

First and foremost is a resources that I’ve mentioned in the past when it comes to e-commerce, and that’s Internet Retailer (www.internetretailer.com). Internet Retailer has a print magazine that you can get for free, as well as several really well done e-mail newsletters that you can subscribe to. Internet Retailer is also responsible for the Top 500 Guide, which every year ranks the top largest e-commerce players in terms of revenue and provides a wealth of information such as traffic figures, sales performance data (conversion rates, average order value, etc.) that you can use to benchmark your own performance.

Next up in the e-commerce space is Shop.org (guess what the address of their website is). Shop.org is the e-commerce focus for the larger National Retail Federation (www.nrf.com). Shop.org puts out a great series of e-mail newsletters that do an excellent job of keeping the reader up on what’s going on in the e-commerce space. I find the coverage they provide to have a slightly different twist than Internet Retailer and between the two you can get a great picture of what’s working, what’s coming down the road, what you need to be doing to get ahead and once you’re there, to stay there.

Internet Marketing

As all internet marketing pretty much begins by looking through the lens of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Live, etc. the best place to get your daily fix of search engine related wisdom is probably Search Engine Watch (www.searchenginewatch.com). They have a series of e-mail updates, as well as a worthwhile RSS feed and Twitter profile (@sewatch) that you should be reading. They cover pretty much all the aspects of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) that you will ever need to know (or at least could ever remember or implement).

The next excellent resource for internet (and even general) marketing is Marketing Sherpa (www.marketingsherpa.com). Marketing Sherpa has developed the reputation as the source for marketing best practices. These are real-world best practices, not high-level theory like you’d get from some place like the American Marketing Association. While they do offer some free reports and resources (their write-ups are free for the first week), to get the most out of what Marketing Sherpa has to offer you will need to pay for the annual subscription. You can sign up for a free trial subscription to check it out. I recommend that you do.

Social Media, etc.

Finally we have the increasingly important and dynamically changing world of social media and all of the hybrid offshoots of sites like Facebook and Twitter.

First up is a site called Mashable (www.mashable.com) who bills itself as The Social Media Guide. They do an excellent job of covering how to use the exisiting social sites both from the perspective of a user, as well as from the perspective of a business looking to use social media for marketing and promotional purposes. In addition they keep on top of the bubbling, churning, and chaotic world of emerging social media players as well as clever and useful ways to leverage the social media ecosystem of feeds, API, applications, and widgets.

Finally I’m offering up a great site, TechCrunch (www.techcrunch.com), that will keep you abreast of both the social media scene as well as the business world of the internet from a technical perspective. TechCrunch is actually billed as a blog, but it’s a blog (and extended media empire known as the Crunch Network) that headed by probably the best “new business” gadfly around, Michael Arrington. Michael and his team are plugged into who’s doing what, what it’s good for, who’s getting funded and who’s the newest member of the internet industry deadpool. It’s a great resource that you don’t want to miss.

So there you have it. A great list of summer reading when you need to know what’s going on in the world of the web. I’ve only scratched the surface by offering up the ones that I read on a regular basis. If you have some great resources you want to share, let me know!

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