I was in a major chain store yesterday and noticed trees and Xmas decorations were already up. Love it or hate it, the silly season is just around the corner and it’s time to start thinking about holiday marketing and associated efforts.
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Are you an ecommerce enabled merchant? PCI compliant yet? If you aren’t, it’s time to get ready as one of the major card companies is about to start issuing fines to larger merchants who aren’t PCI compliant … and smaller merchants will no doubt be next in the firing line.
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If the press releases and some of the buzz are anything to go by, this company is about to turn the world of online payments on its head. Is it a contender for the PayPal crown though?
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I can remember our home phone number from 30 years ago. I know my tax file number which I received over 20 years ago. I even remember the registration numbers of most of our family’s cars through my childhood and teen years. Ask me basic information such as my current home phone number and I’m totally without a clue. I even have to stop and think about how old I am and usually the answer is based on a quick calculation on my birth year rather than just knowing “oh, I’m 38″

Is this just advancing age or the Internet, or more accurately my interaction with the Internet, to blame?
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With online retailers increasingly realizing the power of email marketing, a recent study has found generally many improvements in how the medium is being utilized - but some retailers are still failing to implement some simple strategies to maximize the benefits of email promotion related activities.
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Should you still create sites taking into consideration users running 800×600 screen resolution? It’s certainly looking as though 800×600 is continuing to lose popularity rapidly. Here’s a list of the top ten monitor resolutions based on visitors to Taming the Beast for the past 7 days, compared to some historical statistics from the site.
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Providing links to external sources to either provide further information to your visitors or perhaps to substantiate a claim or testimonial is a great idea - but by remembering this simple guideline, you won’t give your traffic and perhaps customers away.
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15 percent of over a thousand people recently surveyed in the USA said they could cope OK without the Internet for a day or *less*. That’s just terrible.. a whole day?
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Calls to action are a very important part of marketing. We need to tell people the type of action we’d like them to take rather than assume they’ll figure it out on their own - whether it’s “add to cart”, “buy now”, “join today”, “click here” or “read more”.

But, does “read more” actually encourage people to do so? It would appear not.
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The holy grail of advertising on social networks may be a step closer to being achieved. MySpace has announced it can now tailor ads based on the information on members profiles.
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