Stephan Miller
Building Websites, Traffic, and Income
Using Technology to Assist in eCommerce Targeting
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
Guest post by Craig Smith of Trinity Insight
Within the Ecommerce marketplace, new technologies have been developed to assist online retailers in properly messaging content and promotions to different users. These "targeting" solutions help improve the "holy grail" metric of conversion and should be evaluated and potentially included within your store.
What these types of offerings provide is the ability to customize a user session based upon data that is stored within the user cookie. Without diving into the ins and outs of cookies and their functionality, essentially cookies allow a web browser to decipher the geo-location of a user, if a user has been to a site previously, as well as what pages the user has been to and where the user dropped off.
My Magento Bookmarks
Image by Guido Jansen via Flickr
It is still my plan to create a subdomain to host all of my posts on ecommerce. I have a lot of material. It is what I do most of the day. But for now, I will continue to put them here.
Magento is software for running an e-Commerce site. Yesterday I wrote a post on Magento for Search Engine Journal. I mentioned in that article that I had about 60 threads bookmarked in the forums. These threads really helped me modify 4 Magento installations. I also have a few bookmarks from elsewhere. Considering that the only book on developing for Magento leaves a lot up in the air, I figured I would write this post. It may help a few people.
How to Get a Tech Job with a G.E.D
I have never been one to hold a job for long. I don’t have a degree. About two years was my limit. It has not been the pay as much as the boredom. Once I could do the job in my sleep, there was not much keeping me there. The internet has been the only thing that has held my interest for this long.
And the degree thing. I am still sure to this day that if I would have had a degree, it would have been the same. I would have spent four or more years to get a job writing obituaries for the local news or writing the same algorithm over and over in my cubicle. But I would have been paid more and been stuck longer because of it.
A Random Walk Through WordPress Plugins
WordPress plugins don’t stop coming. My initial idea with this blog was to build a set of plugins and then once I thought I was set, download the plugin folder and use it for my other blogs. But, like I said, the cool plugins keep on coming.
So today I took a random walk though the WordPress plugin repository just to see what’s up. No search terms. Just some browsing. And here are some cool plugins I found.
A complex ad serving and content plugin. It supports ad-rotation, scheduling, and works with widgets.
A List of Top Blog Lists
I cover a lot of topics and read a lot of blogs. Up until recently, I had them all in one folder in my feed reader. Then I broke them up into folders. That took some thought and until then, I really had no idea what all my interests are. After that two hour organizing session, a lot of things became more clearer. I saw what I liked listed by topic. After that, I was able to create a few filters for each of my blogs. Now, if I’m in commenting mode, I just go down the river of articles in each filter. I have only headlines showing and open all the links in my browser. It is training me on writing better headlines and opening the link in the browser means I don’t have to retype everything when I go to comment. Read more... (383 words, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)