Bloggers Digest - 2/29/08

Well, it’s the end of the week and the end of the month - so it’s time to sit back and have a little chuckle. If you’ve ever given a Powerpoint presentation or been subjected to sitting through one, I’m sure you’ll “LOL” at this video!

And if you know of any ecommerce/business viral/funny videos for future Bloggers Digests, please pass them along to linda.bustos AT elasticpath.com, and we’ll link to you as a thank you.

• Bryan Eisenberg blesses us with Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart. Bryan’s been collecting screenshots of incremental changes to Amazon’s add to cart process for years (the first design of Amazon is priceless)! Each shot includes Bryan’s conversion optimization comments. A must-read.

• No doubt Amazon does extensive A/B testing on its design, but 75% of online retailers don’t. Perhaps the whole concept is intimidating? If you have burning questions, Future Now is teaming up with Google for a free webinar/clinic on website optimization and testing on March 11. If you have questions, even about your own site, you can submit them in advance and pick the experts’ brains.

• Another activity many ecommerce marketers are hesitant to explore is social media marketing. Perhaps because ROI is more difficult to measure. Jeremiah Owyang provides 3 tips for measuring social media marketing ROI. You might also want to watch this social media case study presentation from Lego - How Lego Caught the Cluetrain: How Adult Fans Changed A Kids Toy Company.

• SEOmoz has a fabulous and colorful primer on keyword research for SEO newbies.

• CandidInfo has an incredible post on shopping cart best practices. Lots of innovative examples. Linked from this article is Get Elastic’s own cart button gallery and Intersmash’s wall of shopping cart icons.

• If you’ve ever looked into becoming a Certified Google Adwords Professional, you know there’s a ton of tutorials to wade through. Where should you start? Dr. Pete shares what he believes are the top 5 lessons from his own Google Adwords training, with links to Google’s tutorials.

• Local search has been a subject I have wanted to cover for some time, but Justin Palmer beat me to it with 25 Ways to Optimize for Local Search.

• Miranda from eCommerce Cache has been painstakingly collecting screenshots from Internet Retailer’s Hot 100 ecommerce sites and presenting usability reviews on welcome emails, newsletters and more. Worth a look, and expect more to come.

• Talk about openness, Urban Outfitters’ Flickr pool invites customers to submit photos, and even tag them with other brands. Ed Henrich has the details at This Week in Etail.