Bloggers Digest 8/8/08

If you’re new here, welcome! And thanks for subscribing to Get Elastic. Friday is Blogger Digest day where we highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

It’s 8/8/08 and I thought it would be fitting to have 8 links this week:

• Avinash Kaushik has an incredibly detailed post on
  how to use Google Trends for competitive intelligence. Bookmark this.

• We hate it when you waste money on PPC, and so does George Michie from the Rimm Kaufman Group. He reminds us that average PPC ROI can hide diminishing returns at higher ad spend levels. High level stuff. Of course, to complicate things, an astute commenter pointed out that life-time value of a customer can off-set the high cost of PPC.

• How “free” is your shipping? Maxim Mironov from Optimalogica shares 4 common errors in budgeting for shipping, and how to avoid them.

• While we’re on the topic of overspending, Justin Palmer writes of 10 Costly Assumptions that impact your ecommerce performance.

• Looking for ecommerce talent? Looking for work? The Rimm Kaufman Blog has an interesting interview with Harry Joiner of Ecommerce Recruiter and Online Retail Jobs, who recruits director/manager and VP level talent for ecommerce firms.

• Chad White shares some gold nugget takeaways on email marketing from Etail East in Washington, DC this week.

• Invesp’s Khalid Hajsaleh has compiled a list of 8 Essential Elements of Successful Category Pages, complete with colorful examples.

• It’s hard to be humble when you retired before you graduated Jr. High. Meet the Copy God, quite possibly the funniest sales letter spoof I’ve had the pleasure of linking to. Via GrokDotCom via Robert Bly.

Bonus Links

For you webinar junkies, upcoming webinars you don’t want to miss:

Special Clinic: Optimizing PPC Ads, Part II (LIVE)
Marketing Experiments
Wednesday, August 13 2pm PST

The Art & Science of Choosing Ecommerce Technology
With Bernardine Wu, CEO, FitForCommerce and Elastic Path Software
Thursday, August 14 9am PST

Web Personalization – What It’s NOT and Why You Should Care
Sitebrand
Thursday, August 21 11am PST

Always Be Testing” Webinar: Landing Pages: Headlines and Calls to Action
Tom Leung, Business Product Manager at Google and Future Now Inc.
Wednesday, August 27 9am PST