We've all heard that "content is king", and it's just as true for an e-commerce site as it is for a news site, blog, or any other website. But one of the common myths in e-commerce is that it's good enough to throw up a two-sentence description and a bland image from the product manufacturer, and all is well.

However, if you're actually trying to SELL something, or to drive traffic through search engines, or both, it's incredibly beneficial to take a look at beefing up the content on your site's product pages.

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Most marketers know by now that social bookmarking sites such as Digg offer huge benefits. In and of themselves, they can drive huge amounts of traffic (into the 10's of thousands from a single frontpage story on Digg), as well as sometimes providing a one-way dofollow link to help your SEO efforts.

The benefit extends beyond Digg's site itself, however. The more people discover your content through social bookmarking sites, the more people you have writing about you, linking to you, and subscribing to you.

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In January I was lucky enough to attend the Marketing Sherpa Email Summit in Miami for absolutely nothing. Quite literally, all I paid for was gas for the drive down, parking, and my hotel room. I was the lucky winner of a free ticket to the summit itself, the pre-workshop the day before, a VIP party, dinner in South Beach, the Gala dinner and party poolside...pretty much everything the event had to offer. And for this wonderful package I have to offer a belated but truly heartfelt thank you to Jason Henderson of Big Marketing, Erick Mott and the team at Lyris, and Todd Lebo and everyone else from Marketing Sherpa. All were tons of fun to hang out with and I learned a lot at the conference that I was able to bring back and put into action. So I wanted to share the top forty takeaways from my two-and-a-half-day jaunt down I-95 to Miami.

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Affiliate.com is running a great contest with these awesome t-shirts they gave away at Affiliate Summit recently. I wasn't lucky enough to attend (being busy with the Email Summit in Miami in January and about to head off to the Miva Merchant conference tomorrow), but Tom Wozniak at Affiliate.com was nice enough to send me one in the mail (along with anyone else who emailed and asked). And the person with the most creative blog posts wins the contest - the prize being $1000 in case, and a $1000 cash donation in that person's name to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund. It's a win-win...at worst I get a great t-shirt, and at best I get cash and Haiti gets $1000 no matter what!

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For most e-commerce sites the online marketing mix is made up of paid and non-paid traffic channels. The biggest and most cost effective non-paid marketing channel is organic web search traffic. If you agree and are looking improve your search engine optimization potential (SEO) for 2010, here are a couple of tried and tested tips. Read more