Bloggers Digest 12/19/08

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.

• We'll start our list off with Justin Palmer's 10 ecommerce startup mistakes retailers make.

• Do you get asked questions from C-level management like ""what would happen if we cut twenty percent from the marketing budget?" Or are you asking this of yourself? Check out Kevin Hillstrom's ROI Rule of Thumb equation

• Tim Peter has a good write-up on what to test first in A/B split tests.

• Tempted to bid higher in PPC to improve positions and hopefully improve sales? Read this first: Click Volume vs. Profitability in PPC Bidding by Alan Rimm-Kaufman.

• Another PPC temptation is to kill keywords that don't convert. Perhaps your keywords are not performing well because you're not optimizing the experience from keyword to landing page, for which Bryan Eisenberg's 3 steps to optimizing your keyword marketing should help you.

• Sally McKenzie suggests how you can find your multi-dimensional value proposition (emotional, functional, experiential and relational strengths) to help you court customers over the long haul.

• You may have heard that the social network Twitter was responsible for $1Million in sales for Dell. Numbers-man Kevin Hillstrom puts that into perspective that that was only 0.016% of Dell's $63B revenue, which for a $50M/year business comparatively amounts to a piddly $794 ($4,000 if you factor out B2B revenue).

• Invesp Consulting has pulled together a list of the Top 100 Influential Marketers of the Year including links to Twitter feeds for many of them, if you're looking for new folks to follow.