Bloggers Digest - 7/18/08

It's exciting to be part of a growing blog...I must admit one of the first things I do in the morning is visit Get Elastic to check the Feedburner stats. So today was very exciting to see our subscriber count crack the 4,000 mark, making Get Elastic the most subscribed e-commerce blog in the world. So a big thank you to all of our valued readers who have subscribed, shared with friends and co-workers, bookmarked, blogged about and linked to Get Elastic and attended our webinars! Like they say on the airplanes, "we know you have options, thank you for flying with us." If you'd like to find more ecommerce blogsto subscribe to, I posted a list of as many as I'm aware of a while back, as well as non-blog resources for ecommerce topics. And if you're a new subscriber this week, welcome! Friday's are traditionally link lists to recognize other blog posts that are helpful to online retailers.

• Do testimonials help or hurt? You'll never know for sure until you do your own testing, but before you test, you will benefit from the expert testing done by others. Marketing Experiments recently offered a free webinar on testimonial optimization. You can catch the replay of Are Your Testimonials Properly Optimized? complete with case studies.

• Marketing bloggers are also web shoppers - and often our blog content is born out of personal experiences, positive and negative. Tim Peter and Andy Beal share their experiences this week, reminding us that customers don't want to buy the wrong thing and overnight shipping shouldn't take a week.

• Invesp Consulting has a 2 part series on choosing an ecommerce platform, do check out Part 1 and Part 2. And don't forget next month's webinar is all about the ecommerce platform decision. (Though we are an ecommerce software company, the webinar will not be self-promotional).

• Before you get too excited about Google's improved Flash indexing, read Rand Fishkin's 7 Compelling Reasons Search Engines and Flash Still Don't Mix for a reality check. If your ecommerce site is still full Flash, remember your content still exists on one URL, among other issues.

• Don't have the budget for comparison engines but still want to play in the channel? Kevin Packler provides tips on how to optimize for Google Product Search over at the Mercent Blog.

• Chad White spotted an email-contest idea from Circuit City - have customers create wishlists, register for an account and be entered into a $1000 sweepstakes draw. Chad notes this type of promotion encourages browsing and product attachment, not just entering a name and email in a draw.