Bloggers Digest: January 2010

No shortage of amazing blog posts to link to this month, was tough to narrow it down. Here's a list of my favorite ecommerce related posts in January. Enjoy.

• Justin Palmer kicks off our list with 5 Anti-Resolutions for Marketing Success in 2010. All the things you shouldn't rely on this year.

• While we're talking about things to avoid, Kevin Hillstrom has 5 things to avoid in your annual sales forecast.

• Ever wonder if those "Tweet this" links in emails get used? According to Silverpop research, sadly, the answer is no.

• Essential reading for anyone involved in pay-per-click is the Rimm Kaufman Group blog. Don't miss George Mitchie's Broad Match is No Substitute for the Long Tail and Evaluating a Paid Search Program.

• There's no one who sees more retail email than Chad White, who's rounded up his favorites for the Email Design Hall of Fame, 2009.

• Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz shares a tutorial for determining your success in the search engine indices with Indexation for SEO: Real Numbers in 5 Easy Steps.
• In last week's webinar Bridging the technology and marketing divide for ecommerce success, someone asked the question about the role of SaaS -- some marketing departments look to SaaS as a way to circumvent IT. Todd L. Michaud makes a great point that bypassing IT for SaaS is not a way to eliminate the "bottleneck" that IT is pegged to be:

As more outsourced point packages are implemented within an environment, the more the emphasis is placed on integration management. Integration is tough enough when all the systems are in-house. When you add disparate technologies (because the service providers don’t standardize on a single technology set just for you), separate companies (that now have to be coordinated with when there is any change) and feature overlap (each one of these products offers some functionality that another system already provides), it can really become a problem.

The IT team is now forced to spend more time and money on making sure that its systems all play nice with each other. Integration starts overtaking all of the other aspects of IT, and less time is spent on developing new offerings.

• Some lively discussion happening at YouShouldTestThat.com debating the usefulness of computer generated heatmaps as a conversion optimization tool.

• There's still time to grab your own copy of our Ecommerce Tips desktop calendar by joining our Research Panel.

• Sally McKenzie brings us home with It's 2010. Do You Know Where Your E-Commerce Strategy Is? 7 Signs You Need to Find It.