Guest Blog from DesignRFix.com

The quality and usability of your shopping cart can make or break a deal. A friendly, sales-oriented shopping cart can smoothen the process of online shopping, and can also persuade visitors to buy more. Needless to say, you want a shopping cart that helps you get more sales and conversions.

While the real challenge is to understand the needs, desires, preferences and idiosyncrasies of your visitors to create an intensely targeted shopping experience, simply following the best practices of shopping cart design and getting the basics right can also contribute to a bigger bottom line. Let’s take a look at what you can do to transform your shopping cart into a powerful sales machine.

Have you given the same sales pitch about what you do over and over again and thought, there has to be a better way? Or the other way around, spent a big budget on ads but not on real world networking and expected more in return than you got?

That's because it takes both.

Guest blog by Carl Thomas, CEO of P.R. Inc.

Are you looking to get business on your website in an authentic, non-spammy way? Then Hubspot is probably right for your business.

So how does it work?

Are you looking to set up a new e-commerce website or spruce up an old one?

For many small businesses, Shopify might be the holy grail you've been looking for. Shopify is a popular all-in-one platform for e-commerce sites focused on simplicity. This is reflected in their pricing, setup, and built-in features.

By @JackieClews

Are you a content marketer looking to show results for all of your content marketing campaigns and collaborate easily but not quite ready to take on a more sophisticated project management software?

Whether you’re marketing an e-commerce or a service-based business to consumers or businesses, an easy trick to try is adding the most important stats to your editorial calendar so you can plan in advance and turn your calendar into a detailed analytics report, as well.

Two great tools to use are Microsoft Excel (as long as you can share it and edit in real time on the cloud) or Google Spreadsheets, which can be viewed and edited by all collaborators in real time.

Are you looking to get more sales, donations, or leads from your email marketing efforts? Then you need to know not just what gets people to open and click on your emails, but what types of content, calls to action, and other criteria gets your subscribers to buy, donate, or signup (convert).

I recently went to Tootsies' top blogger event at their Plaza location in Dallas and felt incredibly uncomfortable- for all the right reasons.

It took less than five minutes from when I walked in past the glass doors (and was never greeted) to the man formally serving cocktails and horderves (that seemed to have a scowl) and then made my way upstairs to the evening gown section (I don't wear evening gowns that often as a 25 year old living in Frisco, Texas).

Do you want people to find your website when they are searching online for related terms? Then you’ve probably thought about search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and maybe even wondered how they differ from inbound marketing strategies to drive traffic from search engines.