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.

There are many options for integrating ads into Wordpress, the solutions for which will vary depending upon your particular needs, but for most scenarios there are a few key points you will want to hit:

1. Dynamic ads that will change between each page load so you don't see the same ad in the same place all the time.
2. Easily editable ads. You want to be able to swap ads in and out at a moment's notice.
3. Support for plain images and links, as well as code snippets like the kind generated by Google AdSense.

Have you tweeted today?

As few as eight years ago, that question would have been as puzzling to teenagers as to their parents. But that was then, and this is now. The fact is, social media is one of the most powerful, effective—and cost-effective—tools available today for promoting your business, reaching out to new clients and keeping current clients interested, engaged and informed.

In short, social media does everything traditional advertising used to do, only better. It has the potential for precision-tailored marketing that's both personable and brand-specific, coupled with an immediacy and relevancy that appeals to today's tech-savvy clientele.

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.

Pick a city, start a search, and links to dozens of dental practices instantly pop up.

Clearly, dentists are as aware as anyone of the importance of online tools and social media in growing their practice.

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

List segmentation. Sounds sexy, doesn't it?

Actually, list segmentation is one of the most important tools available today in tailored marketing, including email marketing. If you're not segmenting your audience, or grouping them into categories, you cannot possibly be communicating with them effectively.

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?

Guest Blog by Dan Stables, Owner of Stables Creative Group

I had a friend ask me recently about the difference between Marketing and Branding. While related and intertwined in application, in definition they are very different.

Branding is the process of creating a unique name and image for a company and/or product in the customers’ minds. Branding aims to establish a significant and differentiated presence in the market that attracts and retains loyal customers.

Predicting the next trend is pretty hard to do, but if you take a look at what was popular in 2013, you will start to see what will continue and what will expand off of those ideas. Every creative wants to come up with something that is their own unique design, but it’s also important to follow visual trends, or at least be aware of them. I recently purchased the December PRINT magazine that recapped the 2013 regional designs. This gave me good insight into what I think may evolve in 2014.