Despite all your SEO and PPC campaigns, there is a limit to how much traffic you can drive to your site. If you could harness the power of affiliate marketing, you would open up whole new audiences. There are many ecommerce setups that succeed solely because of the business that is brought in by affiliates.

But an affiliate marketing program is no silver bullet. You have to learn the basics, and then use your judgment in implementing the best affiliate offer.

While you are at it, do not overlook the close relative of affiliate marketing: referral marketing. Confused? Why not read my article titled: Affiliate Marketing vs. Referral Marketing?

As if marketing was not already broad enough, along come new tools for marketing online.

So, if you are an ecommerce professional, how do you market? Do you use the tools of conventional marketing at all? Or do you have to enter the fancy schmancy world of social media?

To explore this thought more, I recently authored an article on ecommerce marketing. It will probably raise more questions than it answers, but that is the objective.

Businesses are moving faster than ever before. With the economy in the shape that it is in, entrepreneurs want to set up shop overnight, and not have to undergo months of planning and setup.

For the ecommerce entrepreneur, that means setting up a website at minimal cost and least delay. And facilitating that is the emergence of top-notch hosted ecommerce solutions providers.

I looked closely at one such provider -- Shopify, and am happy to review it for you. In my Shopify review, you will notice that I talk about apps a lot. These add-ons have made all the difference between very limited hosted solutions and highly customizable stores. That is why I decided to write an entire article about Shopify apps.

And the apps are sold in an online store. So naturally we need an article about the Shopify App Store too, right?

In a class about Human Behavior, I remember reading about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. It talks about the different needs that human beings have at different stages of growth. I find it fascinating that the needs of the ecommerce are quite similar.

At the most basic level Maslow says that human beings need to satisfy their basic physiological needs such as eating, drinking, sleeping... The ecommerce parallel would be basic infrastructure such as devices, websites, webhosts, connectivity...

But the analogy becomes interesting at the second level. In the hierarchy proposed by Maslow, once physiological needs are taken care of, humans crave for safety. And that is where the parallel with ecommerce becomes eerily similar.

I believe that ecommerce has reached the point where its screaming need is security. That is what led me write an article on ecommerce security.

Would you call me an egomaniac, if I were to credit myself with Khurana's Hierarchy of Ecommerce Needs? Just kidding.

Also read: Ebusiness vs. Ecommerce